Catherynne M. Valente’s DEATHLESS

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.

Sometimes I almost hate good books. First they make me so deliriously happy, and when they end it just breaks my heart. The synopsis quoted above is kind of crap, by the way, but what synopses aren’t?

 

The Etched City, KJ Bishop

Set first in the dustbowl wasteland of the Copper Country, Bishop introduces the battlefield sawbones Raule and her gunslinging companion Gwynn. The duo’s relationship of necessity is cemented as they flee the justice of “The Army of Heroes,” a force created to put down a rebellion in which they were active participants. Wanted and destitute, they make for the uncharted Telute Shelf to find new lives amid the sprawling metropolis of Ashamoil. Gwynn’s ruthless knack for violence sends him to the top of the town as an enforcer for the Horn Fan Cartel and its bustling slave trade. Raule, meanwhile, heads to the bottom where she tries to erase her brutal past through ministrations to the city’s forsaken. Between the opposite poles of Gwynn and Raule is a languid tale wandering through a sideshow menagerie of lovelorn mobsters, debased priests, brutal imperialists, sorcererous drug dealers, gangland warlords, and otherworldly artists that deftly examines the nature of violence, compassion, spirituality, redemption, and reality.

I confess: it took me two attempts to read The Etched City. The first time I couldn’t make it through the first section, which spans sixty-seven pages and involves sand. A lot of sand. I’m not a fan of vast empty deserts. In retrospect, I can see why the section is there–to establish two of the main characters, Raule and Gwynn–but I also think it could have been condensed to thirty pages or even less.

 

Jeff VanderMeer’s CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN

City of Saints and Madmen is one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read. After a few pages, paper cuts started appearing on my thumbs. By the time I closed the hefty volume, my thumb sported six cuts, my forefinger four. At the time of this writing, most have yet to heal. They still sting.

Now that’s what I call edgy.

 

DESIDERIA, Nicole Kornher-Stace

When Ange St Loup is brought unconscious to the madhouse of the Amaranth, she is outlandishly dressed, covered with scorches from the building she burned and bruises from jumping out one of its windows, and her mouth is sewn shut. And that is all she knows. Even as her memory returns to her, and she begins to piece together the puzzle of her life as an actress in the theatre Lady Minerva, every answer only raises further questions, and at the heart of them remain the ones she has no answers for. Answers that might explain what she was doing in an alley, by night, outside a burning building, with her face mutilated and her mind in tatters. Which version of the story is the truth? Is it Ange’s own, despite the amnesia that only gives back her past in fragments? Is it the madhouse warders’, which paints Ange as a murderer, or the prioress’s, which paints her as insane? Is it the one that returns to Ange piecemeal, over time, growing only more sinister as it inches toward completion? Or is the truth something more complex, more dangerous, than anything that Ange can even grasp?

It’s rare for me to read a novel to see what happens next. I usually read it for something else–setting, language, characters–but most novels don’t fill me with the need to know how it ends and what happens. It’s nice, but it’s incidental.

Desideria impelled me with I must know.

 

Kij Johnson’s THE FOX WOMAN

Yoshifuji is a man fascinated by foxes, a man discontented and troubled by the meaning of life. A misstep at court forces him to retire to his long-deserted country estate, to rethink his plans and contemplate the next move that might return him to favor and guarantee his family’s prosperity. Kitsune is a young fox who is fascinated by the large creatures that have suddenly invaded her world. She is drawn to them and to Yoshifuji. She comes to love him and will do anything to become a human woman to be with him.Shikujo is Yoshifuji’s wife, ashamed of her husband, yet in love with him and uncertain of her role in his world. She is confused by his fascination with the creatures of the wood, and especially the foxes that she knows in her heart are harbingers of danger. She sees him slipping away and is determined to win him back from the wild … for all that she has her own fox-related secret.Magic binds them all. And in the making (and breaking) of oaths and honors, the patterns of their lives will be changed forever.

The Fox Woman was disappointing after the excellent (and, admittedly, published later) Fudoki.

 

FEVRE DREAM and VENUS PRESERVED

George R. R. Martin: Fevre Dream

When struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives an offer of partnership from a wealthy aristocrat, he suspects something’s amiss. But when he meets the hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York, he is certain. For York doesn’t care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh’s dilapidated fleet. Nor does he care that he won’t earn back his investment in a decade. York has his own reasons for wanting to traverse the powerful Mississippi. And they are to be none of Marsh’s concern–no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious his actions may prove. Marsh meant to turn down York’s offer. It was too full of secrets that spelled danger. But the promise of both gold and a grand new boat that could make history crushed his resolve–coupled with the terrible force of York’s mesmerizing gaze. Not until the maiden voyage of his new sidewheeler Fevre Dream would Marsh realize he had joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare…and mankind’s most impossible dream.

 

her head’s on fire: Tanith Lee’s SAINT FIRE

Tanith Lee: Saint Fire

Starting with the premise of four novels based on the phases of alchemy and the four primal elements, Tanith Lee created an evocative fantastical alternate to the historical Italy in her Secret Books of Venus series. The fist volume, Faces Under Water, was set against a backdrop of a macabre Venietian carnival. In Saint Fire, the chilling second volume in the series, Volpa is a strangely beautiful servant girl who glows with an inhuman inner fire. When her master, an abusive wood seller, is mysteriously incinerated, Volpa begins to discover her power of fire. Church leaders, who see her as a mighty weapon in their holy wars, notice her gift, and unable to determine whether her powers are heavenly or demonic, are nonetheless determined to have Volpa on their side. This gripping fantasy of a mysteriously gifted Joan of Arc figure is stunning from beginning to end.

Sometimes, I’d read a Tanith Lee that makes me think god, can this woman not write^[1] but then I would read something else of hers that reminds me all over again why I’m vigorously hunting for her books both in hard copies and less-than-legal e-channels (out of print is out of print, so there), and why I’d buy nearly any of her titles on sight.Saint Fire belongs to the latter category. Yes, it’s a story centered around a Jeanne d’Arc figure, but that’s selling it short. It’s one of Tanith Lee’s very best, where language flows effortlessly and every imagery in the prose connects, every sentence in dialogue rings. Sometimes the prose veers a little purple, but the language is often spare and clean, yet evocative.

 

Planescape: Torment: or, why weird fantasy doesn’t just come in books

If you ask most people, they got into fantasy through LOTR or Narnia or even Harry Potter.

I got into it through a video game. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. At all. You see, instead of being about an orphan going off to fight the dark lord, or landed gentry joining a fellowship of classist Luddite white-supremacist aristocrats, it starts you off in a morgue. The character you’re going to play, and whom the story is about? Is dead.

This female corpse is making the rounds from slab to slab in the room. Her hair is knotted into a long braid and looped around her neck like a noose. Someone has stenciled the number “1096” onto her forehead, and her lips have been stitched closed.

 

Kij Johnson’s FUDOKI doesn’t read like weeaboo fanfic!

Kij Johnson’s Fudoki: think Lian Hearn’s Tale of the Otori except it doesn’t FUCKING SUCK ROTTEN, BLOOD-ENCRUSTED, WORM-RIDDEN APPENDAGES.

Now that I’ve gotten my obligatory swearing out of the way: when reading a Japanese-inspired fantasy by a western author, I always have this nagging suspicion that it’s going to be terrible and probably read like a weeaboo fanfic writer’s version of feudal Japan ala Inu-Yasha or Naruto or something equally dumb (hi Lian Hearn, kindly leap off a cliff, no ninjas don’t automatically make your pile of drivel “cool” and why are they screwing on top of a corpse?). Add to that the fact that the author has been heavily involved with D&D and Magic: The Gathering novel spin-offs and let’s just say that sort of thing doesn’t inspire confidence. To be fair, now that I’ve looked at her publishing history, she appears to have been printed in Real Magazines and not, you know, an issue of Dragon. Oh yeah, I’m biased. Why? Because I have read D&D novels and they aren’t pretty. If it’s commissioned by Wizards of the Coast, chances are good that it’s got to be fanfic-level dreck because that seems to be their hiring prerequisite. Supposedly, there was some forumite’s friend who sent a manuscript in to WotC and they rejected it basically saying “sorry, this is too literate for us to publish.” The story may or may not be true and could have been a butthurt author-wannabe’s attempt to salve her own ego, but still.

 

Liveship Traders trilogy, Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders is the closest I’ve come to reading traditional fantasy for a while. Ship of Destiny has the word “destiny” in both its title and backcover blurb, for fuck’s sake. That’s, like, a sticker screaming “DON’T READ ME.”

(Also, this has so many tangents I ended up using footnotes. Lel.)

Having read blogs and reviews ’round the Net, I went in expecting something like Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, where rape squads roam the earth with an eye out for breasts and vagina. Fortunately, Liveship is nowhere near that bad, even if it seems to operate under the assumption that all males of a particular phenotype (i.e. brutish and ugly) are out to force their dicks into anything remotely moist and hollow.⁰ All the way, all the time, all together until there’re so many cocks touching they’d be better off in a gay orgy. Basically, if you’re male and are not a main character (barring one), you’re automatically a rapist in the making. It’s like Hobb decided that you need to have been raped/nearly raped to be sympathetic. I kept expecting somebody to drill an orifice into the liveship figureheads and have a go, but I guess being made of wood does afford you a few graces. Splinters, you know.