Oct 13 2024

The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin

What’s the difference between a very long online discussion and a labyrinth? What if the thread is started by someone called Ariadne? “I shall construct a labyrinth in which I can lose myself, together with anyone who tries to find me — who said this and about what?” (p. 1) What if the participants all say they are each in a single room with minimal furnishings — these include a screen and a keyboard, of course — and a door that opens, for most of them, onto some kind of corridor?

The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin

The Helmet of Horror builds the twisty, turning, unthreaded conversation out to the length of a short novel in which the participants try to figure out their situations, try to meet up, and talk about what, if anything, it all means. The book was originally published in 2006, a time when fewer people had experience with long-running conversations of this sort, and far fewer in Pelevin’s native Russia. Reading it then, especially for people who were not early adopters of online life, would have seemed like encountering persons from a different world. Even today the book is a good representation of the idiosyncrasies of long online conversations. There’s topic drift, people pop in and out, some try to derail the discussion while others vent their annoyance, some make deeper connections and some play it all for laughs.

The cast of The Helmet of Horror includes Organizm(-: (complete with emoji every time), Romeo-y-Cohiba (whose cigar is not just a cigar) and Nutscracker at the start. Soon after the first three have described their similar situations with the single cell, Monstradamus shows up and asks to join, swiftly followed by the return of Ariadne, who says she fell asleep after starting the thread. In due course IsoldA turns up; her first posting explains to the guys something about manga and tentacle porn. Fortunately, Pelevin leaves a lot unsaid.

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Oct 12 2024

Die Physiker by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Dr Miss Mathilde von Zahnd runs one of the most renowned, and one of the most expensive, private psychiatric clinics in all of Switzerland. The enormous fees paid by the rich clientele — in the stage notes before the play proper, Dürrenmatt speaks of moronic millionaires, schizophrenic authors, arteriosclerotic politicians — have enabled most of the patients to move into a new building overlooking a lake in the midst of idyllic grounds that surround the von Zahnd family’s former summer villa. The villa was the first home of the clinic, and the renovation was not always architecturally kind. In the salon where the play’s action takes place the walls up to head level have been covered with institutional paint; above the original detailing remains including some remaining stucco work. Only three patients remain in the villa: one who thinks he is Sir Isaac Newtown, one who thinks he is Albert Einstein, and Johann Wilhelm Möbius, also a physicist. Unfortunately, one of the patients — the one who thinks he is Einstein — has just strangled one of the nurses. Even more unfortunately, this comes mere weeks after Newton also strangled a nurse.

Die Physiker (The Physicists) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The play begins with the police inspector Robert Voß taking statements from head nurse Marta Boll. That The Physicians will be a comedy, however dark, becomes apparent early on. Voß recounts the earlier killing and ventures the opinion that it would never have happened with male attendants.

Head Nurse: You believe that? Nurse Dorothea Moser [the first victim] was a member of the Women’s Wrestling Club and Nurse Irene Straub [the victim whose body is still on stage] was state champion of the national judo club.
Inspector: And you?
Head Nurse: I lift weights.
Inspector: Can I now see the murderer —
Head Nurse: Please, Herr Inspector
Inspector: The perpetrator?
Head Nurse: He’s playing the violin.
Inspector: What do you mean, he’s playing the violin?
Head Nurse: You can hear it.
Inspector: Then he should stop. [Head Nurse does not react] I have to question him.
Head Nurse: Can’t do that.
Inspector: Why can’t I do that?
Head Nurse: We can’t allow that for medical reasons. Herr Ernesti must play the violin now.
Inspector: The guy strangled a nurse after all!
Head Nurse: Herr Inspector. It is not a matter of a guy, but about an ill person who has to calm himself. And because he thinks he is Einstein, the only way that he can calm himself is to play the violin.
Inspector: Am I the crazy one here?

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Oct 11 2024

I Will Do Better by Charles Bock

subtitled A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love.

Perhaps my most popular and controversial review over on Goodreads is of an absolutely abysmal “parenting” memoir by a blogger who lost his wife in childbirth and struggled to raise their child on his own afterwards. I have genuine sympathy for his situation — with my co-parent overseas for weeks at a time, my experiences single parenting our three youngsters have been tough to miserable — but the prose is atrocious and the absolute lack of self-reflection worse. So when I started this book, I had an immediate flash of “oh no, are we going to go through that bullshit again?”

Readers, to my relief and hopefully yours, we are not.

Which isn’t to say that our author here, the novelist Charles Bock, is perfect. There are points in this memoir where I found this grown-ass man to be deeply and unnecessarily self-centered and irritating. But crucially as he’s writing about his past experiences, he recognizes that he really sucked during those less than stellar moments he’s describing. Most importantly, and as stated in the title and echoed like a refrain in the text, he affirms that he “will do better” and strives to follow through, for the sake of himself but mostly for the sake of the little girl who depends on him for everything.

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Oct 10 2024

Do-It-Yourself Dollhouse: Making More With Less by Shannon Anderson & Giulia Pintus

Firstly, I should note that this isn’t technically a how-to manual, but it’s certainly very inspirational for being able to make a dollhouse on your own!

Secondly, wowzers, I wish I’d had a book like this when I was a kid! I always kinda resented my mom for throwing away the three story Barbie dollhouse with elevator that a neighbor gifted me before we moved to Malaysia. My sister and I would subsequently build apartments for our Barbies out of random toys — my brother’s Hot Wheels case inserts were excellent room dividers and decor shelves — and once we got older we’d play clothing store by rearranging our bedrooms and figuring out new and fun ways to show off the clothes we already had. But the real fun, as we both acknowledged, was less in the playing than in the constructing, which always made us feel kinda weird. Weren’t we supposed to have fun playing pretend? How was the building and designing part more fun for us than the actual “play”?

Do-It-Yourself Dollhouse quickly assures readers that this is, as a matter of fact, totally normal. There really is only so much you can do with a finite set of toys, especially when lacking both outside input and interest in conflict. My youngest child will patiently sit for ages by his homemade store, waiting for someone to come by and purchase things from him (as I discovered, to my astonishment and guilt, after coming back to the living room one evening from cooking dinner) whereas I would 100% set up the store, put everything on display, then get bored after a few transactions and leave. I’ve always been an imaginative sort of person, but I also like play that’s more dynamic than static.

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Oct 09 2024

Spinetinglers 3 by R. L. Stine

When R. L. Stine started making headlines as a writer with the Fear Street novels, I was already aging out of his target audience. I know that that’s a weird thing to say given how I voraciously read books across all age ranges now, but having grown up on Nicholas Fisk and Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, I was already well into Christopher Pike and adult horror territory when the Fear Street books came out. And they were fine. Interesting but not as deep or inventive as I expected or was used to, so it was pretty easy for me to tune out both that series and the massively popular Goosebumps books that would come out later, targeted at an even younger audience, while I set my sights on more mature reading.

But now that I’m a much older person with a lot more experience (and now that I’ve officially been a book critic for well over a decade!) I can look at his works and evaluate them as a professional instead of as a young reader. I couldn’t say whether Stinetinglers 3 hit in quite the same way as it would have were I a young reader still, but I can say that it’s quality horror writing, and something I’m looking forward to passing on to my own middle schooler, who adores watching the Creeped Out horror anthology series for kids on Netflix. Tho, as far as I can tell, the Creeped Out episodes tend to have much happier endings than the stories in this book do…

That actually surprised me, how the endings uniformly avoid the “problem solved, now the protagonists can go back to life as usual” sense of normalcy with which certain adults routinely baby children. Coupled with the almost wistfully written introductions to each story — each vignette a short explanation of how Mr Stine came up with the idea for the story that follows — this collection felt surprisingly mature and bleak, but not in a way that’s at all age-inappropriate. Change happens, sometimes for the worse. Life is full of ups and downs, and there are going to be moments when you’re in a bad spot because of things outside of your control. But, crucially, each spooky ending holds within it a seed of what could happen next. The stories almost dare the reader to keep going with the story, to fill in their own heroic endings. And if they don’t want to do that, if they’ve gone through enough of a rollercoaster of emotion to want to rest here at the thrill point (so to speak) before they can pull themselves together enough to carry on, then Mr Stine indicates that that’s okay, too.

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Oct 08 2024

Kill Shakespeare: First Folio by Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery & Andy Belanger

Nothing screams “this was written by men” more than having Juliet Capulet (lately of Romeo & Juliet) assure Othello that he is not a villain. Lol, like hell. Iago may be just as much a bad guy as Othello, but Desdemona is still dead! Murdered for no reason! Even if she’d been cuckolding her husband publicly with the entire court, that’s still no excuse for violence, much less murder. Women are people, not possessions! Having a woman who tried to kill herself for love tell a domestic abuser that he’s not the bad guy is a Sure Jan of the highest order.

That said, this is an interesting take on the Shakespearean canon, sort of a Fables but with characters from the Bard’s oeuvre instead of Mother Goose’s. I love a good pastiche, and given my own ambivalence regarding William Shakespeare, figured that any title with the imperative to destroy him (obviously not a literal directive as the man has been dead for yoinks) had to be relevant to my specific interests. I enjoy Shakespeare as a poet, and admire his storytelling choices — including the adaptation of stories far older than he is for fresh new audiences — but I really don’t care for his script writing. His scripts feel more and more antique with each passing decade, and it weirds me out that people outside of England profess a belief in the masterfulness of his words. Slavish devotion to the Bard in the 21st century feels artificial and pretentious, especially without shared cultural touchstones.

So I went into reading this book feeling pretty open-minded about the reuse of his admittedly interesting stories and characters, especially without the dreary language. Well, mostly without: there’s still the odd quotation included, but those almost entirely make sense and serve as nice callbacks to the originals. Essentially, Prince Hamlet has survived the disastrous play he’s staged, but his mother Queen Gertrude and uncle King Claudius have exiled him for the unwitting killing of Polonius. Torn between wanting to avenge his father and guilt at what his quest so far has wrought, he boards a ship with his faithful companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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Oct 07 2024

The Midnight Mitzvah by Ruth Horowitz & Jenny Meilihove

Being a creature of perpetual lateness, let me apologize for that first before wishing a belated Shana Tova to all readers who celebrate!

Whether Jewish or otherwise, plenty of people will enjoy and hopefully benefit from the message of The Midnight Mitzvah. Hanina Chipmunk is a champion nut collector who enjoys sharing her bounty with her friends and neighbors. Not only does she like feeding people, she also, admittedly, basks in the praise they give her in exchange. But Mathilda Squirrel gives her nothing but a cold reception when Hanina goes to visit one day, and spurns both gift and bearer. Hanina’s friends explain to her later that while it’s a mitzvah — the Hebrew word for blessing — to help others, it’s also a mitzvah to spare them embarrassment. Mathilda was once great at collecting nuts herself but refuses to admit that she’s no longer self-sufficient.

Hanina wants to help Mathilda, but how to do so without the squirrel losing face?* She finally resolves to bring Mathilda nuts under cover of darkness, so that Mathilda will not have to face the humiliation of accepting charity. But the night is dark and full of terrors… or as many as can be expected in a warm-hearted children’s book. Will Hanina be able to accomplish her mission and fulfill the mitzvah she’s undertaken?

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Oct 06 2024

And Go Like This by John Crowley

And Go Like This collects nine works of Crowley’s shorter fiction that were originally published between 2002 and 2018, plus the final story “Anosognosia” — when a person cannot recognize that they have a disability because of an underlying condition — which was published for the first time in this volume. They range in length from one page (“In the Tom Mix Museum”) to about 60 (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and the three parts of “Mount Auburn Street”). They range in genre from fantasy tinged by myth and history (“Flint and Mirror”) to science fiction (“And Go Like This,” “Spring Break” and “Conversation Hearts”) to ostensibly mundane (“Mount Auburn Street” again) to stories that, looking back, I have a hard time fitting into a category (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and “This Is Our Town”).

And Go Like This by John Crowley

Crowley’s writing is never less than congenial, and he conjures scenes with apparent ease, whether they are the mid-century America of “Mount Auburn Street” or the allegorical aliens of “Conversation Hearts” or the nearish future dystopia of “Spring Break.” Some of the stories, like the title tale, have twist endings; others have more ambiguous stoppings, trailing off almost mid-incident and letting readers decide what happens next. If there’s a common aspect, it’s a slight stand-offisheness, an authorial distance from the events of the stories. Some writers are direct and visceral; Crowley is not one of them, at least not here.

I find that he’s difficult for me to write about because on the one hand there’s so much to say, and on the other his diffidence is slightly contagious: here is the work, take it or leave it. I’ve been reading Crowley for more than 40 years, but always steadily, never at a fever pitch. He’s best known for his fourth novel, Little, Big, and it’s a vast and engrossing work, a multi-generational saga that consorts with the ineffable and also has me quite believing that some of the characters can converse with a trout. I’m re-reading it now, slowly, with the turn of the seasons as my measure of time, and I cannot say how many times I have read it since I first picked up the Bantam edition from 1983. Then I went back and read his first three — The Deep, Beasts, and Engine Summer — and liked them all, especially for their very different atmospheres. I also thought that I could feel in those three how he was writing Little, Big all along.

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Oct 05 2024

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. The founder, an American tech billionaire who recently relocated to the UK, is clearly a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but he either didn’t get that the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation failed at everything it tried to do, or he enjoyed courting disaster by naming his newest firm after Douglas Adams’ creation. At any rate, I grew up on Hitchhiker’s and still have most of the six hours of the first radio shows committed to memory, so I got a geeky kick out of all of the locations at Peter’s new job being named for odd bits from the older work. Security staff are the Vogons. Fortunately, Peter is not asked to produce any poetry, and security is more friendly than their namesake.

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Another small set of details I enjoyed were the boardgames that the staff at Serious Cybernetics play on company time. Some of them were from way back — Metamorphosis Alpha gets mentioned on page 20 — and others were familiar names from more recent decades. The Hitchhiker’s references and the gaming go a ways to establish Serious Cybernetics as the kind of company that’s both old-school computing and cutting-edge tech, doing things so innovative and high-concept that nobody is entirely sure what they all are, or how they will make money in the end. Terrence Skinner, the visionary founder, likes it that way, and everyone else follows along. Except, to a certain extent, the head of security, Tyrel Johnson, an ex-policeman with a West Indies background. He has hired Peter to sniff out a rat that Johnson believes is nibbling away inside of Serious.

Then there is the matter of the top floor. Only certain people are allowed up there; nobody talks about what they are doing; and Skinner is very interested. It’s an ideal place for Johnson’s rat to be scuttling about, but Peter is not cleared for anything to do with that project. Naturally, he’s keen to find out more. He gets even more interested in when he spots a fae-adjacent person he knows from the London demi-monde trying to break into the secure area.

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Oct 04 2024

Tantalizing Tales — October 2024 — Part One

It’s October already, friends, and we have a mountain of excellent reads to dive into. First up is a book from bestselling author Richard Osman, he of Thursday Murder Club fame! He’s such a hot commodity amongst mystery aficionados that I keep getting beaten by other reviewers to claiming his books over at Criminal Element, which is saying a lot since my review schedule starts filling up almost half a year in advance!

Mr Osman’s latest is the first in a brand new series featuring a father- and daughter-in-law detecting team. Bluntly titled We Solve Murders, this series debut follows Steve and Amy Wheeler as they do exactly that. They certainly have the pedigree for it. Steve is retired from the police force and thoroughly enjoying his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat. He might do the odd bit of investigative work, but his most exciting cases involve insurance fraud and lost dogs, and that’s just the way Steve likes it.

Amy, on the other hand, thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. A private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. Having taken on what was supposed to be an easy job — hunkered down on a remote island, keeping a world-famous author alive — she’s shocked when the first dead body shows up. And then there’s the bag of cash. And suddenly a killer is on the loose with Amy in their sights. In need of help, Amy sends an SOS to the only person she trusts, launching herself and her father-in-law on a breakneck race around the world as they try to stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/04/tantalizing-tales-october-2024-part-one/