Cameron’s Book Round-Up, 2024, part 6

The semester begins and — as always — it’s off to a rocky start. You would think I’d get a handle on it by now, but watching my older and more experienced colleagues — individuals I respect, some of whom taught me — get started, I see that it’s never exactly a clean process. These things happen, though it does mean that I wave goodbye to the trees I watered through the hot summer months and pick up the bureaucratic duties that make up my bread and butter in the first few weeks of a semester. Expect my next round-up to be a bit heavier on humor and pulp than the summer months were.

As a more general update: Due to changes in my work schedule and the fact that late updates tend to result in a more marked response on Edgar’s pieces, we’re shifting towards an evening publication schedule. So, going forward, you can expect pieces from us here at Broken Hands to land more towards the evening. It will settle down as my own schedule begins to feel more familiar.

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Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm

Counterpart to How to Blow Up a Pipeline from last time, and a much more thorough and impressive book. It has a similar quality to it as Debt or another, similar work by David Graeber, being a deep dive into the early political economy of fossil fuels. The principle concern here is mostly the question of why the steam engine took over as a prime mover from the water wheel, which was a much more efficient source of power.

It was a solid, if somewhat dense work of history, and provides a window into another possible world: it’s impossible not to consider the possibility of a world that – while still capitalist, and still imperfect – is driven by what Malm calls the “Flow” instead of the “Stock”. The exercise of imagining such a world is a fascinating one: it’s a good reminder that everything is conditional, and there are historical forces at work that change how things did (and will subsequently) unfold.

I think that How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a slightly less interesting book, but far more approachable for most readers. Moreover, I don’t think that everyone needs to read a book as dense and referential as Fossil Capital, but it’s still worthwhile to consider it as a source on its particular topic.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (previously reviewed by Edgar here.)

A bone dry comedy that could only have been written by someone like Vladimir Nabokov. It features a 999 line poem written in-character as one person (John Shade) and then followed by a critical analysis by a completely different character (Charles Kinbote), a native of the far-off European(?) country of Zembla, which might be Mediterranean or Baltic (it’s profoundly unclear).

The poem is, fundamentally, fine. I like it more than Edgar does. Most of the book, however, is made up of Kinbote’s less and less relevant analyses of the poem: Kinbote, a European monarchist, wants to read Pale Fire as being about the fall of the Zemblan monarchy, while Shade was clearly writing about the death by suicide of his daughter and his subsequent grieving process.

I enjoyed the book, though I thought the extended bits about Zembla were uninteresting because I’ve already read Jan Morris’s Hav, which did a similar set of bits in a more focused and (to me) interesting way. The misunderstanding of the poem, and the critique Nabokov makes of the culture of literary criticism, that it often misses the obvious meaning of a particular text in order to make a self-serving political point, was an insightful one that is sadly still relevant.

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4) by Jason Pargin.

After all of that, I wanted something more accessible that was still reasonably smart. I opted for If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe, which was a great read. I feel like Pargin – who previously wrote under the name David Wong, which is also the name of the main character of this book.

The story features the main characters – Dave, John, and Amy – working on a case involving a smart-phone enabled toy that appears to be manipulating a little girl into feeding a plastic egg human body parts. The primary motivation here is less being convinced that the toy is necessarily supernatural: the girl’s family is wealthy and have promised them a big payday to come up with some kind of solution for the apparent “possessed toy” situation, which has recently become a major issue that the three of them regularly deal with. It, of course, turns out to be more than Dave first suggests, but the grappling with the financial issue is some of the more interesting writing in a story like this that I’ve seen in a very long time.

As with every book in this series, the intersection of the supernatural horrors — spiders, slime, birds made out of corpses, that sort of thing — and the more mundane horrors — poverty, the internet, garden variety perversion — is where the book really shines. The way that the characters try to deal with these things is the real motor for the plot.

It’s a twisting, turning story, as all books of this series are – what’s most interesting here, to me, is that it really feels like Jason Pargin has been exposed to the work of Greg and Dana Newkirk – the people behind the TV show Hellier, which purports to be a supernatural documentary set in the same region of the country that the protagonists of the JDATE books live. Pargin makes the smart choice, in my opinion, to not directly reference the Newkirks, and focus instead on talking about things in a less immediate fashion.

Experimental Film by Gemma Files. (link goes to alibris because Bookshop.org doesn’t have it.)

A weird little book in a sort of Tim Powers mode, postulating a secret history of Canadian film, centering on a marginally well-known critic and teacher at a vocational film educational program, a woman named Lois Cairns, who is put on to the trail of the earliest female filmmaker in Canada, a wealthy shut-in named Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb. Along the way, she seems to attract the attention of a dangerous goddess from Wendish mythology, called Lady Midday – a figure who is neither malevolent or benevolent, but both in turns.

My favorite character from the whole thing is Lois’s assistant, Safie Hewson, who is a Yazidi-Canadian film prodigy and provides a grounded perspective on the whole thing before becoming a confederate in the effort to deal with the unfolding situation. Likewise, the book has a great human villain in the form of the pretentious (and obsessive) film bro Wrob Barney (I listened to it in audio form, and I found the spelling of that name, after the fact, to be a bit of a jump scare.) Lois’s autistic son was a bit less charming to me, but that’s mostly because I tend to be a bit skeptical of the portrayal of neurodivergent people in horror novels. Files’s own handling seems reasonably fine, but I’m always nervous about that in print.

A solid little novel, and I’ll be checking out more of Files’s writing later – there’s a collection of her short stories that I’ve got my eyes on.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (reviewed by Edgar here.)

A while back, in a Facebook group, I asked a question that essentially boiled down to “does anyone know any secondary world fiction that has a modern setting? You know, a fantasy world where you could see power lines or a phone booth.” There were a number of video game examples — various Final Fantasy entries, Disco Elysium — but very few works of literature that do. Saint of Bright Doors is a perfect example of this under-developed branch on the fantasy tree.

Fetter is a young man without a shadow, raised by his mother — whom he just calls Mother of Glory — for the express purpose of committing patricide against his father, who is known as The Perfect and Kind. While he is a dedicated son for many years, he eventually falls away from this (the devotion to the concept of patricide becomes a sort of Christmas and Easter religion, instead of a daily communicant situation for him.) In the city, Fetter falls in with a support groups for the Un-Chosen and Almost-Chosen of a number of religions, and finds himself helping people navigate the city’s extremely complex legal system, including the opaque institutionalized race science of the city. But the aspect of life there that seems to draw his attention most are the Bright Doors — a condition that might befall any opaque door left closed for too long: they become perpetually-sealed doors that presumably lead somewhere else, because one side of them tends to vanish.

It’s a fascinating book, and Chandrasekera creates an interesting metaphysical system — I hesitate to call it “magic” because in the context of a fantasy story that takes on a more instrumental cast, and this is not simply instrumental but a quality of the world and time within it — that really captured my imagination, bringing to mind some of the better work of Phillip K. Dick. A highly recommended novel.

The Beast You Are: Stories by Paul Tremblay.

We’ve previously reviewed novels by Paul Tremblay, and we have a generally positive though somewhat divergent attitude toward them. My stance on Tremblay’s novels is that they’re good, but he never quite seems to stick the landing on the division between the supernatural and the natural explanations for his stories, and he seems to want to stay in the ambiguity between the two options. You either have to never commit to an answer between natural or supernatural, or commit to both in different stories: he seems, in the two that I’ve read, to have a preference for the natural answer to things as opposed to the supernatural. Of course, if things are handled right, the hope is that this doesn’t matter.

Tremblay’s short stories, I am happy to report, are a delight. He allows himself the freedom to really get weird in them and some things that would just have been weird originally were creepier from the modern perspective (though reading a plague-related story from the late aughts and early tens where there is discourse related to masks discussed was…troubling.) Within the stories, Tremblay is a stylistic chameleon, clearly shaped like himself but changing elements of his voice to blend in with the way he’s trying to write. At some points he’s more Liggotian, while in one or two stories he adopts a more comic tone, almost reaching a horror-inflected version of that used by Donald Barthelme in “So I Bought A Little City”.

While I can certainly respect the bold choice he made with the title novella, “The Beast You Are” — a sort of Shirley Jackson by way of Brian Jacques and H.P. Lovecraft — specifically of writing a talking animal story that is also an apocalyptic horror novel, it wasn’t my favorite out of the bunch. There were a number of great stories in there — “The Large Man” read like a noir story from the universe of Welcome to Night Vale; “The Party” captures the discomfort of joining a romantic partner for a work event (while also being an apocalypse story); “The Blog at the End of the World”, as I mentioned up above regarding the masks, feels eerily prophetic — but I think my favorites were “The Dead Thing”, about a neglected young girl whose younger brought found “the dead thing” and put it in a shoe box before bringing it home, and “The Last Conversation”, which had a twist I saw coming but the foreknowledge didn’t lessen the impact at all.

S.S.O.T.B.M.E. Revised: An Essay on Magic by Ramsey Dukes

I hesitate to acknowledge, on a website I know that a few coworkers of mine occasionally read, looking at a long essay written by someone who claims to be a ritual magician. Or several, because he’s written essays on magic under three or four names. Still, this book — with its salacious full title of Sex Secrets Of The Black Magicians Exposed (there are, in fact, no sex secrets directly shared, don’t worry) — offers an interesting rhetorical puzzle.

Because, you see, Dukes — real name, I believe, Lionel Snell — sets up the primary difference between the scientific and the magical mind as one of skepticism, but not in the direction that you would think: the scientific mind searches for absolute truths that it can build a foundation upon, the magical mind believes everything completely but temporarily. The scientist seeks falsifiability — is this idea something that can be theoretically disproven? — while the magician seeks credibility — is this idea something that can be believed in?

If you follow his argument stringently, looking at each proposition, it becomes a rhetorical snare, drawing you into his world view. It’s a fascinating feat of argumentation, and I’ll be honest: I don’t share Snell’s ideas, but I don’t really see the harm in them (though his discussion of animal sacrifice, which he doesn’t outright condone but which he does discuss to a certain extent, did make me uncomfortable. Of course, I believe this man to be a liar about almost everything he writes, so perhaps keep the salt shaker handy when he starts relating stories.)

Some of his ideas are interesting — he divides human endeavor into four general areas, which he labels Art, Religion, Science, and Magic, which reminds me of a schema present in Chris Gosden’s The History of Magic, which I reviewed about a year ago and Edgar did a bit after. That book will probably be more interesting to someone with an academic interest in the subject, but from a rhetorical standpoint I’ve got a soft spot for Snell — I mean Dukes — who also articulated the exact argument that Nick Bostrom put forward in his argument about Simulation Theory (including what seems to me to be the signature element, i.e., that if simulation is possible then we cannot assume we’re at the “ground floor” of simulation) somewhat earlier than Bostrom did.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez.

A collection of short stories by the author of Our Share of Night (reviewed repeatedly, perhaps excessively, I’ll admit), and selected mostly because I’m interested in getting better at short stories (okay, the mention in History of the Occult, which I touched upon here, helped.) Some of the stories are clearly prototypes for the sequences found in Our Share of Night (the story “Adela’s House” was eaten by that novel and incorporated completely, though it was nice to see a miniature version present here.)

In all honesty, I found the title story to be the weakest of the bunch: I get that Enriquez is using the background of Argentina’s ongoing political turmoil to provide a background and fodder for things, but fundamentally, she’s engaging in what I tend to think of as the “wouldn’t it be fucked up if…?” school of horror. It isn’t about a deeper mythology or anything of the sort, it’s about presenting an uncomfortable situation that the viewpoint is stuck in. I feel like that story got a bit deeper into things and lost the immediacy of the uncomfortable situation — which isn’t to say that what is described isn’t uncomfortable, simply that it began to feel bigger and less immediate.

That being noted, Enriquez is an incredibly gifted horror writer and many of the stories here — from the opening “The Dirty Kid”, which I take to be about the discomfort of living in the proximity of distressed people that you can’t actually help, to “Under the Black Water”, which is an examination of police brutality through a consciously and intentionally Lovecraftian lens — are incredibly strong.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

I read a lot of horror and dark fiction. I needed to pick up something I was reasonably certain was not going to go too far down that road — which is hard. I associate Prachett with Good Omens and Neil Gaiman (whose work we…probably won’t be reviewing for a bit), so I wanted to grab some Discworld and place a good, solid layer of that over top of the associations. As far as I’m aware, no allegations have been made towards him, and I don’t really believe in guilt by association, so let’s just push the one to the back and pull the other to the front.

I’ve enjoyed every Discworld novel I’ve read — in the past I’ve done The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Sourcery, Eric, The Truth, Small Gods, and Mort. A solid run, but hardly exhaustive, and I’ve missed or only lightly touched on some of the sub-series that I know are well-beloved. My favorite might, oddly, be The Truth — I read it while I had been assigned to read A Tale of Two Cities, and (for whatever reason) Pratchett put a number of references to the older novel in that one. It’s a bizarre crossover, but it allowed me to think about Dwarves and vampire photographers instead of whatever A Tale of Two Cities was about.

And here I am, in paragraph three and I haven’t even touched on Going Postal. Moist von Lipwig, the hilariously named protagonist, is a fairly standard Pratchett protagonist: he’s a coward with strong morals who is often pushed up against the wall and forced to take a stand. Moist is interesting because he’s also a conman, so he tries to talk his way through things, which occasionally works. He’s been tasked — immediately after his scheduled execution, by the Patrician of the city in which he lives — with fixing the mail system. You see, it’s fallen into disrepair because business has been taken over by the Clacks, a vast system of semaphore towers that span the continent — unfortunately (and this in no way at all resembles real life in any way shape or form), the company that runs the Clacks has been bought out and so prices are going up and quality of service is going down. It feels a lot like an essential service has been privatized and put in the hands of a Private Equity company.

As someone who has tried to cancel a Comcast subscription, it feels familiar.

So, you set a thief to catch a thief. You get a crook to steal things from a crook and put it back in public possession. It’s a heist, of sorts, but one that involves a great deal of pigeons and ancient postmen. A great read, and one that gave birth to a number of parts of Discworld that I know people reference quite often on the internet — the “GNU Terry Pratchett” meme comes from here — and I’m quite glad to have read it.

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