2010 Stories 134 - 142
Beginning my reviews of the stories in The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, edited by ellen_datlow and Terri Windling. I've already posted reviews of two stories, as well as the opening essay, here and here. I'm about halfway through the anthology now and almost every story (and even the poems) work for me. I think I've discovered what makes Ellen Datlow (and Terri Windling, when they collaborate) such a sought-after Editor of anthologies: the stories she commissions / collects are about Characters first. These pieces aren't here because of the Twist Ending or the Sudden Reveal; they're here because the characters are the draw and the focal point rather than the setting or the theme.
134. The Puma's Daughter by Tanith Lee I have only read one other Tanith Lee story, Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, but what strikes me about these two stories is her knack for creating alternate history societies that feel real and complete even after reading just one story or novella. In this story, Lee gives us an alternate American Rockies circa the 1840s. The shifts from our own history are subtle at best, little twists in the way society is structured (arranged marriages still exist, for example). The main character here struggles, from an early age, with the marriage that has been arranged for him, with the daughter of a wealthy land-owner higher up the mountain. The struggle comes from the rumors that the intended bride is everything a husband could wish for, except that she's not quite normal. Even after marriage and the revelation of the truth / untruth of the rumors, our lead character still struggles with doing what's expected of him versus what his heart tells him to do. Lee also raises the question of just how much one's upbringing affects what one can accept about others' differences. And that's what makes this story (and most of the stories in this collection) work -- we can understand the characters and their actions even in a landscape that is not quite our own.
135. Map of Seventeen by Christopher Barzak The main character of Barzak's story is a sullen, moody, snarky mid-western seventeen year old girl ... in other words, a normal teenager. Her older brother returns home to build a house on their parents' farm property and brings his husband with him. The main character and the husband do not get along -- the girl is rightly concerned that the community will further disown her parents because of the conservative nature of the community (it was bad enough when the brother came out of the closet and moved away, she implies, and this is worse). That's all essentially background to the main story, which is the girl discovering the husband's real secret. Barzak does a nice job of introducing us to this moody teenager with a secret of her own and then deepening her personality beyond the stereotype. Where the Tanith Lee story feels largely "done in one," I found myself at the end of the Barzak story wanting to know where things go from here -- how do the main character's secret, and the husband's secret, affect the on-going lives of not just themselves but the rest of the family?
136. The Selkie Speaks by Delia Sherman I've repeatedly commented that I'm really not a strong interpreter of poems. However, story-poems like this one work for me. Again, it's all about the character, a Selkie (seal-woman) who meets and marries a mortal man. Short, sweet, to the point and romantic.
137. Bear's Bride by Johanna Sinisalo (translated by Liisa Rantalaiho) Another nice aspect of this collection is that it pulls from the folklore of the entire world and not just the most well-known in America. Sinisalo's tale draws on both the story of the constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and traditional Russian folklore about bears and builds out from there. The main character is again a teenaged girl on the cusp of adulthood -- not the physical onset "change of life" type of thing (which seems to have already happened to the character) but the ritual of deciding whether it is time to marry or to enter a sort of priesthood. The society Sinisalo describes feels strongly Matriarchal (the males of the village are mostly seen and not heard), and even though the legend that inspires the ritual involves power coming from a male bear, the bear the main character interacts with is female. The story becomes dirtier, more natural, the longer the main character is away from her village. Sinisalo works her language to create that effect without ever becoming vulgar or cliched.
138. The Abominable Child's Tale by Carol Emshwiller Another main character who is a girl on the verge of a major change, although in this case she is an early teen rather than the later teens of the Sinisalo and Barzak stories. Emshwiller really captures the language of a fourteen-year-old girl. She also captures that sense of being both home-schooled (to protect her from the dangerous outside world) and being an immigrant in a society that speaks your language but still doesn't really understand you. The story commences when the main character loses her mother and embarks on a journey to find her, or to at least find where her mother was from. She is aware that she looks different than her mother did, and wants to know why. On her way she finds both help and hindrance, and each person she encounters forces her to grow up a little bit and to become more socialized. (One of the dangers of home-schooling, even if you are not raising an Abominable half-breed, is a stunted social ability if the parent doesn't make an effort to encourage socialization.) The main character does grow and change -- from too trusting to not trusting enough to perhaps just the right balance by the end -- through her experiences. There is one somewhat cliched, stereotypical moment mid-story that you can see coming as soon as the scene starts, but Emshwiller redeems it by being true to the main character she has created, a character who is flighty and trusting at that point but is not stupid or weak.
139. The Hikikomori by Hiromi Goto This might be one of the few stories in the anthology that I struggled with. I liked the glimpse into Japanese society and the apparently increasingly prevalent problem of "hikikomori," or people who due to depression withdraw from society for long periods of time. The main character here again is an adolescent girl. We learn just enough of what drives the main character to seclusion to understand that this is self-imposed in response to peer pressure at school, but that is not the main point of the story. Most of the stories so far in this collection have dealt with main characters who are shape-shifters or are interacting with "animal people." This is the first story in the collection in which the main character's transformation from human to animal is somewhat against her will. She knows she is withdrawing from society and only venturing out at night when she is less likely to actually see people; her moment of transformation is not a conscious decision but an act of desperation for which she cannot know the outcome until it happens. This leads her on a fantasy journey that throughout feels like a dream despite it's connections to reality. I'm not sure why the story didn't click with me as well as the preceding stories did; something about the main character just didn't pull me in as much.
140. The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin by Gregory Frost Frost's story has a great colloquial voice to it. I could almost hear the actor John Cullum performing this piece. It's a story within a story -- the outer narrator is reminiscing about the auctioning off of a missing man's farm property when the narrator was just a boy, and the inner narrator is the town doctor telling about the events that lead up to the missing farmer going missing. Both voices are pitch-perfect in the delivery of their part of the story and of course the stories connect and complete each other. This is one of those stories in which the animal person makes only a brief appearance and comes across as more judgemental natural spirit than human. A nice change from the stories that focuses on adolescent girls at just the right point in the anthology (perfect placement on the editors' part). Even though this world (I couldn't get a handle on the exact era -- not as early as Lee's 1840s but not much later than the early 20th century. The story feels complete to me as it stands, but I still wonder what ever became of the Doctor.
141. Ganesha by Jeffrey Ford Another story with essentially two points of view: partially told through the eyes of the god Ganesha in his elephant-human form (with his faithful rat companion), and partially told from the perspective of a teenage girl who seems to have met Ganesha at least once, if not several times, before. This one also didn't work for me quiet as well. I loved the interpretation of Ganesha himself, and everything about him seems other-wordly and just a bit indistinct even in the details, which I think are some great touches by Ford. When the story switches to the girl's pov and becomes something of a chase sequence, it lost me a little. I was not really sure what the nature of the thing they were chasing was. (And I'm not sure how I can explain that more clearly without giving away the change in the middle of the story; I hate spoiling any aspect of a twist.)
142. The Elephant's Bride by Jane Yolen Another character-centric poem, and this one also worked for me, investigating the old tradition of widows being burned alive with their late husbands' corpses. The rhyme scheme felt a bit unsettled, which I think worked in favor of the poem. After all, how comfortable should one really feel with the concept of ritual sacrifice, right?
134. The Puma's Daughter by Tanith Lee I have only read one other Tanith Lee story, Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, but what strikes me about these two stories is her knack for creating alternate history societies that feel real and complete even after reading just one story or novella. In this story, Lee gives us an alternate American Rockies circa the 1840s. The shifts from our own history are subtle at best, little twists in the way society is structured (arranged marriages still exist, for example). The main character here struggles, from an early age, with the marriage that has been arranged for him, with the daughter of a wealthy land-owner higher up the mountain. The struggle comes from the rumors that the intended bride is everything a husband could wish for, except that she's not quite normal. Even after marriage and the revelation of the truth / untruth of the rumors, our lead character still struggles with doing what's expected of him versus what his heart tells him to do. Lee also raises the question of just how much one's upbringing affects what one can accept about others' differences. And that's what makes this story (and most of the stories in this collection) work -- we can understand the characters and their actions even in a landscape that is not quite our own.
135. Map of Seventeen by Christopher Barzak The main character of Barzak's story is a sullen, moody, snarky mid-western seventeen year old girl ... in other words, a normal teenager. Her older brother returns home to build a house on their parents' farm property and brings his husband with him. The main character and the husband do not get along -- the girl is rightly concerned that the community will further disown her parents because of the conservative nature of the community (it was bad enough when the brother came out of the closet and moved away, she implies, and this is worse). That's all essentially background to the main story, which is the girl discovering the husband's real secret. Barzak does a nice job of introducing us to this moody teenager with a secret of her own and then deepening her personality beyond the stereotype. Where the Tanith Lee story feels largely "done in one," I found myself at the end of the Barzak story wanting to know where things go from here -- how do the main character's secret, and the husband's secret, affect the on-going lives of not just themselves but the rest of the family?
136. The Selkie Speaks by Delia Sherman I've repeatedly commented that I'm really not a strong interpreter of poems. However, story-poems like this one work for me. Again, it's all about the character, a Selkie (seal-woman) who meets and marries a mortal man. Short, sweet, to the point and romantic.
137. Bear's Bride by Johanna Sinisalo (translated by Liisa Rantalaiho) Another nice aspect of this collection is that it pulls from the folklore of the entire world and not just the most well-known in America. Sinisalo's tale draws on both the story of the constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and traditional Russian folklore about bears and builds out from there. The main character is again a teenaged girl on the cusp of adulthood -- not the physical onset "change of life" type of thing (which seems to have already happened to the character) but the ritual of deciding whether it is time to marry or to enter a sort of priesthood. The society Sinisalo describes feels strongly Matriarchal (the males of the village are mostly seen and not heard), and even though the legend that inspires the ritual involves power coming from a male bear, the bear the main character interacts with is female. The story becomes dirtier, more natural, the longer the main character is away from her village. Sinisalo works her language to create that effect without ever becoming vulgar or cliched.
138. The Abominable Child's Tale by Carol Emshwiller Another main character who is a girl on the verge of a major change, although in this case she is an early teen rather than the later teens of the Sinisalo and Barzak stories. Emshwiller really captures the language of a fourteen-year-old girl. She also captures that sense of being both home-schooled (to protect her from the dangerous outside world) and being an immigrant in a society that speaks your language but still doesn't really understand you. The story commences when the main character loses her mother and embarks on a journey to find her, or to at least find where her mother was from. She is aware that she looks different than her mother did, and wants to know why. On her way she finds both help and hindrance, and each person she encounters forces her to grow up a little bit and to become more socialized. (One of the dangers of home-schooling, even if you are not raising an Abominable half-breed, is a stunted social ability if the parent doesn't make an effort to encourage socialization.) The main character does grow and change -- from too trusting to not trusting enough to perhaps just the right balance by the end -- through her experiences. There is one somewhat cliched, stereotypical moment mid-story that you can see coming as soon as the scene starts, but Emshwiller redeems it by being true to the main character she has created, a character who is flighty and trusting at that point but is not stupid or weak.
139. The Hikikomori by Hiromi Goto This might be one of the few stories in the anthology that I struggled with. I liked the glimpse into Japanese society and the apparently increasingly prevalent problem of "hikikomori," or people who due to depression withdraw from society for long periods of time. The main character here again is an adolescent girl. We learn just enough of what drives the main character to seclusion to understand that this is self-imposed in response to peer pressure at school, but that is not the main point of the story. Most of the stories so far in this collection have dealt with main characters who are shape-shifters or are interacting with "animal people." This is the first story in the collection in which the main character's transformation from human to animal is somewhat against her will. She knows she is withdrawing from society and only venturing out at night when she is less likely to actually see people; her moment of transformation is not a conscious decision but an act of desperation for which she cannot know the outcome until it happens. This leads her on a fantasy journey that throughout feels like a dream despite it's connections to reality. I'm not sure why the story didn't click with me as well as the preceding stories did; something about the main character just didn't pull me in as much.
140. The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin by Gregory Frost Frost's story has a great colloquial voice to it. I could almost hear the actor John Cullum performing this piece. It's a story within a story -- the outer narrator is reminiscing about the auctioning off of a missing man's farm property when the narrator was just a boy, and the inner narrator is the town doctor telling about the events that lead up to the missing farmer going missing. Both voices are pitch-perfect in the delivery of their part of the story and of course the stories connect and complete each other. This is one of those stories in which the animal person makes only a brief appearance and comes across as more judgemental natural spirit than human. A nice change from the stories that focuses on adolescent girls at just the right point in the anthology (perfect placement on the editors' part). Even though this world (I couldn't get a handle on the exact era -- not as early as Lee's 1840s but not much later than the early 20th century. The story feels complete to me as it stands, but I still wonder what ever became of the Doctor.
141. Ganesha by Jeffrey Ford Another story with essentially two points of view: partially told through the eyes of the god Ganesha in his elephant-human form (with his faithful rat companion), and partially told from the perspective of a teenage girl who seems to have met Ganesha at least once, if not several times, before. This one also didn't work for me quiet as well. I loved the interpretation of Ganesha himself, and everything about him seems other-wordly and just a bit indistinct even in the details, which I think are some great touches by Ford. When the story switches to the girl's pov and becomes something of a chase sequence, it lost me a little. I was not really sure what the nature of the thing they were chasing was. (And I'm not sure how I can explain that more clearly without giving away the change in the middle of the story; I hate spoiling any aspect of a twist.)
142. The Elephant's Bride by Jane Yolen Another character-centric poem, and this one also worked for me, investigating the old tradition of widows being burned alive with their late husbands' corpses. The rhyme scheme felt a bit unsettled, which I think worked in favor of the poem. After all, how comfortable should one really feel with the concept of ritual sacrifice, right?