millennial_dandy's reviews
340 reviews

Intimations by Zadie Smith

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3.0

3.5

I don't typically read essay collections because though one given essay may pique my interest, it's rare that the collection as a whole is something I'd want to commit to, particularly a collection of essays all by the same author.

Zadie Smith is, of course, an incredibly well-regarded writer, and is best known, perhaps, for her novel 'White Teeth'.

I haven't read any of her novels, but 'Intimations' gives me a sense of the flavor I might expect, and I liked what I tasted.

This collection was of particular interest to me as it must be one of the very first published works of any genre covering the COVID-19 pandemic given that it was published in the summer of 2020.

In some ways, her words about those early months feel very distant given how gruelling the long-haul has been, dulling some of my memories of the months of panic and lockdown she's largely ruminating on. But I do think it's important to have documents like this, almost especially because I think for so many of us those early months of the pandemic feel like some kind of collective fever dream.

She writes in 'Intimations' about how much pressure we were all feeling to be productive during lockdown with this sudden wealth of time on our hands.

The general vibe of that portion of the collection reminded me strongly of an Onion article headline from the same period:

I know that's definitely how I feel looking back. There's a part of me that thinks: 'dangit, Ren. You could have used all that time so much more productively!'

Smith never uses the word 'trauma' to describe why people in the spring and summer of 2020 might not have gotten around to writing the next 'Great American novel'--I don't think we were quite ready to call the pandemic traumatic back in July 2020. But it was certainly traumatic for me, though my experience was likely better than some and worse than others. So I try not to be so hard on 2020 me for all the books I didn't write, bread I didn't bake, and languages I didn't learn. I got myself and my kitty back home from abroad and then both of us across the border to reunite with my partner. Humbly, I feel like that's not too shabby.

The final essay, 'Contempt as a Virus' has been regarded by many of the reviewers as the best of the lot. And I can understand why. Smith draws a powerful comparison between the literal virus behind the pandemic to a metaphorical virus of contempt leading to the mistreatment of Black and brown people in America.

Though I agreed with everything she drew attention to in her essay, the content of her ideas are fairly well known to most leftists and certainly to People of Color.

Consequently, 'Contempt as a Virus' wasn't the one that stuck with me. What has stuck with me from this reading experience was the description she gave of a conversation between herself and a neighbor. Unbeknownst to her neighbor, Smith is preparing to return to England to weather the pandemic there rather than in her adopted home of NYC. Her neighbor tells her that they're all in this together, and they'll all look out for each other and see the thing through together as neighbors, as a community. Smith describes her feelings of shame and sadness at hearing what is meant as a reassuring message because she knows she is in fact running away, not facing the danger with her neighbors.

This especially resonated with me as someone who also fled the country I was in at the start of the pandemic (Russia) for the country of my birth (the USA). And I too felt a similar sense of betraying my neighbors and my community by 'running away.' It was, of course, more complicated than that (which Smith obviously knew as well), but that feeling of wanting to stick something out with your community while knowing that that might not be what's best for you is a very strange and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

In these early essays, she captures the ominous first days of the pandemic so vividly that her words really did bring back a lot of the feelings I think many of us had at the beginning. Feelings of shock, mostly, that the ground could shift under us so suddenly; something practically unknown to those of us lucky enough to live in countries with relative stability. The collective trauma has come in hindsight, but the shellshock of that announcement: '11 March 2020: The WHO declares the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic' and the shock of the subsequent lockdowns, seeing the streets of Moscow empty, Times Square empty, that shellshock has worn off, but in her essays, Smith really knows how to evoke the ghost of it.

Because this collection really is the result of Smith's raw initial and incredibly subjective experience, not all of it will work for everyone. Some might say that none of it reflects their experience of the pandemic's early months or of the civil unrest in the summer of 2020, but I personally found a lot of it to be cathartic, if perhaps (in retrospect) a tad naive. But that might just be my addled 2022 pandemic-fatigued mind talking.

It's an interesting, short read. Give it a try.
Are You Dissing Me?: What Animals Really Think by Simon Winheld

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3.0

3.5

Someone in a past review of this book described liking a 'palate cleanser' between more serious reads, and I think that is both an apt description of this book and a general good rule of thumb for readers.

'Are you Dissing Me' is quite obviously meant to be the book equivalent of what the kids nowadays call 'shitposting' i.e. posting deliberately provocative or off-topic comments on social media.

Many if not all of the cartoons in this book would find a home on sites like tumblr (probably especially tumblr) or shared in closed friend chats for a quick laugh react.

Most of the jokes worked on me, the clear target audience of young Millennials, so bravo to Simon Winheld for knowing his generation so well. I assume anyone older would find most of these jokes 'unfunny' and anyone younger would find most of the jokes 'cringe'.

We can all agree that the illustrations are immaculate, though.

Thanks for the sensible chuckle, Simon.
A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice

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3.0

2.5 rounded up to 3

'A Density of Souls' really is that: an ensemble cast of characters and POV chapters covering two generations and sliding backwards and forwards in time. It's a lot to keep track of, especially in audiobook format. Perhaps as a physical book it wouldn't have felt so, well, dense, in terms of the number of characters, but I definitely found myself at times forgetting who was whose mother.

The plotting reminded me a lot of a CW drama, and I actually think some of the plot beats would work well in that medium; for a book juggling over 10 characters, it felt incredibly plot driven.

And what even is it about?

I'm not sure Rice was sure. That is to say, even though the collection of plot threads left nothing hanging in the end, it's hard to say how they were all supposed to connect. A lot of them do, but then there are others that feel completely tangential, as though Rice wanted to cover as much thematic ground as possible with little regard for how they all fit together (or didn't).

For the most part, everything revolves around shy, bullied Steven and the various ways in which other character's lives cross with his. But then there's another major plot point that has nothing to do with him at all and was just kind of left hanging out in the breeze; resolved, but out on its own.

This plot really should have been its own book. It had this interesting idea about grief and the weaponization of medicine. But again, it had nothing to do with anything else, and I really am at a loss as to why no one at any point in the editing process (gently) had it cut from the final product. Because as it is, I kept waiting and waiting to have something click into place to suddenly go 'aha! that's what this is all about!' But no, no.

The main plot, as such, is fine. There's some commentary about the toxic hero worship of masculinity in the gay community, but it never really goes anywhere despite there being a very passionate dialogue between two characters about it.

The topic that was probably handled the best was adolescent sexual experimentation, and how but for societal expectations/biases it would be fairly innocent. It's nothing super revolutionary by 2022 standards, but for 2000 I'll cut it some slack and assume there wasn't much in the way of that message in mainstream fiction at the time.

My true beef was the truly yikesy handling of rape and domestic violence, done in such a blase manner it really does accidentally make it feel uncomfortably normal.

Blasé is probably the word I would use to describe this novel overall. Probably due to the crushing weight of so many characters, every single thing that happens has to go at such breakneck speed that characters have no choice but to shrug off everything that happens to them, no matter how important or serious or horrific. And there are no consequences for any of it.

Meredith is built up as an alcoholic, and even ends up in the hospital due to alcohol poisoning at one point. But she just keeps on keeping on and ugh mom why are you concerned; I'm just vibing?

Just...lots of weird choices were made.

The one saving grace was the main plotline (was it the main plotline? Just the best one? The one that should have been the only one???) which centered around the gay district in New Orleans and its (and the gays frequenting its) relationship to the city at large. Some of what could have been more subtle points about the city government being unconcerned about the regular bomb threats bars on the street were getting were underscored as if with a jackhammer, but that section was at least coherent and seemed to understand what it was trying to say.

My main complaint, honestly, was that this novel was set in New Orleans and did practically nothing with it aside from having characters mention from time to time (in case we forgot) that that's where we were.

I really strongly have a preference for novelists who set their stories in real places to make a character out of the setting, and Rice really dropped the ball here.

New Orleans is such a unique part of America with such rich and fraught cultural history, and the most I got was that the graves are above ground because of it being below sea level and there are snooty classist ladies that live in the suburbs.

K.

I appreciate that Rice really was sincere in this book, and clearly loves his hometown (based on the little of it he does show us), it just seems like he was so invested in fostering all the ideas he had for the story he forgot to make sure he could actually bench press that much, so to speak.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles E. Robinson, Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley

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3.0

Being fully up front, I've never been a big fan of epistolary novels. There are plenty of exceptions, but it's a big hurdle. Ditto with framed narratives.

The letter sections of 'Frankenstein' do indeed drag, particularly at the beginning, being both epistolary and a framing device. Absolutely not my cup of tea. The narrator's expedition north is so superfluous that I contemplated skipping it altogeher, but with herculean effort, I perservered, and thankfully, Frankenstein's narration was much less tedious. Unless one is doing an incredibly close reading for a course or out of personal interest and has it in them to build up the analogy (something something the struggle of man against nature is analogous to Frankenstein's stuggle with his monster) you can skim until you get to Chapter 1.

Suffice it to say that some irrelevant dude finds Frankenstein clinging to life in the Arctic and is then the vessel for Frankenstein's story.

You're welcome.

The actual meat of the tale is what's interesting to read and certainly to discuss.

In this early iteration of 'who is the real monster?' we have Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. There is a 'don't judge a book by its cover' element to 'Frankenstein', but it isn't as simple as 'Dr. Frankenstein bad, monster good, actually' either.

Shelley capably argues that wickedness is, in large part, a product of 'nurture' rather than 'nature.' She describes a being (the creature) who is born innocent, absorbs the goodness of the family he spends so long observing, and only learns of cruelty when they reject him due to his outward ugliness.

Certainly, much blame lies with Dr. Frankenstein for creating a life and then abandoning it, just as much of the blame for ill-tempered children can be attributed to bad parenting.

In the infinite wisdom of our modern age we have come to agree that while personality has some ineffible innateness, a hell of a lot can be demonstrably linked to upbringing, to environment, to the acceptance or rejection of a being by society at large.

It's one of the pet explorations of sociologists: what makes a person a criminal?

Way too complicated and nuanced to get into in a Goodreads review, so go forth: read all about it!

Shelley claims in 'Frankenstein' that a person's behavior is the mean sum of that ineffible innateness and nurture. She allows us to pity the creature while still holding him accountable for his actions.
It is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. [...] It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power. (p.203)


Quite the scathing rebuke by our (otherwise unimoportant) narrator.

My one issue with the argument Shelley builds is how she handles the concept of justice. Justice in 'Frankenstein' is presented as necessarily punitive. There are glimmers of examination of this, but at its core this is a 'sins of the father' narrative (with significant, dark strokes from the creation myth). Frankenstein must suffer because he failed in his duty to take responsibility for his creation. His friends and family are picked off one by one by the creature seeking vengeance, and in the end the creature must die because he has become a murderer.

This comes down rather to one's personal moral sensibilities, but as a proponant of restorative justice, I can't help but to cringe at the implication that some kind of tragic justice prevailed in this story.

Sure, it's good and all that Shelley landed on 'revenge is bad', but, and perhaps I just wasn't paying close enough attention, it seems like she also lands on 'wickedness must be punished.' And at the end of the day, aren't those kind of the same things? It's just that one framework we feel good about and the other we don't.

Indeed, the entire story otherwise seems to suggest that wickedness is learned (in the creature's case) or chosen (in Frankenstein's case). Can't it therefore be unlearned and not chosen? This is where punitive justice gets a little bit squidgy.

Were the creature's killings bad because killing is bad or because he killed innocent people? Would it have been justified for him to kill Frankenstein outright since Frankenstein wronged him by carelessly bringing him into existance and then abandoning him? Would he even have been considering suicide if he had only killed his maker rather than his maker's family?

One can go round and round on this.

Personally, I'm in the camp of 'revenge is bad, and sanctioned retribution is also bad.' Just kind of inherently.

Not to oversimplify or trivialize, but I think Frankenstein and his creature would have benefited greatly from talk therapy.

Finally (or first and foremost, depending), this is a tale of society being really shitty to a person who fell outside the beauty standard and was therefore branded as inherently 'deviant' and therefore undesirable (Shelley seems to synthesize these concepts as 'wretched').

So much to unpack there, much of which circles back to the other question of 'what makes a criminal?'

What indeed.

And none of this even touches on the 'playing god' or 'can knowledge go too far?' discussions.

Overall, not my absolute favorite exploration of this concept, largely due to 'Frankenstein' being rather overwritten in places (despite being a slim 206 pages). This is likely due to Shelley's being such a young writer at its time of publication. But it's certainly a seminal text in the horror genre, and the monster is such an icon (especially after his depiction in the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff) that even without ever having read the original novel the average person could give a fairly accurate, barebones summary of at least the basic plot.

There are so many more shades within the novel that it's almost a shame it's become so iconic that many people likely feel there's no reason to read it. For instance, the image of Frankenstein using lightning to bring the creature to life never happens in the novel. In fact, Shelley doesn't give any indication as to how Frankenstein brought his creature to life, leaving it totally up to the imagination.

Give it a read, choose a thread and tug on it.
Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón

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3.0

3.5 rounded down to 3 -- leaving room for growth

As with any novel that delves at times (and increasingly at the crescendo) into magical realism, "Moonstone" seems (at least from the mixed reviews here on Goodreads) to be rather divisive.

Many reviews of 'Moonstone' seem to have come away from the experience scratching their heads, and unhappy to do so. Others, including acclaimed author David Mitchell, laud it as "a pitch-perfect study of transgression, survival and love."

Something everyone seems to agree on is that this book has something to do with cinema, as the cinema in the novel plays a central role in many of the goings on of the plot. It is the place our protagonist, Máni, escapes to when he isn't servicing the 'gentlemen' of Reykjavik, it is where he first sees Sóla, who melds together with the actress on screen as she stands up to leave. And it is the site where the reality of the 1918 pandemic finally hits the citizens of the city after the final orchestra member succumbs to the disease and the cinema is closed.

As a reviewer for The Guardian, Hari Kunzru, points out in their excellent 2016 review there are many, many instances in which author Sjón creates doppelgaenger scenes in his novel to scenes in the 1915 French crime thriller 'Les Vampires'--the film playing at the cinema when Máni first encounters Sóla.

Did all of that texture fly over my head? Absolutely. Without reading Kunzru's review would I have gotten any of that? Absolutely not. I left my time with 'Moonstone' just as baffled and confused as anyone else, but despite sensing at many points in the novel that I was missing something, Sjón's prose would reel me back in and remind me that it wasn't that important. Or, at least, not so important that a lowly reader such as myself couldn't just enjoy the ride. To extend the cinema metaphor, it was at times rather like watching a movie in a foreign language without subtitles; you can follow the plot and enjoy the visuals even if you understand nary a word of dialogue--the feeling is still there. And then, later, if you want to go back and watch a dub or with subtitles, some of the blanks get filled in.

The dream sequences in particular are incredibly disturbing and beautifully rendered.

Definitely worth picking up for a post-COVID19 pandemic Pride Month, especially once you get to the 'reveal' at the end.

P.S. Sjón's depiction of the absolute refusal of the citizens of Reykjavik to stop going to the cinema during the pandemic until there were literally no musicians left for the orchestra was so (probably unintentionally) spot on it gave me a dark sensible chuckle.
Beowulf by

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3.0

When it comes to stories as ubiquitously known as 'Beowulf' where people coming into it likely have some general sense of the plot through cultural osmosis, I feel like it's time to talk editions.

This edition of 'Beowulf' is fantastic. Pretty well every page of the poem is accompanied by a full color photograph either of artifacts pertinant to what's happening in the text at the time, or evokative landscapes or works of art. Each photograph comes with some contextual information of what it is and how it connects to that particular part of the poem. If you're interested in getting some snippets of information about fifth century weapons and treasure hordes with your epic poetry, this could be the edition of 'Beowulf' for you.

The introduction by translator Seamus Heaney is a gorgeous meditation on translation as an art in which he describes his own love of Old English, and how that ultimately led him to 'Beowulf.' He also gives some interesting background on the connection of 'Beowulf' to linguistics, and how it took J.R.R. Tolkein championing the story for it to actually come to the attention of the reading public as a valuable story in and of itself, outside of its value to linguists.

Between the notes in Heaney's introduction, the pictures, context notes, etc., 'Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition' really does earn its keep, and I was very lucky my local library had a copy.

The story itself needs little introduction. Our titular character, Beowulf, defeats three monsters (most famously, Grendel) and dies a heroic death. He's also just an all-around good guy: confident in his own abilities and taking due credit for his achievements, but still fairly humble. And basically everyone loves him. There's one fellow who is briefly envious of him, but he quickly changes his tune and lends Beowulf a fancy sword that doesn't actually help him, but was a lovely gesture.

To my 21st century literary sensibilities Beowulf is just too boring of a character for me to really get behind. Now, to be fair, there is a little bit more nuance than just 'undefeated, riding high, and the nicest guy" as the muses in Disney's 'Hercules' would describe the hero of that story, but that's the gist.

There are definitely some kernals in there that could be ripe for analysis (e.g. why Grendel's mother specifically and not a brother or father figure? What's the significance of the fact that Beowulf starts off the first battle with hand to hand combat only to move into needing increasingly specific weapons and even assistance in his fight against the dragon). And the broadstroke sense of the moral code and social system at the time the poem is set feels authentic enough (dragons and decendents of Cain aside) to get a sense of history coming to life.

Buuuuuuut, it's really not my thing. I definitely like my heroes grey, first of all. Second of all, I'm just not a fan of the whole: 'big brawny dude dukes it out with monsters, wins repeatedly until he dies a manly death, the end.'

As mentioned above: I recognize there's more to it than that, but wading through the actual plot to get to those pieces is an odessey I'm not personally interested enough to undertake. Although, that being said, I do plan on reading John Gardner's 'Grendel', so I guess we'll see if flipping perspectives works better for me than 'Beowulf' itself.
Hide by Kiersten White

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3.0

Coming up with a clever, fresh idea for any novel is difficult, and genre fiction especially often runs the risk of being panned as 'too derivative.' That's why, I think, when a novel comes along that has that clever, fresh idea it's held to a higher standard by an audience ravenous for novelty. And if it doesn't meet that expectation, it gets doubly beaten down in the arena of public opinion.

'Hide' is a perfectly serviceable horror novel that very much has its finger on the pulse of a certain branch of the genre. This is a book for the audiences of 'Cabin in the Woods' and 'Squid Game.' You'll notice that these aforementioned works are a film and a series respectively. Not books. And therein lies the first problem with 'Hide.' 'Hide' is a screenplay formatted as a novel, or at least, it should have been. Everything about the way this novel was put together feels cinematic. The way it tells rather than shows, the actions that certain characters take that in writing seem unnatural and awkward but on film would have been accepted as symbolic shorthand all point to author Kiersten White being a fan of horror films. And in the vein of 'Cabin in the Woods' or 'Squid Game' this would work very well on film and have the space and the medium to pack a harder punch than it can as a novel.

In horror films, no one cares that not every character is equally fleshed out, especially if they're meant to be fodder to feed the plot, but in a novel, POV characters that we don't know or care about feel like dead weight -- a complaint found in many of the reviews of this novel posted here on goodreads.com.

And White seems to have a sense of this too because she tries vainly to give every one of the fourteen 'contestants' a back story. But when you only have 240 pages to tell your story (and honestly even if you had 1000) it just doesn't work.

That all being said, 'Hide' is still fun to read. It uses some of the tropes I really don't like (namely, the 'oh look, let's read that old notebook that spoon-feeds us the entire backstory'), but because the premise was so cool, I could look past that because I so wanted to get to run around this abandoned amusement park with the characters and hide.

The big reveal of what's going on behind the scenes is set up well enough to not feel like it came completely out of nowhere, but the hide and seek game truly is the best aspect of the novel. White does such a great job of building up the park as incredibly claustrophobic and scary, yet darkly whimsical. And following the characters around as they chose their hiding places was a lot of fun. Seeing the group dynamics develop was also interesting, even though with 14 characters to move around some of that aspect felt quite tropey.

Our main POV character, Mack, was far better developed than anyone else, and I really liked that her defining character flaw was one that was perfectly exploited by the plot for a satisfying character arc.

One of the other complaints about this book from the peanut gallery is that (certain) readers found it 'too woke.' Now, while I personally didn't have a problem with the politics of this book (and we'll get to that), there were some choice moments that were way too on the nose for even my leftist sensibilities. And it's too bad, because none of the ideas were bad ones, and could easily have been included successfully with a slightly lighter touch. As they stand, however, while I didn't find them 'too woke', I did find them 'quite cringe.'

For instance, early on in the novel, the contestants are taken to a diner, and the man running the diner is presented as your stereotypical 'boomer', making fun of one of the girls for having a food allergy, and then walking up to another and asking if she was a boy or a girl, to which the reply is: 'no one owes you their gender.' Now, if this exchange had taken place on twitter or facebook, it would have been fine, but to imagine that line being actually spoken out loud felt contrived and, yeah, cringe.

I chalk this up slightly to the age of the author. Not that all thirty-nine-year-old Millennials are just a tad removed from the current discourse, but she specifically seems to have the proximity to it to know the sentiments and the language, but lacks a degree of fluency. This is also apparent in the way she handles one of the contestants being a wannabe Instagram model. She knows enough about this world to know that Instagram models exist and sort of how that world works, but her knowledge seems peripheral which results in a sort of caricature, wherein this instagram model literally thinks about nothing else but her following and aspirations of fame and fortune. Like, color me naive, but I just have a hard time imagining a real human, instagram model or otherwise, sitting on a bus on the way to a game show and whining about not being able to livestream. Out loud. To thirteen other people.

The critique of social media in general just felt sort of preachy and disconnected from everything else going on in the plot.

And what was the plot about? Well, in the acknowledgements section at the back of the book, White tells us pretty plainly: "to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck's sake, look up the origin of the saying."

I agree with that, actually. And if she would have just stuck to that central idea, I think the entire book would have been better, more streamlined. "I wrote Hide as a scream of rage," White said, and it shows. Even though she is on the upper and I the lower end of the Millennial age range, righteous anger is something I think everyone in our generation can understand.

Rage at being called lazy by people who created a world where most of us will never be able to own property or even earn enough to live on our own because we're all drowning in student loan debt, rage at the idea that wanting to get paid a living wage and have healthcare makes us entitled. Rage that our planet is dying under our feet and by the time we can do anything about it it'll be too late. I get it, I really do. I've felt all of those things; I think most Millennials have, and the oldest Zoomers are starting to feel it too: the squeeze of the dystopian hellscape we've all been born into.

So, sure, in the grand scheme of things, posting vapid selfies on Instagram with irony-poisoned captions or making silly little videos for TikTok about why Furries are an oppressed class isn't very meaningful, but for fuck's sake, what else do we have to get us out of bed in the morning? Existential dread?

However, when you get so caught up in that rage that radiates off in about a million different directions, it makes it hard to create a coherent through-line in a novel under 300 pages. The idea that 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' is a myth is certainly the strongest message 'Hide' has to offer, but it really does get muddied by all the competing other issues White tries to pack in. And that's too bad, because without too much re-working and just a smidge of editing to trim away the fat, that argument could have been made to feel much more convincing.

Ah, well.

I still had fun reading 'Hide' and I think anyone already on the side of its politics would enjoy it, but I don't think, unfortunately, it's well hidden enough to pull anyone else in.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

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3.0

Now I understand, said the last man.

I picked this up on a whim after it was featured in a series I was watching back during the summer, and I'll admit that this decision had a lot to do with how striking the cover of this edition is coupled with that title.

My verdict: 'Childhood's End' is ...alright.

This is a case of getting two stories in one, one of which I found infinitely more interesting and complex than the other. The story we start with wherein the alien race of 'Overlords' comes to earth and without much effort forces humanity to stop destroying itself and instead live in a sort of coerced peace was compelling. I didn't really agree with Clarke's central thesis of this section, which amounted to: "The world's now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason's obvious. There's nothing left to struggle for." (p.141) The idea that good art or progress can only come from conflict or tragedy has never sat right with me.

In her video essay, 'Protest Music of the Bush Era,' Lindsay Ellis points out the hollowness of taking this view of art and suffering:

"In times of great cultural stress, there's this sort of impulse to try to give meaning to the badness and the suffering. Like, if you put one suffering unit in, you get one art unit out. And I understand that impulse; you need to give meaning to, you know, the badness, but I think it's kind of misguided to give meaning to suffering by saying 'hey, at least we'll get great art out of it [...] Like, yeah the Holocaust sucked, but we got 'The Producers,' didn't we?'"


She goes on to talk about how not only does this way of thinking feel tone-deaf when taken out of the abstract, but it puts pressure on people living through the badness and the suffering to produce something meaningful when they're likely already mentally taxed, a sentiment The Onion fabulously pokes fun at:

description

So this idea that suffering results in productivity which results in progress/art is already one I don't like from that side, and I doubly don't like the implication that therefore peace would be the end of art and progress, as though much of our progress and art hasn't come from people who have no conflict or struggle in their lives and are, in fact, privileged enough to live lives where they have nothing stopping them from pondering the apples falling on their heads or tinkering around with new types of music. Like, sure, it's not untrue that struggle can lead to productivity, which can lead to progress/art -- there are plenty of examples of this, and the 'starving artist' stereotype doesn't exist for no reason at all, but it's absolute post-capitalist brain rot to feed poor, struggling people the narrative that they should be grateful, actually, because they're the only ones in the enviable position to live under the necessary conditions to move the world forward. Sure, Jan.

That all being said, the other, more subtle, exploration is of colonialism. I'm not sure that was Clarke's intention, but alien invasion stories by their very nature rub up against and are a comment on colonialism. As with most of these narratives, Clarke lands on the logical side of 'colonialism is bad, actually.'

Now, in many, many alien invasion stories, the attempted subjugation of humanity by the aliens is overtly forceful and often violent, but usually ultimately unsuccessful -- and we cheer for humanity's victory because on some level we recognize that it's, well, it's not very nice to do that. Colonialism historically was very forceful and violent, but the victors don't tend to paint it that way, so the narrative we tend to get is something along the lines of 'well, yes, it was kind of unpleasant, but honestly, those people are better off now because [insert some kind of justification].'

But in this one, the subjugation of humanity is not overtly forceful -- the Overlords just kind of arrive and tell all the Earthlings that they aren't going to have war between nations anymore, and because they have superior technology, they can wave a hand and stop all attempts to disobey with no effort at all, and more importantly, no bloodshed at all. And yet, there is tension among the people around when the Overlords first arrive between those who think the imposition of peace is good and those who think that despite the good, there's something nefarious about the loss of autonomy.

"Can you deny that the Overlords have brought security, peace, and prosperity to the world?" "That is true. But they've taken our liberty." (p.14)


And that tension, though it falls to the background, never really goes away. One of the central POV characters, Jan, rebels against the Overlords by stowing away on one of their ships in defiance of the insistence that 'the stars are not for man.'

In the end, Jan realizes that humans were never really going to be able to reach the heights of the Overlords or their master, the Overmind. This would seem to suggest that the Overlords taking over control of Earth was justifiable because humanity was intellectually inferior. However, by having Jan remain suspicious to the end of the intentions of the Overlords, and having those suspicions justified in the narrative, we still reach the conclusion that colonialism is bad even when done without bloodshed and that it is only ever self-serving and never about helping anyone. And not only that, but that it's bad even if the conquerors are 'superior' in some way to the conquered.

Again, no idea if this was Clarke's intention, but the messaging is nonetheless there.

All of this is rich enough material to bite into, but when it came to the more intensely sci-fi twist involving answers to questions I didn't really find that interesting to begin with (why did the Overlords come to earth? What else is there in the universe beyond the Overlords?) I kind of lost interest.

Apparently, there's a TV miniseries of it from 2015, but I got the sense that it leans most heavily into the second half of the plot rather than the first, so I'm unlikely to follow up with it even though it appears to have pretty good reviews.
Prime Evil by Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Douglas E. Winter, Whitley Strieber, Thomas Tessier, Stephen King, Charles L. Grant, M. John Harrison, Clive Barker, David Morrell, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Ligotti, Paul E. Hazel, Jack Cady

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3.0

"Horror is not a genre [...] it is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion. It can be found in all literature."

So spake Douglas E. Winter, editor of the 'Prime Evil' horror anthology.

I'm inclined to agree, which is indeed part of where my love of horror comes from; it is a limitless playground for the imagination since there are an infinite number of things that can scare us, and an infinite number of ways to dress them up.

That being said, because of its inherent lack of limitations when it comes to convention, it's really hard to hand a horror fan just any work falling into that broad categorization and expect them to enjoy it. What type of horror fan are they exactly? Do they gravitate towards monsters and ghosts, do they like gore, blood, decaying Gothic manors, violence, darkness, realism, fantasy? Do they want to battle death, social anxiety, PTSD, grief, existential dread?

This would definitely speak to why it was that reviews of this collection were so mixed. This wasn't a collection with a through line (e.g. 'Vampire anthology', 'Ghost Stories', etc.) -- it's a smorgasbord of all things horrific: ghost stories, body horror, child abuse, insanity, PTSD, vampires, nervous breakdowns, aliens. The gang's all here. But not everyone in the gang is for everyone.

From what I can gather, Winter certainly had the credentials to choose well-executed works from established authors, so I don't question the actual caliber of the stories, but I, like anyone presented with sundry options, liked some more than others; my final rating coming down to, really, how closely my taste aligned with Winter's.

Like any good 'Poe hoe', I like a good bit of cracked sanity in my horror, so I share the seemingly popular opinion that 'Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity' by David Morrell was a standout, though I wish the ending had left a bit more to the imagination (like, did we need to have it spelled out where the madness came from? Did that not just knock some of the terror out of things?)

I also liked Thomas Ligotti's 'Alice's Last Adventure', which was on the more subtle side in terms of offering any sort of explanation for anything, though it also explored a bit of frayed sanity, perhaps a nervous breakdown of an aging writer of children's fiction, now haunted by her own creation.

Many of the others were fine. 'Food' was the expected value of body horror, but written well. 'The Night Flier' was the expected value of Stephen King, complete with the morally bankrupt protagonist pissing himself not once, but twice.

'The Juniper Tree' by Peter Straub was definitely the most polarizing of the bunch. Unsurprising, considering the subject matter of sexual abuse of a child described in pretty graphic detail from the perspective of that child having to reckon with that abuse as an adult. Everyone seems to agree that it was well-written (including me), but stories like that do raise questions about where the line is exactly (and if there should even be one) when it comes to gratuitous depictions of certain things (sexual abuse, violence, torture, sex, etc.). Honestly, that line will likely be in different places for different people. I don't like graphic torture scenes. For this reason, I'd never watch something like 'Martyrs.' But do I think it crosses a line just because I don't like it? Super hard to say.

I tend to be interested in the harm caused by the slant of the messaging of a text more than the degree of graphicness with which a text depicts distasteful things. A lot of the sex scenes in bodice rippers bother me more than, say, that scene in 'Lolita' where Humbert Humbert gets Dolores to unknowingly jerk him off with her foot, and it all comes down to framing. Bodice rippers tend to frame a lack of consent as just part of the ritual of sex--as sexy even, whereas Nabokov is careful to frame the sex in 'Lolita' as disgusting and horrific. And to what end? Bodice rippers aim to be titillating while 'Lolita' is meant (in part) to be an exploration of how easily charismatic people can spin a narrative in their own favor even if their monstrousness is out in the open.

'The Juniper Tree' doesn't romanticize what happens to its protagonist, but instead goes out of its way to criticize the culture that allows such disturbing things to happen; the ways in which a lack of sex education leads to children being more easily manipulated by adults with malevolent and predatory intentions. Given the publication date of 1988, this could also be seen as a retrospective critique of the parental neglect of the 'latchkey' generation.

There's stuff going on if you pop the hood is my point.

It's also definitely horror in the emotional sense that Winter describes in the introduction (the introduction, by the by, is definitely worth a read on its own), and so I agree with Winter that it belongs in a collection of 'modern horror' (as proclaimed by the book's subheading).

Definitely not for everyone, though, and one could argue that certain things could have been implied rather than shown without the story losing its sting.

Honestly, my biggest issue with many of the stories wasn't that they weren't to my taste, or explored themes I'm uninterested in, but more so that there was all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to most of them. Explore grief and PTSD and madness, yes, but (and maybe I'm just world-weary after all my years in the horror game) have some finesse, leave some mystery, some ambiguity. These are stories for adults, and I wish more of the authors involved in the project had trusted their readers a bit more.

In any event, 'Prime Evil' does what it sets out to do, I think; presenting horror as not a genre but a feeling that can come from many places, and it's a good introduction to popular and talented late 20th century writers for newer horror fans who may well only have heard of Stephen King. It's also a great collection for a budding horror fan still trying to feel out their taste.
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