The Golem

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While the story of The Golem alone deserves four stars as Gustav Meyrink's masterpiece, the Tartarus Press edition, of which I happen to be a fortunate owner, pushes the book-as-artifact into the five star category. This book is one of my most prized possessions, one of the books I'll reach for if the library ever catches fire. Everything about it screams "I defy you to find another book as cool as me". From the outstanding internal artwork to the silk ribbon marker to the weight of the pages themselves, this is a book of quality workmanship through and through. If I could own all of my favorite books in a Tartarus hardcover edition such as this, I might do nothing but read the rest of my life, starving to death in an easy chair under the light of a reading lamp.

As several reviewers have pointed out, The Golem is obtuse. It is clearly not the story of the golem as dramatized in the silent movies directed by Paul Wegener. This book is much less forthright in its horror, if it can be called horrific at all. I think that "unsettling" is a more accurate term. The heavy mysticism and symbolism Meyrink employs simultaneously draws in and distances the reader, making for an uneven read that sets up a disturbing cadence in the reader's mind. This can be aggravating at times, and absolutely captivating at others. One always feels that there's something just around the next bend, emotionally and intellectually speaking. I wonder if Meyrink didn't intend the book to read this way. In this way, he is much like Kafka, but on a more ethereal plane, if you will. Where Kafka creates unease with a sharp dose of uncaring bureaucracy, Meyrink plays hide and seek with shadows that may be interpreted as real demons or as the slow nightmare of a collective unconsciousness. It is because of this openness to interpretation that one reading is really insufficient to judge the work. The Golem, while not as hallucinatory as some think (those who haven't read it) or hope (those who were looking for an early surrealist Gothic tale) , is also not as incomprehensible as some reviewers complain. It is not an easy read, but, like many difficult reads, it is rewarding to wander Prague's streets in search of Meyrink's elusive creature.

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The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children by Brendan Connell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Full Disclosure: I co-wrote the story "The Search for Savino," which appears in this collection, with Brendan. I will refrain from any comments regarding the story.

Connell's collection, The Life of Polycrates & Other stories for Antiquated Children has strong roots in the decadent French writings and Symbolist writings of the 19th Century. These stories are biographical sketches-cum-stories of individuals who descend into decadence. They all start off with differing degrees of affluence, social acceptability, and sanity, but every one of them seems to dive headlong into the most banal lows of moral turpitude.

Brilliantly written, each story is a lesson in the writer's craft. At turns languid and shocking, Connell clearly has a deft hand for word-painting, with a special talent for understatement and the perfect turn-of-phrase.

Intentionally or not, some of the stories come off as emotionally suppressed, while others show an almost manic expression of emotion. Perhaps the occasional feelings of emotional flatness result from the work required on the part of the reader to dig the plot from underneath the documents, letters, conversations, and narrations that compose each story. This is not casual reading, but it is absolutely immersive, if the reader takes the time to slow down and absorb the litany of information inferred by context and the subtle nuances of dialogue that hide meaning between the lines.

To me, the most satisfying story was "The Chymical Wedding of Des Esseintes," perhaps because it struck me with the most direct terror, whereas the other stories festered "under the skin," so to speak. Overall, this is a brilliant collection, but not an easy read. Recommended to those for whom plot is secondary and the careful crafting of language is a spectator sport not to be missed.

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The Tunnel

The Tunnel by William H. Gass
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

WARNING: This review contains graphic content. I am not joking. If you are squeamish, please do not read this review!





Years ago, on my way home from Disney World, of all places, my wife and I came on the scene of a wreck on a rural California highway. The accident couldn't have happened but a few minutes before we arrived. The police had not yet made it to the scene, though some good citizens were directing traffic and approaching the victims. It appeared to be a single-vehicle accident. The car had rolled, if the dents on the roof were any indication (the car was upright on its three remaining wheels), and one of the passengers had been thrown through the windshield. He was quite dead: a river of blood a foot wide, coming from his neck, had already flooded across two lanes of traffic. We drove right through it, no avoiding it. The body was not all in one piece, I'll leave it at that. Another person, the other passenger from the looks of it (the body might have been his brother, I don't know) was aimlessly wandering around the middle of the highway in obvious shock at what had just happened. Thankfully there were people trying to slow traffic and make way for the police, who arrived just as we passed the body.

The feeling I felt then was akin to the feelings this book gave me inside. As an experiment in literature, it's brilliant. The formatting is incredible and intellectually stimulating. The language is superb, as one would expect from William Gass. I am a huge fan of his shorter work and have been in awe of his facile use of the English language. Academically, this book is a hit. An existentialist experiment in sentence construction, word usage, and visual arrangement.

That said, the book made me sick. I couldn't put it down, once I had picked it up, but I loathed picking it up at each reading session. There was an internal battle raging within me during the time I read it: Intellectual curiosity vs emotional revulsion. Ultimately, I hated myself for reading this book. But in the back of my mind, I admire it.

The narrator, Frederick Kohler, is attempting to write his forward to his life's work, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany". He never finishes. Instead, the story follows Kohler's life, a failure in almost every sense, in a meandering, tedious narrative . . . well, tunnel. The sense of self-loathing in this work is powerful and depressing. Rather than making the book playful, the clever tinkering with formatting serves to disarm the reader into thinking she or he should be really excited about tackling this intellectual challenge, setting the reader up for a downward emotional plunge from which it is difficult to break free. I would not recommend this book for those who easily fall into depression. The Tunnel won't just let you fall into depression, it will forcefully push you there, face first. If you can distance yourself enough to enjoy the cleverness of it all, by all means, do so. But I couldn't distance myself enough. In the end, I found myself stuck in The Tunnel and it took a good few days to get out. Just like the feeling I had after witnessing the aftermath of that accident.

Four stars for intellectual bravado and inventiveness, two stars for internal yuck = 3 stars.

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Up!

No, not that movie (though I am rather fond of it, truth be told) . . .

Cloaks of Vermin and Fish, volume 1 in the Misadventures of Italo and Vincenzo, is back up on Smashwords! I am currently waiting for the robots on Amazon to do their mechanical editing, after which I will post a link to the book's Amazon page. UPDATE: The Amazon gods have condescended and Italo and Vincenzo are now appearing there.

As mentioned earlier, I took Cloaks down for a time, and it's time for it to go back up. I'm very excited, since Cloaks seems to have been rather popular with my readers. At least that's what the stat bots tell me. So, go see what all the fuss is about! I hope this doesn't come across as narcissistic, but I love these bungling thieves and I am hard pressed to think of a more enjoyable time writing than when I followed their escapades. Tell me what you think, honestly. I appreciate honest reviews!

Most of all - ENJOY!

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My Man Jeeves

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's P.G. Wodehouse, so why not five stars?

Well, here's the scoop. I love Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. One of the most clever duos to have ever graced the printed page. Between Jeeve's restrained resourcefulness and Bertie's self-admitted idiocy, there is a lot of potential for misadventure, and Wodehouse delivers it in droves.

Half of the short stories in this volume are Jeeves and Wooster material. The other half is from what I glean as earlier material, with a main character named Reggie Peppers. Now, Peppers is a fore-runner of Wooster, no doubt, but he is a bit of a homunculus, a shadow, a pretender, when compared to the sharp imbecility of Bertie Wooster. Peppers is . . . well, smarter. And more wordy. The clipped down anti-witticisms of Wooster are watered down in Peppers, which leaves the Peppers stories a little wanting. Peppers wants to be Wooster, but doesn't quite get there because, quite frankly, Peppers isn't dumb enough.

I am so glad that Wodehouse decided to stick with it and followed through to give life to Bertie Wooster. This isn't to say that Wodehouse missed here. Peppers made an adequate character, but Wooster, with Jeeves as his foil, is pure stupid genius. The Wooster stories in My Man Jeeves bear this out. The merry bungling of Wodehouse's longer works is apparent and the plot lines are as ridiculous and convoluted as one can expect in short fiction (though not as ridiculous and convoluted as his novellas/novels). Five stars for Bertie, negative one star for Peppers. Still strongly recommended!

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If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Keeping it Honest on Goodreads

Goodreads rocks! It is, by far, my favorite place for virtual sociality. I'm not much of a facebook guy (I prefer Google+) and while I like twitter, it doesn't allow for much in-depth, fulfilling conversation. Goodreads, though, allows me to connect with hundreds of other readers and, potentially, with authors whose work I might learn to appreciate and even love. I relish the conversations I can have there with readers who have similar tastes and I enjoy getting new takes on old favorites (or old books I despise) by people whose opinions differ from mine. I even like to read what others think about works that I am ambivalent about (and have changed my opinion on a few of these after considering someone's comments and giving the book a re-read).

That said, I don't read to review, necessarily. While I was an undergraduate student at BYU and a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I learned how to sap the love of books right out of a person. Take a book, any book, and give it to the person with an assignment to read the book with a ridiculously short deadline, and require that the person apply a specific type of analysis to that book in order to squeeze out the sweet academic wine that must be in the book, if the student will only look hard enough using the correct tools.

I recall one of my sweetest summer breaks. Mind you, I usually took classes through the summer in order to graduate sooner. But one summer, as an undergraduate, I couldn't find the classes I needed, so I worked and read.  I read The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and the three parts of the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King - all in that order.  I read them because I didn't have to, and it was glorious. I'll never forget the feeling of lusty freedom. Thankfully, it was enough of a heart-lifting experience to free up my brain to think more clearly for the rest of my college career, rather than being bogged down by the chains of academic necessity.

It was after college that I decided to write my own works. I began by reviewing a little for Tangent Online, then did a few editorial gigs (including Leviathan 3 for which Jeff VanderMeer and I won the World Fantasy Award), then, I wrote. I'm still writing.

As a young, overly-eager author, I rated my own work rather highly. I wrote it, after all. But now, I see that this was a mistake. As a reader, the thought of an author telling me how great they think their work is seems incestuous, at best. So I went back and un-rated works that I had written at Goodreads. I'll let readers figure out if they like my work or not. I will retain the privilege of rating works I have edited, however, or anthologies in which I have a story appearing. For those anthologies I have edited, I truly feel that those stories I published were the best ones available to me when I edited the anthology. I make no apology for rating "my" authors as five stars. If I didn't believe that strongly in their work, as contained in these volumes, I wouldn't have included them in the anthology. As far as anthologies containing my work go, I'm unapologetic in my assessment of other stories in the volume, though I typically shy away from including mention of my own work, except by way of letting readers of my reviews know of a potential conflict of interest. I feel that this is honest.

Why the change of heart from the young writer/Forrest to this older one? I think it has to do with the disgust that I felt when I discovered the practice of authors buying reviews of their books. Pardon my naivete, but the thought just never occurred me that someone would, or even could, do such a thing. Now, I'm not above giving free copies of a book or e-book to a potential reviewer - this is how the business operates and I'd be an utter fool not to try to leverage the good praise of a legitimate, unpaid reviewer. Duh! In fact, I've done so recently, here and here (and am game, possibly, to giving away more free e-books to those who will review the work, pending a review of the potential reviewer's past reviews). And I always encourage the reviewer to give an honest appraisal of the work, whether it's flattering or flaming.

But I find it disingenuous to pay someone to review my work. The conflict of interest there is so reprehensible, that even the smarmiest businessman out there would cringe at the thought (well, okay, obviously they wouldn't or I wouldn't be typing this blog entry).

I think this dog has bitten me, too. Not too long ago, I was looking for something in the mystery/noir/crime genre, and stumbled across several 5-star reviews of a particular book. I thought "Wow. This sounds like a great read. So many people love it. How can I go wrong?" Well, things went wrong, alright. Horribly wrong. After reading this book, I felt cheated. Cheated of my time and money. Frankly, I was pissed. I'm all for allowing people to enjoy incorrect usage, tired tropes, poor grammar, flat characters, gross generalizations about specific ethnic groups and their bathing practices, and hideous inconsistencies. That's fine. But I had to ask, after reading this book, "Did any of those who gave the book five stars actually READ the book?" Even if some of them did, I find it hard to believe that so MANY had actually read the book from beginning to end and still saw fit to give it five stars.

Now, I'm not saying that the author paid reviewers (he did give away a few e-book copies and some reviewers were honest enough to acknowledge this). I don't know, either way. But I thought about the potential for abuse here, how an author COULD pay reviewers to give their crappy book a high star rating. It could happen, and that's a shame. Unfortunately, there's really nothing to be done to enforce honest, unpaid reviews. We really have to police ourselves.

For my part, I'm going to keep on giving my honest appraisals on the books I read, good or bad, and I'm not going to feed you with BS about how wonderful my work is. You judge it for yourself. I've often heard (and believe, to some extent) that nice guys finish last, but I'm going to be a snob, take the "higher road", and stick with honesty in my reviews. I hope that others do the same, because while I hope that readers will want to read my work, I go to Goodreads, first and foremost, not as an author, but as a READER! I like what I like, I dislike what I dislike, "I yam what I yam!"

So here's to keeping it honest on Goodreads. It's my favorite place to hang out on the internet, guys. Don't soil it by spamming people with your books (outside of groups and topics specifically designated for such activities) and please don't buy in to the paid reviewer game. I don't want that crap to interfere with good, clean fun and discussions about reading, nor do I want to be the sidelong victim of those who give authors a bad name by spamming goodreads with announcements. Save that for some place else. Just don't do it. Not in my backyard!

Thanks for playing nice and see ya in the stacks!

Also see:

Keeping it Honest on Goodreads, part ii

Keeping it Honest on Goodreads, part iii

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If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Putting it Back Up Again

I have this magical gift. Years ago, when the then "funct" Surreal Magazine accepted and published my story "The Further Adventures of Star Boy" (still available in this collection), I had the privilege of bringing the death-knell to that publication. Well, maybe it had more to do with the publishers over-extending their reach, financially, but I like to think of Star Boy as the harbinger of that publication's doom. I believe my work was also primarily responsible for the untimely demise of the excellent magazines Whispers from the Shattered Forum, Flesh & Blood, and my favorite rag of all time, 3rd Bed. I can't tell you how many stories I've had accepted at various venues, only to see them go tits up before my story saw print. I've lost count.

So, surprise, surprise! What looked to be a very promising project is now dead. I'm not going to recount every convulsion of the fine small press who was considering my work, as I have a great deal of respect for them and their editors and hope for a speedy recovery. Suffice it to say that my action of taking my Italo and Vincenzo stories down from Smashwords was premature.

Therefore, in the next two to three weeks, I will be republishing the first volume of The Misadventures of Italo and Vincenzo: Cloaks of Vermin and Fish. I'll be sure to let as many people know as possible without making an ass of myself (I hate it when authors have no shame - seriously hate it) via twitter, google+, goodreads, smashwords, and this here blog. In the not-too-distant future (read: when I come up with cover art with which I am happy), I'll be compiling all three of the Misadventures of Italo and Vincenzo. For now, though, you'll have to be satisfied with only the first misadventure of the most bungling and lucky of Venice's Thieves' Guild apprentices. Soon . . . soon . . .

Afterword: "Soon" has come! Cloaks of Vermin and Fish is now up again!