Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales

 

Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales by Mark Beech
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthologies are a hard sell. Meaning they hardly sell. I know a bit about this, having edited several volumes myself. Heck, I even won an award for editing one, a long time ago. Note that it's been a long time since I've edited a fiction anthology. I love short fiction, but editing a short fiction anthology is hard work, if you're doing it right. And it's often thankless. I remember speaking with author Stepan Chapman years ago about editing anthologies and his comment was "something for everybody to hate"! Truth.

A great anthology is one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A careful balance has to be maintained for this to work. A theme needs to be strong, but not overwhelming. And there needs to be a variety of voices, but not so varied that they all become a choir of chaos.

Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales is an anthology that could easily fall out of balance in this regard. But it largely (though not completely) succeeds. Mark Beech, the editor, thankfully took a broad approach to the theme, though there is a preponderance of stories about "poison gardens". Of course, it might be difficult to winnow down the the absolute best stories about poison gardens, but that is an editor's job - to build a collection, then hack it down to the best of the best.

The presentation is nothing short of amazing. This is a book you want to have in your collection to show off to your friends. It is beautiful, well-built, and smartly-designed. This is typical of Egaeus Press books. You know you're getting a quality artifact when buying an Egaeus volume.

Some of the stories herein are outstanding. I guessed this would be the case after looking at the table of contents. Many of my favorite contemporary authors had stories in here, and they did not disappoint. There were other authors unknown to me (which is, actually, something I always look for in an anthology - including "unknown" authors was something I prided myself on while editing), some of whose stories succeeded, some of whose didn't quite. If you're on Goodreads, you'll note I gave the anthology a four-star rating. Not because most of the stories were four-star stories, but because many were five-star stories, and a not-insignificant amount were three-star stories. With that, here are my notes on the stories:

"A Night at the Ministry" is as crisp and decadent as one should expect from
Putting the "decay" back in "decadence," the story "The Blissful Tinctires," by Jonathan Wood, marries the grinding post-grandeur of Peake's novels or Wilde's Dorian Gray with the banality of Great War England (and France, for a critical few short moments). It is a grueling, lustrous, dirty, pathetic, and triumphal read, all at once. This is Wood at his hollow, beautiful finest, mixing glory and defeat. It's a tricky story, one that you think you have figured out in the split-second before you figure out you were completely (and delightfully) wrong. I like being tricked in this way.

"Delightful" isn't the first word one would use for a story about poisoning, but Rose Biggin's "The Tartest of Flavours" is light-hearted. This tale, set in the universe of Alice in wonderland (in a slightly different guise) is, shall we say, "frivolous"? I didn't dislike it, but, at times, it seemed to be trying too hard to be cute (in a grim sort of way). Still a nice change of pace, but the weakest story to this point of the book.

Timothy Jarvis' "The Devil's Snare" is everything I would expect from his pen: carefully-crafted mythic storytelling with a limning of dry-humor and dark beauty. What I was not expecting was the ending. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming - but should the townsfolk. Alas, they are in for a big surprise. I love the mix of rather ordinary people moved to extraordinary visions here.

Rosanne Rabinowitz hits a simultaneously melancholic and celebratory mood here with "The Poison Girls". It's a long story, grazing over many years, and the main character, Marla is a complex and interesting person. The story blurs the line between the nostalgic and the imaginal, "breaking" chronological constraints in an emotionally-satisfying story of joy and grief, healing and pain. Beautiful.

I greatly enjoyed "The Invisible Worm" by Ron Weighell (if one can call cringing discomfort brought on by masterful writing "enjoyment"), but I fail to see how it fits, thematically, with the rest of the volume. I suppose it is, loosely speaking, a "poisonous" tale, but it involves no poisonous substance outside of religious fanaticism. Still, it's a great story, though it reads like an introduction to a novel.

A nice, evocative poem with a deeper story between the lines in "Chatterton, Euston, 2018" by Nina Antonia.

"Out at the Shillingate Isles" is a tragic story of a socially-rejected woman named Gert making a living in a harbor fishing village. She meets a new friend, "Low-key," who has compassion for her and her plight. He has a flair for performing strange tricks of magic. They go together on a scheme to give Gert the upper hand against her enemies, and things seem to be going great. Seem to. Four stars to Lisa L. Hannett.

When George Berguño is at the top of his game - and he is at the top of his game in "The Other Prague" - there are very few who can match his writerly voice. Calvino, Borges, Schwob . . . he stands in good company. And this story is polysemic, not content to settle on one meaning . . . or the other. All is one. And none is all.

I don't know that I've read Sheryl Humphrey's work before, but if "The Jewelled Necropolis" is an indicator of the quality of her writing, I will read her work again. This is part of the joy of reading an anthology: discovering a new (to me) author whose work I can continue to explore. I love the framing piece of an anonymous manuscript found as a result of the Federal Writer's Project, and the way Humphrey leverages it is more than just clever. It's a dreamlike tale of searching and finding a glimmer of paradise.

"Not to be Taken," by Kathleen Jennings begs the question "who is who's victim"? Or, more properly "who is the real perpetrator"? It's a story of disturbed individuals who happen to meet and orbit around each other, further disturbing the universe around them. It's a touching piece, in Its own perverse way, with very distant echoes from the decadent tradition. Four stars.

With a writerly voice reminiscent of Sarban, yet with a cuttingly-clever humor very unlike the staid Sarban, Louis Marvick, in his uniquely Marvickian way, immerses the reader in a sea of poisonous plants with "The Garden of Dr Montorio". But he takes it a step further, not only trapping the protagonist in a presumably lethal maze, but by trapping readers in a deadly story within a story. Marvick continues to amaze.

I've been effusive in my praise of Stephen J. Clark's writing. "Of Mandrake and Henbane" does nothing to quell my enthusiasm. Here the triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone are tied to The Green Man (under a slightly different guise) by a "sacred unguent" that binds them all together. This is a beautiful story of loam, love, and loathing that blossoms under Clark's deft pen.

There's a kernel of what could be a good story in Joseph Dawson's "Beyond Seeing," but it appears to me that this is a rough draft in need of serious revision. I was willing to cut some slack, but with an awkward writerly voice that is too terse and too verbose in all the wrong places, I had little patience with such a predictable plot. This is harsh, but the anthology would have been stronger without this story.

For some reason, I sometimes greatly enjoy stories that obliquely or peripherally toy with the theme of an anthology (though I do like some connection). Such is the case with Yarrow Paisley's excellent "I in the Eye". Poison plays a part, but only a small part in the larger narrative of dissociation with self and family. The writing here is fantastic, and this is one of the darkest stories in the volume. Five stars.

Jason E. Rfe's "Canned Heat" was quaint, in a disturbing way. It feels like there could have been so much more to this story; should have been more. It felt like a pedestrian effort to me.

Alison Littlewood's "Words" is a weak story, strongly told. But I'm afraid that the eloquence, in this case, doesn't outweigh the inevitability of the plot. There may be something to "tried and true" stories (I'm certain I've written a few myself), but when one can determine what's to happen when one is only a quarter of the way through the story, no amount of good writing can save it, ultimately (and unfortunately).

The tone of Carina Bissett's story "An Embrace of Poisonous Intent" is strikingly different from the rest of the book. This is high sorcerous fantasy replete with unicorns and griffins. The mythic element here is powerful, and the story excellent. It stands on its own strength, meaning it contrasts, somewhat jarringly, with the rest of the volume. But I can't fault the story itself. Viva la difference!

So overall, an excellent anthology. It has it's weaknesses, but every anthology does. The strongest stories (Murphy, Wood, Jarvis, Berguño, Humphrey, Marvick, Clark, Paisley) will infiltrate your veins and seize your brain, just as one would expect from the theme. Cheers and bottoms up!

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The Shadow Out of Providence

The Shadow Out of Providence by Ezra Claverie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lovecraft afficionados: Pay attention! This is unlike any other Lovecraft-inspired book you've laid eyes on. It is unique for its quirkiness, its aims, and its presentation. There really is nothing like it "out there". When I heard about the project from author Ezra Claverie, I agreed to do an honest review, as I felt the premise was inspired: A metatextual critique of Lovecraft's racism, predeliction for the superiority of the aristocratic class (from which he was derived), and his baroque language.

The Artifact:

The Shadow Out of Providence is a short volume, 85 pages long. It is, however, packed with content for a book of its size. The cover is a genuine cloth cover (when's the last time you saw that?) imprinted with the design portrayed in the cover photo of this review: A black silhouetted city with tentacles thrust "underground" into the blue background, with silver lettering (and a silver moon on the top center binding). spread out, the cover looks like some sort of sinister piece of art nouveau. In other words, it's beautiful, the sort of book collectors drool over. The pages are substantial, so unlike the flimsy tissue floating around so much of the publishing industry today. This thing has weight. The interior is lavishly (and I don't use the word lightly) illustrated by Timothy Hutchings, Dan Zettwoch, and Erol Otus - yes, that Erol Otus, you roleplaying geek, you. The one whose paintings and drawings you grew up with in your basement with your friends late at night over cold pizza and a bunch of polyhedral dice. But please, keep the pizza away from this one. It's gorgeous - you don't want to stain it! My copy came with a postcard illustrated by Otus showing a Shoggoth surrounded by flying Elder Things (more on this later), an ex-libris bookplate illustrated by the same (his telltale sigil can be seen in the open book beneath an amorphous something - probably another Shoggoth - which is reaching up to apprehend a bat in mid-flight), and possibly the most unique bookmark I've ever seen: a clear acetate bookmark, hand-painted on one side with a representation of drilling occurring at the Soviet research base Vostok Station, wherein an immense drill is being sent down through the 420,000 year-old ice sheet into Lake Vostok below. Flip the bookmark over and you find - surprise! - a burbling Shoggoth, all eyes, tentacles, and pseudopods, bursting up toward the surface.

If you aren't convinced that you need this already, please, let me continue . . .

Part 1: Diving to Dunwich:

This bit of short fiction fairly erases the line between fact and fiction. I consider myself pretty knowledgable about Lovecraft and his historical milieu, and I must admit that, while reading this piece, I found myself, again and again, looking up names, places, and dates of events that may or may not have happened, either in Lovecraft's fiction or in "factual" history.

The title, "Diving to Dunwich," is to be taken literally - this story begins with the account of a dive by the author with his companion, multimedia artist Timothy Hutchings, below the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir, to the underwater ruins of Dunwich, Massachussets, in order for Hutchings to create more material for his video installation "The Persistence of Dunwich". As any interesting commentary does, this narrative soon wanders into a strange alternate reality in which Lovecraft lived until 1959, married one Comity Archdale, and enjoyed commercial success with his writing to the point where Directors Peter Jackson and David Lynch both made movie adaptions of his work. There is much more in this pseudobiography, conflating timelines and causing the most erudite Lovecraft scholar (which I am not) to go scrambling for the books. It is a convincing treatise of what might have been, or what might be, in some dimension just sideways of our own. I would not be surprised to see some of these "facts" show up on Wikipedia at some future date. You just wait and see . . .

Part 2: Facts Concerning the Late Eadward Thurston and His Family:

What exactly is a metatextual critique? Good question. I don't know that I have a good answer. But I think the answer might lie somewhere in this second piece, a play, replete with stage directions, and illustrated with watercolors by Dan Zettwoch showing how certain costumes are to be constructed and providing some storyboard illustrations, as well. The play was presumably written by Albert Jermyn in 1962. The biography of Jermyn, included in a preface to the play, indicates that Jermyn was the illegitimate son of a white travelling salesman by the name of Winfield Lovecraft, and Eulalia Jermyn, a black housekeeper of New Bedford, Massachussets. Winfield was later to marry Sarah Phillips, with whom he would father Howard Phillips Lovecraft. A series of letters from Howard to his wife, Sonia Greene, reveal a veritable soap opera of accusations and confrontations which end in Sarah declaring that "the black brat looked more like Winfield than poor Howard does."

Through a long series of events, Albert ended up taking a teaching position in Senegal, where he wrote the play. In that process, he found himself in the midst of a turbulent intellectual exploration of communism that left him disillusioned.

Now, you might think you could imagine what kind of a play a person with such a background would write.

You can't . . .

You can't even begin to imagine. Keep in mind that the actors would be Senegalese or of other West African descent. Jermyn couldn't help but write a critique of aristocratic structures into the text, though it is sometimes difficult to pin down exactly what he thinks of socialism. Add to this the relationship between the main protagonist (or is it antagonist - again, these roles are difficult to establish) and his dead, but recently reanimated father. Now, now you can start to imagine. In essence, we have the skeleton of Hamlet hung with the skin of Lovecraft, filled with organs of soviet social revolution, animated by waves of self-love, self-loathing, and revenge. A strange, absolutely brilliant piece of metafiction that would make Lovecraft turn over like a roto-tiller in his grave.

Part 3: From the Game Designer, etc:

The last section of the book is composed of several disparate pieces, a dossier for use in a role-playing game. The bulk of this section is taken up by the short story "Beyond the Far Islands". Now this is a piece that took me a while to figure out. The voice used herein is intentionally simple, sounding a lot like a young teenager. It is the Anti-Lovecraft voice, and yet, it does well to convey the horror felt by the narrator who is . . . well, I don't think I'm going to tell you! This character was absolutely NOT what I thought, at first. I was deceived by the voice, truth be told. As I discovered who it was that was talking, and continued to read, a smile grew on my face that never quite left. That said, this is no mere lampooning of Lovecraft. There is a sense of dread conveyed, a sense of cosmic dread, but it is conveyed in a way that Lovecraft would not, perhaps could not write. After spinning Lovecraft over in his grave, Claverie and company then flip the body on its head . . . and with style, I might add. Erol Otus's illustrations here are fantastic, among the best work I've seen of his, and I've seen a lot. The subject matter lends itself to many amorphous, non-humanoid illustrations reminiscent of the old Konny and Czu comics (among my favorite comics of all time) or the cartoons of Stepan Chapman.

A Note from Forrest Aguirre on the Mutation of Capitalism

While I think that the End of Capitalism is a bit oversold, I do want to pause here a moment and note that this book was initially funded as a successful Kickstarter project. Without Kickstarter, this book would have never seen the light of day. It is a work that could only have been produced and reached a wide audience with the internet. No publisher would have taken it. And that's part of the appeal to me. Yes, my own work has been published by a third party publisher, but I've also had a few things that I've published independently, outside the bounds of the "normal" publishing industry. The more I look into works published in this way, the more I like. Yes, there are problems, especially in the vetting of quality that a professional editor normaly provides through the publication process. Then again, there are some wild successes, some books that otherwise never would have seen the light of day. I'm also discovering the many wonderful podcasts available and have even funded a few using the patreon website. Between the various nodes of commerce available on the internet, including paypal, amazon, smashwords, kickstarter, indiegogo, and patreon (among others), there is a tool-set that is slowly changing the face of commerce and capitalism as we know it. I laud those who are pushing the frontiers of creativity for the simple reason that they can. There are some duds, there always will be, but this book is an example of everything that can go right with the new economic paradigm that seems to be emerging. These are exciting times! Embrace the mutation of capitalism!

. . . pedantic cheerleading over . . .

Where do I procure this bizzare congerie of eldritch metatextual critiques?

Right here, right now! If you don't get one for yourself, get one for that Lovecraft-lover in your life, or even that Lovecraft-hater! I can think of a lot worse gifts, and not many better for collectors of all things - or anything - inspired by the creator of Cthulhu.

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Editing, Writing, Teaching; Conducting, Performing, Instructing

This morning, I had an interesting conversation with my son's vocal performance instructor. I'll call him "B". B is an outstanding teacher and we have seen my son's abilities coaxed and coached to a level that he (my son) didn't think possible. We are very pleased to have B work with our son. B is very patient and he is able to break vocal performance down into discrete chunks in a way I've never seen before. I have learned a lot about singing just by being in the same room as B and my son go over practice pieces.

B also teaches music at a local private school. In fact, he attended my son's (and other of his students') high school choir concert the other night and told me about the extensive time and effort he had put into a performance by his own students. I would have thought that he would have been ecstatic, knowing what I know of his personality, but B just seemed drained. He told me that while he had taught his kids where to be, when to be there, and how to sing, some well-meaning parents inadvertently made things difficult by not trusting their own children to do as instructed, as they had done several times before in rehearsal.

Fast forward to today, when I had a conversation with B, after my son's lesson was over. I honestly don't remember how the topic came up, but B essentially let on that he was looking for other opportunities, that teaching, he is finding, isn't as rewarding as it once was. He said he had come to a realization, only recently, that what he loved to do was to perform in front of an audience, not as part of a larger choir (which he does with a church choir), but with a small group, a band.

There have been times when B has interrupted himself while teaching my son. He stops playing and singing along with my son and says "Sorry, I'm showboating. I'll stop that." Most of the time, I don't even notice that he's been showboating. I just assume he's trying to lead my son with a little more emphasis, and sometimes that's the case. But there are occasions when I can tell that B is showboating. Thankfully, he knows that instructing my son is not the same as being on stage. Yes, he can emphasize certain phrasings, even exaggerates things so that my son, in reaching for the exaggeration, hits the right tone. But when he finds himself slipping into performance mode, he catches himself and resets.

When we had our conversation, I remarked that his desire to move from instructing and participating in choirs to more focused vocal performance with a small group reminded me of my own journey as a writer. The corollaries are not exact (are they ever?), but when I look back on my writing career, it goes a bit like this:

In the beginning, I edited. My writing at that time was overly baroque and florid (some will argue that it still is, but I have some MSS hidden away from my early days that will have you puking purple in no time). I had a good grasp of grammar. I knew a good story when I read it. I knew how to organize a theme. And I had (and still have) distinctive tastes in fiction. So what better way to learn how to write than by exposing myself to a large amount of short fiction in a short time? At around that time, Jeff VanderMeer asked if I would like to help him edit the Leviathan 3 anthology. I had loved the first two Leviathans and Stepan Chapman's The Troika, all of which Jeff had edited. So I jumped in.

I learned a great deal from Jeff. We compiled the anthology, and won a World Fantasy Award for editing. I took on a few other editorial projects, while, at the same time, working on honing my short fiction skills. I found some measure of success there, but considered myself more of an editor than a writer. I'm not quite sure why: I had more stories published even at that time than many others who considered themselves "writers". Maybe it was some internal coding I had that left me feeling that my writing wasn't as good as many other people's writing or not as recognized as others' writing, but I knew that my editing had garnered some attention. Ah, that inner demon, self-esteem!

As time wore on, however, more comfortable with my abilities as a writer. As the writing credits racked up, I still felt like something was missing. That something was long-form fiction, novellas, novels, the big stuff. The important stuff. The stuff that shows "I am a writer," at least how I conceived a writer at that time.

Short fiction came quite naturally to me, with little effort. I'm told that this is all backwards, that most writers write novels first, then short stories, and that writing short stories is the most difficult of writing arts. Not for me. The long-form was my bugbear. This probably has something to do with a short attention span and my penchant for being distracted by responsibilities and other interests. So I attempted to write a novel. I had had a few different ideas brewing for some time, so I thought it was time to give it the old college try.

What a disaster . . . The novel, as a novel, never materialized. Well, it did, but it was an ugly, mutated mess. I had a few writerly friends read it and the best advice I received was to split it into two. I could see that they were right, so I did so. In the course of splitting these, I discovered that what I had was not a novel, nor a short story, but two novellas. After thorough editing, I had created two long, but not-novel-length stories that I was pleased with. I found the exercise so enjoyable that I went on and wrote several more.

One of them I sent to editor John Joseph Adams, who said, in effect, "what you've got here is a novel". He said that it had made the short list for one of the anthologies he was editing at the time, but he felt that it just needed more breathing room, so he rejected it. Best . . . rejection . . . ever. I took his advice and unraveled the "end" of my novella to open up the door to . . . more. How much more, I didn't know at the time. Well, to make a long-form story short, I ended up with the rough draft of Heraclix & Pomp.

So this transition from editor to short story writer to novelist parallels, in some ways, B's ongoing journey from instructor/conductor to performer. But what about "showboating"?

Many years ago, I was lambasted in a review for being too enamored of words. That might have been true. I love beautiful words and beautiful sentences. I found that my editors for Heraclix & Pomp were frequently chastising me for using overly-complex metaphors and odd constructions that, while they made sense to *me*, were becoming stumbling blocks for the editors and would, hence, get in the way of the common reader (and I use the term "common" with the greatest affection). My job as a writer is not to impress, but to communicate. If I can communicate effectively *and* beautifully, all the better. But clarity must come before elegance, at least in the long form novel. I'm afraid, though, that you'll have to tolerate some level of experimentation and overt playfulness of language in my short fiction. I love words, I love beautiful sentences, and sometimes, at least in the short story form, I have to wear my emotions on my sleeves. I am, after all, a romantic at heart.

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RIP Stepan Chapman

The man whose writing single-handedly pushed me "over the edge" into the world of writing has passed away. I learned of Stepan's passing a few days after the fact. I am still saddened. Stepan was a great writer - I published his work two times as an editor (in fact, Stepan was the only author to appear in all four volumes of Ministry of Whimsy Press's World Fantasy Award-winning Leviathan series). His writing was quirky, a touch cynical, funny, and whimsical. Those who met him know that Stepan's personality was reflected in his work. The writing world lost a good writer. The human world lost a good person.

Stepan's first influence on me came when I picked up a copy of his Philip K. Dick-award winning novel, The Troika. I was generously gifted a copy of his short fiction collection, Danger Music, by Jeff VanderMeer. Stepan was gracious enough to sign them both. He later sent me a copy of his longer collection, Dossier (signed as well) and his cartoon collections Life on Earth and Common Ectoids of Arizona. In my experience, Stepan just wanted to share everything. I've met few people as kind and giving as he was.

I had the privilege of spending some time with Stepan and his wife, Kia, at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington DC back in 2003. I remember him as always smiling, even when he was squelching his inner cynic with a good laugh.  I came to view him as unassuming, yet theatrical (he did children's puppet theater in some capacity or another, and I could see why).  I corresponded with him from about 2001 to 2007 or so. Then life got in the way and we lost contact, which is much more my fault than his.

I miss Stepan. In hindsight, I wish I had kept contact with him. He was the kind of person who could brighten up your day just by being around, and heaven knows I could have used that from time to time. I owe my writing career to Stepan. His work started it all. And though he did only a little in the way of mentoring, his work inspired me and continues to inspire me.

One last thing that Stepan sent me some years ago was a 3-ring binder containing his unpublished novel Burger Creature: The First Volume of the Burger Creature Saga, including "A Synopsis of The Burger Creature Saga" and a series of drawings showing the various characters in the book. Here's Stepan's synopsis of the 1st book:

THE PLOT IN A NUTSHELL:

Novel one: BURGER CREATURE
Part one: THE BURGER WALKS AMONG US
Lily Cook, a sweet young burger-franchise cashier, discovers and animate beef patty and raises him to humanoid adulthood in a matter of weeks. he has french fries for hair and pickle slices for eyes. She names him Burger Creature and falls in love with him. But after a single night of wild cosmic burger sex, he's kidnapped by two sinister corporate thugs in a black sedan - representatives of Bennett Foods and the Burger Planet franchise.
Part two: CURSE OF THE LIVING FOOD
Lily abandons her life in Tuscon Arizona and roams the roadways in search of her ill-fated boyfriend. Meanwhile in Colorado, at a research-&-development facility of Bennett Foods, Burger Creature is held captive. He grows into a giant, but despite his size, he's severed at the waist and decapitated. Everything below the neck is transported to the research labs of two other R-&-D unit. Lily allies herself with a trio of Japanese spies who steal the head from Bennett Foods, then ditch Lily and keep the head for themselves. Luckily Lily has new allies waiting in the wings - her friends from Tuscon.

This gives a taste of Stepan's wackiness, but some of his writing had a decidedly Literary bent to it. For example, "The Minutes of the Last Meeting," a novella, which appeared in Leviathan 2, is an exquisitely written historically-based science fiction piece about what would happen if Czarist Russia were to develop a nuclear bomb. Stepan's breadth of writing was pretty amazing.

Behind the clear plastic cover to the bindered Burger Creature is a note from Stepan. It reads:

5.2.2005

Dear Forrest:

Confused? Put upon? Adrift in a fallen world? Read this book?! It solves everything.

yrs.

Stepan

It just might, Stepan. It just might . . .

Rest in Peace, my friend.

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Life On Earth

Life on Earth by Stepan Chapman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite his Philip K. Dick-award-winning The Troika and a slot in the well-known Orbit series of anthologies, Stepan Chapman has a gift for obscurity. I tried, twice, to help him along, but for some reason Stepan remains a cult classic.

I think this is because Stepan is the proverbial Renaissance Man. He's written novels, short stories, is involved with puppetry and children's theater, and is noted in the small press for his quirky and surreal drawings.

And this last talent is what is on display in Life On Earth. These are not your normal drawings, either. The closest thing in the comic world is, I believe, Konny and Czu (an all-time favorite of mine and among my most prized comic possessions).

"Life on earth was depressed," the story begins. Story? Well, more like a fable. Here, Chapman has tied together a series of wildly disparate (and just plain wild) images in a sort of existentialist fairy tale. The story is not particularly strong, but on the whole, the book is quirky and just so darkly-cute that it makes the little goth crouching behind my heart snicker a bit. The imagery is out of this world - literally - there's no way you can place it on this Earth, and I wonder if the irony is intentional. That seems like something Stepan would do - just for laughs. Now, the book won't make you laugh, unless you have a very grim sense of humor. The characters depicted herein - from vaguely insectoid entities to malformed and tortured humans (this is not for kids, folks) - will make you cringe and, at the same time, fill you with self-loathing for that little smile that crept onto your face as you feigned disgust.

But it will make you think about your place on earth, about where you fit in, and mercilessly toss you between hope and cynicism. Where you end up after this game is over says a lot about what you think of Life On Earth.

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