Evadare Volney's Blog - Posts Tagged "lgbtq"

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Marvellous atmospheric rural creepiness in this short tale of queer occultish anarchist squatters becoming demon hunters, which as you can imagine I'm 1000% here for. I loved the normalization of counterculture - the protagonist Danielle Cain takes traveler/squatter culture for granted, and for the most part resists info-dump except for the sort of political praxis speak that can seem preachy but I think is also true to life, especially in the rather heightened circumstances of a squatter town being menaced by a stag-shaped spirit of vengeance that eats wrongdoers' hearts right out of their chests. This novella achieves a lot in a short space - if it has a weakness I feel like there are too many potentially interesting characters to develop well in a paranormal thriller plot that also deals heavily in parable and symbolism. But since this is the beginning of a series, I know I'll have more time to get to know the survivors.



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Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel by Rudy Rucker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This one has really stuck with me days later. I was sucked right in by the audacious premise: Alan Turing escapes an assassination attempt and uses his weird bioengineering experiments to fake his death, copy his dead lover's face and flee to Tangier, where he meets William S Burroughs and develops a prickly romance with him and with a cast of bohemian side characters. Turing's mad science has led to the development of parasitic/symbiotic sluglike creatures called "skugs" that fuse to their hosts and grant a range of weird powers, including telepathy, self-healing, and shapeshifting. This has both pros and cons (Skug sex sounds amazing though)! Rucker has a flexible, adaptable writing style and he's even good with women characters (more than the actual Beats). The ghost of Joan Burroughs has a strong personality, and I fell a little bit in love with Susan, the avant-garde composer who has a sort of physics-magick of her own based on sound (and who is an adventurous soul who takes Turing's seduction of her husband more or less in stride as long as there's also something in it for her).

There's a LOT of scientific material in here, thoroughly integrated in narration and dialogue - both realistic and not, and a cameo by the nuclear physicist Stanislaw Ulam - and I'll be frank, most of it is way over my head. But Rucker and his characters describe it with such ecstatic glee that it becomes bop prosody in its own right: like the best Beat writing, it works as music as much as prose. And his style really sings in the sections of the book that are in the form of letters from Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg - he really nails WSB's bone-dry wit and morbid frankness and inimitable gift for unconventional syntax. The love story (well really there are several) is both sweet and prickly, and doesn't skimp on the bitterness caused by being dangerously queer and smart in the repressive 50s.



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The Compact by Charlie Raven

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this book immensely - just as much as I liked A Case of Domestic Pilfering, if not even more. Raven writes delightfully about a class-varied cast of fin-de-siecle types, and weaves a complex and compelling story about a murder and a sinister businesswoman that includes both mundane and paranormal elements. Much of the tension and emotional momentum is fueled by something we don't see very often - a love triangle of sorts between three middle-aged women. Around them are a supporting cast of theatricals, decadents, some honest police and some crooked ones, quick-eyed servants, and people damaged and deprived by the Victorian closet.

A good mix of well-loved other folks' characters combined with fascinating real historical figures is something I always enjoy: sheer genius that the mystery deduction here is driven by Dr. Watson (a little bit lost since Holmes has gone to the continent without him) finding a passable substitute in a young, callow Aleister Crowley (who is much better suited than Holmes would have been to take on the occult aspects of the case - and his mountaineering skills also come into play at the terrifying climax). Crowley's rocky relationship with Jerome Pollitt gets a lot of exploration and is beautifully handled - as superficial as Pollitt sometimes seems, he's sympathetic in his frustrated love for a brilliant eccentric. Pollitt's friendship with the tragic Aubrey Beardsley is also alluded to. (I was struck how very different Crowley's characterization was from a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I read recently that he also appears in, Guy Adams's The Breath of God.)

I loved the atmosphere of this - the rooming houses of London, the Gothic landscape of Minerva Atwell's creepy health spa. I loved the characters and their relationships; I loved the organic motivations rooted in fear of aging, fear of loss, fear of discovery; I loved a mostly mature cast who have loved and lost before; I love ethereal George's visions-cum-past-life-memories. I quibble just a little with the pacing - first part felt slow and second half rushed - but that is a minor flaw among so many things it does right.



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