Evadare Volney's Blog

The King in Yellow Rises [Annotated] [Illustrated] [Translated]: The Lost Book of Carcosa by Charles Baudelaire

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The TV series True Detective brought a revival of interest in the King In Yellow mythos, and this eerie little book is a great handy source to link not only all Robert W Chambers stories that involve the sinister play, the Yellow Sign, and the lost city of Carcosa, but a lot of his sources and inspirations as well, most directly Ambrose Bierce. And while Baudelaire's poem and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper, and the Lord Dunsany tales aren't properly part of the mythos, it's not a reach to see why they're included here, for cultural context of nothing else - and if Poe's The Masque of the Red Death didn't inspire RWC at least a little bit, I'll eat my...um...mask. It's a pity the relevant stories of HP Lovecraft can't be included here for copyright reasons (and the editor/translator explains which stories you need to read in the afterward essay anyway), but the star I'd have docked for missing them is restored by the inclusion of the decadent, surrealistic, nightmarish illustrations, which bring this collection up to a new level.



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John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World by Jason Louv

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a fascinating read, and the most striking thing about it for me is the way it builds on earlier writers on Dee and his life and work like Dame Frances Yates and Benjamin Woolley to carry that legacy of, not just Hermetic magick but also his apocalyptic worldview, into the present day: through the Rosicrucian movement, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons (whom he compares to Dee as someone who was both a committed occultist and a pioneer in the cutting-edge science of his time and saw no conflict between the two whatsoever - a POV you'd expect in the 16th century but rather more striking, if not completely un-heard of, in the 20th). This is a brand-new book and it works events like the Trump election into a legacy of spiritual conflict and desire to take material control of occult energies that's rooted in the very history of Western religious iconography. Jason Louv also runs the Ultraculture blog (https://ultraculture.org/) and is deeply immersed in this background - I enjoyed this book immensely not only for its intense modern-day relevance but for the way the various characters in this centuries-long drama come through as people: flawed, sometimes unhinged, dedicated, torn between their mortal lives and the spiritual forces that pushed them beyond human limits.



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My Grave Ritual by G.S. Denning

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I dithered over the number of stars because it didn't make me howl with laughter quite as much as the first two books in the series, but then I decided it was just that the novelty had worn off and this one is really just as good - and maybe even better in that it's definitively building towards a series finale that's probably going to be gruesome and painful. Anyway, if you like the premise - Watson is the real detective, Holmes is a rather dim but extremely powerful sorcerer who's usually completely riddled with demons - and you like continually surprising re-writes of the canon stories that turn them into pulpy slapstick horror, you'll enjoy this one just as much as the others.

You'll be rewarded by various cultural easter eggs too if you happen to catch them ("Bellinger leaned in with renewed vigor and insisted, “Destroy the doctor!” “Destroy!” Hope agreed, in high-pitched, strident tones. “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”), and droll asides on social behavior ("The man was an arch-conservative politician, but famous for his even temper and courtesy. His political reputation was for upholding basically indefensible beliefs by remaining calm and genial until his opponent’s patience ran out, he yelled, and by the laws of British propriety therefore forfeited the debate.")

But I'm worried. I love this universe, and yet I know I will fail to take Watson's very wise advice here: "To the reader who loves our world and wishes to believe it will continue, let me say: Stop. Stop, right now. Close this book, set it aside and never read anything else I write."



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Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories by Connie Wilkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I always want to love alternative history, and yet I'm picky about it. When events happen in fiction that could have made a better future than the reality we got, I feel both delighted and conflicted: is this cheapening the horrors of what really happened? By contrast, perhaps they highlight it. These stories don't generally shy away from that - I'm still gnawing on the tale of a gay Thomas Jefferson as a marriage-equality campaigner while still being an unapologetic slave owner (Samuel Hemmings in this story). There are two stories of Indigenous lesbian resistance to colonialism, a gay Indian (from India) survivor of a brutal Caribbean voyage, a transgender T.E. Lawrence, a tale in which everything you think you know about Shakespeare and Marlowe was wrong (except Marlowe being gay, that part was true) a painfully sad but hopeful story that considers what the influence might have been if E.M. Forster's Maurice had been published at the time it was written instead of decades later after his death...There is a LOT to chew on here, and while not all the stories worked for me, the ones that did really haunt me.



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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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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 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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Gods & Monsters: A Shadow Council Archives Novella by S.H. Roddey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I got a chance to hear the author read the first chapter of this at MystiCon in Roanoke, VA and was hooked immediately. Loved the rest of it too. It's a gripping, tightly-paced horror/adventure story, with a heartbreakingly sympathetic (but still terrifying) protagonist.



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The Ghost and Dr. Watson: A Shadow Council Archives Novella by Alexandra Christian

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this - fantastically creepy and more than a bit sexy. Ghost!Holmes is just marvelous, and poor lost Watson getting back in touch with his inner badass was amazing. I was intrigued by Mei, I hope we get to see more of her someday.



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The Killer Wore Leather: A Mystery by Laura Antoniou

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I had a wonderful time with this book, a murder mystery set at an IML-like leather pageant/convention. At first I thought it might be a bit long for a weekend-set whodunit, but Antoniou really dives in and lets us spend time with all the characters - a huge cast representing so many different aspects of the kink community, as well as the detectives who turn out to not really be as much of fish out of water as they thought they were. So much delicious, witty detail, so many touching moments, so many engaging characters, and a few genuine twisty surprises. Although I didn't find the identity of the killer to be a surprise, by the time we get there I'd become so immersed in this world that the initial mystery plot was just one storyline out of many and not even the most compelling one. The journeys of the living characters surrounding the dead man are richly rewarding.



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