In the Year 1977

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For Tolkien fans, that is.

1977 saw the publication of The Silmarillion, which critics apparently hated, I guess because they wanted some happy novel about hobbits. But 1977 also saw the appearance of the two titans among Tolkien clones: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, and Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson. Each might be described as The-Lord-of-the-Rings-with-a-twist: the first replaces the prehistoric past with a post-apocalyptic future, while the second replaces the merry band of doughty halflings with a cynical, s**t-head leper.

I read a stack of Terry Brooks novels back in the nineties, when I was a teenager, both his Shannara series (the first seven, I think) and his Magic Kingdom of Landover series (the first four?), checking them out one by one from the town library and devouring them. The Landover novels in particular I remember with fondness. But I recall going into Waldenbooks one day (this is when malls had bookstores) and seeing the next Landover installment on the shelf (Witch's Brew, I think), and suddenly realizing that the series was, in fact, an open-ended commercial venture. Shocked to the marrow, I turned my back on popular fantasy then and there, and began my Gollum-like transformation into the lurking curmudgeon I am today.

Anyway, it was the Shannara books I read first. Their shortcomings, which were obvious even to my tenth-grade-level literary acumen, have been pointed out many times, and I needn't dwell on them matter here. I genuinely enjoyed them. I don't know how I would feel upon rereading now. But there's no denying that the publication of The Sword of Shannara was a seminal event in the evolution of fantasy into the commercial genre we know today.

Now, I never encountered Stephen Donaldson back while I was still a happy Smeagol splashing by the banks of the Great River. But he's come to my attention a few times in recent years, and his darker take on Tolkienism interested the writer in me. So I picked up Lord Foul's Bane about five years ago...and promptly put it down when I encountered That One Part.

Let's get that out of the way before we move on.

The protagonist, toward the beginning of the novel, rapes a teenage girl, the daughter of his hosts. He's a leper. A moral leper, that is. Now, I defend the right of an author to write whatever accords with his or her artistic vision, and I'm not one of those people who think that everything a novelist writes about is some statement of their personal beliefs. Nevertheless, I put the book down at that point. It disturbed me. I didn't feel like reading a book where such things happen. Or rather, I didn't feel like reading such a book written by an author lacking the psychological profundity needed to write about such things without trivializing them. And I wasn't convinced that Donaldson had that profundity.

The strength of my disturbance, I think, owes to the identification I felt with Thomas Covenant, which was quite visceral due to the graphic depiction of his leprosy. (And this depiction is one of the novel's strengths, in my opinion.) I felt as though I were leering with him, first at a girl in the telephone company office, then at the sixteen-year-old Lena. The rape scene itself sent me down a well of vicarious guilt and horror.

[Aside: The cover of The Sword of Shannara sports a picture by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I like a lot of their work, despite the fact that it's dated and a bit goofy. The cover of Lord Foul's Bane features a lovely painting by one S. C. Wyeth, about whom I can't find any information. Is he related to N. C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth? The style recalls the elder.]

Maybe it's that I feel genre fiction to be too frivolous, written too much for pure entertainment, to justify the inclusion of such elements. Or maybe it's more a matter of style than anything else. I mean, if you're going to have your protagonist commit an unspeakable crime, then the plot sort of needs to be about that. It can't be one element among others. It's almost inconceivable that a mother would travel for weeks in the sole company of her daughter's rapist, however cogent the reasons, and the fictional depiction of such a journey should be a descent into an emotional hell. What we get, though, are descriptions of scenery.

I suspect, however, that we aren't meant to view Thomas Covenant in quite that light. The rape scene is presented as though we're supposed to imagine that he commits the act because he thinks he's in some kind of fever-dream or coma, and also because he's overwhelmed by the unexpected return of his lost virility. But if he's really the Unbeliever he always claims to be, why does he go through his VSE (visual surveillance of extremities) on every page? Why is he always reminding everyone that he's a leper? I mean, maybe I could accept the fever-dream excuse on a literary level if the presentation of the plot were consistent, if (say) he went on a febrile, Maskull-like odyssey of crime and depravity through the Land, but it's not. Covenant's supposed conviction that it's all a dream comes off more as an occasional pose. Which, I repeat, is a matter of style, not of morality.

And then there's the scene later on in the book when he lusts after another underage girl, and suddenly feels remorse for what he did to Lena, and basically decides to send her an annual present. Dude. That just makes you twice as creepy and despicable in my eyes. Which is fine if that's what the author intends, but here I don't think it is. Because it's presented as a climactic moment beginning Covenant's reconciliation with the Land and his opening up to friendship with his companions. So, ramifications continue to be felt, etc., but, to me, it all comes off as slightly phony.

Well, anyway, that's enough of that. It's a point reasonable people can disagree on. My own (purely stylistic) assessment is that the rape scene is presented so as to shock the reader's sensibilities, but that its inclusion isn't supported by the novel's subsequent meandering quest-plot. Still, there's something to be said for Covenant's moral numbness, the numbness of his leprosy, and his identification with Lord Foul, and I'll admit that there may be more to it all than I've seen at my first glance. On the moral side, I can see why it bothers people, but I'm going to suspend my judgment until I finish the trilogy.

As for the rest, well, I don't feel that it's worthwhile to comment much on the story until I've read the next installments. (Or maybe I'm afraid to throw rocks, having just published my own novel.) Instead, I'll talk about what struck me on every page of Lord Foul's Bane: the extent to which it draws from The Lord of the Rings. Just to name a few items, we have:

• Tolkienesque place-names like Mithil Stonedown, Kiril Threndor, Trothgard, and Glimmermere.
• People with sturdy, earthy, Anglo-Saxon names like Treeroot Branchtwig (okay, I made that one up). 
• A long journey to a big info-dump of a Council, which takes place midway through the book.
• Mysterious liqueurs that magically refresh you.
• Woodsy retreats and way stations.
• Slow, friendly giants who practically hoom-hom while they complain about the hastiness of their companions.
• Elvish-sounding exclamations like Melenkurion!
• A super-important gold ring that someone tries to bite off at the end.
• A city carved in a mountainside with a layout almost impossible to comprehend.
• Dark forests with angsty, anti-biped trees. 
• Geologically fanciful mountains.
• Horse People.
• A Dark Lord who returns after a long vacation but remains offstage.
• A volcanic climax. 

I could go on and on. It's got the potential of being a commentary on or deconstruction of The Lord of the Rings, what with its s**t-head leper of a protagonist and its opening in the Real World, which might be kind of cool in a way. And I say that as a Tolkien fan. But, in the thick of things, Lord Foul's Bane just becomes a somewhat shallow retread of something that had already been done, with a twist to make it seem original. For me, the Land remains mere artificial "scenery" (to quote a word from an ironic conversation in the novel); it doesn't come to life and make me long to enter it, like Middle-Earth.

It's no coincidence that books like The Sword of Shannara and Lord Foul's Bane were published the same year as The Silmarillion. For whatever reason, people were starving for more Tolkien, and there was simply no more to be had. So they had to settle with uneven compilations of his unpublished backstory material and new novels that mixed and matched his stylistic tics. It's taken a long time for the commercial genre to outgrow that. And maybe it never quite has. Certainly the fracking of Tolkien's unpublished works "goes ever on and on."

But I'm still struck by the narrowness of the adherence to Tolkien's vision. What, in fact, do we want when we want to read Tolkien? What is the real hunger that The Lord of the Rings whets without satisfying? I ask this as a writer who consciously (and probably unconsciously) adopts elements from Tolkien. What's really essential about his work? Is it something material, or something deeper, something hidden under the surface? When are you producing something truly new, and when are you just making a direct-to-DVD mockbuster?

There's not a simple answer to this, I suppose. While reserving my final judgment on Lord Foul's Bane until I finish at least the first trilogy, I'll just end with William Blake's pithy paradox:

The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is: the Bad Artist Seems to copy a Great deal. The Good one Really does Copy a Great deal.

Nightspore Goes Digital

Rev up your Light Cycles! Climb aboard the Solar Sailer! It's time for an odyssey through the Grid! That's right: Keftu has been digitized!

The King of Nightspore's Crown, the second volume in the Enoch series, is now available as a Kindle e-book. Get it here.

That's the link for US customers, incidentally, though both of my books are available internationally. It's only gradually dawned on me that, while many of the copies I sell go to either the UK or the EU, the links I provide are only for my country's Amazon store. If you're in a country other than the US, this third-party redirect link should get you there, or you can just do a quick search.

Anyway, like Dragonfly, The King of Nightspore's Crown is enrolled in the Kindle MatchBook program, so, if you've purchased the print edition, you can get the e-book for free.

Thank you for your patronage!

The King of Nightspore's Crown at Black Gate

The King of Nightspore's Crown received an awesome review by Fletcher Vredenburgh over at Black Gate today. It's worth reading in its entirety, so, if you're one of the subset of persons who read my blog but do not regularly read Black Gate, I hope you'll go check it out.

He mentions the need of a glossary, which, come to think of it, I probably should have provided. Hm. I guess I'll have to post one here in the not-so-distant future, and include one in the next volume. In the meantime, have fun figuring out which words are invented and which are merely rare or obscure.

I'll also mention that I'm working on an e-book version of KoNC for Kindle. It's been my plan from the outset to offer it through that channel, but, unfortunately, various contingencies have gotten in the way. Be looking for it in the next week or so if interested.

In other news, I had an art show in town recently, and managed to sell a few pieces, including my Samuel Palmer-inspired Entombment painting. Here's the announcement:

The exhibit will be up through the end of the month, if you happen to be in the area. (But, ha ha, you won't be.) The turnout was good for our town, but limited mostly to my personal contacts, plus a few of their contacts. There's just not a lot of interest in the arts here. It was the night of the homecoming game, but somehow I don't think there's much intersection between the art crowd and the football crowd.

The gallery owner, who also teaches art at the local college, was especially enthusiastic about my Nightspore painting. He noted a similarity to Brueghel and Bosch without any prompting from me, which probably pleased me more than anything. So I'm currently at work on a wrap-around painting for The Worm Ouroboros, which never got that treatment in the Ballantine series. It's taking inspiration from Persian and Indian miniatures. I may do some illustrations and a map, and try to sell it under Hythloday House like my own novels.

Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions

My post about "serial epic fantasy" a few weeks ago has gotten more (non-robot) hits than most of my recent posts, so I thought I would revisit the topic, which is, after all, a perennial one on this blog. In fact, it goes back to my second post ever, when I threw down my gauntlet before the literary world.

At the time I wrote that, I had just despaired of ever finding an agent or publisher for my gargantuan first novel, which was 150K words after trimming it down by half and seriously boring. It was about autism, autogyros, quantum mechanics, and various characters that eventually found a home in my Enoch stories. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was too inwardly focused to be readable. I ultimately relegated my autistic recluse to the void in favor of a sanguine pugilist who leaps before he looks and basically does everything I would never do.

So that post was (and is) a kind of manifesto. Manifestos are fun, especially when they're full of hyperbole and self-importance. So let's do another! I'll begin with an unapologetic catalog of my twenty favorite fantasy novels, listed in chronological order:

• Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916)
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)
• The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) 
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (1938)
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
• Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1983)
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984)

Well, okay, that was twenty-one. To get on that list, you have to have made a permanent impression my imagination, and I have to have reread you as a guilty pleasure at least once. A list of my favorite short fiction would include pieces by George MacDonald, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore. I tend to gravitate toward the weird and ornate, like "The Repairer of Reputations" or "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" or "The Tower of the Elephant" or "The Demon in the Flower."

So I think it's fair to say that I'm biased toward the what came before the Tolkien watershed. When I read what other people have to say about pre-Tolkien novels, I often get the feeling that they're viewed as ungainly precursors, as the dinosaur skeletons at the museum entrance. They're the work of primitives who didn't quite know what they were about, Giottos and Fra Angelicos to our modern Raphaels and Caravaggios. They're tolerated or even admired, but as a kind of academic curiosity that one delves into occasionally as an act of literary penance.

My preferences are quite the opposite. I do read modern fantasy. I discover hidden gems that way. They're out there, to be sure. But my first and only real love is the pre-Tolkien canon. How many times have I read A Voyage to Arcturus or Phantastes or The Worm Ouroboros? Too many to count. If I read modern fantasy, it's because I'm looking for something to satisfy the hunger whetted by these works.

But, more often than not, genre fiction cheats this desire. It's got no bite, no danger, no weirdness. It's tame. To put it in galline terms, it's caponized and clipped. It lacks the grotesque stylistic bosses, the glowing digressions, the awkward framing devices and dumb shows of the classics.

I could point to myriad ways in which the works of the pre-Tolkien canon influenced one another. But each draws far more from philosophy and science and mythology. They were part of a real literary movement rather than a genre. A literary movement is a living thing that grows according to its own inner logic and is necessarily bound in time; a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements. The difference between fantastic literature and a lot of genre fiction is the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a McMansion.

And in case I seem entirely dismissive of more recent efforts, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about everything that's out there right now. I've read things that I've liked very much. But just look at the sheer quantity of it all. The kinds of works I like can't be mass produced or made to order. They're like lightning strikes. And one thing I note about the majority of the authors I listed above is that their primary career was not fiction writing. If it had been, they would have starved.

Let me also emphasize that I'm not into nostalgia. I have no desire to try to "get back" to anything. If a true fantasy novel is to be written in our time, it must take root right here in the twenty-first century, drawing its nourishment from the world around us even if in reaction against it. There are no "good old days" to hearken back to. The world in which fantasy first flourished was a dirty and brutal place, and the master fantasists were people of their time. Even the one author most responsible for creating the modern fantasy novel, the aggressively backward-looking William Morris, was a social activist whose efforts in manufacture reform were echoed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus half a century later.

As Tolkien points out, the Escape for which fantasy is often blamed has "Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt" as its companions. True fantasy is not safe. It's revolutionary. But genre fiction can't be revolutionary. It mixes and matches the established tropes, making novel arrangements rather than creating new worlds. It might, if quite certain of its audience, cautiously advance a few progressive or conservative talking points, but it will never ever do anything that makes it unclear which tribe it's supposed to appeal to, because that is the one unforgivable sin.

It's easy enough to talk about all this on my blog, and I do often enough. The quality of my novels is debatable, but at any rate they're out there. Sometimes you just have to get up on a rooftop and shout about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Plus, the robots were getting kind of rambunctious in my absence. Go away, robots. Dance somewhere else.

Related: A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art

Animated Princesses

My family is not what you'd call up-to-date. We don't watch television. We do watch movies together, but it tends to be older stuff. We're not entirely out of pop culture, but at best we're usually a couple of years behind.

A big giant movie like Frozen comes and goes, and it's not even a blip on our radar. I see news stories about "viral videos" of people dressed like these two big-eyed girls singing some song called "Let it Go," and kind of scratch my head, and move on to another Mental Floss video, or maybe watch Mothra vs. Godzilla with my daughter.

But well-meaning adults tend to assume that Disney movies are some kind of universal touchstone that you can use to gain instant rapport with any child. Alas, that doesn't work with mine. They'll change the subject to the giant black leeches on The African Queen.

A friend recently gave my daughter, who's six, a shirt with the two princesses from Frozen. She wore it somewhat tentatively, but stated every time she did so that she felt awkward wearing a shirt for a movie she hadn't seen. Eventually she requested to watch it, telling us that she wanted to decide whether she liked it. So my wife rented it for the kids on a rainy day when I was away at something.

For several days afterward my daughter refused to say what she thought of it. She evaded the question when asked. It was plain that she was deep in assessment. At last, however, she dispassionately declared that she didn't like it, that she wouldn't be wearing the shirt in the future, and that in fact she wanted to place the shirt in our next yard sale. But she still wouldn't explain why she disliked it. After several weeks, however, I asked her again while we were alone, and she told me, somewhat exasperatedly: "Of course I didn't like it because it has too much love."

Now, I can't say whether my daughter's assessment is fair or accurate, because I haven't seen the movie. But my kids tend not to like any Disney/Pixar fare, and I can't say I blame them. They're all so bland, so repetitive, so perfectly smooth and rounded. My attention just slips right off them.

In the past several weeks, however, two animated movies have come to the rescue to prove to my kids that not all cartoons are meh: The Last Unicorn and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. They're both so well known in certain circles that anyone reading this has probably seen them, but I'm going to talk about them anyway.

Visually, both are products of Japanese animation. The Last Unicorn (1982) was produced by Rankin/Bass, of whose stop-motion Rudolph fantasies I'm rather fond. The screenplay is by Peter S. Beagle, the author of the novel, and it has excellent voice acting. I would describe it enchanting, sad, and whimsical in equal parts. My children were struck with its beauty from the first few frames. They told my wife afterward that it was "a cartoon but not really a cartoon because most of it is painted." I'm not sure exactly what they meant by this, but I think they were just struck by the freshness of its hand-drawn, hand-painted animation as opposed to the slick computer-generated stuff they've seen in more recent movies.

Flaming demon bulls and vicious harpy attacks don't faze my kids, incidentally, but there's one scene I don't quite understand, and wish hadn't been handled as it was in the film: the one involving the, er, tree. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. What were they thinking?

On the other hand, Nausicaä (1984), directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki and based on the manga by the same, is just about the most terrific animated film I've ever seen. I've watched it twice now in a single week, and I think I'm in love with it. How could I not have seen it sooner? High-speed battles between giant airships. Ruined cities. Monstrous biomechanical warriors. Ancient disasters. Jungles of poisonous fungi. Ceramic blades. Gigantic, intelligent insects. Swords and tanks together.

Most of all, a brave, kind, intelligent, resourceful, independent female protagonist. I mean, she's a princess who actually acts like one, as opposed to, say, an entitled tween with indulgent parents. She single-handedly brightened my daughter's dim view of the breed. The main themes – peace, harmony with nature, self-sacrifice – are straightforward enough for a child to grasp, but movingly and profoundly presented.

And it's all done in the loveliest animation I may have ever seen, accompanied by a delightful score that's sometimes enchanting, sometimes almost religious, and sometimes pop, Plus, the English-dubbed version features the voice talents of actors like Patrick Stewart, Edward James Olmos, and Uma Thurman.

Oh, yeah, and my kids liked it, too. Tonight, after watching it for the first time, my eight-year-old son said, "That's the best cartoon movie I've ever seen."

 I'm definitely going to be reading the manga sometime soon.

Garbage-Can Literature

Found this response to a charming fan letter from the 14-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman drifting around on the web today:

See Ackerman's letter here. "All you speak of is real to me."

Despite a few misspellings, I'm struck by how readable it is. Not many college students could write a letter like that these days. How depressing.

In other news, it seems my somewhat processy post on epic fantasy was linked to by the Castalia House blog: many thanks to them, and a hearty welcome to all you hordes of visitors. You came here to read my thoughts on unity in fantasy; now stay to read my rambling and often irrelevant posts on art, dollhouses, chickens, and cosmogony.

The Eladogran Cosmogony

My fiction is based on a set of documents that came to me from a source which must remain secret. However, because this is my blog, where I may do as I like, I will here offer one document for the reader's perusal. If inclined to doubt its authenticity (or my sanity), please regard it merely as an exercise in mythopoeic verisimilitude and an attempt to gather my extensive notes into one place, somewhere among Plato's Timaeus, Tolkien's Ainulindalë, Blake's Book of Urizen, and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

The text comes from the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes, though whether from the future, the past, or some other cycle I cannot say. It appears to be of Recusant authorship. The editor's introduction, however, is plainly the product of Enochite erudition, which tends to miss the point about most things.

The edition relies on secondary sources, namely, transcriptions of the original codex into the cylinders used by the Enochite archives. Cylinders are decoded by mechanical readers, and are known to be more durable than other forms of record-keeping, but even slight damage to a cylinder can make entire passages completely inaccessible, a drawback not shared by paper or baked clay.

Though I didn't scruple to make use of modern English punctuation and vocabulary in my translation, I did my best to retain the flavor of the original. One word posed a special difficulty, however. The nephelic tongue uses different terms for the human species as a whole and for the male of that species, while the English word "man" can refer to either. "Human being" is an unforgivable solecism, and "human" is, properly speaking, an adjective, not a noun. In the end I went with traditional English usage, though this does some injustice to the text.

The manuscript in my possession (which, strangely enough, is on paper, not a cylinder) is accompanied by a number of curious pictures. Unfortunately, the gamma radiation to which they were exposed during their long sojourn in the deeps of space has caused them to fade badly. I fear that the harsh light of a document scanner would only cause further damage. Even the darkened, climate-controlled room where I keep the manuscript has not proved entirely adequate. I may attempt to reproduce the pictures by hand at some future date. If I do so, I shall certainly append them to this post.

I caution the reader not to expect too strict an adherence to the letter of this document in my writing. The account reflects philosophical, mythological, historical, and topological traditions, whereas my stories are works of literature.

And now, on to...

Two More Hauntings, and a Madhouse

My search for haunted house movies continues. I saw a very good one recently: Burnt Offerings (1976), starring Karen Black and Oliver Reed. As it began I resigned myself to poorly lit, foggy-lensed, muffled-sounding, ill-carpeted seventies schlock, but I very quickly got into it. It's underrated and, I think, quite good.

I'll not reveal much about the plot, except to emphasize that it's not a ghost story. The house itself is a character, as it is in the best movies of this kind, from The Haunting to Crimson Peak. It's not enough (and may be a great deal too much) to have creepy carved newels. The Haunting does amazing things with the illusory faces you seem to see in patterns on the wall at night. Burnt Offerings seems to rely mainly on an attic window that stays lit a lurid red at night. It was shot at the Dunsmuir House, where a number of movies have been filmed. There's a pool, unfortunately, but it's used to good effect.

I'm familiar with Karen Black mainly from Trilogy of Terror. That little doll has lived in my nightmares since I saw it as a fourteen-year-old. I thought Black was quite effective in Burnt Offerings, especially in the final moments, which I saw coming from a mile away, but was still genuinely scared by. That's what a good haunting story does well. It lets you in on the secret pretty much right from the get-go, but toys with you, taunting you until just the right pitch of suspense has been reached. Timing is everything.

And there's this chauffeur. With shades. Sometimes he smiles. It's terrifying. And a mysterious locked room that no one can ever go into. That right there is the stuff of bad dreams. In fact, put a sealed room in pretty much any kind of movie, and you've got a ho

All in all, the movie has a weird kind of logic that reminds me of the nightmares I had when I was a little kid. Like the one about the picture in the yellow living room that silently wanted me to go get a candy from the candy dish. Ugh. Everything is out to get you, the movie seems to say. It's watching you. What is watching you? Who knows? But it watches. The world is sunny. It smiles. It smiles at you.

Though marred by one or two cheesy scenes, this is a good movie that I won't soon forget.

*

And then there's The House that Dripped Blood (1971), one of those horror anthologies released by Amicus Productions. As a haunted house movie it's terrible. The stories, though taking place in the same house, are all quite different, and have nothing at all to do with the setting, except for one or two ominous references shoehorned into the script. Contrary to the advertising, the house doesn't drip blood, and as a matter of fact I don't think there's one drop of blood in the whole production. And it's got vampires, even. What a waste of a good set! A rather nice and creepy little house, murky and slightly run down and with just the right amount of ornament.

Still, it seems a bit churlish to grouse about a movie starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Two of the shorts are fairly creepy, one involving waxworks and the other a little witch-girl, and a third is mildly amusing. All were written by Robert Bloch. As a whole the film would have been better if it hadn't been so painfully awkward about linking the stories to the house.

So, as a schlocky horror movie, thumbs moderately up, but as a haunted house movie, thumbs down.

*

I also happened to watch Asylum (1972), another Amicus anthology written by Robert Bloch, and it's much better. Humorously campy at some points, genuinely scary at others, and delightfully bizarre (or gross! – like that little robot's guts!) at still others. In addition to Peter Cushing, it stars Herbert Lom, an actor I'm fond of. Not a haunted house movie, though.

House by Niggle

J. R. R. Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle" is a fairy tale about a Sunday painter whose devotion to his craft leads him to neglect his duties in life, despite the fact that he works in complete anonymity, in his shed, with his neighbors' contempt as his only recognition. When it comes time for his "journey," he must set out unprepared, and undergo a long period of penal servitude (painting board after board the same boring color) to rectify his many failings. But in the end he's granted the reality of what his faltering art has always aimed at without ever achieving it.

Really, the story is a parable about purgatory (cf. Of Rodents and Ashes), and captures a great human truth: time does something to the soul, something that can't be replaced by any amount of wishing or willing. It's has always had a special significance for me, because I seem to have a lot in common with its protagonist. Tolkien appears to have had himself in mind. But his "tree" has, in fact, gone on to become one of the marvels of modern times.

Anyway, one of the duties I've neglected while spinning tales and painting pictures is the decoration of a doll house we bought for my daughter two and a half years ago. It started in a plain-jane, raw-wood condition and has progressed by fits and starts. A dresser here. A floor there. No hurry. But gradually the conviction has grown in my mind that, should I happen to die unexpectedly, the first 200 years or so of my afterlife would be spent painting thousands of identical doll houses the same uniform white. So, overcome by my conscience at last, I've put in some serious man-hours, and gotten the darned thing playable.

Now, don't worry. I'm not going to bore you by showing– Wait, what's that? You want to see pictures? You're twisting my arm, but...okay!

*

We bought the house unpainted and unfinished. It's not fancy or anything – it's made to be played with by little kids – and we got a set of blocky, unpainted wood furniture to go with it. So, here's the finished exterior:

There's a brick stoop that didn't make it into the picture for some reason. Thin slats of wood and a coat of silver paint on top sufficed for a metal roof, which the houses all have around here. We live in the old part of town, and decorated the house to resemble some of the ones around our neighborhood. We don't know what the chimney is for, as there's no fireplace inside, but no matter.

The interior was decorated in the shabby chic style, in consultation with world-renowned designers. Actually, we copied things out of interior design books from Half Price. But it is shabby chic. As you can probably tell from the background, it's made to look a bit like our house, and a bit like we would like our house to be.

We begin our tour in the master bedroom. Note the distressed antique finish on the nightstand and chest of drawers (or "chester drawers," as people around here like to spell it). That's a genuine natural-fiber jute rug you see on the floor, carefully hand-crafted from a place mat I bought at Wal-Mart. The edges are coated in Dritz Fray Check, in case you're wondering. I think I'll glue some rafters to the ceiling one of these days.

And here's the loo. My daughter informs me that the red pan on the floor is the cat's litter box.

Here we have the upstairs hall. I made the wood floor from popsicle sticks craft sticks which I cut square, glued together in a movable mat, stained, and varnished. Everything made specifically for doll houses is super expensive, so I improvised where possible.

The kids' bedroom. We followed instructions from a furniture refinishing book to give everything the antiqued look. We're still working on the lace curtains and blankets and pillows, but that's my better half's department. We're also working on some paintings for the walls, and that, of course, is my department.

The living room, where I think we really do need some more work, plus a big throw rug. Unfortunately, the Plastic Ordoñez family resembles the Real Ordoñez family in that every available horizontal space is stacked with books. We both need more shelves.

The kitchen, where the bareness of the walls is felt most keenly. Note the chunky vintage appliances: pure shabby chic. Disconcertingly, my daughter has given the Plastic Ordoñez family the gender-reversed names of the Real Ordoñez family, with the exception of my wife, whose name has no masculine version. I'm told that they dine around the coffee table, as there's not enough room in the kitchen. At least they don't have a TV.

Thank you for visiting Chateau O., where you're always greeted by a chicken on the roof.

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My grandmother, who in my own mind ranks among the great matrons of antiquity, became an expert miniaturist in her later years, despite her arthritis and rapidly failing eyesight. She would make scale models of the cane-bottomed chairs built by her carpenter father, who was also blind, and crochet tiny sweaters with tiny crochet hooks. A good but reserved and terrifyingly critical woman. The story is that whenever her adult children gave her handmade gifts at Christmas, she could later be seen surreptitiously giving the handiwork a critical examination.

I recall once driving her around town as a teenager; my truck had a standard transmission, and, impressed by her silent presence beside me, I did my utmost to ensure that my gear-shifting was as smooth as cream. And she was watching carefully, because later on she expressed approbation of my skills with the clutch to my mother.

Her nine children are scattered across the country now, a race of eccentric misfits who might make for a good screwball comedy in the style of You Can't Take it With You, if you could get them all in one place, which only happens when someone dies, and sometimes not even then.

She, alas, would be less than impressed with my accomplishment here, despite being the inspiration behind it. It is a bit crude. But my daughter is sitting here playing with it as I type, which is very rewarding. We'll keep adding to it, too, and no doubt our next endeavor will be finer.

I've always loved models – I had a dinosaur diorama and an HO-scale train set when I was a boy – and I think my son and I will start railroading sometime in the next few years. That's what's great about having kids around: you get to play with really cool stuff, and people act like you're all virtuous because of it.

What now? Hm, I think the backyard may need mowing...

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Many thanks to whomever has been buying my books, incidentally. I hope you enjoy them! And if you haven't bought 'em yet, go get 'em! See the links on the sidebar for more information.

Serial Epic Fantasy?

I mentioned in my last post that I've been finding epic fantasy somewhat boring lately. That's got me thinking about what epic fantasy is (or ought to be) and why precisely I'm finding it boring. Unfortunately, I'm something of a dinosaur (or would it be a paleontologist?) in my tastes, and anything I say is automatically about thirty years out of date, if not more.

(But wait. I thought fantasy was literature for the dinosaurs. When did it become all edgy and contemporary and topical? Wasn't there a time when fantasists prided themselves on looking backward? I guess that's a topic for another post, though. Back to epic fantasy.)

I've been reading Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane this summer. It's been slow going. I tried reading it once a good while ago, but put it down because of That One Scene. But it's a fairly well-respected book all the same, and an example of post-Tolkien fantasy that didn't fall into the cookie cutter approach of some other authors at the time. (You know who you are.) So now I'm giving it another go.

And I'm finding it kind of dull.

I don't think my problem is with the novel, exactly, but with the subgenre in general, or maybe with myself. There was a time when I ate epic fantasies up. The thicker the better. But I realized one day that the particular series I was reading at the time wasn't going anywhere, and that there was no reason the author couldn't keep spinning them out forever. What got me started reading doorstops and paper weights was, of course, The Lord of the Rings. But LOTR had three things that these others lacked: a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had a sense of wholeness, of completeness. And that's rare in the subgenre called epic fantasy.

Which is kind of ironic. An epic, properly so-called, is a narrative recounting the deeds of larger-than-life characters taking part in great events of universal import. There's an expectation of roundness, of unity and completeness. Think of the Iliad. Its action take place in a matter of weeks, but its perspective encompasses the entire Trojan War, from the judgment of Paris to the razing of the city. Any other epic worthy of the name is similarly comprehensive.

The two great original works of epic fantasy of the twentieth century – The Worm Ouroboros and The Lord of the Rings – take that approach, though describing the end rather than the middle. The Book of the New Sun, which in my opinion is up there with those two, is more like the Iliad in that it narrates the middle of its great events, pointing toward the end without altogether explicating it. Afterwards, each of these authors continued to write in his invented world in various ways, but none sought to actually add to his epic, because it was clearly finished.

Obviously, the more commercial aspects of the fantasy genre militate against that kind of completeness. What people call "epic fantasy" nowadays is often really serial fantasy, which in a way is the opposite of the epic. An epic requires wholeness, with build-up to climax and aftermath. It can't just be arbitrarily prolonged like a soap opera.

Of course, it's premature for me to pin all this on the Thomas Covenant novels. They do seem to have a certain wholeness, though they're also a kind of commentary on the subgenre to which they belong. And I'll admit that I'm interested in seeing where it's all going, at least as far as the main character is concerned, despite my utter contempt for him. I couldn't care less about the Land. But maybe I'm supposed to not care.

Or maybe, like Thomas, I've just gotten too cynical to care. That's a scary thought.

Cf. my long-ago post Literary Fantasy and Ecological Comedy.