New Work Published: Other Town by Ray Wennerstroem

 I kind of missed the boat on the publication date on this one by a couple of months, but this is another novel I have illustrated (including the cover).  "Welcome to...Other Town" by Ray Wennerstroem is a YA novel in the style of Clive Barker's "Thief of Always" or Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree".  From it's Amazon description:

"When Georgie Robinson falls off his bike and gets lost in the woods, a strange adventure awaits.

Wandering through the forest, Georgie discovers an abandoned town that is not abandoned at all, but is filled with folks that are strange, wonderful, and frightening. While his dad and best friend, Pete, are searching for him, Georgie sees a Furliz, meets the Picklock Clan, and is guided through a strange town by a peculiar mayor with jellyfish skin and a very big hat.

But when a sinister plot is exposed, will Georgie find the help he needs before it's too late?"

Aside from the cover, I've provided several interior illustrations for this project.  This one was a bit experimental for me.  Around the time I started on this, AI art was just beginning to hit big, with several tools becoming available to the public.  I decided to play around with the tools and see if I could make an ethical use of AI generated images.  So for some of the images in this book, I fed prompts into a couple of AI tools and had them generate images that I used to help nail the composition and perspective of the finished images I would eventually create.  I printed out the generated compositions and traced over them on my light table, adding and changing details as I thought necessary, then scanned them back into my computer and digitally inked them on my tablet.  I wouldn't say this is my best work (although there is one image in the book I am especially fond of), but it was an interesting change to my process that opened up some new possibilities.

For anyone who has strong opinions on AI art, I'd love to know what you think of this use of the tool.  Was it ethical?  Is this a fair use of computer generated imagery, or just higher level cheating?  Feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.

The Reading List: World Fantasy Award 1975 - The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

 

In Stephen King's memoir, "On Writing" he recounts a conversation with Amy Tan in which he asked her if there was a question she was never asked in Q&A sessions, and her response was "They never ask about the language."  

This line has stuck with me since I encountered it, and it has made me more mindful of my reading since then; I pay much more attention to the way an author uses language, and it is one of the criteria by which I determine the quality of an author or a work.

McKillip's book "The Forgotten Beasts of Eld" stood out to me like few others for its use of language.  Written in the language of high fantasy (think Tolkien and C.S. Lewis),  this story reads more like a poem than prose; her language has a lyrical idealism that is only found in the very best fantasy literature.  Witness this piece of "dialogue" from the novel:

"I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle.  I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you.  When you opened your gates to me, I was home."

I cannot imagine many recent authors I've read even attempting a passage like that with a straight face, but McKillip carries off the entire book in that manner.

Now, I'll make a confession...no surprise to anyone who knows me...I don't generally like fantasy fiction.  Oh, sure, I enjoy the Lord of the Rings as much as any reader, but when it comes to most modern fantasy, I tend to shy away from it.  For one thing, there's hardly such a thing as a fantasy "novel" any more.  There's fantasy sagas, epic series, cycles and chronicles aplenty, thousands of pages requiring a major commitment of time to read with no guarantee that the story will ever even be finished (yes, I'm looking at you GRRM).  On top of that, I can't seem to handle the names in fantasy novels; there's far too many hyphens and apostrophes in there for me to be comfortable with them.  When an author starts telling me the saga of L'erin-Medd'ezzath, archmage of Tir Cinealta, I'm out and heading for a stack of Donald Westlakes.

It's very refreshing, then, when I find an occasional and rare fantasy novel that engages me the way this one did.  "Forgotten Beasts" is not so much a read as it is an experience, like a fugue or a reverie.  It stimulates the imagination with visions of high fantasy and removes the reader from their personal context into the ficton of the novel.  It's characters are ideal figures, yet somehow still relatable, and still fantastic enough to inspire grand mental pictures of the kinds of world depicted by only the best fantasy artists.  

This is a book for not only those who love high fantasy, but also those who love good literature.  It is the kind of writing that much fantasy fiction aspires to be, and in achieving that transcends its genre in a way that echoes more popular authors whose work is considered more widely known.

"The Forgotten Beasts of Eld" is, of course, available to purchase on Amazon, or if you'd prefer to read it for free, there's several copies available to borrow at Archive.org.

Reading List: "The Vessel" by Adam Nevill

It's Hallowe'en, which must mean it's time for a new Adam Nevill novel!  

In the past few years, one of the best things about this time of year has been the release of a new book by Adam Nevill.  From the cosmic horror of "Wyrd and Other Derelictions" to the rural terrors of "Cunning Folk", October always seems to bring round another Nevill-authored treat just in time for some great Hallowe'en reading.

Nevill writes in the weird fiction tradition of such greats as Lovecraft, Blackwood, Barron and Ligotti, and he certainly deserves a place among that pantheon.  His works are as imaginative and distinctive as they are dark and disturbing.  He puts in the work to avoid the tropes that mark even his own corner of the genre, instead devising horrors that are new and that arrive in unexpected ways.  

 With "The Vessel", Nevill seems to be promising us a good haunted house story, territory he's explored previously with books such as "Apartment 16".  However, as with that book, which went into insane territory by the end, I'm sure that what will be delivered here will a story that reaches well beyond the predictable form of that classic genre and will resonate in newly disquieting ways.

From the book's description:

"Struggling with money, raising a child alone and fleeing a volatile ex, Jess McMachen accepts a job caring for an elderly patient. Flo Gardner – a disturbed shut-in and invalid. But if Jess can hold this job down, she and her daughter, Izzy, can begin a new life.

Flo's vast home, Nerthus House, may resemble a stately vicarage in an idyllic village, but the labyrinthine interior is a dark, cluttered warren filled with pagan artefacts.

And Nerthus House lives in the shadow of a malevolent secret. A sinister enigma determined to reveal itself to Jess and to drive her to the end of her tether. Not only is she stricken by the malign manipulation of the Vicarage's bleak past, but mercurial Flo is soon casting a baleful influence over young Izzy. What appeared to be a routine job soon becomes a battle for Jess's sanity and the control of her child.

It's as if an ancient ritual was triggered when Jess crossed the threshold of the vicarage. A rite leading her and Izzy to a terrifying critical mass, where all will be lost or saved.:"

Give yourself the treat of some great reading this spooky season, and be sure to check out Nevill's other offerings while you're at it.  I strongly recommend "Wyrd and Other Derelictions", a personal favorite, which does things with the cosmic horror genre that no one else, as far as I know, has ever tried.

Reading the Unreadable - #2: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

For anyone who doesn't know, or might possibly care, the list I'm using for my reading of the most unreadable books is this one published a few years ago by Buzzfeed.  Technically, by their criteria, these books are not necessarily unreadable, just difficult to get through.
I'm not sure why "The Sound and the Fury" by Faulkner made it onto that list, let alone to the #2 spot.  About the book, they say:
"The style is stream of consciousness with three different narrators and one third-person section. The first narrator is mentally disabled to the extent that he cannot process linear time and jumps between past and present mid-sentence."
Perhaps I'm just in a better mindset for it after just coming off Finnegan's Wake, but not only did I find this one relatively easy to get through, but I actually enjoyed it.  I didn't understand all of it, but I got enough of the story to enjoy Faulkner's deep dive into his characters.

Reading this book is like hearing events told through several characters internal monologue, sort of a Southern Gothic take on Rashomon.    The story of a Southern family in what appears to be a rapid decline, it is told through the perspective of a mentally challenged adult, an anguished college student, the conniving elder male of the family and through an omniscient view of the African-American maid Dilsey.  With such a diverse range of characters, each with their own idiolect and idiosyncracies, the reader is given an exploration of character and setting that is in-depth and personal in a way that no other narrative choices could deliver.

Although the unique nature of each character's inner voice makes the actual story hard to follow at times, it doesn't take a terribly in-depth understanding to figure out the main points of what is happening, and how the family is reacting to it.  As an outsider to Faulkner's work, I may be an outlier in thinking this, but it seems to me that this book is not so much about the story as it is about the characters; about the different viewpoints that can surround a set of events.  If there's any takeaway from this novel, it seems to me that it is the subjectivity of consciousness and experience.
 
It helps, too, that Faulkner's language is at times beautiful.  With sentences like, "Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time," used to describe Dilsey, this book can be pure joy to read, even if full comprehension is lacking.  It's a trip that's not about the destination, but it's definitely worth the journey.

I suspect that the rest of the books on this list won't be quite so easy to read, however.  Up next will be Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in it's original English.  This one could prove an uphill battle.