MEDUSA OF THE ROSES, we have a literary heir to Jean Genet at last

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES
NAVID SINAKI
Grove Press
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki’s bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they’re planning to leave their hometown for good

Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan for the future: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.

Then Zal vanishes, leaving a cryptic note behind that sets Anjir on a quest to find the other man, hoping he will lead to Zal. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran—where he encounters his troubled mother, addict brother, and the dynamic Leyli, a new friend who is undergoing a transition of her own—Anjir soon realizes that someone is tailing him too. It quickly becomes clear that more violence may be the fastest route to freedom, as Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of love, peace, and self-determination.

Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think most of us love the honorable thief in fiction. Stories abound over the generations that feature a good person forced to steal by an unjust system, by a pressing external need, or just to redress the wild imbalance of power over one's person. Robin Hood, Locke Lamora, Aladdin, and their literary kin are enshrined in the cultural conversation. Mythology's trickster gods, those agents of chaos, are...witness Loki as embodied by Tom Hiddleston here and now...endlessly popular because no one doesn't love a funny, witty piss-take.

Then there's Jean Genet. DEFINITELY not a comfortably admirable character to most people, a petty thief and prostitute whose actions as a very incompetent thief (he kept getting caught!) earned him the 1940s French version of a three-strikes law conviction. No one ever tried to pretend he was in the Resistance. Who cared what language the jailers spoke? He stole and sold his body because he didn't like the other options...wholly self-motivated, probably a narcissist, but magnetically interesting and embodying anti-establishment Cool.

Now, after years of disuse, we have Anjir from that mold. He and his love Zal must be together. Funds for transitioning to female aren't coming from the government that demands he take this step...which, to be fair, isn't one he resists...so he steals.

Living in theocratic Iran is awful enough for AFAB women.Think how much more horrifying it would be to be an AMAB man-loving man who, deliberately and consistently, acts "like a woman"...has sex with and enters into romanitic partnerships with men. A complete affront to Male Privilege! An assault on God's Will! God put men on top! DON'T BOTTOM!! Or, if you really must, then transition to female.

I totally support trans rights. I am not in any way trans, have no desire to be female, dislike pretty intensely my culture's hideous fun-house mirror idea of "femininity" and would strongly prefer to be dead rather than forced to conform to what I see as a ghastly disfiguring joke of an identity. Yet, if gay men want to live and love their partnered lives, that is what their theocratic government tells them to do.

I live in fear of the US right-wingnuts figuring out their transphobia can be redeployed.

What I enjoyed about my ride through modern Iran was the sense I got of a society on the boil. Stuff is happening in this book, stuff that's out of most people's sight, but is building up pressure and will blow a hole in the status quo. The author has crafted an avatar of selfish anti-social action who represents, just by his existence, Resistance!

Told in beautiful sentences, this story of Love, Passion, and Honesty draws on millennia of models for its men's identities. It is a read I won't soon forget or easily allow to slip under the newer reads to come.

MANHATTAN CULT STORY: Abuse, Crime, Sex, and My Life inside a Secret Organization, delivers true-life #Spooktober chills

MANHATTAN CULT STORY: Abuse, Crime, Sex, and My Life inside a Secret Organization
SPENCER SCHNEIDER
Arcade Publishing
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “We were invisible. We had to be. We took an oath of absolute secrecy. We never even told our immediate families who we were. We went about our lives in New York City. Just like you. We were your accountants, money managers, lawyers, executive recruiters, doctors. We owned your child’s private school and sold you your brownstone. But you’d never guess our secret lives, how we lived in a kind of silent terror and fervor. There were hundreds of us.”

Right under the noses of neighbors, clients, spouses, children, and friends, a secret society, simply called School—a cult of snared Manhattan professionals—has been led by the charismatic, sociopathic and dangerous leader Sharon Gans for decades. Spencer Schneider was recruited in the eighties and he stayed for more than twenty-three years as his life disintegrated, his self-esteem eroded, and he lined the pockets of Gans and her cult.

Cult members met twice weekly, though they never acknowledged one another outside of meetings or gatherings. In the name of inner development, they endured the horrors of mental, sexual, and physical abuse, forced labor, arranged marriages, swindled inheritances and savings, and systematic terrorizing. Some of them broke the law. All for Gans.

“During those years,” Schneider writes, “my world was School. That’s what it’s like when you’re in a cult, even one that preys on and caters to New York’s educated elite. This is my story of how I got entangled in School and how I got out.”

At its core, Manhattan Cult Story is a cautionary tale of how hundreds of well-educated, savvy, and prosperous New Yorkers became fervent followers of a brilliant but demented cult leader who posed as a teacher of ancient knowledge. It’s about double-lives, the power of group psychology, and how easy it is to be radicalized—all too relevant in today's atmosphere of conspiracy and ideologue worship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm going to reproduce the author's "Nine Tell-Tale Signs You're in a Cult":

1. You give an inordinate amount of time and money to the group.



2. The group's ideology is strict, exacting, and unforgiving.



3. Your life is highly regulated by the group.



4. You cannot challenge the leaders or the ideology—their word is final.



5. The leaders will punish you for breaking the rules of the group.



6. Former members are ostracized and denigrated.



7. The group isolates you from your friends and family.



8. The group discourages you from thinking for yourself.



9. You are afraid to leave the group.

I was tense and uneasy as I read this book...I know lots of people like the author from my years living in Manhattan. It could easily be any one of them, any one!, who tells this awful, painful story. I don't think I know the author, though honestly it doesn't matter, the poor guy's been through so much and in service of so little.

His cult experience reminded me of my mentally ill mother's tactics and techniques for controlling others. I don't see that as a nurturing thing, though I suppose I can see why someone who felt...unmoored...would see it as such. It's a cruel world out there, and to be told...convinced...that the cruelty you're experiencing is actually lovingkindness replicated religious nuts' favorite tactic of "love, it's all done from love"...just not for you, vile sinner, but for the little animatronic cultist they are trying to free you to become! (I think they actually have the balls to call it "your best self.")

So his decades of serving the whims and needs of capricious, demanding, judgmental Others are a bitter recapitulation of the way my experience of christian and jewish religious nuts tried to grab hold of me in my youth. It was a chilling, dreadful reminder of how easy it is for others who have Othered you to convince you to give up the real, authentic you and submit to them and their warped, perverted will.

That said, the author's clearly got something to say about how he feels vis-a-vis gay people. No mention ever comes without his vigorous denial that he's gay. Okay, so...why bring it up? It kinda-sorta goes along with my main dissatisfaction with the read as a read. It feels scattershot. It takes time to explain a life, and I think that time was laser focused on the axe he quite genuinely and necessarily grinds against Sharon Gans and her vile School. It left me feeling like I was looking at the hole where that guy had been, not the guy who'd climbed out of said hole.

It's #Spooktober. Read something factual...and still truly, inescapably, chilling and horrifying.

WITH FLAMING SWORDS, "One voice is easily silenced."

WITH FLAMING SWORDS
CLEVE CARTMILL
Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, September 1942
free to read on the Internet Archive

Rating: 4* of five

When the estimable James W. Harris, a science fiction fandom monadnock, reviewed this obscure piece of SF's long and patchy history, I ran right out and found it. His review, linked above, wasn't a warble of ecstasy. It was more a muted fluting of appreciative indifference...the B-student's reward from the preceptor "some good ideas, execution needs work" about says it...though the, um, less-than-factually-grounded science (even for the era) gets a drubbing.

note the shiny gent in panel four...taken from Classics of Science Fiction, post linked above

What on this wide green Earth could lead this minor, forgotten writer's minor, forgotten 1942 story (anthologized precisely once) to merit a full four stars? I'm not even going to pretend I care for a single second about the junk science. Here is narrator Saint Robert Hanson explicating the whole rigmarole:

"Yes. Listen. Here is the truth. Nearly three hundred years ago, a new weapon was introduced into warfare. It was fired only once. The destruction was so great and terrible that nations by common consent outlawed it, for it destroyed friend and foe indiscriminately. Thousands were killed within the radius of its effect. It was silent death, for the gun was a ray gun. But listen. On the edge of that area of destruction, people were affected by that ray. Their germ plasm was affected so that male children born of those individuals were born with an aura...."

There's more, but the point is made. This ain't hard SF, or even particularly well-scienced SF. I don't know if, in 1942 as Author Cartmill was writing this, the term "social SF" had been applied or if that coinage was still in a goopier, sappier future. I'm looking at this marvy as someone fresh from the grindhouse that is the 45th Presidency of the USA.

What has happened to these glowy-boys? Some bright spark decided that the post-apocalyptic chaos could best and easiest be controlled by making the poor sprogs into objects of veneration. Thus quite probably saving their lives, since the hoi polloi are ever prone to killing those they Other...and these kids are Othered for all to see! A technocratic theocracy arises under the Saints, and ordinary men and women are enslaved to accomplish their will. Many fanciful things, like garageable planes for all, are commonplace under the rule of the Saints. But the cost to the average person is complete loss of freedom, and utter, bone-deep conditioning to accept that the Saints are Divine. Why, even the woman that Saint Hanson wants to marry still addresses him as "your Reverence" and takes a completely submissive stance in relation to him. An incel's dream, this future...at least if he glows it is. And like people from time immemorial, the status quo has no more staunch defenders than those who lose under its strictures:

"Please believe that you are wrong, your Reverence. Even if you're right, you're wrong. You will destroy faith. That's all we have, our faith. Take it away, and what will become of us? Have you thought of that?"

Thus does Ellen address him, though only at the behest of his enemy among the Saints which possibly explains her temerity in disagreeing with a Saint. And I've thought of little except that since 9 November 2016. The people who benefit the absolute least under the current system, not to mention the efforts of ephemeral intensifiers like the current Administration, are defending the system! At the ballot box! And no one can blast open their addled, misinformed, and downright feeble minds...the world isn't working for you, and if you need proof, look at this bloody pandemic!

So this story, like all good stories, is the story of how we mere mortals screw up and screw over any- and everyone and -thing. In order to maintain a myth of our own superior understanding of the mechanisms regulating our lives, we're liable to fall for the most absurd nonsense. "I don't believe you," cry the uneducated to the deeply learnèd subject-matter expert. It means we know better, you can't fool us! And that's exactly what The System, in this story and in 21st-century America, needs. Because then it's easy to manipulate reality, to say, "you have enough," to people who make the stuff of life and give it to the greedy elite.

We're driven to be "on top of the world" because...well, I'm not all the way sure why. I'm off that carousel and for the life of me I can't remember what made it so desirable to have more than I need and still want more. It's been a very long time that I've been off it, you see.

It's also the story of how a passionate band of like-minded freedom fighters (or a passionate band of scum-sucking wold-be slave-owners) can alter the course of history. Haven't we seen the evidence often enough to know it when it's right there? Does it take a Rosa Parks, a David Duke, a John Lewis, a Donald Trump, to prove *again* how vile people can be, and how the vile can be fought? At the end of this story, a confrontation takes place that's taken place innumberable times before. The powerless rise up against their oppressors when the passionate band show them that they can win, and gives them a reason to want to win.

For that reason, I give this pretty awkward and not remotely believable story four hope-twinkling stars. (Even though the victory is most certainly temporary.)