GHOSTLY DEMARCATIONS: Stories, linked novel-in-stories with the Halloween Spirit

GHOSTLY DEMARCATIONS: Stories
JOE TAYLOR
Sagging Meniscus Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: "You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer." Or, "'Shut up,' Michelle replied. 'Shut up,' Michelle repeated." Or, "Don't look up. At least don't shout when you do. She's here, on the balcony." Or, "'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers." Or, "Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete." Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: "I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar of dark farewells."

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: A further disclaimer: I've known Joe for over a quarter century. As he will somewhat sniffily tell you, this has never stopped me from letting him have it with both barrels if he dares to do less than his best. So, everybody clear on who did what to whom? Good. Let's begin:

This is a storytelling format that I'm fond of, the linked short-story collection or "novel in stories." Joe plays with identity in a lot of his fiction, and this format allows the issue to develop without ever making its presence feel forced.

As is my wont, I will use the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to view the stories as they come.

Galen's Mountain Child starts right off with creepy hillbilly ghosties of abandoned burned-alive kids, mothers without maternal instincts, and *retch* kittens.

His mom had been dating men starting the year after Galen's dad died and she hadn't been the gospel of kindness. Or maybe she was the gospel to the men, but not even the epistle to Galen.

True voice, I'm old enough to have heard exactly those locutions from older relatives. 4 stars

I Am the Egg

Kids Know

Angel's Wings

Hey-hello/hey-goodbye/hey-weep-no-more

Madonna on a Country Road

Faithful Companion

The Mansion, the Chandelier, and the Belle

Tacete

A Red Phase

Tit for Tat

The Perfect Ghost Story, Plus One

The Widow with the Hookah

I'll Be Home for Christmas

Louie, Louie and the Blonde Hippie

Ms. Sylvia's Home Care

Truly Mine

YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES, gay life as a sex toy in the pre-Stonewall world

YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES: A Gay Life Before Stonewall
ALAN HELMS
University of Minnesota Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he soon became an object of desire in a gay underground scene frequented by, among many others, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich. In this unusually vivid and sensitive account, Helms describes the business of being a sex object and its psychological and physical toll.
"Riveting."- New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary and elegantly written. A record of a gay world that has virtually disappeared over the past twenty-five years of liberation and fifteen years of AIDS." -Boston Globe

"A beautifully written memoir. Helms sped through the celebrity-packed fast lanes, but he has learned how to stand back and get some perspective." -Los Angeles Times

"Sublimely funny, engaging, pathetic, highly literary, and painful to read. Helms seems like a gay Everyman whose quest for self-knowledge, respect, and contentment in this contemptuous world mirrors that of many other marginalized people." -Bloomsbury Review

Alan Helms is professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Beloved Boston cultural institution Alan Helms had a wildly exciting past! See the film! Admire his art collection, appreciate his cultured and elegant way of speaking, his breadth of cultural knowledge, and his charming sweetness.

What does a young, abused man from flyover country do the moment he realizes he's queer? RUN! Get to New York City as soon as possible. He got to Columbia University in 1955, leaving behind a life in Indianapolis, Indiana, that could charitably be described as "uncongenial." A father who thought his son was a bitter disappointment...how many of us queer boys can relate to that...a mother whose situation wasn't a lot better than his, a younger brother whose close brush with death was the single moment in his childhood when peace reigned. None of this is a recipe for a healthy adulthood...and add in the author's understandable, if off-putting, self-absorbtion and you get a difficult-to-empathize-with narrator.

But he was So. Beautiful. Look at that face on the cover! Hoo-ee!

And the awfulness of that...wow...to be so pretty and so readily available and so snobby, who can claim to be surprised that he wasn't a pleasant person? His sexual awakening came at the price of being raped. His family life prepared him for a life of abuse. He dived into it in the glamorous world of closeted gay life pre-Stonewall. Pretty sexually available intelligent boys found innumerable lovers, and the author wasn't about to say no. (I totally relate to this and would've done precisely the same in his shoes. Damn the bad luck of not being pretty!) So a decade and a half passed in what I imagine was a golden haze...this book's largest part. It's a bit less charming to me than it might be to a younger reader. I look at the wreckage he glosses over and think, "there's the real story."

Yes, sleeping with famous Hollywood stars and titled Eurotrash is all very well. But the people you stood up, the ones whose parties weren't quite glam enough that you said you'd attend, and so on and so forth? How did you sleep, look in the mirror, launch yourself at the next big fish in your hifalutin' pond without thinking about them?

The Fall took place when he was thirtyish, and some semblance of human feeling broke the ice he'd cultivated to keep his agony at bay and under the surface of a freezing cold lake he called his heart. Escape to Boston and the tender mercies of a shrink who began the process of waking the author up from his frozen state. Then it happened: His body aged. He wasn't the hot young muffin anymore; he wasn't even visible to the hot young muffins. That had to be a bad, bad day.

Now, let me not try to hide my glee here. This event has occurred in my life, too. I can not imagine how much worse it was for a formerly gorgeous creature, feted and celebrated and wined and dined, to be cut off from that gushing geyser of distractions. Luckily for his sanity, Helms had a brain and a deep love for the life of the mind that he'd never left behind or neglected. While learning what he'd never known, that feelings are best felt in the moment and not in retrospect, I'm sure he left yet more carnage in his wake. But the fact that no one ever killed him means that he learned enough to at least fake his way through professional, if not personal, relationships. So hope still shines for him to pull his head out of his ass and recognize that, in his swan-paddle through youth, he got into some ugly emotional habits that would be wise for him to shed before he's patted in the face with a shovel and 120 cubic feet of dirt dropped on him.

I guess it shows that I don't like the man too much. Yes, part of it is envy: I would've LOVED to live among those glittering parties and glamorous people, and I'm jealous that he won nature's looks lottery. But more of it is the sense that grew and grew as I read his (ampersand-laden) memoir that he wasn't sharing his journey with me.

He was bragging that it happened.

I suppose I would too, and that is a disappointing self-revelation that elicits deep sadness in my shallows. Read the book, o ye queer boys over 50 to relive a lovely, dead time when we were few but fabulous; QUILTBAG youth, especially young and pretty ones, definitely think about your history; y'all straight folks, mm, on balance I'd say not unless your Gay BFF approves it for your personal tastes.

THE NAKED BLOGGER OF CAIRO, necessary cruelty to my friends who need to wake up before it's too late

THE NAKED BLOGGER OF CAIRO
MARWAN M. KRAIDY
Harvard University Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them.

Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings. While commentators have stressed the role of social media, Marwan M. Kraidy shows that the essential medium of political expression was not cell phone texts or Twitter but something more fundamental: the human body. Brutal governments that coerced citizens through torture and rape found themselves confronted with the bodies of protesters, burning with defiance and boldly violating taboos. Activists challenged authority in brazen acts of self-immolation, nude activism, and hunger strikes. The bodies of dictators became a focus of ridicule. A Web series presented Syria's Bashar al-Assad as a pathetic finger puppet, while cartoons and videos spread a meme of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak as a regurgitating cow.

The rise of digital culture complicates our understanding of the human body in revolutionary times. As Kraidy argues, technology publicizes defiance, but the body remains the vital nexus of physical struggle and digital communication, destabilizing distinctions between "the real world" and virtual reality, spurring revolutionary debates about the role of art, and anchoring Islamic State's attempted hijacking of creative insurgency.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

My Review: At a very low point in an ever-sinking US-Arab world relationship, this book could not have been a more timely read. The people the US Government left to twist in the wind...many of them Iraqis promised asylum in return for "betraying" their home country...all understand viscerally a fact the US and its soft, spoiled citizenry need to remember that they simply do not know: Tyrants and dictators use human bodies as propaganda tools to enforce their dominance.

The Gestapo and Putin's former employers, the KGB, are the most famous of these hideous organizations in the US. Worldwide, they are joined by our very own CIA, as well as innumerable unofficial, quasi-official, and openly governmental "state security" apparatuses. (Well, they can be enumerated, but I don't have the stomach for it.) The terror industry is thriving. Ask the poor souls who survived Abu Ghraib's horrors how they feel about the fact that the private contractors never faced prosecution or had to return one dime of the money the US Government paid them in spite of the fact many participated in the abuses. Ask the Kurds on the sharp end of Turkish weapons how their bodies are in danger of harm from a powerful, protected, well-armed state terrorism perpetrator of long standing. Human bodies, equipped with human souls, are routinely savaged and maimed by those whose idea of peace is best compared to the grave: Silent, dark, and unbroken.

At the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch, in which climate change is a given and planning for it a joke, one small corner of the planet that we call the internet (no longer capitalized, please note) has taken a small degree of risk away from confronting tyrants. Author Kraidy, a most extraordinarily august person, with Directorates and Carnegie Fellowships and more under his belt, has taken a close look at the first Revolutions to be tweeted: The Arab Spring of 2010-2012. As we're now in the grips of a new political use of Twitter, it's deeply and rewardingly instructive to read this measured analysis of the role that social media did and did not play in this popular uprising.

The core of the book is the idea that, in a digital or analog revolution, the human body is central to our idea of the stakes, the purpose, and the desired result of any revolution. Seems sort of silly to say it...it's a given that a revolution is meant to free some group from the constraints put on them by another, which of necessity means the body is involved as it (at a minimum) carries around the wetware telling us we're not free. But extend the idea of revolution with its subtexts of battles and skirmishes of flesh into cyberspace and then what?

Aliaa al Mahdi in her native element, the internet
This photo ignited the entire Arab world, though I must say that it looks pretty darn tame to me. Far more provocative, in my opinion at least, is her protest photo in the pose of Lilith:

Her hearkening back to the Ur-protestor, the woman who refused to be subservient to a man and was cast off and out for her insolence, seems much more a statement of her principles and her point that a mere "beaver shot."

Author Kraidy then refines that daring act of the Naked Blogger into a more distilled and powerful meaning as part of "creative insurgency:"

...the notion of creative insurgency {explores} the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression and tracks the social transformation of activism into Art and ensuing controversies. At the heart of these processes is the human body as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor...activists have deployed a rich array of art and media in fierce propaganda wars against murderous dictators. Mining the past for resonant symbols, creative insurgents execute daring physical performances, catchy slogans, memorable graffiti, and witty videos.

You'll need to be prepared for a long and upsetting journey into the hatefulness that our world never seems to run short of, I warn you now. That it is a view mediated by the art it has produced is not, I'm sorry to say, in any way a diminution of the horrors awaiting the bodies of dissenters across the globe. Author Kraidy, in his role as Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is a man whose knowledge of the topic is deep and broad. His eternally-at-war Beirut childhood, and an adult return to head the American Studies department of the American University there while the Arab Spring was springing, had to make him extra sensitive to the topic. The art world, so dismissive of Arabic art and artists while celebratory of the reductive and racist Orientalism (most famously excoriated forty years ago in a book by Edward Said) that fed their Eurocentric concepts of Arabness, discovered in the Arab Spring protest art a vibrant and exciting new way to harness the rage of the "outsiders" into a profit- and control-centered "creative-curatorial-corporate context" in Author Kraidy's memorable words.

What you can expect, then, is a fascinating and thorough delve into a new, or newly technologically expanded, level of insurgency. Artists have never not responded to politics and the world's injustice...Hogarth, anyone?...but the avenues and the reach of their creative insurgency are alarming to the tyrants and heartening to all the resisters and rebels the modern world's manifold oppressions have spawned.

Introducing the last section of the book, Requiem for a Revolution?, Author Kraidy reminds us of some facts as we contemplate the apparent dimming down of revolutionary action around the world:

A more dangerous threat looms over the Arab uprisings: death, at every turn, awaits the body. "The Specter of Death" hovers menacingly above the rebels...If creative insurgency is an artful explansion of the human body in a public space that foments a new revolutionary identity, then the dark shadow of fatality—through guns, bombs, fire, chemicals, starvation, disease, exposure, torture, beheading—is a threat to creative insurgency. Handheld drollery that once enjoined Mubarak, Leave, My Arms Hurt"(from brandishing revolutionary banners), looks positively rosy when set against pictures of emaciated corpses, bloody limbs torn asunder, or the numbers, those stupefying, ballooning numbers, of bodies slaughtered, diseased, displaced.

And the Kurds continue to contribute their mite, all thanks to the 45th President of the United States of America.

THE LINES, a family's devastation in malaise-era US by a master of voices

THE LINES
ANTHONY VARALLO
University of Iowa Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was a teenager during the 1970s, already a survivor of a "broken family," though I suspect my own family was less broken than unformed...rather like the asteroid belt, widely dispersed bodies intersecting with silent violence when they bother to interact at all. Hence my interest in Author Varallo's first novel (after several story collections, including 2005's kid-themed This Day In History which I read in the Aughties and LOVED).

What strikes me first is how subtle Varallo is in making his points. "The mother," "the father" (much less in evidence beginning to end...I suppose that was inevitable), "the girl," "the boy," are all people with names though not in relation to each other. I have sisters...my sister is the mental name of each, after all I know who I'm thinking/talking about...and thus the message is sent. Author Varallo is narrating the novel from the inside, like any omniscient third person narrator...oh wait, he's not using omniscience...hm...so we're limited in our viewpoint but intimate with the thoughts and the only people who have names are outsiders and so the narrator is The Family?

Did I parse that correctly?

And, most importantly, does it matter...after all, I wasn't wondering about or even aware of needing to wonder about that until I started writing this review. I like it when I'm aware of a writer's writerly craft in hindsight. It is all too often the case in what I am told we should call "literary fiction" (isn't all fiction of necessity literary? even the televised, broadcast, projected kind? or am I too "big-tent" in my application of its definition?) that the overriding impression I, and many other readers, take away is, "how very hard it must have been to perform that feat." I love the hell out of Ducks, Newburyport and rated it almost five stars, but it's a very literary book, one that's got a huge amount of craft in its composition and good goddesses how much sweat and graft in the editing, and it shows.

I'm not against working for my pleasure; I'm against not including more work of the pleasurable reading sort in the category "literary." This novel is a pleasure read; it was a pleasure to read; the story was deeply relatable; and it didn't push its complexities of construction and creation at the reader. That's a good enough reason to read it right there, assuming broken-family fiction is one's thing. Sales figures suggest that it's a lot of peoples' jam...so come get you some.

I was deeply saddened by the father's ineffectual solipsism. He wasn't able to reach out from his gravity well of depression to connect with anyone, certainly not the mother in her angular, cutting unkindness. The girl, a highly competent person in the mother's mold, wasn't particularly ready for her role as leader to fall on her so soon; the boy, well, what a mass of inabilities he was, and isn't that depressingly familiar. Marcus, the bullying stepbrother brought into the family by the mother's decision to be Cliff's woman, is my worst nightmare of a human being. He decides to "teach" the boy how to be a man. It goes, unsurprisingly, horribly wrong and ends up as a major adolescent pissing match. As the nightmare of the blending family unfolds, there is a moment on pages 206–206 where the mother crystallizes the problems she's faced all her life in one paragraph:

And what is the mother to make of this scene, her son and Marcus locked into some kind of adolescent combat, while her husband's old coin bank, that banal and detestable thing, inexplicably smolders on a grill that had, as far as she can recall, only held burgers and hot dogs? Smoke, thick and unnatural, rises from the grill's lid. The air feels heavy with lighter fluid. If ruin has a scent, this back yard reeks of it. See the smoke drifting into the neighbor's yard, as real and substantial as the boy's tears, which he wipes now, his breath heaving in his chest. This family has seen enough tears to last them for a good long while, but each day seems to show up with a fresh supply, unaware of surplus. Human misery, there's never a shortage of it. Surely the neighbors will detect its odor, if they haven't already gotten too heavy a whiff this summer. This house where so much has gone up in smoke.

The mother puts her hand on the boy's shoulder, says, "Where's your sister?"

Uplifting it isn't, but rewarding it is. The world as seen through eyes much like my own. A pleasure not to be dismissed or belittled, that.

THE COMEDIAN, a fully explanatory title for a theater novel set in Ancient Rome

THE COMEDIAN
CLEM MARTINI
University of Calgary Press
$5.45 trade paper at Amazon or $24.99 via the publisher, $5.18 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: (from Goodreads) Titus Maccius Plautus' career is on the decline. Once renowned for bringing Greek comedies to the Roman world, now he struggles to stage a single play. Unlucky with money and unlucky in love, Plautus faces the world with wry dignity. This could be the performance that brings back fame and fortune, or the one that ends it all.

Engaging, thoughtful, and funny, The Comedian dives into the rough and tumble world of arts in its infancy. Clem Martini draws on his talent and experience to bring to life the signs and sounds of a world where playwrights suffered and succeeded--but mostly suffered.

(from the book's webpage) In the Roman Republic, comedy is a serious business. Nobody knows this better than Titus Maccius Plautus, the principal comic playwright of his time. Licking his wounds after a series of artistic flops and financial disasters, Plautus returns from his refuge in the country to Rome, desperate to produce a new play.

With limited financial backing provided by tough and striking bar owner Casina, Plautus recruits a company of actors from the amateurs and cast-offs he can afford. Led by a disreputable drunk who just happens to have a pedigree with one of the most respected traveling Greek acting guilds, the motley company unites an eccentric cast of characters on and off the stage. From Orestes, Plautus’ dour, thrifty director to the eager but untrained neophyte, Fronto, to the debt-plagued Plautus himself, each has a role to play, and each is not quite what they seem.

Can this company of misfits come together in time – and remain together long enough – to find success on the stage? With his creditors closing in, can Plautus stay one step ahead, or will he be finished, once and for all? Redolent with the sights and scents of the ancient world, this novel is a rowdy, boisterous ride through the realm of theater in its infancy.

THE PUBLISHER GAVE ME A DRC OF THIS BOOK THROUGH EDELWEISS. THANK YOU.

My Review: I salute you, Clem Martini, for taking a lifetime's interest in theater, its history and its incredible impact on each of us, and turning it into yet more (thirty plays authored and/or produced, standard texts on theatrical history authored, a graphic memoir with his older brother as artist) than you could reasonably be expected to. Plautus would approve: humor, tension, a spicing of sex, and an ending to break a smile on the reader's face.

"I admit," {the elderly actor} says, "I got a little lost—"

"A little??"

"—for a moment," he allows, "for a few moments, but we recovered—"

"Recovered?" Orestes continues, his lips hitting each consonant. "Is that what you call it? Recovered? You," he says poking the old actor in the chest, "are an ancient, derelict billy goat, burping, farting, baaing, and in general eating up the scenery. If you were more intent upon your actions, your actions as we have rehearsed them, rather than upon preening for the audience, you wouldn't forget your lines. And by all that's holy, if you can't remember the lines, then at least improvise something clever. By Jupiter Maximus and all his punishing power, that stammering and umming and awing was pitiful."

If you've ever been in a play, you'll recognize every single beat of that peroration; if you haven't, you'll recognize that the author has and does. Bonus points to Author Martini for getting a good likeness of Plautus in his dialogue, as well.

Reflecting on the self-evident to writers impossibility of making others laugh, of conveying subtleties of meaning across language and time barriers, Martini's Plautus wryly says:

It's irksome how essentially untranslatable humour can prove. Lines that cause great hilarity in Greek lie down like sheep with colic, to sicken and die, in Latin.

So beautifully done...anyone who's tried to write, or translate, or perform humor gets it instantly; Plautus (and of necessity Martini) belongs to our fraternity; the bucolic ancestry of the Roman playwright is reinforced in such a way as to remind the reader of the temporal displacement of the story from us as well. After all, not a lot of twenty-first century people pull out sheep-death similes in pursuit of a point.

It isn't perfect. At times the impression is of reading a novelized play, with action taking place offstage or being relegated to "the chorus" to narrate:

Orestes urges me to keep writing, stay healthy, and abstain from garum. With that he claps me on the back, drains his cup, stands, and bids us both good night. Naevius nods as my Greek friend slips past him. I reflect as he leaves that there's always been a certain reserve between those two that I honestly don't understand. I know Orestes respects Naevius as a poet, and Naevius has praised Orestes's musical abilities to me many times. Still it's undeniable, there's tension when they sit together.

All of that reads as though it's stage directions and actor asides. It isn't bad, it isn't flawed in some way, but it distances the reader by removing us from the immediacy of experiencing the story with the characters (dialogue plus some of that narration) into straight narration of the story to us. Further distancing, at least for some very tradition-minded readers of my acquaintance, comes from Author Martini's use of non-standard dialogue tags:

"I think so," I admit.

He nods a moment, then takes another drink. "And you're satisfied with that?" he asks.

"What?" I reply.

This is one example among many where I found myself wishing that he'd simply left off these tags entirely. However, the times when they're useful, what's wrong with "said" and, when something's a question, simply allowing this dingus: "?" to alert the attentive reader that an interrogative tone is to be used in their sub-vocal verbalization? (See what I did there?) (Oops, did it again!)

However, that very quality of stageiness is used to marvelous effect when Plautus has the creative soul's inevitable Dark Night of Self-Doubt:

Let all the gods strip me naked and flail me with a leather lash if I ever pick up a wax tablet to write again, let the god Dionysus plunge me deep in a vat of wine and hold me under if I ever pick up a stylus again, I am done, I am done, by all the gods who ever pulled their togas aside to piss on humans, I am done with this.

Success or failure, triumph or humiliation, every single writer who has ever lived will recognize this moment. You're released from the divine madness of creation; the human side of you has no bloody clue what to do now, or next; and yet the chasm of Reality yawns at your feet and you're suddenly subject to gravity again. That. Rots. On. Ice.

The effect of the whole is, I think I've shown, engrossing and entertaining. Definitely recommended for classic-aged audiences and cautiously so for those of middle years. It's strong meat indeed Author Martini serves us, a taste of what we're in for, and that's probably not going to go down well with younger audiences (it made my Young Gentleman Caller cry):

The body is simply a leather mask that the spirit slips on when we are born. This is never so evident as when a person passes away, and you observe the shell stripped of its animating inner force.

SWEET AS CANE, SALTY AS TEARS...Cajun escapee comes Home, hijinks ensue

SWEET AS CANE, SALTY AS TEARS
KEN WHEATON
Open Road Media (NON-AFFILIATE Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A freak accident forces a New Yorker to return to Louisiana and confront her Cajun past

There is nothing more dangerous than a spooked rhinoceros. It is just before lunchtime when Huey, the prized black rhino of Broussard, Louisiana, erupts from his enclosure, trampling a zoo employee on his way to a rampage in the Cajun countryside. The incident makes the rounds online as News of the Weird, and Katherine Fontenot is laughing along with the rest of her New York office when she notices the name of the hurt zookeeper: Karen-Anne Castille—her sister.

Fifty years old, lonely, and in danger of being laid off, Katherine has spent decades trying to ignore her Louisiana roots. Forced home by Karen-Anne’s accident, she remembers everything about the bayou that she wanted to escape: the heat, the mosquitoes, and the constant, crushing embrace of family. But when forced to confront the ghosts of her past, she discovers that escape might never have been necessary.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS-PLUS. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's funny how The Book for a particular mood will lurk until that moment hits. I needed an undemanding read, one that had nothing to do with the present-day mishegas I find both distasteful and unseemly; I found this book set in Obama-era New York City and central Louisiana. About a funeral, and coming to terms with what family means, what being in a family requires, how it is that Facebook has metastasized across nations and cultures.

Published in 2015, the book follows Katie-Lee, fiftyish and full of the fear that gives single people, as she returns to bury her little sister in the wake of a Facebook-meme-able death. In fact, she finds out about the life-ending from her colleagues at (unnamed but obvious) Advertising Age, their titters and chuckles about a humorous tale of a zookeeper trampled by a rhino morphing into a dreadful reality: That's her baby sister. The shamefaced colleagues try to make it right, but she's already launched the boat onto the Styx.

She has to Go Home. Not a flying visit. The Native has to Return. O frabjous day.

Must be done. She does it. Hijinks ensue; her Louisiana family, of her generation that is, are all au courant with the world as they see it on Facebook, which is a large player in the novel. No political crap yet, as this book was written and published before the 2016 debacle revealed how much influence the platform has over far more than one's personal life. No Instagram, glancing mentions of Twitter, and Katie-Lee's a screen addict whose phone running out of bars is a Biblical-level disaster. She has more in common with the grandkids of her sisters and brother than with them.

She honestly has no idea what to do with her sadness. Facing mortality for the first time is a life-changing experience. I did it in my 20s when the AIDS epidemic decimated the gay guys I knew and loved. I remember the emotions, the detachment from reality that realizing your own death is, inevitably and inexorably, coming closer and closer. Youth is gone in that moment, calendar be hanged. And Katie-Lee's life in Brooklyn isn't such that she's cushioned from the yawning emptiness of survivorhood.

Dig we must, chere.

The healing in this tale is family-wide, and inclusive. The tragedies of the past are present again as they always are at funerals; so are the fun memories that inject themselves into the geology of one's life. People whose acts are literally unforgivable are not forgiven, though that day will clearly come. But the truly unforgivable ones are the least likely to see themselves as needing forgiveness. THAT resonated. Author Wheaton nailed that. But he did so in a format, following a structure, and thus made sure the Lesson isn't A Sermon (and he includes one of those, a real dilly of a tone-deaf nightmare-from-Hell one at that) and moves on to the next laugh.

There's the rub. This is a nightclub act written as a book. These moments are Wheaton's Brooklyn party pieces connected into a gender-swapped story to make them cohesive. (In fact, Katie-Lee's ex Howie sounds to me like Wheaton's ex only maybe not gender-swapped, if you take my meaning.) They're not less real or funny for that, but the structure of the book does nothing to hide this fact from knowing eyes. I'm from South Central Texas, I had a mamaw and she was transplanted Cajun stock, and in the days when I had party pieces, they fit together much the same way as Wheaton's do. So my eyes weren't fogged up but rather cleared by reading the present action-memory-lesson structure.

I hurry to remind y'all that 3-1/2 stars is a positive rating. I'm not trying to blast the author; in fact I liked the rhythm, was comfortably on board with the predictability of it, and felt completely relaxed and happy and at home. Nothing much happens. No excitement apart from a funeral games scene that about popped my eyeballs out from trying not to wake my roomie up from the laughing.

So do I recommend this read? Sure, so long as you're a storytelling-voice addict. It's $8 on your ereader and that's not a lot to spend on four or five hours' vacation without moving. But if you're not in the mood to listen to stories, this will not be a successful trip to Opelousas. (Where Mamaw's family came from! Now, I don't *know* that any Tullises married any Wheatons, but I bet if we....)

FLAMES, Tasmanian debut author Robbie Arnott's full-tilt dive into magical realism, is a must-read!

FLAMES
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘A strange and joyous marvel.’ Richard Flanagan

A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte—who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.

The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island that takes us full circle.

Flames sings out with joy and sadness. Utterly original in conception, spellbinding in its descriptions of nature and its celebration of the power of language, it announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in contemporary fiction.

Robbie Arnott was born in Launceston in 1989. His writing has appeared in Island, the Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings and the 2017 anthology Seven Stories. He won the 2015 Tasmanian Young Writers’ Fellowship and the 2014 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. Robbie lives in Hobart and is an advertising copywriter.

My Review: I'm sure anyone reading my reviews knows of The Guardian's marvelous ten-year-old "Not-the-Booker" crowd-sourced literary prize. I learned of Flames's existence from the ginormous user-generated longlist for this year's jousting match. It looked intriguing, but the contest review sold me, being by Guardian reading-group, literary-link curator Sam Jordison...who also happens to be the co-director of Galley Beggar Press, the 2019 Booker Prize-unwinner Ducks, Newburyport's original publisher. So he's got strong literary chi. I trusted him; I took a leap of faith; I was amply rewarded.

This lovely debut novel from a small-yet-mighty Australian publishing house was a delight to me from the moment I met Karl and his seal. Karl fishes off the northern coast of Tasmania, that deep-southern island state of Australia, the last significant spot of land between Antarctica and the world. His seal, like Lyra's daemon in His Dark Materials, is connected to Karl's very essence and forms a large part of Karl's self—both image and awareness. Their "Oneblood tuna" prey, the giant and preternaturally perfect piscine predators found only in the Bass Strait (this is never stated but is implicit in the constant Japanese tuna-buyers' presence), bring in huge amounts of money from sushi-mad Japanese consumers through their local Tasmanian agents. Karl supports his family, his seal included, on the proceeds of their hunts. His bond with his seal is, however, the source of his undoing. His seal, being but a seal, is not immortal and falls to a hungry orca before Karl's appalled and helpless eyes and ears:

Karl tried to forget that clicking sound. But it was lodged in a hole between his ears, a backdrop to his days that he feared and hated but could not escape. He was reminded of it constantly: when a light switch was flicked, when Louise clicked her fingers, when his leaping daughters clicked their heels, when Sharon at the fish-and-chip shop clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she waited for the oil in the deep fryer to heat up.

There is no magical cure here. Not even for the cruel soulkiller PTSD.

Already, in the first twenty-five pages of the book, the magic of Tasmania's lands and waters bears the reader's weight. "How does a fisherman become the partner of his competitor the seal?" wonders the Western materialist tapping the touchscreen to deliver the next jolt of story-junk to his addict's brain. In these first pages, we're tossed into a magical world where dying mothers (if they're McAllisters) are cremated, return to life as themselves melded with ferny forest glens before recombusting, which thereafter somehow gives the grieving son the clarity to think, "Everyone dies, even when they’re reincarnated;" where the son, who is also a brother, encounters the maimed soul of Karl for a prelude to one of the novel's truly bizarre, and bizarrely perfect, themes, death as an almost-silent character in the weird, winding path the Tasmanian humans tread:

Levi. And then, as if his surname was an afterthought: McAllister. He...ran his hand through his hair. Everything’s fine.
Righto. The name bumped around between Karl’s ears where the clicks usually lived. I’m sorry.

(Be aware that this story is dialogue-light, and such dialogue as there is is italicized as well as unattributed; this could present a problem for some traditionally inclined readers.) This is a crucial moment, but how is the reader to know it? Trusting the newb of an author to put this scene, with its awkward Manly Emotions Inadequately Expressed, in this precise place at this exact juncture is a big ask. I sat a moment after reading this, aware that the expression of sympathy in "I'm sorry" wasn't connected to anything in Levi's head, and the idea of a McAllister wasn't connected to anything in Karl's head (yet); and yet this is a deep and important scene in the book, said my spidey senses. What, why, how?

I love that. Author Arnott didn't tell me! No rookie mistake of hand-holding me through the significance of Levi's peculiar purpose...gathering driftwood for a coffin, a wooden receptacle for much of the meaning in this book...and Karl's peculiar and solitary presence on this beach at this moment. I am left with the deeply experienced reader's tingle in the presence of Momentousness; I am left with a king-sized curiosity bump itching like mad; but I am left and the story moves on.

Levi wants something. (More than the proverbial glass of water, for sure.) He can't really be anything other than an authorial self-portrait because no one else would receive an assessment as cruel as, "Tweaky voice, even though his words were smooth. Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked," unless it was a self-assessment. He wants to control a world he can not comprehend. Levi wants to make the world behave, be orderly, not abandon him as he feels his father did, as he now feels his recombusted mother did; as his sister, whose death will result in her resurrection and recombustion because she's a McAllister woman, has when she discovered Levi was making her a coffin. He loves them all; they all leave him; where's the love in that?

Levi is reminding himself of his resolve: to show Charlotte that she wasn’t condemned to rise again, changed and ghastly, after she died. That her life needn’t end twice. That she needn’t suffer the same fate as their mother. That he had sourced this calming coffin for her and her alone; that in the face of their sorrow he had gone to great lengths to have it built; that he couldn’t go another day knowing she was in such pain; that he cared for her this much; that he loved her more than he could ever show with words; that the coffin represented all this.
Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words.

Levi is, I fear, the very saddest and least likely to be redeemed of the people in the story. Or so we're led carefully to believe.

Now meet Allen, the wombat tenant-farmer, decades among the wombats protecting and caring for them, that they might be turned into pelts. (This somewhat odd-to-non-Tasmanians idea is more suggested than explained.) Allen is a true lover of the deepest South this southernmost tip of Australia has to offer. His helpless adoration for the land is the occasion of some truly lush description:

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm.... If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. Its undulating moorlands of peat and buttongrass; the glints of white quartzite that blink on the mountain caps; the cold, clean welcome of its unbroken sky; the harsh cliffs and tea-coloured waters; the gathering sense of wild solitude that breathes out of every crack in the land. I cannot go back to the flat brown farms of the Midlands, or the over lush dairy pastures of the northwest.

The source of his reverie is anxiety, however, a deep and well-grounded fear that the farm owner will dispense with him when he finally builds up the nerve to describe to her the horrible fate that's begun to befall the wombats in his decades-long care. He's no longer caring for them alone, though.

Karl's daughter Nicola, training as a veterinarian, has come to the farm for work experience; she has established herself with Allen, a taciturn man, as trustworthy and useful. Now Charlotte McAllister arrives, aflutter with the fear of her brother the coffin-procuring weirdo following and finding her. The women are deeply affected by the mysterious wombat deaths, as one would expect. Allen is affected as well, though with time his need for the women's help and his desire to husband the wombats as a farmer is curdling, changing him into a fearsome figure and an angry old man:

Each morning I march off, gun in hand and knife in belt, as their eyes follow me filled with what looks more and more like fear. It is futile, feminine softness, and nothing more.
***
I watched {the wombats} lumber towards her, four-legged lumps of uselessness made flesh, and realised that I hated them, that I must always have hated them, that I had been lying to myself for all the long years I have been trapped in this barren southern hell.

Action is required; the women take it. Events swirl out of control, Allen transmogrifies into an avatar of rage and hatred unique to this one place in the world. His final acts of fury and aggression cause a shocking change to come over Charlotte: She finds in herself her mother's fierce power to burn. Only she finds it before she dies, and she finds it as a defensive weapon against old Allen.

This is the beginning of the most intense, most magical passage in the novel: The search of Charlotte for control over her power to burn. Nicola is the only person who can quench Charlotte's fire. She gentles the rage and softens the heat in her friend (not feeling it as unusual that she has this heat...maybe because of her own father Karl's seal-mate?), and takes Charlotte to a place where she cannot cause accidental damage to the world around her. She drives them to the Northern mountains, a beautiful snowy stony world where her father's Japanese tuna-buying friend has a stone-built home. Perfect! It's too cold for vacationing friends to want to be there; Australian snow-tourists aren't going to know where it is. Of course they have all the comforts...the flammable comforts...of home:

Nicola turned back to Charlotte, looking harder through the darkness, and saw a thin blue trail worming out of her ear. It had reached the cushion beside her head—a wispy, plasticky stream of it, rising up into the cabin. As Nicola scrambled towards Charlotte the smoking patch of cushion erupted into a small blue flame. With one hand she smacked it out, and with the other she rested a palm on Charlotte’s hot cheek.
Through her palm she again felt the pulse of flame from within Charlotte’s body. Again she felt it flicker out. She felt the burn in her stomach, hot and red, and knew she’d doused the fire. Again she didn’t want to let go.

Charlotte learns slowly to control the flames of her combustive power. Nicola continues to gentle her rage and bank her fires; they become (inevitably) lovers. And it is at this point that the novel shows how much it is a first novel, one by a man.

Women connected in intimacy must, of course, be sexually involved. If/then, right? No. Not that cut-and-dried, but that is where men go with it. To be fair, that's where men go with it among their own kind as well. I can think of few truly intimate friendships between men in male-authored stories. More often than not they are hidden rivalries or become sexual relationships. Still, it's not as though the issue is handled pruriently. We're not treated to much more than a kiss and some hand-holdings between the ladies.

Also not very deft is the handling of the female private detective whose presence in the narrative is to give us a reason to go on the road while she tries to find Charlotte. She's the device used to deal with an unwoven plot thread about another of Tasmania's many nature gods. A human causes the death of the animal-formed Esk God in his own river. That certainly can't go unanswered. The tough-as-nails prick-teasing ball-buster P.I. stereotype is launched to give these two strands a fast stitch. Her own story of having a strong physical sixth sense is shorted, as it must be unless the book is to be as long as the Bible. Suffice to say she serves her dual purpose, then goes quietly away. In fact, she was underused. Her role, larger and less broad-stroked, could've bridged the super- and the natural worlds. Missed opportunity, that.

It is also at this point in the narrative, the point where Charlotte and Nicola are together and dealing with the weirdness of Tasmania's hyperaware supernatural world, when we discover Charlotte's ancestral connection to fire. I won't spoil it. It's one of the lyrical joys of the book. At last we bring all the narrative strands together. Charlotte and Levi each learn how to speak their truths to each other; Nicola learns that her life's bonds are strong enough to bear the weight of multitudes; Levi, in a unexpected and amazing volte-face, learns his rudderless life's purpose. And it is Karl, at Nicola's behest, who weaves this into another strand between Charlotte's McAllister firey world and Nicola's seas and snows. It is exactly right.

The few issues above set aside, I'm left delighting in the sheer beauty of the language and the vigorous imagination that gave the magic of Tasmania a voice at last. This is what makes Flames a full five-star read. Earlier I mentioned the moment I knew when the threads of these disparate stories began to merge, that initial knowledge of Momentous Doings taking place. The full fruition of that sense came when the supernatural and natural worlds collided with all the force and all the passion of the stories told up to now; the resolution was revealed, the purpose of these journeys was enunciated:

A cloud’s sorrow: you cannot imagine it. But you can feel it, whenever a storm hits the world with uncommon force. When mountains crack and forests flood. When rivers surge and oceans bloat. When there is no true shelter left in the world. For the hardest storms are made of sorrow.

Sadness and sorrow powered the trip. The destination, left a bit in shadow, is as simple and as difficult as:

It had something to do with attraction...and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose.