Ex Libris: Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio's Stories: All-New Tales

You will know the best stories by heart.

I find that any book and/or anthology that calls itself 'Stories' has a lot of guts. But then again, when you've got the very popular Neil Gaiman as your editor, I suppose you can go all-balls out, which is why we have Stories: All-New Tales as edited by Gaiman (natch) and Al Sarrantonio.

With this anthology, Gaiman gave a bunch of writers the stated goal of coming up with stories that fulfill the storybound promise of getting the reader to ask the Four Important Words: "And then what happened?" Likewise, he asked them not limit themselves to genre or tropes (which is always either a way to raise the bar on good writing or a backhanded compliment, take your pick).

So does it work? Personally, I like Tor.com writer Ryan Britt's attempt to define what makes a good anthology, which is: "the key to a good SFF anthology is to have a specific enough thesis for why the fiction belongs together, but not too limiting as to make the anthology one-note." Very true. Applying this to the anthology, it's certainly very ambitious-- and ambiguous, which probably works to Gaiman's advantage. It also helps that the editors have managed to attract some top-notch names to submit to this anthology, whether mainstream (like Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates and Jodi Picoult) or genre (Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Swanwick and Gene Wolfe).

So taking Gaiman's advice, I asked the said question after I finished each story. Some of the stories seemed to be written with the Four Important Words in mind-- like Joanna Harris' "Wildfire in Manhattan" and Lawrence Block's "Catch and Release"-- and did it well enough. Some stories failed to hit the mark, like Doyle's "Blood" and Walter Mosley's "Juvenal Nyx". And some stories-- like Elizabeth Hand's "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerphon", Kurt Anderson's "Human Intelligence" Lansdale's "The Stars are Falling" and Joe Hill's "The Devil on the Staircase"-- were simply great that it didn't matter whether the story answered the question.

(In particular, as the anthology's ender, Hill's almost fairy-tale like story is written in a format that's shaped like a staircase, which makes it doubly enjoyable. On the other hand, Gaiman's own story in the anthology, "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is undeniably solid Gaimanesque, something that all of his fans would like. But whether his story answers his own question though is not as obvious.)

With all of its hits-and-misses, I can honestly say you won't regret picking up this collection. I suppose you have to hand it to Gaiman and Sarrantonio that they had enough editorial drawing power that they managed to get some good names to write some great stories for their anthology. Go on and pick up a copy. It's definitely recommended. (Rating: Four paws out of four.)

Hanging out with the cool kids in cyberspace

Oh look! Excellent fictionists Carljoe Javier and Karl M.F. de Mesa's first works will be launched as ebooks courtesy of University of the Philippines Press and made available online! The launch will be on September 6 at the National Computer Center in UP Diliman.

The books here are Carljoe's first short story collection Geek Tragedies (first published in print by UP Press with the ebook recently made available on Amazon) and Karl's first short story collection Damaged People: Tales of the Gothic-Punk (also available in print and on Amazon).

Congrats, guys!

As I once mentioned before in my CNET post, it'll be great to see Filipino works made available internationally thanks to this wonderful little tool called the Internet. So maybe it'll take some time for Filipinos to get published in print in international markets (we're getting there). But thanks to the power of the 'net, we now have left our footprint on the dust of the moon.

P.S. Whoops, looking at the shelf, I forgot to mention that Ian Casocot's first short-story collection, Beautiful Accidents, is also now available both as print and ebook. That's now three writers on the online shelf. Not bad, eh?

Ex Libris: Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow

The secrets of cities are buried underground.

If there's a slowly developing trope of speculative fiction of cities (read: urban fantasy?), it's that their underground hides a great number of secrets. Ranging from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere to Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon's Hidden Cities series (Mind the Gap) to China Mieville's YA book Un Lun Dun to the aptly named Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein.

This is not surprising. William Gibson said in an interview in The Paris Review that "cities are like compost heaps--just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent." In this case, the city is both the burial ground and garbage dump of all our myths and legends, where our monsters and dreams go to be forgotten after our childhood ends.

If you also notice the aforementioned books, it does seem like most writers have a tendency to focus on the London underground as the most "happening" place. This is why I was happy to check out Ekaterina Sedia's first novel, The Secret History of Moscow, which is set (of course), in the underground of Russia's capital.

This wasn't the only reason why this book was the first I've read of Sedia's. I've heard a number of good things about this author and her body of work looks definitely interesting. But I figured: why not go with the first work (or so I thought), see if I could observe her growth as a writer? Which is why despite the flaws I encountered with this book, I was generally forgiving as I persevered reading until the end.

In this case, Galina is a young-yet-spinsterish translator with a past of alleged schizophrenia whose pregnant younger sister Masha disappears in a locked bathroom, leaving behind a newly-birthed babe and a human-acting jackdaw that quickly flies out of the window. Accompanied by Yakov, a policeman with his own emotional baggage who's investigating the numbered disappearances throughout the city, and led by a street artist Fyodor seeking some lost magic in his own life, the trio discover the realm underneath Moscow where all-- as the title points out-- the buried secrets of Russia's history have been relegated, ranging from myths like Zemun the celestial cow (rather, a talking grousing cow) to rusalkas crowding every body of water.

Unfortunately, despite the fascinating concept behind Sedia's book, it never really caught on fire for me no matter how hard I tried to enjoy it. Sedia never really maximizes the mythic resonances of the material she's working from while her prose-- though it gamely moves beyond the sparse and into literary territory-- felt too clumsy to lift the story. It also doesn't help that I didn't get a proper feel of Sedia's Moscow nor the supposed shadow place underneath the city. The city should be a character in its own right within the book but I never got that feeling throughout my reading.

In a sense, these were my main objections of Sedia's book throughout my reading. So even though I could talk about other things in my review, about characterization, the magical/mythical lore, the vignette-type storytelling, the conceptual implications of secrets and buried history in a setting like the former communist country-- heck, even whether the story gripped me enough-- none of these mattered. Yes, I had high expectations with Sedia-- but with books we think we'll treasure forever, shouldn't we expect that?

In any case, I'm still willing to try Sedia's other works. Just chalk it up to first time blues and hope that the next books are an improvement, yes? (Rating: 2 paws out 4.)

P.S. I do feel that I should really do a speculative cities blog. It's so damn fascinating, this whole cities thing. I wonder why...

Ex Libris: Jonathan Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Even the Devil will fear a man with nothing to lose.

Among my bookshelves is a special shelf that holds my favored books. Here are a handful books that I could actually say that I loved them from cover to cover, from concept to execution to prose to even that sense of wonder one gets when opening a book. One was Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial, the other was Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection while a third was Matt Ruff's Set this House in Order.

I can admit that despite the fact that I already had expectations that these might good books, I was surprised to learn as I read them that they were great books. Now this doesn't happen often: sometimes the problem of what could be an interesting book is the execution or the prose. Sometimes I just can't get into the book no matter how hard I try. This is why I'm glad to find another book to number in my shelf: Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer.

The protagonist of this book, of course, is Johannes Cabal, a necromancer though he's more of a researcher of Dark Knowledge who converses with demons and digs graves for his ingredients. He's a cold-hearted bastard who gets what he wants and runs rough-shod over anything in his way-- and in this case, he wants his soul back, which he traded to Satan as per your usual Faustian exchange for knowledge. Satan, for a laugh, makes another deal with Cabal but for a price: a hundred souls in exchange for Cabal's. As a bonus, Satan gives Cabal a dark carnival complete with a train to help him gather the souls.

Of course, when you deal with the Devil, you don't expect fair play. On the other hand, when you deal with Cabal, you hinder him at your peril.

With this set-up, the fun starts rolling with Howard's witty, arch humor evident in every page. The author plays the laughs sharp despite the fact that the socially inept Cabal is as humorless and crotchety as a hoary old nun in a convent and the topics-- devil-dealing and soul-buying-- can be macabre as hell. One could say that in Howard's book, the world is a straight man that gets mugged by a comedian.

And speaking of the straight man, Cabal has his own with his vampire brother Horst, a charismatic, somewhat more compassionate (in the sense that being betrayed by his brother and left to rot in a mausoleum with a vampire had made him realize his own flaws) version of the necromancer who has his own share of regrets (see mausoleum). The two play off well with each other and their interaction gives a more in-depth perspective to Cabal (rather than just some dick protagonist who likes to carry a bag of spells and a big gun).

There are other minor/supporting characters that mark the page when they grace the story with their presence: Cabal's undead henchmen Denzil and Dennis; Bones, the demonic carnival crew chief; Joey Granite, the intelligent strongman; Timothy Chambers, a hapless boy whose life is ruined by Cabal's mercy; and Cabal's nemesis, the former policeman and ever-suspicious Frank Barrow.

(I mention Cabal's mercy to point out that Howard's protagonist isn't one-dimensional: he browbeats bullies, he runs away from better opponents but he can also outwit them, he has changes of heart and refuses to explain them away. In short, he's pretty human despite knowing how to raise the dead.)

If ever there's one flaw to this jewel, I did find the climactic confrontation somewhat of a let-down. However, the end itself more than makes up for it with a hint to the secret behind Cabal. And this, more than anything else, makes me want to look forward to Howard's next book about the necromancer Johannes Cabal. All in all, highly recommended. (Rating: 4 paws out 4)