amazing interview with Phil Rickman

No, not here. Sadly the interview with Phil Rickman is not with me, but wonderfully is over at Kittling's Books, here.  It is a fabulous interview.  He has a great sense of humour.  And yes, there is a new book in the Merrily Watkins series coming out next May: The Turning of the Hay.  Yeesss!!!

 In other news - how life affects reading
There is a hole in the foundation of the house and we have it sandbagged to keep rain from going into the foundation.  We have some contractors coming to look and give estimates.....this happened two weeks ago, and we are still trying to deal with it. It's suspected the recent drought we suffered through here in Eastern Ontario is to blame, not that that will fix it or the crack that is running through the foundation on the other side of the house.   It's meant that I can't concentrate on reading very well.  Because we are going through our divorce, the decision to sell the house or not was still on-going, and now even that has been pushed back, as the house has to be fixed before any other decisions can be made.  It's been a rough year, and this was so unexpected.  I suspect this is why I've been reading so many short stories in the past two weeks.  I am finding it hard to concentrate on reading for any length of time. I also seem to have 8 books on the go again, a sign that I am stressed and not able to settle into anything big. 

Does life affect you like this too?  I hate it when I can't read for very long.  I feel like I am missing a piece of myself when that happens.

Three short story reviews for RIP - and a link to Niagara Falls and holidays

Before I get started on my short story reviews, I wanted to tell you about an awesome giveaway I just saw over on Court's blog Once Upon a Bookshelf.  She is giving away a new Fringe book!  Yes, a new book about one of my all-time favourite shows has just been published, and she won a copy in a bag of goodies she won at last weekend's FanExpo Canada 2012.  Lucky, lucky her, and us, because she's never seen an episode of Fringe....so if you are like me and love this show, this sounds like an interesting book just published about the themes and elements and plot.  Happy sigh.  I've already entered.....Into the Looking Glass, Exploring the Worlds of Fringe, by Sarah Clarke Stuart.  Hmm, if I don't win, I'll add it to my Christmas wish list.....

Ok, on to three really good, no, awesome horror short stories that I've read over the past week.  Two are  from The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010 , edited by Paula Guran. 

Monsters - Stewart O'Nan.  This is the story about a young boy, Mark who is playing with a pellet gun that belongs to his friend Derek. They are shooting bottles, and then the game expands in the way that it does when the pellets are harmless, and the bottles don't break.  Something does happen, and this is the story about how everything changes in an instant.  It's heartbreaking, and moving, and it hurts.  That sense of guilt that Mark feels eats away at him, even though no one blames him, and he is not able to forgive himself. That's where monsters come from,inside us.  An amazing story that feels so true, powerful and unsettling - I certainly have felt that guilt, and forgiveness is much harder to do than it sounds, especially towards one's self.  Oh, and no one dies, so don't avoid the story out of fear that it's like that.  It's much more subtle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - Holly Black. A vampire story, but not like any you've ever read before.  Vampires are caused by a virus that mutates, an infection that sets in when you are bitten.  If you get a taste of human blood after being bitten, you become a vampire.  If you don't?  Well, read what happens to Matilda, who has been bitten, and is trying to not become a vampire.  Then her friend Dante finds her, and tells her the boy she loves has crossed over into Coldtown - so named, because every city and town has a Cold area barricaded, where all the vampires live - along with Dante's sister.  They are both still human and alive. There is only one reason to go to Coldtown, however.  What Matilda does will chill your heart and make you cry at the same time.  An amazing story, one of the best short stories I've read about vampires.  As Guran says in her end note, you will want to know more about Matilda, and Cold Town, after.   I certainly do.  Fascinating.

The third short story I read is from The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert:

The Upper Berth - F. Marion Crawford.  A haunted berth on a passenger ship, and a narrator who is a no-nonsense kind of man, until he meets the - thing that haunts the berth.  It is a ghost/dead thing that will make your hair stand on end. awful in its wrongness.  It is written in 1886, so Victorian in tone and attitude, for those who like the early ghost stories.  I liked this one, it reminded me that ghosts are all about the unknown, and the uncanny, and that to be touched or in the presence of one, reminds us in our core that it's not the natural way of things.  The Upper Berth is available here, online.

All these stories rate 5/5.  Have you read any of them?  How is your short story reading for RIP?  I'm so excited that I wrote reviews for short stories  for RIP!  They are all so very good, you have to check them out if you can. Go on, I dare you. 

And now for something completely (but not so unrelated) different:
Niagara Falls
Sidenote:  I was just exploring online to see if I could find Monsters online as well for you to read.  Well, I found this instead, a review of Stewart O'Nan's new book, The Odds.  It's set in Niagara Falls.  Now before you wonder what I'm on about, I just went on my summer holidays to Niagara Falls, last month.  I hadn't been there since a child, and I wanted to show my soon-to-be ex husband and children the Falls.  We had a fantastic holiday, one of the best ever.  So to find out that O'Nan's book is set there - and the main couple go there to see if their thirty-year marriage can be rekindled or if it's  over, because the Falls are one of the Honeymoon capitals in North America.  (We didn't go for that reason, and all my romantic prone friends are dismayed that the Falls didn't work magic on us anyway). Well, you know me, my friends, I had time to look for a bookstore, and eventually found the only one in the central area, a second-hand bookstore called One Page, not so far from our hotel. I even got in while it was open, and bought some books.  Well it turns out that Stewart O'Nan likes this store too - see the bottom of the article I've linked you too.  Small world......and now I definitely have to read his novel, with Niagara Falls fresh in my mind.

By the way, I LOVE Niagara Falls.  Not the Clifton Hill attractions, which are like Blackpool in England only smaller (so my ex says), but the Falls themselves are extraordinary and beautiful. As a child I saw them many times, as most of my family is from the nearby London area. It was fun to go back as an adult and realize they are just as awesome and beautiful as ever.  Below are four pictures from our trip. How is this related to the above?

So about the horror RIP link:
Well, my youngest son was determined to see some ghostly or ghastly wax museum.  When I went a as child to Niagara Falls, I clearly remember going through the Chamber of Horrors, which was set in the bottom of Louis Tussaud's Wax museum.  I would start off slowly, and then when the exhibits got too much for me, I would start running until I was dashing through the exhibit.  That was when I was 10. Flash forward to now, 39 years later.  We eventually found two wax museums which each had a tiny horror section.  My reaction to both was the same:  I started off okay, and if it was too dark and the exhibits moved or were too close to us, I began to move faster and faster until I was almost running.  My youngest son is most disappointed in me.  I failed the 'cool mom can go through a horror museum' test. I think I got clammy hands at one point,and we had to take the short cut through one part.  My son kept saying, " They're only statues, mom!  they can't move! They're not real!"  I kept thinking that something was behind me when I wasn't looking......so that's my real live RIP moment, brought to you courtesy of Niagara Falls.  That Freddy Kreuger statue was very life-like and much too close in the passageway.....

Fire Watch - Connie Willis

"Fire Watch" by Connie Willis is her short story that features her time-travelling continuum that Willis uses in-depth in Doomsday Book , To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout and All Clear. I've linked you to my two reviews.  I haven't read All Clear yet, that's on my immediate TBR pile.

"Fire Watch" is the story of Bartholomew, who is supposed to travel with St Paul, but because of a spelling error, is shipped instead to St Paul's - in the Blitz, in London, 1940.  Bartholomew doesn't have time to switch his history learning from the time of St Paul to the Blitz, and he only knows he is sent there to prevent St Paul's from burning down.  He joins the Fire Watch brigade at St Paul's for three months, which is the length of his time travel visit there.  And the story is him trying to do just that, save St Paul's at night when the incendiaries and bombs fall,  while he learns about the Blitz, while he tries to recall through memory aids what he needs to know about that time.  The memory aids  were implanted the fast way and so don't work until the moment he needs them.  So he bumbles about, learning everything as it happens, and then understanding what happens, almost instantaneously as the memory aids kick in. History happens and he is supposed to observe, as a historian, but like all the characters in Willis's time-travelling books, they end up doing, participating in history, and being changed by it.  There is no such thing as observing history, and part of the thrill and charm of this story and all her time-travelling stories, is that we get to experience that moment of history along with the characters.  By the way, I love the cover of the edition above - I don't own it, though I am going to try a copy now.  It's lovely, isn't it?

I had read "Fire Watch: before, several years ago.  So when I came across it in The Winds of Marble Arch, her massive collection of short stories (and still sadly no paperback editions have ever been issued, despite what Subterranean Press says, or if they did, they were so few that there weren't enough for the stores to carry), which I am currently reading from the library (because Subterranean Press refuses to publish any more in hardcover, which I would run out and buy RIGHT. NOW. if they did), I reread it again.  Since the time I read it the first time, I have been to St Paul's - if you look on my sidebar, you will see a picture I took when we were in London last in 2009, that we also have framed in our house.  I love that picture, it seems to capture the past rising up in the present, that everywhere you go in London, in England (and Europe), history is everywhere.  This sense of history is much harder to find in North America. We don't hang on to our history very well here, except in museums and in the US, the Civil War is remembered in many locations. I love that going about your every day life in London, you can see this beautiful awe-inspiring majestic church, that Christopher Wren rebuilt when it was destroyed in the 1666 Fire of London.  So much was lost in London during the Blitz, too, and this sense of loss, of history being lost, and trying to not forget it, infuses all of Willis' time travel books.  Why else do we study history, but to experience it and learn from it?

"Fire Watch" is stunningly moving. I forgot how good it is.  Here it is, online. I'm so glad it's available.   I cried as much at the ending as I did the first time I read it so many years ago.  There is something about Willis's writing that moves me, and this is why - along with her wonderful fun, zany, humorous, gentle, witty, smart writing, that I love so much. She never forgets that it's people that count.  No matter how prepared I am for her work to touch me, even in reading her short stories, I find she has the ability to pierce through to the important place where truth is kept.

Bonus review! another short story by Connie Willis:

"Letter from the Clearys" seems like such a quiet story (again, from The Winds of Marble Arch), and yet it lingers, this image of the world after it has exploded and left the survivors grimly hanging on.  It makes me realize how much in the 1980s we had to live through the threat of nuclear war - remember that Doomsday Clock, forever pointing at 1 or 2 minutes to midnight and death?  It is the story of a young girl, who goes to the corner store to fetch supplies - mostly seeds - and looks among the mail. She is looking for a letter from their summertime neighbors, who didn't come as usual the summer before last, when the end of the world started.  She is trying to hang on, and unwittingly reopens all the scars her family carries about the time - the day - the world changed. The Letter from the Clearys is also about us, as a human race, about how nuclear war might start with a bomb, and it is the small things that drive home the loss, the details, the way people don't always talk about what needs to be talked about, because it hurts too much.  The heroine, Lynn, aged 14,  reminds me of me as a child.  I was bumbling and awkward and forever saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  I still don't have the greatest sense of timing.  Lynn wants to share the letter from the Clearys, because it's from before the bomb, and she doesn't realize the pain it will cause everyone to remember the way things were before. This is exactly what it would feel like to live in America after the bomb fell.  And you still have to live with people, and try to stay alive.  It's scary, and it's bittersweet, and it's supposed to be.  Brilliant, really. 

One thing Willis's writing is reminding me of, that I am discovering as I read science fiction this year, is how much science fiction is trying to find a way through the certainty of some global disaster or nuclear war or ending of the world - trying to find some way through the future, so that we have a future ahead of us. How do we survive?  what's the best way?  Do we have to leave the planet, is that our only hope?  It would be depressing fiction, if it weren't for this sense of hope infusing it, that we can find a way.  Science fiction is one way of pointing us to possible futures and outcomes. Connie Willis' writing (the time travelling series anyway) comes from a future where we do still exist,but things have changed, and they are trying to come back to see what they can save, or to see what happened.  It's beautiful and I love her writing, and this story, "Fire Watch", for showing that in the midst of war (the Blitz), there is time to care.

 "Fire Watch" won the Hugo and Nebula award for best novelette in 1983.
"Letter from the Clearys" won the Nebula Award for best short story in 1983.

Dreams Underfoot - how to fall in love with fantasy

Dreams Underfoot was the first major collection of Charles de Lint's short stories, published in 1993, most of which were previously published in short story collections. For me, this was the collection that launched de Lint into public fame as a Canadian writer of urban fantasy. I'm 3/4 of the way through the book, and I'm finding I am delighted all over again with Charles' writing.

I first read this collection in 1993 or 94, when it first came out, and I thought it the best collection of short stories by anyone I had come across. There are no bad stories in this book. Some are stronger, some are better worked out, some have such fabulous stories that I really want them to continue, a few - very few - don't touch me or disappoint because they are different - yes, even a second time around reading, I still get disappointed when I want a story to go one way and it goes another! The wonder of this collection is that it mostly amazes with a gentle touch of wonder. These are real fantasy stories, every one. They are like the gossamer feel of dreams, tiny enchantments, glimpses of a world of wonder and magic that still exist around us. I want to go to Newford. I want to live there!

There are 19 stories in all, and I am on 14, 'The Moon is Drowning While I Sleep.' I like this story just for the title alone! It feels like a song when I say it. I thought that this morning while I was reading it on the bus on the way to work. These short stories are like pieces of music put to the page.

If you are looking for something a little magical and a little dangerous and a whole lot enchanting to take you from Hallowe'en into the Christmas season, this is a book I can reccommend to do just that.

The stories are interconnected, but they can be read and enjoyed separately also. Combined together, they make a lovely interweaving of myth and city legends, glimpses of fairies and magic, wonder, magic and fear - because Faerie is dangerous, and the myths that walk the streets of Newford always change whomever they touch. This is one of the finest collections of fantasy, and I am so enjoying this collection all over again.

Short Story Monday - Fragile Things

I only had time to read a bit of Fragile Things tonight - short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" and his fairy-tale poem "Instructions".
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" is a neat twist on the 'girls are from another planet' idea, a line that one of the characters Vic actually uses in the story, pun intended by the author! It makes me wish Gaiman had written more of this story - it is like a mix of 'Day of the Triffids' and a Dr Who episode. And it has poetry and music from the '80's in it! It is a coming-of-age - slightly - story, and again, like the ones read last week, haunting. I'm not sure I would want to go to that party myself - but I like the idea that the girls carry the universe in their eyes. You will have to read it to find out more, Gentle Reader. (wicked grin)
"Instructions" is the kind of poem I would write if I were trying to write down how to survive a fairy tale. Worth reading, printing out, carrying with you in case you encounter any fairy tale creatures or settings in your daily travels.
I am definitely enjoying the stories and Neil Gaiman's writing in Fragile Things. Some, like "The Problem of Susan", keep returning to me at odd times, pieces of it swimming up in the surface of my mind this past week. I'll keep you posted on how I do with the two from this week. I think I will read "Instructions" again before bed, and see if it brings me any interesting dreams.
Happy Short Story reading!