THE SPECTRES OF M. R. JAMES by Richard Svensson

 

THE SPECTRES OF M. R. JAMES

written and illustrated by Richard Svensson

M. R. James is one of the most famous writers of classic British ghost stories. His tales feature academically-minded protagonists investigating university libraries, old abbeys, and country manors where they come across strange and malevolent supernatural entitites. His tales are colorful, even quaint at times, but a slow, suspenseful dread gradually creeps in until the final horror is revealed.  

Richard Svensson has illustrated some of most iconic beings from these stories. At no more than 60 pages, it’s a conveniently small book you can keep by your bed to glance at as you’re falling asleep, or leaf through while you’re in the waiting room at a doctor’s office.

Seeing all these stories collected together, it’s surprising to realize just how many “monsters” were in James’ “ghost stories”.  There’s the weird, tentacled horror of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, the unseen, hairy demon of “Casting the Runes”, and the gigantic monstrous sawflies of “The Residence at Whitminster”. Even James’ more traditional ghosts can be quite bizarre, such as the frog-man of “The Haunted Dollhouse”, the hallucinatory pink-faced entity from “The Rose Garden”, or the famous bed-sheet phantom of “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

You can get a copy of The Spectres of M R James at Lulu.com

BOOK REVIEW: Mary's Monster, written and illustrated by Lita Judge

 

The common story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is that she conceived the plot during a ghost-writing contest while she, her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her sister Claire were staying at the manor house of Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori. Some might add that she took inspiration from an experiment in galvanism she had witnessed a few weeks earlier.  But Lita Judge’s evocative book, told through prose poetry, posits that the novel grew for many years within Mary’s mind, sewn together from the tragedies and drama of her life. It grew from the deaths that surrounded her: her children; her neglected sister; Percy Shelley’s abandoned first wife; and Mary’s own mother who died giving birth to her. It grew from her feelings of estrangement towards her once-beloved father who did not approve of her romance with the young poet.  It grew from the anger of her sister Fanny “shackled by illegitimacy and despair”. And it grew from Percy Shelley’s own growing madness “because society loathes him for his beliefs”. Out of these parts Mary made her creation, so Judge writes, stitching them into a greater whole just as Victor Frankenstein assembled his creature from corpses.

The book is told in first person from Mary’s perspective, giving the reader a personal connection with her pain and her joy. At critical moments the voice of her creature also emerges as an extension of her. A literary child just as precious to her as the biological children she lost. 

Central to Mary’s story is her turbulent relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley. How they came to love each other and fled to Europe to try to build a life through loss, ostracization, and Shelley’s growing mania. Equally important to the narrative is Mary’s relationship with her sister Claire, who travels with the couple and shares in Mary’s pain and joy. And, then, of course the book depicts the fateful ghost-writing contest at Byron’s chateau, when Mary’s creature finally comes to life and speaks with his own voice.

The book gives context to some of the more macabre events in Mary’s life, such as when she first makes love to Shelley on her mother’s grave, or how she rescues his physical heart after he is cremated and keeps it in her writing desk for the rest of her life. Both acts keep her deceased loved ones close to her.

Judge’s evocative black-and-white illustrations accompany and enhance each poem, steeping the book in a gothic aesthetic. This is a passion project for the author, undertaken- as she explains in the afterward- while she struggled with pain, fatigue, and isolation during a long illness. “I have represented the details of Mary’s life,” she writes, “by weaving the actual events (as documented in her journals, copious letters, and later biographies) with the themes she and Shelley wrote about in their creative work.” The author does acknowledge that, although this book draws from facts, it is a dramatization of Mary’s experiences.  Judge provides an extensive bibliography for further reading, along with a list of what the characters themselves read, to provide some context for their lives. She also includes short biographical notes of what happened to everyone later in life.

You can get a copy of Mary's Monster at BookShop or Amazon.

BOOK REVIEW: Yes! We Are Latinos by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy, with pictures by David Diaz

 

I recently had the pleasure of discovering poetry (or rather, rediscovering poetry, since I used to enjoy reading it as a kid) thanks to a class on children’s literature genres that I took for my Library Science degree.  While working on an assignment to survey part of the children’s section at my local library and found a bunch of great kid’s poetry books and thought I’d share a few of them. Hopefully y’all might find some that interest you too.

Yes! We Are Latinos is a collection of free-verse poems about the experiences of Latino children in the United States,  showcasing a great diversity of characters who are Black, Indigenous, white, and of mixed Hispanic heritage. The book also includes groups who may not be as widely known, such as Latinos of Japanese and Chinese descent, and Sephardic Jews who fled Spain in the Middle Ages. Each poem is accompanied by background history on topics such as the Spanish Civil War, migrant farmworkers, and African heritage. These notes especially appealed to me because they gave each poem more context and really helped build an appreciation for the history and experiences of Latino culture.

The poem titles follow the same formula, beginning with “My Name is ___” followed by the ethnicity and cultural relationship of the narrator. For example: “My Name is Monica. I Am From El Salvador. I Live in Houston. I am Texan. I am Latina.”  Each is a short vignette in the life of a Latino child. There is a girl questioning what she wants in life as she prepares for her quinceañera; a migrant worker boy catching a ride in his father’s truck and thinking about the life he left behind in Mexico; A boy dreaming about becoming a painter; and more. Though the stories differ, there is a strong theme running through them about dreams for the future and building a better life.

Poems are written in a free verse style which mimics prose speech. This may bother those used to more traditional rhyming couplet poetry. But for other readers, the natural flow of the sentence may make it easier to follow the stories.  

Each poem is accompanied by Diaz’ black-and-white illustrations which resemble wall murals, Mexican papel picado banners, and even shadow puppets.

Oddly, despite trying to encompass the breadth of Latinx people, the book glaringly does not feature any characters of Brazilian ancestry, even though this country is the largest and one of the most diverse in Latin America. The book also lacks characters from other countries where Spanish is not the dominant language, such as Suriname where Dutch is the official language, French Guiana where French is mainly spoken; or Guyana and Belize where a sizeable portion of the population speak English.  Indeed, the book seems to be focused mainly on Hispanic identities with a few exceptions such as the Sephardic Jewish family in “My Name is Sultana, o Susana”, and the white Spanish family in “My Name is Rocio” who fled to Mexico, then the US during the Spanish Civil War. While these omissions do knock the book down a little in my rating, the collection does a good job of highlighting the diverse Latino identities of people living in the United States. And as Ada states in the Introduction: “Whatever your background, this book is an invitation to look inside yourself.”

You can get a copy of Yes! We Are Latinos at Bookshop.org or at Amazon

REVIEW: Astrovitae Issue 2

 

Astrovitae Issue 2

Review by John Meszaros

Astrovitae is a magazine devoted to creators in the speculative fiction subgenre of speculative biology. Though people have imagined fantastic beasts and beings since the beginning of our species, speculative biology focuses on developing organisms using our current knowledge of biology, ecology, physics, geology, and other sciences. Though even within these limits there is a wide spectrum, as some creators may work with strict hard science rules while others prefer to design fantastic beasts closer to myth and folklore.

This second issue of Astrovitae shows significant refinement from the already impressive first issue.   There is a new section on speculative biology news featuring interviews, YouTube videos, Kickstarters, and new projects. It’s a good way to keep abreast of the bewildering variety of speculative projects out there. This issue also features the first of a regular book review column, beginning with Christian Cline’s The Teeming Universe.

Collaborative projects are the focus of issue two, with articles on the online Discord-based Specposium convention, the Project Sil Discord, and a preview of Almost Real magazine. The latter showcases the Keraunoplast, fascinating slime mold-like organism that feeds directly on electricity and can actually bond with old space junk to form cybernetic life forms. This issue came out in September 2021, and it’s fascinating to see how the imposed quarantine of the Covid pandemic and the subsequent burst of more online communication through Discord, Instagram and other social media has led to the birth of so many new speculative biology projects.

Hyperlinks embedded in the Pdf pages are a really useful feature. Readers can click an article’s byline to go to the creator’s website or other social media. Clicking the section heading will also take one back to the table of contents.

As with the previous issue, Astrovitae #2 is divided into several sections: Captivating Worlds, with overviews of large world-building projects; Artist Spotlight, which looks at the creators themselves and their bodies of work as a whole; and Creature Compendium: which zooms in on individual organisms.

 Captivating Worlds begins with an in-depth look at the natural history of Mathijs Megens’ Amethyst Beach Shield, a chemosynthetic armored organism.

The next entry, Domenic Pennetta’s Project Perditus is a survey of a world that resembles Earth in the early Paleozoic, with creatures that will feel familiar to many paleo-enthusiasts, while still retaining their own alien-ness.

The Alternate Cenozoic Project by Thien Anh Nguyen is a what-if about an earth where the large dinosaurs were not killed off by an impact form space, following in the tradition of works such as Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, and the Speculative Dinosaur Project.

Sea Serpents of the Arthechocene by Alejandro Martínez Fluxá is set in the future after human-caused mass extinctions. With all the large pinnipeds and cetaceans gone, sea snakes evolve to fill the niche of large oceanic predators and filter-feeders, becoming the long, whale-like tiamats.

Giant sea snakes by Alejandro Martínez Fluxá

Evan Proctor’s Before Planet Feni is primarily an outline of the dominant species on the titular planet, as well as some background about the planet’s explorers. Hopefully there will be more to come in this work.

The World of Nijin-Konai by Lorenzo Battilani is a hard science look at a primarily aquatic alien world, delving into microbiology and genetics with a radiation resistant enzyme and redundant genes that allow the planet’s organisms to adapt to the lethal UV radiation of their native star.  Battilani also discusses the complex neurological, metabolism and anatomy of his creature in minute detail that could have come from a college biology textbook.

  Artist Spotlight features an article by YouTube creator Biblaridion detailing how their channel grew from a tutorial on concepts in evolutionary biology to a detailed study of a fictional world. 

Reinhard Gutzat offers a meditation on the sometimes rocky intersection of creativity and biological accuracy during an artist’s development process.

 Artist Sibilla Pepi offers a look at their design process as they develop a feathered wyvern based on the biology of real-life birds.

A detailed look at the heads of Ichtyomorphs from Lorenzo Battilani's world of Nijin-Konai.

Creature Compendium showcases individual speculative creatures in the manner of pages taken from a field guide and includes a giant diving beetle, an alien tadpole, a balloon-like organisms that lives in the atmosphere of a gas planet, and more.

The authors write with the enthusiasm and vernacular of seasoned biologists well versed in scientific nomenclature. Their creatures are given unique taxonomic names and anatomical terms, adding greatly to their believability. These complex names can get a bit overwhelming, however, leading to what one might call “textbook burnout”.  Sometimes I found it necessary to go back and reread articles to fully absorb all the names. This terminology might turn off a reader with a scientific background, but the imaginative variety on display should hold most interests. This is a minor critique, though, and the magazine overall is a professional-quality publication that would be at home in any library shelf. I am particularly pleased to see more projects focusing on the hypothetical evolution of Earthly creatures.

Astrovitae issue 2 is vailable both as a free downloadable PDF from the magazine’s website and as a virtual book that one can flip through on Yumpu.com

BOOK REVIEW: Trans New York by Peter Bussian

 

“It is easy for people to misunderstand and even hate an idea, a concept. It is a lot harder to hate a human being, especially if you know their story, their journey. Of course, people can still be hateful, but if they know about the struggles of their fellow humans, the chances that they will accept and love them are much higher” -Abby Chava Stein, from the Introduction.

Trans New York is a photography book giving a glimpse into the lives of transgender individuals living throughout the city, much in the style of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York blog.

The folks interviewed run the whole range of ages, genders, and experiences. Some people are trans, others genderfluid, nonbinary, or genderqueer in some other way. Some people say they have finished transitioning, others are still in the process. And others feel their gender is a continuous evolution with no point at which their identity is complete.

Each profile has basic information: preferred name, preferred pronouns, hometown, current age, age of transition, etc, along with three open-ended questions (paraphrased): What was your path to transition like? What makes you unique as a person? What would you like people to know about yourself that are different from typical assumptions about trans people? I have to admit these questions feel a bit limiting to me as they focus only on the person’s transness. While I understand that this is because the focus of the book is on being transgender, it would have been nice to devote some more space to finding out who these people are as individuals. What are their hobbies? Their passions and goals? What is their most beloved memory? And so on. 

The interviews do not shy away from trauma and struggles. Some people mention abuse they suffered growing up and how it has shaped them. Others describe having to advocate for themselves because they had no other resources.

Some of the photos can feel abrupt and unframed, as if the photographer just caught a quick shot of someone as they were going about their day. Since Bussian is a professional photographer with 20 years of experience, I assume this was a deliberate stylistic choice to portray the interviewees as a part of their world, rather than as models or subjects for examination. In this way, perhaps, it allows trans readers who may not know many- or any- other folks like themselves to get a glimpse of the diversity of trans lives. And perhaps cis readers too will come to a better understanding and empathy with people who are really not much different from themselves.

You can get a copy of Trans New York at Bookshop

And at Amazon

BOOK REVIEW: Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, edited by K. M. Szpara

 

As literature about exploring and pushing the edges of human experience, it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy have always featured characters who are beyond the binary of cis men and cis women.  From L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, who spent her childhood as a boy; to Virginia Woolf’s titular Orlando, who begins life as a man and wakes up one day as a woman; to the gender-cycling Gethenians of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. 

Following in this long legacy, Transcendent is the first in a yearly series of anthologies featuring trans themes and characters.

Many of the stories are poetic and experimental, requiring a slower reading to fully absorb the atmosphere. Often a reader must simply plunge headlong into a tale, trusting that they’ll figure it out as they go, or maybe understand it better on a second reading after the piece has had a chance to sit for a while in their head. The effectiveness of this experimental storytelling method can be very subjective, and while didn’t always work for me, other readers will find more meaning in these esoteric stories.

Other stories, like Bonne Jo Stufflebeam’s Everything Beneath You, have the feel of mythology, as if they were modern translations of tales illustrated on sunbaked clay wall frescos, or in delicate inks across unfolding silk scrolls.

There are, of course, stories that fit into our more conventional notions of science fiction and fantasy. E.Catherine Tobler’s Splitskin is magical historical fiction featuring nonbinary Native characters during the American Gold Rush era. Molly Tanzer’s The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad is a modern take on Lovecraft’s gender-swapping pulp tale The Thing on the Doorstep. Margarita Tenser’s Chosen is a riff on one of the most popular fantasy tropes- you can probably guess which one. Where Monsters Dance, by A. Merc Rustad has veins of metaphor-heavy fantasy films like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story. 

The Need for Overwhelming Sensation by Bogi Takács is a particularly interesting story about a starship literally powered by the magic generated through the pain and pleasure of a loving BDSM relationship. 

As with any anthology, some stories did not entirely work for me. Holly Heisey’s Contents of Care Package Sent to Etsath-tachri, Formerly Ryan Andrew Curran, for example, is a short piece about a human who transitions into an alien. For me this plot hews a little too close to the “when I was a kid I identified as a velociraptor” rhetoric that transphobes use to try to delegitimize trans identities. But perhaps that’s part of the point of the story?

Transcendent is an important milestone in more direct representation of trans folks in speculative fiction. You can get a copy of this and the other books in the series from Lethe Press, from Bookshop.org, or from Amazon.

BOOK REVIEW: Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Nautral World of Animal Sexuality by Eliot Schrefer

 

Many people have tried to justify their homophobia by claiming that queer identities and relationships are “not natural” and don’t occur in other living creatures (witness the tired classic “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”). However, Queer Ducks shows that same-sex relationships are just as common in the animal kingdom as they are among humans.

The book is as much a memoir about growing up closeted as it is a book about animal sexuality. Schrefer himself knew he was gay at a young age but could not be open about his sexuality at the time. Even when he came out, he initially thought of queer behavior in animals as a dead end, but after looking through scientific articles he discovered numerous examples of same-sex behavior throughout the animal kingdom from primates, deer, insects and more.

Queer Ducks is careful to distinguish between homosexuality and heterosexuality in humans and same-sex behavior in animals. The former two terms specifically refer to human orientations and identities, while the latter is an observation of animal behavior; researchers can’t directly know what goes on in an animal’s head, after all.  The book does describe many animals as being “bisexual”- in this case referring to observed behavior where animals mate with and form close bonds with members of the same sex while still engaging in procreation with the opposite sex.  

 Male bottlenose dolphins, for example, regularly form strong, affectionate same-sex partnerships, though both will mate with female dolphins. A similar dynamic occurs with Japanese macaques, where females form strong same-sex bonds and will otherwise ignore males except for reproduction.

While Schrefer acknowledges it is hard to say if animals are transgender since humans cannot directly ask them about their mental state, Queer Ducks does talk about physically intersex animals such as “velvet-horn” deer, which have male genitalia but bodies that look more physically female. It should be noted that intersex animals are not the same biologically as hermaphrodites. Intersex animals can have a mosaic of both male and female secondary sexual traits, but they occur in groups where the majority of individuals have only one type of sex organ, such as mammals or birds. Hermaphrodites, on the other hand, are animals where each individual usually has both male and female gametes, such as slugs. Animals that change physical sex during their life- such as parrot fish- are also called hermaphrodites.

Schrefer is careful to explain that Queer Ducks is not arguing that human sexuality should be directly compared to animal sexuality. He is well aware of the long history of bigoted rhetoric equating homosexuality with bestiality. Instead, he clarifies:

 “We can no longer argue that humans are alone in their queerness, that nonheteronormative human sexualities and gender identities are unnatural because they don’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom… Queerness is a well-established and fundamental part of nature. If queerness is ‘wrong,’ then you’d better be willing to say that the entire animal kingdom is wrong.”

Queer Ducks is humorous and snarky but also sensitive and compassionate; the author makes a segue to talk about the usage of the word “queer”, acknowledging that while it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community, there are still some people who are uncomfortable with that term, and their discomfort is legitimate. The book is also very frank about sex, but never vulgar.  There are jokes about sex, but no “dick jokes”.

You can get a copy of Queer Ducks from HarperCollins

Or through Bookshop or Amazon.