Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Another scarecrow backstory


As I explained in a previous blog entry, in the course of drawing and writing my picture book, The Scarecrow Harvest Festival, I came up with backstories for most of the characters. Maybe someday I'll compile them all into a companion volume, but for now, have another one! This is the story of that guy in the middle up there with the wrinkled suit and the head full of candles.

FEUILLEMORTE


The road from Deerford to Souhaven is a long, lonely route passing old, tangled forests thick with vines and brambles, shadowed by hemlocks, and haunted by vampires, glowackus, and stranger beasts. The swamps along the trail bristle with quilled horsetails and clumped sword sedges, the waters dappled with the green of duckweed and alive with choruses of frogs, whispering night birds, and screaming fisher cats. There are blocky sandstone ridges marked by the fossil paths of long-dead saurian beasts and haunted by their ghosts. 

The loneliness and foreboding dread on this road can be overwhelming. Thus it was a great relief for travelers in decades past when they came to one particular marsh along the trail that was aglow with fireflies gathered in such huge numbers that one could read by their combined light. This marsh was a sign that they were within sight of the unsurprisingly-named Firefly’s Rest, one of the only inns along this dark trail.

The inn and marsh were fondly remembered landmarks for many years. But, sadly, progress marches on in the River Valley. The stream that fed the marsh was diverted and the wetland itself filled in to provide land for fields. And with the marsh went the fireflies. The inn remained prosperous, many guests agreed that an intrinsic part of its charm and magic had been lost along with its titular insect greeters. Millicent Tunis, the owner of the new fields built on top of the marsh did not forgotten the importance of the fireflies, though. She had many fond memories of being greeted by them when she passed the marsh on the way to Souhaven when she herself had been a young woman trying to make her way as a trader. To honor their memory, and to advertise the inn, she and her family set out dozens little lanterns in their fields, creating their own swarm of dancing lights to greet guests. Initially they made the lanterns themselves from metal scraps but soon guests of the Inn began to donate their own lanterns, some of them brought from distant lands specifically to place in the fields

For a while Millicent and her family hung the lanterns themselves. That proved to be exhausting work, however, and the family had a hard time balancing the task with planting, harvesting and other work.

The Autumnal Powers looked upon this situation and breathed life into the old scarecrow that stood in the field. They dubbed him Feuillemorte and gave him the task of keeping the lanterns lit and the memory of the fireflies alive.

Nowadays Feuillemorte wanders the fields nightly, inspecting each lantern to make sure it’s lit. His own head is made from a driftwood stump and adorned with magic candles that will only burn themselves, but do not touch the dry stalks of the field. 

Travelers still bring lanterns from all over to hang in Millicent’s Firefly Field. A few months ago, the innkeeper even began cataloguing the stories behind them, and collecting them in a hefty book in the inn’s small library. 


Locals and travelers alike have developed an affection for Feuillemorte as well, and volunteers have ensured that he receives consistent repairs and a new outfit once the old one gets too ragged.


Monday, February 10, 2020

Review: F4 by Larissa Glasser


The Finasteride is a luxury cruise ship grafted into the back of a drugged and comatose kaiju, the titular F4, or Fury-Beast 4- so named because it was the fourth in a wave of titanic alien monsters that broke through a dimensional gateway to wreak havoc in our world. Despite being repeatedly bombed to Hell, the creature regenerated too fast for anyone to truly kill it. Eventually somebody figured: why not sedate it and turn it into a cruise liner?

Carol is the bartender on this ship. It’s a decent gig, and an escape from the transphobic trolls she’s been dealing with on the mainland. Things seem to be getting better for her, so of course the ship’s captain has to turn into an amorphous horror and shunt the whole vessel into a nightmare-dimension of violent mutations and alien energies. And things just get crappier from there. While the crew and passengers transform into monsters, Carol and her friends make their way through the literal bowels of the vessel to try to escape the flesh phantasmagoria. Or at least survive until it’s over.

F4 is a gonzo novella that reads like 70s New Wave pulp science fiction mixed with an 80s creature feature and a little bit of the SCP Foundation dropped into classic 1990s Doom.

The action on the Finasteride is broken up by scenes of the incident on the mainland that drove Carol to the ship in the first place. These chapters are slower and grounded in the mundane world, reading more like a crime thriller and providing a nice anchor to the craziness on the F4.

It’s refreshing to read a story about a transwoman front and center as the protagonist. Also refreshing to read a story about a transwoman that isn’t a prurient, often cis-authored, drama focused only her struggles with being trans.  Though the transphobic bullshit Carol has to deal with is certainly not glossed over. She puts up with constant micro-aggressions- and a lot of regular aggressions, too. Heck, the reason she ended up on the ship in the first place was to get away from a concerted transphobic harassment campaign (which bears similarities to the way the media and trolls victimized Claudia Charriez during the assault trial of her ex- a deliberate parallel that Glasser herself pointed out in an interview).

Despite the hellscape erupting all around Carol, she remains focused as she tries to keep her companions safe. And as we see in the mainland story, she tries to do the right thing even when she knows it's going to bite her in the ass hard.

Carol is also not at all shy about her anatomy, which brings up one thing to be aware of when going into this novella: the dicks. Sweet Christmas, are there a lot of dicks. Girldicks. Kaiju dicks. Crab-monster dicks. Maybe even one or two cisguy-dicks. Dicks even become a major plot point. But you get used to it. Just go in expecting dicks and you’ll be fine.

The ending of F4 does feel like it needed more set-up. There’s an island shaman who pops up right at the end with hardly any foreshadowing. And Carol has some sort of epiphany regarding her relationship to the kaiju that I didn’t fully understand.

Overall, though, this is a fast, fun, action-heavy read good for folks who like pulp horror featuring protagonists who are just done with all this crazy monster shit. You can get a copy of F4 on Amazon, though I got mine at the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences store in Providence.