Noir goût

About a year ago I picked up a copy of John Marks’ Fangland because it was a staff selection of the good people at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville (www.malaprops.com), and because it looked like a light hearted satire, in which a fictional version of 60 Minutes (called The Hour in the novel) is taken over by vampires. I was expecting a kind of Network News with corpses and fangs.
Corpses it has. Fangs, despite the title, no. And though it’s not without satire, it’s not a comedy. More, Marks seems to think he’s writing a real novel (as a opposed to another vampire book).
Loosely, it’s a retelling of Dracula. The main character is Evangeline Harker, and she stands in for both Jonathan and Mina Harker. There’s also a Renfield character and character’s who can be loosely associated with Seward and Van Helsing. Dracula’s three wives, whose attempt to feed on Jonathan Harker make for that novel’s most genuinely frightening moment also have counterparts in the form of three brothers who are shown vividly but mysteriously; like their sources, they provide a sharp, frightening menace to the novel early on.
Like the novel Dracula, the book is told in a scrapbook epistolary style of diaries, letters, journals, and, because this is set in the 21st century, email (why no blog?). Evangeline is an assistant producer sent to the province of Transylvania in Rumania to interview a man who claims to be the head of a crime syndicate that has operated since the cold war. He turns out to be the novel’s version of Dracula, named Ion Torgu, an odd enough name that I figured it was probably an anagram; best I could do was “noir goût,” which would translate into “dark taste,” a fair description of the character and what he represents.
What Marks borrows especially effectively from Bram Stoker is that he brings the monster onstage early, still trying to act human, than, after Evangeline escapes his clutches, keeps him in the background.
The most effective thing the novel reinvents the vampire without any of the standby clichés. Torgu, for instance, collects burnt, ruined debris, including holy relics. Why is not entirely clear, except that it seems to be the type of thing a vampire would do.
Because it’s difficult to read Stoker’s novel with fresh eyes, most modern readers probably miss how mysterious the nature and extent of Dracula’s powers are throughout that novel, and this, too, is something Marks borrows effectively. Torgu can and does pass his vampirism on to our heroine—but just how is a little mysterious.
Equally mysterious—but not in a good way-- is the reasoning behind why two members of the Hour staff plan an explosion to call attention to Torgu’s evil. Not to kill him, but, apparently, to make people believe he’s trying to kill them. I could not figure out if their thinking was supposed to be infected, or if this was supposed to seem like a heroic, last ditch act.
All of this is set in a studio nearby Ground Zero. Marks makes effective use of that setting, though frankly I wish he’d avoided. The devastation of ground zero is one of the things that has attracted Torgu to NY. But if he’s attracted to mass death, wouldn’t Iraq or parts of Africa have been more interesting to him?
He also has some apparent plan to infect the world with his vampirism through a broadcast, though to what end I’m not certain.
Still, it contains chilling scenes. Everyone who works for the Hour starts to hear place names whiere slaughters have happened being whispered. Evangeline finds that writing starts appearing on her skin as the vampirism takes hold of her. And the most chilling, one of the senior Hour correspondents is seduced by Torgu, and slowly turns into a shade.

Nalo Hopkinson: The "new"--no, I can't say it.

In June of 2007, roughly a year and a half after the unexpected death of Octavia Butler, Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention held annually in Wisconsin, had a panel discussion on Genre Tokenism: The New Octavia Butler. Thanks to the tenacity of a few Bloggers, the thoughts that were informally exchanged that morning have been recorded on the Feminist Science Fiction wiki (wiki.feministsf.net) and discussed at length across a special corner of the web. In part a tribute to a revered foremother, and in part a bitter commentary on the lasting racial and gender blinders in the fields of speculative fiction, a group of respected authors (their numbers include K. Tempest Bradford, and Nisi Shawl, among others) who plow some aspect of the speculative fiction field and happen to be women of color, reflected on being called the “New” Octavia Butler, and what that might mean. While of course rejecting the question as tokenism, several of the panelists agreed that the writer most likely to be attached to that label is Nalo Hopkinson, because she has been relatively prolific as a novelist. When the blogger Oyceter picked up on this discussion (http://oyceter.livejournal.com/605061.html), it sparked a lively conversation in which, again Nalo Hopkinson’s name was again mentioned prominently. Hopkinson herself chimed in: “I find that when white people in SF talk about this stuff, money of them assume that the only perceptivle difference between a POC writer and a non-POC one is skin color. But that’s like assuming that a hearing person won’t regnise a tune being played if s/he can’t see the band. The makers of culture, language, and experience ring as loudly as any visual marker – which is to say, they’re so fluid that you can’t make any hard and fast assumptions.”

Hopkinson’s stateswomanly response to this issue seems to me to acknowledge two plain facts: In turns of similarity, no careful reader of Butler’s clean, direct prose would mistake her work for Hopkinson’s often flamboyant, Caribbean inflected prose, just as the introspective, heroic women who occupy center stage in Butler’s novel bare little similarity to the brash women Hopkinson is often at home with. Yet both of them have, with some been able to insert a black, female voice into the overwhelmingly white boys club that has usually been American SF. And of course, both of them question the hell out of standard definitions of race and sex.

more to come

Dark Corners: As I Was saying...

As I was saying, Brandon Massey's Dark Corners imports wholesale aspects of Steven King's Salem Lot: a rural town with a tradition limited contact with the outside world, a dark evil related to the town's past, a young man whose move to the town stirs things up, the quick spread of the vampire disease.

Each of these elements is a horror cliche by now.

What works for Steven King that doesn't work quite so well for Massey; King has absolute contempt for the small mindedness of this town. The evil of vampirism reflects the evil within the town itself.

Brandon Massey likes his people and his town, for the most part. Vampirism here does not represent the evil of slavery which brought it on the town; vampirism represents the desire for revenge.

This is a great idea. I wish he'd have done more with it. Instead, the theme he siezes upon is the father / son dynamic. David Works it out with his father, Kyle fails to work it out with his father, and Kahlil very effectively works it out with his. There's something to it: the wanton siring of vampires by vampires is an image of fathers wantonly siring sons.

Too earnest.

Where I really fell off the boat, though, was with the handling of Nia James and the romantic subplot. In a subplot unrelated to the main plot, Nia is being pursued by an abusive man from her past, Colin Morgan. Nia, who can repeatedly shoot a friend turned vampire until he's incapacitated, lets Colin get away AFTER he has captured and abused her Grandmother.

Here I see an author manipulating his plot to make certain plot points. It just doesn't work.

What I would have liked: Diallo is compelling. I wish his son had been equally so. I wish we were made to feel that his thirst for revenge, and that he were almost right to have it.

He leaves himself room for a sequal, which I expect to see. I hope Lisha, Kyles mommy, shows up and turns out to be unextectedly complex and not at all squishy good, and that Kyle intends to do evil but gets sidetracked into being less than evil. After he eats David Hunter. That's what I hope.

Brandon Massey's Dark Corner

I first heard of Brandon Massey in connection with Dark Dreams, a volume of horror tales by African American writers edited by him. His own story, “Grandad’s Garage,” about a packrat who has collected such things as a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, is strong, not the strongest, but I remember it fondly, so I can say it’s not one of the weakest. Zane’s pornographic vampire story is silly, but it is what it is. One of the better stories is “Bras Coupe,” which takes its title from the story within a story of an African slave in The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable’s magnificent novel that pre-Faulknered Faulkner. In Cable’s novel, Bras-Coupe is an indominatable spirit who cannot be broken, only destroyed, and that not easily. In the story in Massey’s collection, Bras-Coupe comes back as a ghost who appears and then disappears from the apartment of a young white man living in New Orleans.

There is also a Dark Dreams II and III, by the way. I own but have not read Dark Dreams II. DD III has received some of the strongest reviews of any of the three books.

I belabor the point about Bras-Coupe not to show how well read I am (although, you know….) but because at the heart of Dark Corner, Massey’s Vampire novel which I have recently finished is an African Vampire who is very much the literary descendent of Cable’s Bras-Coupe. Only he’s ramped up about a hundred fold into a vampire who wants to destroy mankind.

This is all to the good.

It is equally influenced by Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which is a pretty darn good vampire novel, but Massey takes the elements which King returned to about a thousand more times—a haunted house, a man returning tohis small rural town, a love at first sight subplot—and uses them as a formula, which is not good.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is the parallel it sets up between two naïve sons trying to live in their father’s shadow. David Hunter is the son of Richard Hunter, who disappeared in a boating accident. Maybe. Kyle Coirat is Diallo’s son (with Lisha, an ancient vampire), who wants to resurrect his father (he does). There’s a nice parallel which loses some steam halfway through when Kyle falls under his father’s spell and never re emerges as himself. Still, Kyle, the modern vampire, is one of the more interesting characters. Diallo is essentially a black Dracula, but I do not mean this in any way as a dig. He’s compelling.

Lisha is not. She appears, disappears, acts from a distance, then doesn’t. I can see the problems the author is facing. Diallo is too strong for Hunter and his girl Nia to take on, so they need some alliance. But if there’s someone even stronger than Diallo capable of taking him out, why doesn’t she? The ways of Lisha are strange and mysterious, my child.

Actually, the novel has another father and son pair, and they nearly steal the show. Van Jackson is the police chief of Mason’s Corners; and his son Jahlil (who represents the hip hop generation) has the best arc of any of the characters, developing from selfish and indifferent to engaged and fierce. I like that these characters snuck up on me; both are presented as potentially 2-D, and both develop unexpected depth.

Next Up the good and bad of Nia James, her baddy Colin Morgan, and why King's overall structure does and does not work here.

Fairwell, Amporn’s

Despite our colds, last night we went Amporn’s Thai Restaurant on their last night of operation. Amporn’s opened in Elloree about 8 years ago, with Amporn and Earl Appleby at the helm. Amporn was from Thailand, he from small town South Carolina (Eutawville, I want to say, but maybe only because I like saying Eutawville; try it and you’ll see why). The wait staff included their pretty daughter (who was about college age when it opened, so must be in her thirties now), and a fellow who is the neighbor of a friend of mine, out Columbia road (over the years, I learned and forgot the names of these latter two). At least once a week, and sometimes at lunch, Amporn’s brother filled in as cook. This was a true family operation.
"Thai food" I asked when my wife spotted the restaurant on a ride through town.
"Thai food!"
"Thai food?"
"That was my first reaction, too."
Thai food is not exactly what South Carolina is known for. It’s not much like American Chinese food, which does pretty well locally, it’s nothing like fried chicken, which does pretty well everywhere, and it is certainly not barbecue. Barbecue is a South Carolina favorite. It splits the population, between mustard and tomato based sauces, and every restaurant, every stand, has a loyal tribe of customer, its own diaspora. When my pharmacist was going to Savannah a few years ago, he packed a few extra bottles of Duke’s Barbecue sauce from Elloree. I had barely noted the store’s existence until a Jiffy Lube mechanic was taking my information. "You must go to Duke’s, huh?" he said.
I said no, I usually came right here, to Jiffy Lube.
"No, Duke’s."
"Oh, Duke’s!"
"Barbecue!"
"Yeah! Duke’s Barbecue, right there on the corner. I pass it every day," I told him. Then I admitted I’d never gone there. Some people have the barbecue taste gene, and some of us don’t.
We were at Amporn’s the second week they were open for dinner. We had the place to ourselves. My wife ordered a Thai curry. "That there is pretty spicy," Earl warned her. "Some folks who come don't know that."
I don’t think anyone else came in that night. When I ordered wine, he asked if I wanted red or white, and I said white, he brought out the bottle of Almaden and poured me a glass. Before we left, I asked Earl how business was going. "We were packed last weekend," he assured me. That had been the week of the Elloree Trials, the once a year horse race held on a race track in Elloree, and probably the biggest weekend of the year for most Elloree businesses.
"I hope you catch on," I said.
"We plan to be patient. This is something my wife has always wanted to do."
"Well, we’ll talk it up," my wife assured him.
And she did. She dragged several generations of Trinidadian students to Amporn’s, on the theory (which proved itself accurate) that people who have learned to like one kind of Curry would learn to like another. She talked it up to friends and colleagues. Twice we met colleagues out there, and both times thought that this is something we should do more often, though the fact of it being twenty-two miles from where we work really made that more inconvenient than a smallish, friendly number like twenty-two at first suggests. One woman, a seasoned traveller, told her flatly, "Oh I don’t eat that kind of thing," which was exactly the reaction we were afraid more people would have.
Folks everywhere have their own preferences about stuff. It clarifies and simplifies things to say I like this but not that. Mustard barbecue, not tomato. Spaghetti but not Pasta. Fried rice, but not Thai food. Folks who live in small towns have also had less chance to challenge those preferences, at least beyond a narrow range of choices, and are very happy to have achieved the kind of clarity that affords, thank you very much. When I was in college, I tried to emulate this kind of clarity of thought, mostly because I am from a small town and had none of the wordly sophistication I saw in my peers. But it’s not me. I’m stuck with experimentation in my tastes and preferences: "I wonder what would happen if..."
Again, open experimentation is not exactly the local motto. In point of fact, the state motto is "Dum Spiro Spero," which is Latin, so who knows what it really means, but seems to have something to with a disgraced former Vice-President of the United States. This is clearly in need of an update. I've seen as a suggestion (written by me) "Deep fried, barbecue, or grits"; though it has never been brought to a vote, it would look snazzy on a state flag, and more to the point expresses (in English) a genuine local attitude, one which would seem to preclude the fiscal health of an Amporn's Thai Restaurant. As we headed back on a biweekly basis to work our way through their menu, and usually found an empty or almost empty restaurant, we would discuss among ourselves the possibility of a small section of American favorites: steak, chicken, spaghetti. It never happened.
Then two things happened. Amporns was voted as having the best deserts in Orangeburg County by the readership of Times and Democrat. This was well earned. She served homemade ice cream, so this was certainly a worthy choice, but I suspect there was co-ordinated campaign behind it. And a few months later, we went to Amporn’s on Valentines Day and were told, and got the last seats in the house.
Afterwards, it was hard to introduce people to Amporn’s. If they lived in Orangeburg, they probably knew it.
Last night, when were there, we were among the few people who didn’t sound like Orangeburg in their voices.
Is this important? It is for me. I’ll never be from Orangeburg, though in a year I’ll have lived in this county longer than I’ve lived anyplace else in my life. Likewise, I’ll never be from Elloree; though I’ve lived in the town much, much longer than I lived in any other town, I only recently have developed the insider’s view of the place that I had of the town I went to high school in. For, not the least attraction to Amporn’s was its essential inessentiality. It was Thai but it was South Carolina, and it was home. Before it opened, the only restaurant we could decided, on impulse, to eat at on a Wednesday or Saturday night, was in Santee. While a good, family restaurant, it is the type of steakhouse that you find all over America. Amporn’s was unique, it was 3.5 miles from our home, and it belonged in Elloree no more, and no less, than we did.

Kudos to...

Fantasy Magazine for a three part round table discussion on people of color in fantasy literature, the problems with the way it has usually been done (what are Orcs, anyway?), and some insights. Part 3 has a list of books you should read, but for the complete interview, start here.

More Who Speak

The most remarkable aspect of the Dr. Who series 3 is the introduction of Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones, and the underdevelopment of the same. People of color have a small enough position within the world of televised science fiction that it is worth asking what, if anything, the producers are or were hoping to do with the not-a-couple coupling of The Doctor with Martha.

True, for the past two years, they had also featured an inter-racial relationship between Rose Tyler and her boyfriend Mickey, but that relationship was never really explored, except as something that did NOT tie Rose down. Mickey was the doctor-NOT, parochial, tentative, and undereducated, a symbol of Rose’s working class roots. Towards the end of the second season, they seemed to feel bad for not having created a character for the actor to play, and so gave him a bit of an arc; at the point he became interesting, though, he disappeared, along with Rose.
When they introduced Martha at the beginning of season 3, they also introduced a series of possibilities, most of which have so far been unrealized. Martha is a doctor in training herself, so potentially the most substantial companion the Doctor has had in quite some time;–here was someone who might be able to do more than get kidnapped and rescued. Also, they introduced a family of strivers, so here was a chance to explore the world of black, upwardly mobile Britain.

Instead, though, the actress, or the writers, or directors fell in love with the actress’s smile. She has, I must say, a very pretty smile, but I kept waiting for scenes in which she could put her medical expertise to meaningful use. I waited in vain. Worse, the meatiest acting role she was given was as a (drumroll please) domestic servant to the Doctor’s amnesiac in the two parter where he has convinced himself he’s human.

I have a suspicion about all of this. I suspect the season was in large measure outlined, that scripts were in development, before they knew who the doctor’s companion was going to be. The other option, of course, is that the season flew by before they got to know her. It is also likely that the actress is simply not a very good actress, or is dealing with directors who don’t know how to direct. "Okay, big smile. Now look pouty. Pouty some more. Now smile. Beautiful."

At any rate, they tried to make up for this in the last two episodes, by bringing Martha back to London, introducing her family, and making her the domestic savior of her family. I wonder how aware they are of the melodramatic history of Black women as domestic saviors? Within the universe of typologies, it’s a fairly positive one, so I’ll only not my objection that the trauma her family is forced to endure of having been The Master’s domestic servants for a year is culturally loaded one, that the ending suggests that it brings them together, but that three seconds of thoughtful analysis would suggest the togetherness forged by this shared trauma of captivity would almost certainly fail when exposed to the strain of everyday life. (Who wants to live everyday with someone who reminds you of your darkest hour?)

("You do know," a voice from the back of the peanut gallery asks, "that this is a tv show?" Yes, but a thoughtful tv show, one which respects its viewers’ intelligence and which plays with and against convention, which is why I’m writing about it.)

A show like Dr. Who brings a black woman into the role "lead supporting actress" to make a very specific statement. Whatever else they may have intended, a central biracial partnership says, in the language of television, "cosmopolitan"; the character they created is cosmopolitan–educated, not narrowly defined by race or class, interested in the wider world. Cosmopolitan is good, kind of proto-post-human. It’s no excuse for shallow.

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Martha Jones has her own MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/marthajonesuk. She had 3600 + friends when I checked it, including on Dalek. Wikipedia has a pretty good article laying out the issues that fans and producers have discussed regariding this character. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Jones