Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, by H. G. Parry

 A familiar remix of familiar ideas, with not quite enough of anything fresh or novel

I follow a lot of writers on social media, and one particular message that they often promulgate goes something like this:

Don’t be afraid to do something that’s been done before. Tropes are tools, not poison! Even if [other writer] did it first, YOU haven’t done it yet! The fact that it’s YOURS is all we need to make it special and new. Give us YOUR take on [trope]. Every new voice is valuable.

I’ve always enjoyed this perspective. It’s so fundamentally encouraging to shy new writers, an open-armed invitation to join a club, not to self-reject one’s work just because it doesn’t feel fresh. New voices are always fresh, even if they are offering familiar old stories. (If nothing else, the endless parade of retellings of myths and fairy tales is evidence enough of SFF’s (excessively?) high tolerance for familiarity.)

The problem is that, sometimes, even a new voice telling an old story is not enough to make that story fresh. And such was the impression I got from The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. The scholar in question is one Clover Hill, a young woman who has grown up on a farm in northern England in the early 20th century, and had her life reasonably well planned out, in unthreatening but not terribly exciting detail. Then WWI hits, and her brother comes back from the front lines terribly damaged—not, as so many young men were, by the shells and the gas and the guns and bayonets, but because there was a supernatural element to the carnage. As Clover learns from her brother's comrade who brings him home, our world is overlaid with a world of magic, hidden but mighty, governed by old families who derive their power from intricate deals struck with the world of faerie next door.

One such magic-user was on the front lines of the fighting, and in all the carnage summoned a faerie. Something went wrong: the faerie was not contained, and a hideous curse struck down as many or more soldiers as any human-made weapon. Clover’s brother is unusual only because he mostly survived. But only mostly; he is not well, and he will not recover without help. So through perseverance and connections Clover manages to force her way into a spot at the school where all magic-users are trained, determined to learn the skills she needs to save her brother.

The  problem, though, is that the world of magic-dom was spooked by this catastrophic release of uncontrolled faerie magic, and so the teaching of faerie magic has been banned. All doors to faerie are closed and locked. Clover has no hope of learning to save her brother, unless she can find her own way to an open faerie door—which, if you’ve paid attention to the title of the book, is not an impossible task.

If you’ve spent much time reading fantasy books in the last 20 years, you’ll recognize a lot of these elements. A non-magical outsider goes to magic school where she must fight for a place among an entrenched magical aristocracy who don’t want her there. Harry Potter, anyone? Babel?  She finds a home and a core cohort of friends (The Secret History), but learns that there are dark secrets and hidden evils, and to save what she loves, she must destroy it (Scholomance). There’s even a tree that beats up people who get too close to the restricted section of the library. There is a Whomping Willow, for dog’s sake. The faeries, too, with their binding bargains peppered with dangerous loopholes, whose otherworldly weirdness is beyond human comprehension, give a lot of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell vibes, mixed with Lords and Ladies by Sir Terry Pratchett, or Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirrlees.

And, in principle, I’d be all over this. I’ve written before how I love me some faerie bargains. And this particular trope is freshened by being intertwined with another trope, in which faerie land becomes a metaphor for colonisation (hello, Under The Pendulum Sun!). Unfortunately, ‘Colonialism Bad Actually’ is a very low-hanging bit of low-hanging fruit to signal who the baddies are in your story—especially if those baddies in question have already been signalled to be baddies by being wildly misogynistic (snoooore).

And furthermore, using colonialism for faeries strikes me as problematic. One element that makes faeries (in general) work really well (for me) is their inhuman blue-and-orange morality. The idea that there are these sentient creatures whose values and morals are so wildly askew from human understandings of virtue is really, really compelling in fantasy storytelling. But if these creatures are also metaphorically equated with colonised people, we’re left with a deeply unfortunate implication that colonised people are inhuman and incomprehensible. To be fair, perhaps Parry picked up on this, because she eventually gives the faerie antagonists an entirely humanly comprehensible motivation for their actions, but in doing that, she betrays the blue-and-orange morality that makes faeries so compelling as a plot device in the first place. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds: colonised people are still incomprehensibly inhuman and other, and they don’t even have a satisfyingly weird value system.

The plot itself is fine. The pacing is good, and Parry decides to do a time-jump in the middle, rather than use the structural device of back-and-forth intertwining timelines, which I appreciated. Mixing timelines has always been rather frustrating to me, since one is always less interesting than the other. I find the secondary characters quite well drawn, too, with compelling motivations, and the development and collapse of that sparkling cohort of best friends in school felt very real. I had one group of friends in high school that I’ve fallen out of touch with; and another in college who I likewise haven’t spoken to in decades. The collapse of these close-knit bonds that feel unbreakable in youth, and the awkward groping back together after a decade of separation, landed very precisely in my feels, exactly as Parry intended. But for all that, the plot itself didn’t feel very exciting. There are some developments that could have led to very fun twists, and didn’t; and Clover’s angst about her desire to pursue this new life among the patriarchal upper-class colonisers felt forced and in places inconsistent. And I’d already seen the same thing done much more effectively in Babel.

I guess that’s the thing. This book had a lot of familiar elements in it, but the way they were combined didn’t make them into anything fresh or new. It was not more than the sum of its parts. It was exactly the sum of its parts—and each of its parts could also be found doing its bit more effectively in a different book. If you want faeries, (re)read Susanna Clarke and Terry Pratchett; if you want dark academia, (re)read Donna Tartt; or go for R. F. Kuang if you want it mixed with magic and colonialism. And if you want to read something by H. G. Parry that is genuinely fresh and novel, allow me to recommend The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Faerie bargains

• Secret magic school

• Colonialism is Bad, Actually

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

References:

Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell [Tor 2006].

Kuang, R. F. Babel [Harper Voyager, 2022].

Mirrlees, Hope. Lud in the Mist [Knopf, 1927/Orien Publishing Co, 2018].

Ng, Jeanette. Under the Pendulum Sun [Angry Robot, 2017].

Novik, Naomi. A Deadly Education [Scholomance 1] [Del Ray, 2020].

Novik, Naomi. The Last Graduate [Scholomance 2] [Del Ray, 2021].

Novik, Naomi. The Golden Enclaves [Scholomance 3] [Del Ray, 2022].

Parry, H. G. The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door [Orbit, 2024].

Parry, H. G. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep [Orbit, 2019].

Pratchett, Terry. Lords and Ladies [Harper Collins, 1992 / Harper 2013].

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History [Knopf, 1992].

Film Review: Never Let Go

What's there to be afraid of? Wouldn't you want to go see it for yourself?

In a remote house in the woods, a mother raises two kids. They have no contact with other people. This is by choice. They subsist on what they can find in the forest, but they're terrified of what could lurk out there. Whenever they walk outside, they tie themselves to a long rope whose other end is attached to the foundations of the house. As long as they're tethered to a place built from love, they can feel safe. There's no telling what might happen if they lost contact with the rope.

Never Let Go is a subtle kind of horror, one based on the anticipation of unseen things. It's no coincidence that the Bible gives "anticipation of unseen things" as a definition of faith. The mother (Halle Berry) has created a cultish dynamic in the house, constantly warning her kids about a nameless, formless evil that could devour them with a single touch without the protection of the rope. She makes them recite litanies and spend hours inside a dark box to purify their souls. It soon becomes clear that she'd have no problem killing any member of the family touched by the evil, and the dialogues establish that she has already done it more than once. Understandably, the kids are growing up in a very confused state, unsure of what they should fear more: the forest and its mysteries, or their mother and her zeal.

Several questions emerge as we learn what few bits of backstory the mother is willing to disclose. The central one in the movie is: Do you feel afraid because you're seeing monsters, or are you seeing monsters because you feel afraid? And also: Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? Are the archetypal intrafamilial betrayals (Hansel and Gretel's parents, or Cain and Abel) fated to reoccur in each generation? How do you tell when love is starting to demand too high a price? And what space is there for you to grow when the extent of your world is one person?

The child characters are far from prepared to face those questions, and the child actors convey that anxiety marvelously. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the more devoted one, happy to be disciplined and eager to prove his loyalty to his mother. Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is the more curious one, willing to question arbitrary rules and investigate what the real danger is. When the family's food supply dwindles to an alarming degree, and the mother makes a desperate proposal to ensure everyone's survival, the children's opposite perspectives finally clash, and the fragility of their self-imposed isolation is shattered by uncomfortable truths.

The ever-present rope that connects this family is a powerful symbol. A rope can be a lifeline, or it can be a noose. Adhering to an invariable rule of never letting go can blur the line between staying safe and staying trapped. The mother is eventually revealed to have lacked a healthy model of parental love, and the way she's chosen to handle her own turn at parenting makes the kids' doubts justified.

The movie plays a clever game with the audience's beliefs. The dreaded evil has so far been invisible to the children; it only manifests to the mother's eyes in the shape of people she's watched die. Why don't the children see it? Is the evil merely in the mother's head, or is it playing a long game to catch her sons with their guard down? For a good stretch of the movie's runtime, both possibilities are presented as equally likely. It's immediately obvious that the mother isn't entirely reliable, but (and here's one of the oldest tricks in the horror arsenal) what if she's right? What if the world really did end in mass murder and this family is all that is left?

Later plot developments that must not be spoiled give a cruel spin to these questions. The choices that the kids make when their mother is not next to them appear to demonstrate the resourcefulness of evil. Then again, the evil that those choices express wouldn't have happened if the mother hadn't taught them about evil in the first place. Do we become tainted from simply hearing about the human imperfections? Does this mean that not even solitude in pristine nature is a refuge from the flaws of society?

Never Let Go starts as a survival movie about a mother bravely fighting to protect her children, but it gradually reaches the idea that you cannot shield children from evil forever. They will grow, and you will die. They need to learn how to face evil without you, and if you seriously try to keep them safe forever, what you're actually doing is make them your prisoners. Obsession with hidden enemies typically leads to seeing enemies in each other. He who fights monsters, etcetera.

In a scene loaded with layers of meaning, the mother explains to the kids that pictures do more than show images: they show feelings. To me, that's an invitation to not read the movie literally. This picture is not simply the story of a family hiding from a threat that ended the world. It's a picture that says that our fears don't have to be our children's fears, that what creates enemies is the very concept of enemies, and that a form of love that is unwilling to let you go is precisely the form of love you most need to let go of.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nanoreviews: Lyorn, Haunt Sweet Home, Extinction

Lyorn by Steven Brust

Many of Steven Brust’s novels, at least in his Jhereg sequence, play a narrative game with structure—sometimes with a food recipe, sometimes as a gothic novel—and in Lyorn Brust plays with the structure of musical theater. Smarter readers than I will be able to tell you how significant that structure is to the actual novel, but at a minimum I think it’s because it helps Brust maintain interest in what he is writing because he is also working out if he can pull off a Vlad Taltos story while doing something else.

With Lyorn he absolutely pulls it off and makes the gimmick work. This certainly could be a “your mileage may vary” situation if you’re typically not into theater, or into musical theater in particular, but Brust plays with the theater world while weaving in the story of the assassin in hiding (and bits of the larger relationship storyline of Vlad and his ex-wife Cawti, which frankly is the core of the series to me) and if it’s not a romp and not quite a farce, Lyorn is a delightfully fun book.

Lyorn is the seventeenth novel in the Vlad Taltos series (out of a proposed nineteen) and is thus far the latest novel in the chronology, taking place after the events of 2014’s Hawk (book 14; the two books between Hawk and Lyorn are set earlier in the chronology). This is the book where it finally feels like Brust is making a real push towards a series ending of some sort.

Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

Haunt Sweet Home is a perfect story to read just before Halloween. A young woman gets a job as an intern on a reality-haunted-house show (think Ghost Hunters or any of those paranormal investigation shows) and readers get a solid behind-the-scenes on how those shows are constructed through the introduction of Maya to an unfamiliar workplace.

That’s interesting, but not quite enough to make Haunt Sweet Home a good spooky season read. Where Sarah Pinsker shines is in slowly ratcheting up the weirdness, because all is not quite as it seems, and Maya is caught up in the middle of something a lot weirder than a TV show that fakes hauntings.

Pinsker is a master storyteller who doesn’t tell the same story twice, and Haunt Sweet Home is another outstanding story filled to the brim with heart. There’s haunts in the aforementioned weirdness, absolutely. No question. But Pinsker’s telling of Maya’s story is that of a woman beginning to find out who she is and who she wants to be. I’m not sure Haunt Sweet Home is a coming-of-age story when the person coming of age is in her mid-twenties, but that’s the vibe Pinsker brings. Plus ghosts. Don’t forget about the ghosts.

Extinction by Douglas Preston

The way I want to describe Extinction is that it’s like Jurassic Park, except it’s bringing back mammoths and other more recently extinct animals, and adds in a murder plot possibly by some ecological terrorists—but that’s really only the initial frame job of the book. Honestly, as much as I generally enjoyed Extinction, that is also the story I generally wish the full novel was.

Extinction (the novel) rolls into the secrets of the extraordinarily wealthy company reversing the extinction (the concept) of multiple species and how far that research may go, and ultimately *that* is the direction the novel pushes. My experience reading Extinction was an exercise in continually resetting my expectations of what sort of novel it would turn out to be—which on one hand is perhaps what I should want, because Extinction is all about discovery. On the other hand, every reset was a turn away from the parts of the novel I most enjoyed. I’m in the minority on this, I think.

The ultimate problem I have, for a novel I generally enjoyed, is that, when the scope of the real story is finally widened far enough to get to what’s actually going on, my reaction was to raise one eyebrow like I’m the Rock raising the People’s Eyebrow, and start to back away from the storytelling.

It’s fine.

Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather, Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner. Minnesotan.

6 Books with K V Johansen

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.

Today she tells us about her Six Books

Six Books questions:

1. What book are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading RJ Barker's Gods of the Wyrdwood. I'm a bit behind, as the sequel to it has just come out and is sitting on my desk waiting, but although I started reading it quite some time ago, I had to set it aside for a while -- not due to anything to do with the book, really. It's been a rough year and RJ's a brilliant writer; his worlds are wildly fantastic and his characters are engaging while carrying a lot of shadows, people you really start to care about. I love his work, but when I'm stressed and exhausted myself, reading something where you're immersing yourself in a new, very unfamiliar world and in characters dealing with a lot of heavy stuff can take energy I just didn't have, and I wanted to enjoy my reading of the Wyrdwood. Now that I'm picking it up again, finding my way back into it, and am not quite so tired, I'm finding it utterly enthralling. Some aspects of the world are like a fever-dream half-remembered, strange and beautiful or strange and terrible, while the characters are always firmly rooted in their human nature, even when their actual humanity is debatable. 

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

At the time of my writing this, a forthcoming book I'm waiting for eagerly is Karla's Choice, by Nick Harkaway (though I expect it'll be out, purchased, and read, before this interview is posted). I have a lot of favourite books, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People are among them. I first read LeCarré as a teen and those two had a big influence on me. Usually I don't like people writing other people's people, as it were, but Harkaway has the connection with this that, for me, gives it a feeling of more rightness, and since he's an excellent writer on his own merits in the sff field, I'm very interested to see what he does with Smiley. 

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

Last month I was rereading some of my Arthur Ransome collection and I had a great urge to reread We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (published 1937, part of his Swallows and Amazons series and quite possibly the best of them all) but my only copy is a Puffin paperback from what I call the Bad Glue Era -- it's held together by being tied up with a piece of string. I decided to treat myself to a nice old hardcover copy, and wait to read that. Unfortunately the used and rare bookseller in the UK failed to seal the package, WDMTGTS fell out -- a first edition, though a later printing from the forties, and I am sick at the thought of that lost and tossed in some post office garbage can. I received an opened package in a plastic bag from the Royal Mail, with that book missing. The bookseller has a second copy (in worse shape, sadly) with which they're going to replace it, hopefully taping the package shut this time ... But meanwhile I am still itching to reread that one in particular. The Swallows -- John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker -- are spending some time with a young man on his yacht, Goblin, in harbour at the mouth of the River Orwell, but there's an accident while he's ashore, he ends up unconscious in hospital, and in fog and rising tide Goblin slips her anchor and they drift out into the North Sea. Once they realize what's happening, being sensible nautical children, they do all the right things to try to sail back, but between fog and shoals and storm they end up only able to go on, and cross to Flushing in the Netherlands, where -- because in stories some coincidence is allowed, due to narrativium -- their father is about to cross on his way back overland from a posting in Hong Kong. Not only is it a great adventure story, in which you really see the older two, John and Susan (who are probably about either side of thirteen in this one) coming into their own, having to stand in for the adults in a genuinely life and death situation, but it's one of the books from which I learnt most about sailing. You could read the part of The Last Road in which Moth sails alone and through storm back to the abandoned island homeland of her people as a tribute to We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. 

4. A book that you love and wish you yourself had written?

One that comes to mind is Patricia A. McKillip's Kingfisher, which I'm currently reading for the nth time. It's an amazing book, fascinating and beautiful, and written with such a deft, light hand. It's a fantasy with a modern setting, though not a real world one, woven around Chretien de Troyes' twelfth-century Romance Perceval and the Mabinogion. The landscape is that of the Oregon coast of the US and the technological level is, or was at the time of its publication in 2016, slightly near-future, seamlessly combined with a world of magic. For all the motorcycles and cellphones and high-tech weaponry, it's a story of questing knights and young people, men and women, finding themselves deep in myth and mysteries. It's also very much a book celebrating cooking! The way McKillip was able to weave all these elements together and tell a story at once so solid and satisfying, and at the same time so poetic and full of dappled shadows and things half-seen, is awe-inspiring and perfect. The feel of the book is like reading a poem, and yet it's full of well-rounded, down-to-earth characters getting to grips with things even when those things are strange and half-seen at best. I don't so much wish I'd written it -- no one but McKillip could have done that -- as I wish I could achieve something that could leave readers feeling how I feel when I'm reading it. McKillip, like Diana Wynne Jones, is a writer who leaves me in awe. 

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing? 

There are a lot of those! Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, taken as one for this answer, are among them. (The concluding book about Merlin, The Last Enchantment, is excellent but didn't have as much of an impact on me as a child.) The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills are about Merlin as a child and young man in post-Roman Britain. They're part of the long tradition of the "historical" Arthurian matter rather than the Romance tradition -- if you're interested in that distinction, I'd direct you to my fellow CMS alumnus Richard Moll's book Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England. For me, Stewart's Merlin and Arthur remain the only true and definitive versions! When I wrote an Arthurian story myself ("The Inexorable Tide" in The Storyteller), I couldn't get away from some of her facts -- Merlin and Arthur as first cousins, for instance. Her narrative style, too, was an impressive example of how to handle the first person, though I was reading other first person narratives at the time, particularly John Buchan. Merlin's reflective approach, looking back on his own life, a conscious telling that catches up with itself partway through The Last Enchantment, has, I think, always made me aware of the constructed frame, present or not in the story, implicit in using the first person, so that I need to know who the audience within the book is, and at what point the character is telling any particular part of their story. It's not something unique to Stewart -- Treasure Island has a definite "now" from which Jim is looking back on his story, though in contrast Buchan doesn't usually do that, you're never told from what point in his life Hannay is narrating his adventures -- but it was through Mary Stewart's Merlin that I first became aware of that device and absorbed how it worked, and why you would choose do it. The setting, too, influenced me, that lingering post-Roman world of multiple languages and old buildings falling into ruin or being repurposed, the worship and rites of old gods and new mingling, that sense that there is a wider world beyond the horizon and that what happens there will spread ripples across the lands and years between. 

6. And speaking of that, what's your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Wolf and the Wild King: snow, swordfights (Mairran, armed, on horseback = Ladyhawke vibes), and dragons.

To expand on that, my latest book is The Wolf and the Wild King, out from Crossroad Press's Mystique imprint. It's the first part of a duology, The Forest. For a long time, I had been wanting to write something that captured -- call it a particular mood, or maybe a mode, of fantasy, something elusive that I was missing in my current reading. I wanted that feeling of things unseen, of mystery, of ancient rites and remnants of older powers still there if only you know how to call on them, and forests and dragons and the intense mythic mood. I wanted a winter book that acknowledged the depth of winter and used it, not just a delicate southern set-dressing of snow. The Wolf and the Wild King is my attempt to capture some of that, writing about protagonists, Mairran and Lannesk, Nowa and Sage, who may have grown out of some ur-characters who've been with me a long, long time, but who are their own people now, and a pleasure to write. Mairran, who is wolf, raven, and the prince who serves as his mother executioner for ritual sacrifices, and Lannesk, the mute outlaw and musician, are younger than my usual adult main characters, being just twenty-one or so, warriors and musicians both, full of confusion and strong emotions -- mostly, in Mairran's case, anger that he's not admitting to but which is affecting everything he does; he's kind and savage, the latter not least to himself. To balance the intense mythic background, Mairran has a first-person narration that can, if not undercut the air of folkloric mystery and ancient legend, act as a foil to it. He's angry and snarky and hurting, and a lot of the time he pretends none of that is there in himself and he's just being a dutiful child, serving the Queen his mother and it's not strange at all that she's as old as her reign and has no name and no past. Lannesk's story unfolds a couple of centuries earlier, at a time before the Queen's rule, when the Forest is being invaded by dragon-kin led by sorcerer-priests whose magic is fuelled by human sacrifice; he and his brother are reprieved from death at the hands of their stepfather's cousin and slayer by their oath to follow two of the Immortals, the Wild King and the Grey Hunter, in fighting the invaders. Through battle and loss and death, Lannesk's story intersects with Mairran's. Nowa is Mairran's shield-companion, an older woman who's been with him since he was a boy. She was captain of a company of the Queen's road-wardens, then his tutor; now he calls her his keeper. She's constrained in what she can protect him from, but she's made it her personal mission to keep him sane and keep him from becoming the unthinking, uncaring knife that the Queen would have him. Sage is a girl of around fourteen, a Forest-dwelling outcast Mairran captures when she tries to rob his camp. She's also a fox, in an era when such Forest-blessings are so rare they've become the stuff of legend and fear. Being captured by the Queen's son, about whom little is known among the folk generally except that he's the priest of the solstice sacrifices and probably mad, is not Sage's idea of a rescue at first, even when the alternative seems to be dying in the winter Forest. All these characters are brought together around Mairran's quest to find a murderer, but that's not really the story at all -- it just takes Mairran quite a while to realize it.

Thank you, Krista!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

And That's It for Our First Scare Series

Boo.

Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.

I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.

It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?

For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.

The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

And then there's just the plainly bonkers.

Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.

If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: He Who Drowned the World, by Shelley Parker-Chan

A masterpiece of politics, people, magic, murder, and war

Cover design and illustration by Lucy Scholes

I almost didn’t read this book. I had enjoyed the first book in this series, She Who Became the Sun (SWBTS), so much, and felt so satisfied by its ending, that I was hesitant to crack open the sequel for fear of a disappointment. But I was not disappointed, my friends! Everything that made SWBTS an outstanding book returned, in spades, in He Who Drowned the World. Twisty turny betrayals? Court politics? Conquest strategy? Tragic character arcs? Explorations of gender presentation? Wang Baoxiang¹? Yes, yes, and yes. Also yes. And, yes, again, yes.

If you have not read SWBTS you need to put down your device right now and go read it. It is superb. It won the British Fantasy Award both for Best Newcomer² (it is Parker-Chan’s debut novel) and for Best Novel overall. It follows the initial rise to power of Zhu Yuanzhang, historically the founder of the Ming Dynasty. However, in this telling, Zhu is not the son of a tenant farmer, but the daughter, so disfavoured that she is not even given a name. In a searing first chapter, relentless drought and famine, combined with a bandit attack, destroy her family, including her brother, who had been given a prophecy of greatness by the village fortune-teller. The girl, whose own fortune was a laconic ‘Nothing’, refuses to accept this future. She takes her dead brother’s name, and with it decides that she will fool the fates and take his fortune of greatness as well; and for the rest of the book she becomes Zhu Chongba, a man whose rise to power you can read about in the history books (or the wikipedia page I linked earlier). SWBTS ends with Zhu’s victory halfway up the ladder to total domination: she has taken the city of Yingtian, changed her name to Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, and declared that she will lead her people to rout the Mongols from China. 

It is a wildly satisfying ending. I loved it. But it is not the end of the story. The Mongols are not gone yet, and the Ming Dynasty has not yet been founded.

He Who Drowned the World continues that story, from three primary perspectives. All three are familiar from SWBTS, and all three have achieved the first stage of their goals from that first book.

First, we have Zhu Chongba (now Zhu Yuanzhang), who’s doing pretty well! She’s in charge of an army and recognized as the Radiant King of her people in the southern regions of the disputed territory. She further holds the indisputable Mandate of Heaven, which manifests as the ability to generate light and see ghosts. She is also well-supported by her wife, Ma, who has managed to get over a bit of child-murder at the end of the last book. The child in question held a Mandate of Heaven of his own,³ so Zhu had to off him in order to remove a possible rival to her own claim. To be honest, the kid was a bit creepy throughout the book, so his murder didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have.

Second, we have General Ouyang. Ouyang has also managed to achieve the first step in his life goal. When he was a child, his family was captured and murdered by the Prince of Henan, down to the last man — except him. Him the prince castrated and left alive, and Ouyang has since grown up as a kind of pet eunuch to the family, acquiring enormous skill in murder and warfare, rising to command the entire army of Henan, while nursing in his bosom the desire for revenge. His only goal in life now is to revenge himself upon the Mongols — but he’s not happy about it. He had started building a kind of life for himself, anchored by his deep, agonized, sort-of-but-not-really-but-kind-of sexual-romantic attraction to the Prince’s son,  Esen, who  in turn trusts Ouyang utterly. So Ouyang has been kind of putting off the first step in his revenge, until battlefield losses to Zhu kind of force the issue. By the end of SWBTS he has betrayed and murdered Esen, and feels pretty darn miserable about it. But that’s ok: All that remains for him to do now is to find and murder the Great Khan, and then his life will be complete. He is not in a good head-space, but he’s got his goals and is making progress toward them.

Third we have Wang Baoxiang. Wang was Esen’s brother, and now, after Ouyang’s murder-spree, the Prince of Henan. He is deeply pissed at how everyone has been treating him: they see him as effeminate and unmanly for being bad at stabbing, and refuse to recognize his bureaucratic skills. So he’s decided to use those skills to climb the ranks at court, and become the Great Khan himself. Also, he’s haunted by his brother’s ghost (he may have had something to do with smoothing the way for Ouyang to do the murder), and seems to have some sort of Mandate of Heaven of his own.

What makes He Who Drowned the World just sing is the way each of these characters engages with the same themes from different perspectives. Each has a clear goal which in some way requires taking down the Great Khan. Zhu is the merry warrior, who never doubts the rightness of her path. Ouyang is the tortured warrior, who is fighting the blackness of despair at every step, and regularly doubts the rightness of his path. But — having taken that terrible first step in betraying and murdering Esen — Ouyang cannot allow himself to take any other path. no matter the kinder opportunities that present themselves. Wang, too, is tortured by despair, unable to turn off his cruel, traitorous path to power, despite meeting kindnesses of his own that might, in other circumstances, have made a difference. But for all the similarity between Ouyang and Wang, Wang is not a warrior, so his actions are fundamentally different in strategy from Ouyang's. And all three of them, to one extent or another, must face the question: Is it all worth it? 

Another key theme is the subversion of gender roles. Zhu is the clearest example of this: a woman posing as a man. Or perhaps a non-binary person who takes up whichever gender presentation suits her needs at the moment. She does not envy men their bodies, except inasmuch as their larger size and strength makes them better at fighting; and she does not hate her own, except inasmuch as it poses obstacles to her goals. Honestly, she’s much more inconvenienced by her missing right hand (which Ouyang cut off in SWBTS) than she is by her anatomy.⁴

Not so Ouyang, who is a eunuch, and hates it. He has the manliest of manly roles — the general of an army — and yet everyone describes him as beautiful, woman-like. He is effectively the opposite of Zhu, who approaches gender from a deeply pragmatic perspective: she benefits both from everyone’s acceptance of her as a man as well as her ability to present as a woman when subterfuge is required. She gets the best of both worlds. By contrast, Ouyang, who abhors everything female, is denied maleness as well. Like Zhu, he is mutilated, but unlike Zhu, this obstacle is connected with gender. He gets neither world, and his misery and despair in no small part springs from that.

Wang Baoxiang offers a third perspective on gender roles: he is a man, a cis-het man, with all the relevant anatomy. But he is seen as unmanly (because he does bureaucracy instead of battle), and perceived as being one of those men who sleep with other men. He doesn’t like this perception, which contributes to the general social disrespect that motivates his own actions throughout the book; but he’s not above using it to his advantage, to make alliances and develop relationships that he can exploit and betray when the time comes.

Oh, and speaking of relationships, I’ve got to mention the sexual encounters in this book. Because, dang. There are a lot of them, and not a single one is built on basic kindness or affection. Every single sexual encounter is a power play, a political act, a treachery, a betrayal, manipulation. The degree to which Parker-Chan can construct such a wide variety of unhealthy sexual encounters, all of which are vital to the plot, is astonishing.

Because, yes, they are all vital to the plot. The plot is intricate, subtle, heart-breaking, surprising, inevitable, and deeply, deeply satisfying. The twisty-turny politics, the subtle character studies, the psychology of ambition and regret and sacrifice for a larger goal, are all woven into an astonishing tapestry. It is dark and brutal, with a great deal of dismemberment, but there is just enough hope and goodness that it’s not all awful. Just barely. Maybe. Assuming you don’t need a lot.

1 Wang Baoxiang is the half-brother of the Prince of Henan in SWBTS. He won my heart by being entirely uninterested in battle and manliness, instead turning his considerable brains to the minutiae of administration, supply, and all the other activities that make it possible to feed, outfit, and field an army to do the stabby bits. ‘Moar Wang!’ became my battle cry at my book group meeting. Friends, there is so much Wang in He Who Drowned the World. 

2 Full disclosure: I was on the the panel for that award, and I don’t mind sharing that there was no disagreement at all among panelists that SHBTS was far and away the winner.

3 The Mandate of Heaven hedges its bets. Sometimes as many as three or four people may hold it at one time. It recognizes the potential to be Emperor, but it does not mark inevitability. As demonstrated by the dead kid from SWBTS.

4 Mutilation, in this world, is seen as deeply wrong. Ghosts of mutilated people turn into soul-eating monsters; and even before they are dead such people are shunned and reviled, refused entry into monasteries and other important locations. Actions like, oh, say, sending a jar of pickled hands to your enemy have a very particular resonance in this context.

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Nerd Coefficient: 10/10, mind-blowing/life-changing/best.book.evar

Highlights:

•     Trenchant psychological character work
•     Betrayal, politics, and manipulation
•     Twisty turny gender stuff

Reference: Parker-Chan, Shelley. He Who Drowned the World [Tor/Mantle, 2023].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

First Scare: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Weird, light, cynical, musical fun

I went all the way back to the ‘80s to find this classic horror musical for my First Scare piece. The idea of “musical” and “horror” normally has me heading in the opposite direction. The closest I’ve come is seeing Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta and my obligatory viewings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in college. But, after decades of skipping this story (including the constant stage productions at all levels), I have finally watched Little Shop of Horrors for the first time.

I was surprised to discover that the story of the murderous, man-eating plant is framed by a trio of singers (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell) who appear in each scene and act as a Greek chorus for the story. In 1960s New York, nerdy, awkward, underdog Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) lives and works in a rundown plant shop in a rundown neighborhood. We know this thanks to the catchy opening song, “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the really well executed follow up song “Downtown / Skid Row.” His beleaguered but awkwardly glamorous co-worker is Audrey (Ellen Greene), who is dating an abusive boyfriend, Orin (Steve Martin). The curmudgeonly but mostly okay store owner, Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia), becomes frustrated at the lack of business and wants to close the store—to the dismay of Audrey and Seymour. Seymour shows them an unusual little plant he found shortly after a recent solar eclipse and suggests displaying it in the shop window to attract customers. Despite hesitation from the owner, the plan works and the store becomes a success as curious customers stop by to see the weird, Venus flytrap-like plant, and then make other purchases at the store. When the plant begins to wilt, Seymour discovers (after a musical number) that the plant actually wants to be fed human blood.

To keep the store’s success going, Seymour gives the plant his blood. The plant (an eventually giant puppet voiced by R&B singer Levi Stubbs) grows larger and demands more blood. Over time, the store and Seymour become successful, but Seymour begins to suffer from blood loss. The plant convinces Seymour to kill and dismember someone to make food, and it suggests Audrey’s abusive, dentist boyfriend as the victim. As the film progresses, Seymour’s fame grows along with the size of the plant, but it comes at the price of the plant killing people and ultimately seeking world domination. Seymour has to learn to set boundaries and find his strength in order to defeat the plant, save the world, and secure his true love, Audrey.

Little Shop of Horrors was unexpectedly fun to watch for two reasons: 1) the music and 2) the '80s A-list comedy cast. First of all, the music was excellent. It’s weird to say that about a horror comedy, but the songs were fun. Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, and Michelle Weeks do a great Supremes routine, constantly and magically appearing in new costumes and singing through all sorts of shenanigans by the lead actors. Thoughtful songs like “Downtown” bring in some societal commentary on class struggles and allow for emotional solos on the monstrosity of real life. Rick Moranis is the only one who doesn’t belt out his songs, but that fits since he is playing the insecure, awkward young man. If you’ve seen him in Ghostbusters, he is playing the same type of character.

The second thing I enjoyed about the film was the cast. The film has basically an all-star cast of 1980s comedy A-listers, including Steve Martin, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Christopher Guest, and James Belushi. It's also fun to see super-young Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold sliding through the absurdity and violence of the story as background commentators. Steve Martin manages the most unlikeable character in the film, the violent dentist and unrepentant bully, by playing Orin as an Elvis / Fonzie parody. His violence is a serious topic and, at least, the entire cast, including Orin himself, acknowledges that he is a terrible person. Lastly, a little internet research told me that the voice of the plant is Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of The Four Tops. No wonder his voice was so appealing.

There were a few parts I didn’t enjoy as much. I thought Mr. Mushnik deserved better treatment. He takes in Seymour and tries to get Audrey away from Orin, warning her that Orin is a bad guy, so I'm not sure why his character was treated in an ultimately negative way. The puppet plant was, of course, distracting, although the heavy-handed puppetry added to the farcical nature of the story, especially when Audrey II’s true murderous motives are revealed.

Little Shop of Horrors is too weird and quirky to become a favorite for me, but I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want something creepy but also comedic but also in a musical style (and who doesn't), Little Shop of Horrors will fit the bill.

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Highlights

• Fun music
• '80s comedy stars
• Weird but entertaining

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.