Spring 2007 (31 page)

“…the house emerges from behind the screen of two water
oaks, ramshackle and many-eyed with black windows, presenting the impression of
a ditsy old matriarch, her torso rising from waist-high yellowing weeds of
skirts so ragged, the corroded wrought-iron fence of her bustle shows through.”

Further down, on the same page, Shepard turns Sanie’s
nearly imperceptible feeling about the ghost she has encountered into something
feline:

“Anxiety bristles up in her, but she also feels a mild
burst of affection for the voice, and she thinks she detects a faint vibe of
devotion, as it it’s been waiting inside to squeeze out the cracked door,
nearly tripping her up, and rub against her ankles.”

Ranking up with the haunted
house novels (which are rarely about haunted houses)—
The Haunting of
Hill House, Ghost Story, Bag of Bones
—Shepard’s Softspoken is a
classic ghost story that comes off like a collaboration between Shirley Jackson
and Tennessee Williams, with just a touch of James M. Cain. The end result is,
of course, all Shepard.
Softspoken
is both a taut psychological thriller
and a beautifully rendered portrait of the New American South, told with
unflinching honesty, humor, insight and compassion.

Review:
The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

(Del Rey/352 pages/$13.95, trade paper)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

It may be sacrilege among the faithful to make such a
proclamation, but “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” really isn’t that great of a
story. It’s a very fascinating, very interesting premise: A box containing the
knowledge of how to gain entrance to an alternate is found; but the problem is,
no one but children can understand the “instructions” because as we humans get
older, we began to think and reason in a different fashion. It’s a premise that
Kuttner cleverly glommed from reading
A High Wind In Jamaica
by Richard
Hughes (the title of his story is taken from a stanza of a song in
Through
the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll). Yes, Mimsy is a clever concept, but as
a story, it doesn’t quite work, failing to sustain narrative flow, losing steam
and direction about mid-center. At that point, a character named Rex Holloway
enters the picture and commits the sin of so many of the scientist characters
in 1950s science fiction flicks (and not a few modern SF novels) make,
over-explaining this facet or that theory. Check out this excerpt, taken
from—I kid you not—nearly two pages of such meandering by the good
Dr. Holloway: “The brain’s a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don’t know
much about its potentialities. We don’t even know how much it can grasp.” I
won’t go on further except to say whatever editor bought the story fell down on
the job. A bit more clipping and a genuine classic would have, indeed, been
born. As it is, “Mimsy” is still a good short story.

Why such attention to a story written to a story nearly
a century ago? Because New Line Cinema has made a film of the Kuttner classic;
and because Del Rey has reissued
The Best of Henry Kuttner
under a new
title,
The Last Mimzy
, deigning to use the filmmaker’s misspelling of
mimsy (but as well all know, most filmmakers, and not a few folks in
publishing, rarely make smart choices). Despite that clunky middle ground,
“Mimsy Were the Borogroves” is a dark and twisty landscape with enough unseen
brambles and potholes about (as well a killer ending) that readers will forgive
the narrative hiccup.

In
Worlds of Wonder
, the sublime anthology edited
by Robert Silverberg, the Grand Master speculates on the writings of Henry
Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore (after marriage, both writers worked on each
other’s stories). Silverberg notes early work was marked by “emotional
intensity and evocative coloration” while Kuttner’s fiction was always
versatile, clever and technically adept. Leading one to speculate that the
stronger parts of “Mimsy,” near the tale’s end, might have been provided by
Moore; if so, good on her for elevating the tale from merely clever to artful.

These few nits aside,
potential readers should not let the above musings stop them from picking up
The
Last Mimzy
to sample the rest of this best of collection devoted to
Kuttner, because there’s plenty to entertain. Such as “The Twonky” (originally
published under Kuttner’s Lewis Padgett byline) in which paranoia reigns as
characters discover that certain everyday item of entertainment in homes is
actually a robot designed to turn humans into bovine-like creatures—or
eliminate them (had the story been written a bit later, Kuttner and Moore would
no doubt have substituted a television or internet-linked computer, and rightly
so). Other highlights include “Two-Handed Engine,” “The Proud Robot” and
“Absalom.” In truth, all of the stories in this collection will serve readers
well and entertain them beyond their wildest expectations.

Review:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union By Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

By Michael Chabon (HarperCollins/414 pages/ $26.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

For those who wish a mainstream writer would get it
right when writing genre fiction, the latest tome by Pulitzer Prize winner
Michael Chabon,
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,
will put a smile on their
faces.

Unlike Philip Roth, who claimed ignorance of other
alternative history novels (easily dismissing great works like
The Man in
the High Castle
or even fun reads like
Fatherland
) when in talking
about the origins of
The Plot Against America,
Chabon, who edited
McSweeny’s
Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
among others, has a solid knowledge of
genre fiction; Chabon also has an astute eye for details, which is why he based
his new novel on a fairly obscure bit of history. The author’s starting point?
What if, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested, Alaska became the
homeland for Jews after World War II? “These are strange times to be a Jew” is
the refrain repeated by various characters, a litany which gives voice to the
book’s theme.

Working off that interesting premise, Chabon pulls his
readers into a world called “Alyeska,” a Jewish settlement in Alaska’s
panhandle. Gangs of young, Orthodox Jews (replete with long curls of hair and knee
breeches) known as “Black Hats” roam around the streets of a central city known
as Sitka, looking like a bizzaro-world version of the gangs from West Side
Story. In their midst is Meyer Landsman, a Jewish Detective who could’ve
stepped out of a novel by Raymond Chandler or John D. MacDonald. Landsman is an
old-school tough guy who practically oozes alcohol and cigarette smoke when he
talks: “…the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka…” Saddled with all
of the conventional problems of any gumshoe worth his salt, Landsman is dealing
with the ghost of a broken marriage, the memories of a dead sister, and a case
of career ennui that would challenge even Humphrey Bogart When the landlord
Tenenboym of the Hotel Zamenhof wakes the drunken Detective up one morning to
investigate suspicious happenings with a neighbor in the apartment building,
Landsman finds that the neighbor is, of course, dead. Said neighbor was not
only a chess prodigy and a heroin addict, he was the son of Sitka’s most
prominent and powerful clergyman, Rabbi Lasker.

For reasons not quite clear to him, this murder suddenly
awakens a long-dead spirit inside Landsman. With the help of his partner, Berko
Shemets (who is half Jewish, half Tlinget–a Native American tribe),
Landsmand sets out to solve the murder mystery. Standing in his way is the fact
that in two months Alaska will no longer be a sanctuary for Jews–seems
the new homeland was only a rental–the fact that someone (or a group of
someones) doesn’t want him to solve the murder, and that his ex-wife, Bina
Glebfish, is now Chief of Police!

Chabon tackled the mystery
genre with
The Final Solution,
an interesting mix of Sherlock Holmes and
Holocaust history, proving he can tackle just about any genre (he covered YA
fantasy with
Summerland
). Taking that already honed skill, he breathes
some interesting new life into the formulaic, noirish detective story.
Hilarious and moving, suspenseful and contemplative,
The Yiddish Policeman’s
Union
is, like all good genre novels, a twisted, fun-house mirror gaze into
the heart of our own troubled times. Of course, it’s also damned good,
entertaining little mystery story and an interesting study of a down-and-out
character who redeems himself with an eleventh hour act of heroism and
detective work. Filled with wordplay, compassion for all the characters
involved, and a genuine sense of Weldschmertz (angst at the pain of the world’s
citizens–
all
of them),
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
is
wild ride through what might have been, a reflection of what might currently
be, and another tour-de-force of storytelling from one of America’s premiere
novelists.

Review:
White Night by Jim Butcher & Wizards edited by Jack Dann
and Gardner Dozois

White Night

by Jim Butcher (Roc/416 pages/$23.95)

Wizards

Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkely/402
pages/$25.00)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Although wizards have been popular in genre fiction
since the days of Dorothy and the Scarecrow or Gandalf, the appearance of Harry
Potter and friends in the last decade and a half has upped the ante and the
interest. The resulting overflow of books about wizards and/or witches seems to
be spilling out into the aisles of late. Two such publications are the focus of
this week’s column.

To be fair,
The Dresden Files
series by Jim
Butcher owes as much to the
Rockford Files
and
Buffy the Vampire
Slayer
as it does to Hogwarts. More so, in fact. After all, Chicago-based
Wizard Harry Dresden is a low-rent wizard who works as a consultant (for those
in need of advice on how to slay preternatural creatures), performs lost and
found services and does just a lot of private investigation work. If you’re a
regular watcher of the
Sci-fi
Network, you may already know of Harry via
the television show which has run one season thus far (its renewal is being
decided this spring). If you’re a reader who hasn’t caught the TV show, you
might like to know that Harry also drives a beat-up Volkswagen, and lives with
a talking skull (the skull is actually haunted by the ghost of Bob, a sarcastic
magical entity who loves Harry despite all evidence to the contrary).

Jim Butcher’s amalgam of fantasy and tough-guy private
eye genres is one of the better paranormal series currently riding that popular
subgenre wave. And
White Night
, the ninth entry, is one of Butcher’s
best efforts, although some political intrigue involving group dynamics and
politics (in this case, the White Court of psychic vampires and the Red Court
of blood-drinking vampires) threatens to weigh it down at times (strangely,
that same albatross currently hangs around the “necks” of the Anita Blake
Vampire Hunter Series by Laurell K. Hamilton and the Sookie Stackhouse Southern
Gothic Vampire series by Charlaine Harris).

This time out, Harry is investigating the deaths of
several second-class practitioners of magic in the Chicago area. Called on by
Detective Karin Murphy - an old buddy in the Special Investigations division of
the police department who was recently demoted from Lieutenant to Sergeant -
Harry learns that what was thought to be a suicide turned out to be a case of
murder. It seems someone is carrying out a vendetta; and Harry finds a card
left specifically for him at the first murder scenes. The card bears a quote
from the bible, Exodus 22:18 - “Suffer not a witch to live.” Worse, as the
investigation continues, evidence Harry uncovers points to his half-brother Thomas
(a member of the White Court) as a prime suspect. Getting help from his
apprentice, Molly Carpenter, and assorted other eccentric (secondary)
characters, Harry eventually finds himself hip-deep in trouble, battling
ghouls, vampires and assorted creatures of the night.

Full of well-written banter, fast-paced plotting and
memorable characters, “The Dresden Files” is just a lot of noirish,
spell-casting fun - both Harry Dresden and
White Night
, a series high
point, are sure to appeal to the fans of that other wizard with the same first
name.

Unusual for a theme-based anthology,
Wizards
is
full of surprisingly good stories centered on wizards and magic. And it starts
from strength with Neil Gaiman’s “The Witch’s Headstone.” Rumored to be part of
a novel in progress, the story reads as if written by a descendant of Ray
Bradbury, with its poetic prose style, its reverence for traditions, and an
unusual bit of family dynamics. Eight-year-old Bod (Nobody Owens) is being
raised and schooled by a family of ghouls and ghosts while living in a
graveyard: the fanged Silas, the zombified Pennyworth. But it’s the lessons of
a Sorceress that prove most important. Although Gaiman ends the tale at the
just the right spot, knowing it’s part of a larger work will leave some readers
wanting more.

Orson Scott Card’s “Stonefeather” tells the story of a
seemingly unremarkable, Fifteenth Century kid who suddenly discovers heretofore
unknown powers after leaving home in search of his destiny. Elizabeth Hand
delivers one of her stunning, unexpected endings in “Winter’s Wife,” a New
England magical tale which pits modern-day pragmatism against old magic, and
Terry Bisson does some interesting things with well-worn images and plotlines
when a young boy meets the Devil himself in “Billy and the Wizard.” Other
highpoints include stories by Gene Wolfe, Patricia A. McKillip, Jane Yolen and
Jeffery Ford. There are a total of eighteen stories in all, with only a couple
of clunkers, and most of them well worth the read. As editors Dann and Dozois
point out in their preface, “Wizards have stalked through the human imagination
for thousands and thousands of years…the figure of the wizard is still a deeply
significant one.”