Cross-posted on Soapboxing

I received my copy from NetGalley.com and Harlequin Teen. Thanks. 

Because I might as well use my minor in folklore for something, I'll begin my review of Grim, a collection of young adult short stories, with a little bit of pedantry about the fairy tale. Broadly speaking, there's two kinds of fairy tale: the Märchen, which are orally transmitted folk tales with no specific origin and wide variation, and the literary fairy tales, which are written by a single person. Some of the distinction can be a little mushy, like with the large and glorious oral and literary history of the Arthurian legend, which has a lot of switch-backs and cross-pollination between literary and oral history.

Sometimes it's less so, like when you're dealing with the works of Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, or Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, who wrote The Snow Queen, Puss in Boots, and Beauty & The Beast, respectively (and among other things.) Though these stories use traditional folkloric motifs, they were written stories, often designed for court or salon readerships, like de Villeneuve, or children, like Andersen and Perrault. Andersen hat-tipped Dickens in The Little Match Girl, and was hat-tipped in turn by C.S. Lewis in the character of the Snow Queen in Narnia. (And this second has become her most famous incarnation. The Turkish Delight, I'm given to understand, was Lewis's doing.) The tales are more part of a literary tradition than an oral one. 

It really shows in something like Perrault's Puss in Boots, which is a pretty classic clever servant story (like Mozart's Marriage of Figaro which got him in such hot water). Certainly Perrault is using some clever cat folklores - which lends some dissonance when the the immoral Puss is used to prop the moral of industry and sticktoitiveness - but the boots, the gormless third son, the instructive tone are new, literary elements. The essential amorality of the folk motifs makes the whole thing kinda funny though, no matter how many admonishments of industry are included. 

Our booted feline friend was part of some of the earliest editions of what eventually became Mother Goose, an editorial invention for publishing instructive tales for children in the growing middle class in England, set alongside other sanitized (and anglicized) Märchen. Amusingly, concern-trolling has been around since the invention of children's literature. Observe (from the wikis):

The renowned illustrator of Dickens' novels and stories, George Cruikshank, was shocked that parents would allow their children to read "Puss in Boots" and declared: "As it stood the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying!—a system of imposture rewarded with the greatest worldly advantages."

Perrault shines a folk tale into something suitable for children, but certain things will not out.

Folk tales are often violent, sexual and political. The frog is transforms into a prince not because the princess kisses him, but because she throws him against the wall. Cinderella's sisters cut their feet to fit the slipper, and are caught out because of dripping blood. Sleeping Beauty awakens from her slumber when she gives birth to twins, because the prince was charming enough to rape her while unconscious. So.many.people get their eyes pecked out by birds. Folk tales are often not about imparting morals, but about exploring sometimes gruesome economic, political, familial and sexual imbalances through the metaphorical. Folk tales aren't didactic or instructive, in the strictest sense, while literary stories often are, especially when they are aimed at children. 

And if it looks like I'm bagging oral folklore, I'm not. Folk tales like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, Lady Gregory (a firm friend of W.B. Yeats) or Andrew Lang (who was also a Homeric scholar) were, often, very much not for children, and can have unnerving elements of horror and the macabre. A lot of these cats had very specific 18th and 19th Century ideas about "the folk" as "noble savages" or specific nationalist agendas. (I'm looking at you, Yeats.) There's fairly good evidence that even the Grimms, who prided themselves on their impartial collection and transmission, mucked about with the stories they were collecting for whatever purposes. The whole relationship between the oral and literary traditions is pretty complex stuff, well more complex that my opening paragraph implies.

Jesus, my head has really come to a point here. My purpose, if I can find it, was really to talk about the ways the fairy story has been used in oral and literary traditions, and it's interesting to see these young adult iterations published by Harlequin Teen in the larger tradition of packaging some seriously wicked shit to impart morals to children. There are still a lot of plucky kids, though they seem to have shifted gender from the the lucky son to the Strong Female Protagonist. Love is the answer more often than I remember from Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Grimm's Tales, where marriages often occurred between people just because girls are a prize for lucky boys. Several of the stories here push back at that notion. There's also more revenge than I remember. Because so many of the oral folk tales are not terribly psychological - young Hans left one day to make his fortune, etc, with no real bother about his internal state - few historical folk tales have the requisite psyche to really pull a gotcha at the end. You can with a short story though; good. 

Anyway, at this point I should probably get into the individual stories.

"The Key" by Rachel Hawkins. I liked the writing on this - the main character is one of those world-weary teens I find charming - but it's not a story so much as a situation. I find this often with writers who are primarily novelists dabbling in the short story form. They write prologues to larger fictions, and then bite them off. 

"Figment" by Jeri Smith-Ready. This was one where my general crank level was too high, because there's really nothing wrong with the story, but it still grated me a little. The characters are drawn with a steady hand, and overall its cute and playful with just enough drama that it's not too lightweight. I just didn't like this specific treatment of Puss in Boots, mechanically speaking, because turning that immoral schemer into a plush toy that just wants to be loved just seems wrong. 

"The Twelfth Girl" by Malinda Lo. Dark and class conscious take on the Twelve Dancing Princesses with a wonderfully pyrrhic ending. Very good.

"The Raven Princess" by Jon Skovron. The recounting of the Grimm version of the princess who was transformed into a raven and then won by a plucky young man hews close to the original, but does manage to provide a fresh angle and perspective. It felt a little message-y at points - and that's how you behave like a good person! - but the story does have a kind heart.

"Thinner than Water" by Saundra Mitchell. Resounding props for taking on Donkeyskin or Catskin in a young adult short story. There are a whole bunch of related folk tales about kings attempting (or succeeding) in marrying their daughters and how the girls trick their way out, but the central horror of incest and sexual assault is serious shit. Mitchell's story vividly relates the way the girl is isolated and made complicit in her abuse, and doesn't flinch. Maybe you get out, but you probably won't get out clean, and you're not the only one. 

"Before the Rose Bloomed: A Retelling of the Snow Queen" by Ellen Hopkins. Reeeally straightforward retelling which isn't bad, but also doesn't add anything. Felt plodding.

"Beast/Beast" by Tessa Gratton. Very claustrophobic take on the Beauty & the Beast story, with one of the more interesting beasts I've seen in while. He's like a golem sewn out of all manner of animals and plants and...stuff. The writing is very good, and while I'm troubled by certain things, they're mostly the sorts of things I'm always troubled by in Beauty & the Beast stories. I'm still turning over that ending; a good sign. 

"The Brothers Piggett" by Julie Kagawa. Men are pigs! hahaha. But seriously, this had just a brutal snap to it, which surprised me from a retelling of the Three Little Pigs. No girl is a reward for a boy when he acts like a decent person, and he doesn't get to act like an indecent person when she is not rewarded to him. Well played.

"Untethered" by Sonia Gensler. The Little Shroud, itself, is somewhat inert and stubby, so a story based on it suffers from that brevity. This slid perspectives in a cool way, but it felt a little stagy to me. Well drawn relationships though. 

"Better" by Shaun David Hutchinson. The Pied Piper of Hamelin...in space! I kid, I kid. I'm a sucker for generation ships and clone golems though, and the scifi setting was just aces. A nasty little piece of work, and while I'm rooting for our heroes, I'm also terrified of them. 

"Light It Up" by Kimberly Derting. This retelling of Hansel & Gretel felt like it didn't do enough work updating the premise to the present day - it was too literal - but it was fine, I guess. But cannibalism is hilarious, no matter how you slice it. (Get it?? Hahaha, I kill me.) 

"Sharper Than a Serpent's Tongue" by Christine Johnson.  Again, the fairy tale motif needed to be better updated to the present day. I think the attempt at a reversal was botched a little, though it might just be my weariness with the idea that "sometimes a curse can be a blessing!" The central part about how some parents should not be honored because they're terrible parents is totally legit though.  

"Real Boy" by Claudia Gray. Robot love story! There was something very old school Asimov about this - the rules! - but it functioned as a self-contained world, which is a nice bit of parallelism. It almost would have been better if we didn't see the reveal at the end. 

"Skin Trade" by Myra McEntire. Yeah, I don't know. I can see where this was going, I just think it didn't get there. Plus it was just lurid. I like lurid, even lurid for its own ends, but this felt forced. And again, not enough thought went into the update.

"Beauty and the Chad" by Sarah Rees Brennan. I really appreciate the light-hearted anachronism and general goofing, I just think I'm too damn old for this story. The beast in this retelling is a frat-bro, and frat-bros are the very worst for me. I completely recognize this is my own hang up, and frat-bros notwithstanding, this story was cute and funny, the sentient furniture especially. 

"The Pink" by Amanda Hocking. Another reeaaallly straightforward retelling with very little heat or danger. The names were way dumb too.

"Sell Out" by Jackson Pearce. The premise was updated well, and I think it had more friction than a lot of the more straightforward retellings, but it also just didn't do it for me. Age, again, may be a factor, as I bristle about the term "sell out" used by children who have zero idea. I'd like to see the sequel when the hammer falls, kiddo, because fall it will. (Somebody top off mommy's drink; she's being a crank again.)

In sum, a perfectly cromulent little collection, with nothing that overwowed me - "Beast/Beast" and "Thinner Than Water" came close - but also very few straight up failures. I have a couple of these writers pinned as interesting, and I'll be sure to scoop something up next it comes to my attention. There are also a couple who have now been solidly cemented as not to my taste. Though I'm loathe to pretend I can predict what a teenager might think of this, I imagine someone less old and cranky will cotton to some of these stories better than I. Good job, demographics. 

Cross-posted on Soapboxing

There is no other monster more contested than the zombie. Call any creature which doesn't adhere to strict Romero-style zombie epistemology - it runs, or it's not exactly dead, or it can talk, or whatever - and someone will jump down your throat. I tend to take a functional definition of your fictional monsters, meaning I'm less interested in static attributes, and more interested in how those attributes are deployed in context. Meaning if it walks like a duck even though the text calls it a chicken, you might as well treat it like a duck in terms of how that fowl functions.

Take, for example, the vampires in Twilight. There is very little to the creature called vampire by Meyer that adheres to the folklore. They're undead, and contagious, but they sparkle, cross running water, and can go out in sunlight with no deleterious effects. (I'm not even clear on whether they drink blood, or if they consume flesh too.) No one questions whether they're vampires though, because the whole functional definition of a vampire has to do with predatory aristocracy, sexual and class politics, and certain kinds of body horror, especially as regards to procreation. (Maybe this last isn't in the traditional folklore, but since Claudia in Interview with a Vampire, it's definitely a thing.) Her vamps are just ducky, even if their attributes are only vampish. 

But call the creatures in I Am Legend zombies, and you will get into serious trouble with the neckbeards, even though they (the zombies, not the neckbeards) adhere to the functional definition of the zombie. They're relentless; they outnumber "normal" humans (the opposite is almost always the case with vamps); they presage or have caused the end of the modern world; their body horror is not based on their sexual attributes, but on revulsion and rot. (Also, bearing in mind I'm talking about the Will Smith and Vincent Price films, not about the source novel. Those creatures are an interesting inversion.) Additionally, those movies have lots of the motifs of a zombie narrative: besieged homesteads, traumatic loss of loved ones, the slow madness of the lonely. 

I guess my point is this: I've gotten into a lot of pointless, stupid arguments on these here Internets about the definition of the zombie, and I wonder why the definition is such a big deal to people. I wonder why people police that definition so narrowly. My pet theory is that zombie narratives are often about race and class, and we're all pretty kinked about those definitions as well. Like when I see idiots say things like "Obama is half white, so I'm not being racist when I say this racist thing about him." Race isn't like swirl ice cream, but a complicated slurry of competing functional definitions. In other words, race can't be defined by attribute; it can only be defined by function. But holy god do we want it to be defined by attribute in our biologically deterministic little hearts. Ditto zombies. 

But pet theory aside, I think the other things about zombie stories is that they are new on the scene, relatively speaking, so they have a kind of same-same to them. Although the whole sexy aristocrat thing is new to the vampire - older folklore has vampires as more zombie-ish ghouls who are decidedly unsexy - the folklore is old enough to allow wide latitude in definitions based on attribute. We've got at least a hundred years of sexy aristocrat blood-drinkers. You can date the modern zombie to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, no question, which was filmed not long before I was born, cough cough. The motifs have yet to fully differentiate through a century of reiteration and reimagining. We're still working out the tropes, collectively.  

Which is why The Gospel of Z by Stephen Graham Jones is notable. No, the zombies are more or less your granddaddy's Romero zombies - neckbeards take note - but there's a fundamental weirdness to the proceedings that stretches the motifs, moves the markers, and fucks with the same-same. It's ten years after the zombie apocalypse - or zombie apocalypses, as the end of the world was a slow, bleeding affair in this this novel, a series of last nights before the very last night. We pop into the life of the "more or less white" Jory Gray, low level schmuck who lives in the militarized encampment of what's left of half of humanity. His girlfriend left him recently for the Church on the hill, the other half of what's left of humanity.

It's whispered by the working stiffs that the Church both worships and has neutralized the zombie threat, but this is the kind of whispering that occurs between all working stiffs, and it's both envious and disbelieved. Jory works building Handlers, a kind of superzombie built out of mad scientry and bureaucracy. The Handlers are used to differentiate zombie flesh from the edible, human kind, scrambling in the dirt to eat our remains unless our remains want to eat right back. They're also fucking terrifying, in a way, this barely restrained weapon used for the most prosaic ends. Everyone can see how they're going to go wrong, and spectacularly, but everyone is just some asshole trying to get by.

Everyone is shades of Jory Gray, trying hard not to be noticed until they are, and then fuck, maybe I'll have to come to terms with that thing that one time. Maybe the apocalypse has more to do with one moment with a hammer than it does with anything that goes on later. Maybe we're all working though that one trauma, and the zombies and superzombies and everything else is a memento mori, but a memento mori with teeth and a descant. Jones's prose is nasty, pointed, that kind of horror writing that runs everyday until it escalates, and then it's well over the fence. Catch up; keep up. 

I thought the climax was confused a bit - what the fuck was that one thing - but the parts that ran everyday honestly wrung me out. So much of the end of it all is the end of the one true thing, the thing you keep trying to find once it's lost, and when you find its reminder, you sit on the floor of the bedroom and weep. You kill something with a knife made of bone. You go to work everyday like a schmuck, because that's what you've got in you. That's the only thing left, until it isn't. Who even knows. 

The Gospel of Z feels non-functional, in a way, this fucking weird, armadillo-ridden narrative, too personal, too specific. This is something left out of the canon: a side story, an apocrypha, a letter to the Galatians. This is a vision on the road to Damascus brought on by epilepsy. This is a parking lot with a good vantage. Which makes it somehow perfect for the zombie narrative, giving you good, Romero zombies that no one could argue to do this crazy thing on the edges. God bless, and good night. 

This ended up being a cautionary tale about picking up a book solely because hey! I have a cat named Grendel! Being somewhat ignorant of comics, I wasn't aware that Grendel is a series that has been running since the early 80s. So bad on me. Though I could follow what was going on in the broad strokes, my lack of familiarity with the characters meant I missed a lot of nuance, and I could feel it. This is a regular problem with me and comics. Because I have no idea what a good entrance point into a mythology that has been building and doubling back for decades, I just think bah and ignore them. Ain't nobody got time for that. 

That said, the story itself is a nasty little piece of work, charting the brutal sexual psychology of a very messed up woman. Ruminating over years and laying traps that then snap at the reveal, Grendel manages to tell a solid tale, even despite my ignorance. The art is really good, with lots of greyscale set against splashes of red - very Noir. The artist also did a fine job of using the panels - rotating perspectives, jumping from large to small at the right moments to alarm or underscore. The style worked well with the subject matter. Even though I'm sure I'm missing something, there was certainly enough here to amuse me, this nice little blood soaked Oedipal puzzle box.

When I kenned on the fact this was certainly part of a series, I did a quick wiki of the series, and it honestly looks interesting (which is something given the origin date.) Grendel is apparently the name of a super villain of sorts, and is the protagonist of the story, which seems odd indeed. The creator claimed Grendel was a study of the nature of aggression. This is cool to me, because so often comics (especially superhero comics) ruminate on such bullshit as honor and responsibility. There is nothing wrong with honor and responsibility, certainly, but this seems disingenuous given the fascist hijinks of many superhero comics. It also shows the age of the intended audience, young people for whom responsibility is largely circumscribed. Come talk to me about responsibility when you have a mortgage payment or dependents of any kind before you start jumping around in spandex acting like that has any bearing on reality.

Say, for example, you can see your family members slipping into a cult which will undoubtedly defraud them. Is it your responsibility to step in now before they lose everything? Your responsibility to step in after the fact and pull them from the abyss? What about the fact that they will view any well-meaning help as interference, which, of course, it ultimately is. These questions, you might have guessed, are not that theoretical to me. Mostly I'm resigned to an ugly phone call when their house goes up on auction, at which point I will do everything to help them save it. I will not be thanked for this, and will probably be resented. But I don't think gratitude has any bearing on what needs done, whatever that is. I honestly have no idea. 

It's an ugly lesson in the nuances of responsibility, and one that no amount of superpowers and the wingeing about how to use them right can help. It cheers me to see a comic devoted to things like aggression - and some seriously kinky psychosexual stuff - because it feels more grown up to me than the usual. (And not adult in the boobies! ultraviolence! ways that comics sometimes pull to seem "edgy". In those, the adolescent sensibility is still solidly at play, despite the rating.) So, you know, maybe I'll check some other Grendel comics out. I have a cat named Grendel too, as you might have heard. 

Cross-posted on Soapboxing.net

Backwards Compatible reads like a cross between The Guild and Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist, though the comedy isn't as sophisticated as the former (which, you know), nor the central relationship as affecting as the latter (which, also.) George and Katie meet cute at a midnight event for the sale of the newest version of a World of Warcraft-ish game. After a tousle over the last copy of the game is won by George, Katie guilts him into giving it to her because boobs and tears. The plot details a growing group of gamers, high school friends, losers and little sisters playing video games, hanging out at the mall, and learning a little something about friendship. 

Before Jeffrey Brown won us all over with his Darth Vader parenting books, he was riffing on 80s cartoons in the Incredible Change Bots books. (Also he wrote some books about cats which are top notch, and some autobiographical comics for grown ups which I've never seen because I'm immature.) Brown has become my son's favorite comic dude, which makes me so happy because I want to punch Greg Heffley in the balls so hard he sees stars.