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Reading

the library at mount char

December 16, 2018 by L.S. Johnson

This book.

I put it on my TBR list when it first came out, but, well, the TBR list is long and money is tight … so when it went on sale I grabbed it, buoyed by the fervor on Twitter, and it delivered.

Here’s the thing. About halfway through I realized: this is the most realistic depiction of divinity that I have yet encountered. By divinity I’m thinking Greek pantheon-esque, those beings who are at once like-us and inscrutable, fuckable yet operating on a vastly different moral and emotional gradient. That’s what Hawkins has created here: he lets us inhabit that kind of body, lets us see how they move through our world when so much of what we value just doesn’t register for them at all. Some of the details are purely batshit, a hair’s shy of caricature, yet he stays just within the bounds of believability and it feels right. One character wears a helmet made of accrued dried blood and a lavender tutu, and it feels like it should read as Wes Anderson’s Nightmare on Elm Street, but in the context of the story it feels utterly appropriate. I have a lot of half-formed thoughts about narrative authority which I have yet to quantify, but I know it when I see it.

And there’s really two stories here, and one has a little less energy than the other … but these are quibbles. No book is perfect, but this one was Very Good, which is all any author can hope for. Everything past that is in the eye of the beholder.

I want to go back through to look more closely at the characterization, but this book now holds the record for the number of times I have simultaneously giggled while also feeling horrified AND thinking both ewww and WT everlasting F, all at once. I might need a few spins on a plain ol’ merry-go-round before I ride this coaster again. But dude, what a ride. Highly recommend.

Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char

2018 Award Eligibility

December 3, 2018 by L.S. Johnson

This has been a year of planting, not harvesting, but nonetheless I had a few tales published:

Short story

“All That I Left Behind (We Are),” in The Fabulist.

“A Harvest Fit for Monsters,” in Nightscript IV.

“From Court Visionaries of the Imperial Age,” in Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry.

“Sabbaths,” in Syntax & Salt.

Novelette

“X Is for Xavier,” in E Is for Evil.

Novella

Leviathan

 

I’m also reading for awards, but I am a little, ahem, inundated at the moment (at last glance I had nearly 200 emails with everything from short stories to novels … insert Munch-style screaming here …) so while I want to do a recommendation list, I’m going to wait until January, when I’ve had more time to read and process.

Filed Under: Process, Reading Tagged With: awards

evangelion

November 28, 2018 by L.S. Johnson

Cautiously pleased that I’ll be able to rewatch Evangelion on Netflix. I’ve been meaning to for a while, I’m curious to see how its influence on me has played out (I first saw it sometime in the late 90s, I think? When it aired on PBS in San Francisco) … But please, please can we not redo it, or extend it, or revise it, or live-action it, or anything else? The series was so good, both as a story and an artwork, a kind of commentary on its own creation, which is also one way of looking at the story’s themes. It’s interesting times we live in where we can access more content than ever, we live in a perpetual tidal wave of story, yet we keep reaching again and again for a few old familiars. Watch new things. Read new things.

… and tell me where I can finish Ergo Proxy now that it got snatched from Crunchyroll. 😉

Filed Under: Reading, Visuals Tagged With: influences, neon genesis evangelion

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