Monthly Archives: March 2012

Greg Herren’s SLEEPING ANGEL

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I’ve been on a review kick lately. It’s a nice departure from my fiction projects now and then, and it gives me a chance to talk up queer-themed lit that may get overlooked elsewhere.

This week: Greg Herren’s young adult-mystery SLEEPING ANGEL (Bold Strokes Books, 2011).

The story has a terrific premise: Eric, a high school football hero and Junior Prom King, wakes up from a coma to find out he’s the only person who can solve a murder he remembers nothing about. He was pulled from a car wreck with a classmate in the backseat. The classmate Sean had a bullet in him, and he didn’t survive the car crash.

Eric has total amnesia.

The portrayal of Eric early on was one of my favorites parts of the book. Eric is panicked and confused. He knows he should feel something for the people who are worried about him, like his mom, but he can’t. He searches for clues about what kind of person he was. Amnesia can be a convenient mystery plot device, but here it’s a departure point for a multi-dimensional journey of discovery.

One discovery is Eric’s brain injury somehow gave him the ability to hear people’s thoughts when he touches them. Those interactions, revealing what’s really on the minds of his family and friends, are nice, intriguing moments. They shed light on Eric’s character and keep the story moving forward.

We find out the deceased Sean was gay and being bullied at school. Eric was one of his tormenters. The history between the two places Eric as a prime suspect in Sean’s murder, and Eric can’t say whether he did or didn’t do it.

It’s an interesting approach to the subject of teen homophobia. Amnesiac Eric – removed from social pressure and the attitudes of his peers – can’t understand why he would kill or even dislike Sean just because he was gay. Eric is ashamed when he hears from other people, and starts remembering himself, how he treated Sean.

With all those narrative hooks, and Herren’s tight, fast-paced writing, I sped through the story to the end. Eric finds a Facebook message from Sean asking him to a confidential meeting just before the car accident, and I was dying to know what the meeting was about and who shot Sean.

I’ll be judicious, and just say another nice aspect of the story is the build-up of various suspects. What could’ve been a heavy-handed lesson about the treatment of gay teens becomes richer through the range of people in Eric’s life. I liked especially Eric’s younger brother Danny who is full of rage and hurt because Eric is perceived as the perfect son.

I went back and forth about what it meant to take the story from Eric’s perspective versus Sean’s. It felt at times that All-American hetero Eric didn’t deserve to be the story’s hero just by virtue of becoming enlightened about his bad behavior through this scary episode in his otherwise privileged life. In fact, Eric expresses as much, which earns him some self-awareness points, but Sean, for whom there was much more at stake in the story, was more interesting and likeable to me.

Overall though, SLEEPING ANGEL is a satisfying mystery with very clever storytelling approaches.

COLLECTIVE FALLOUT: Queer Speculative Fiction!!

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Cover art from Collective Fallout Vol. 3 Issue 3

While researching queer fantasy markets, I discovered Collective Fallout. It’s a literary magazine dedicated to queer speculative fiction.

Issues are themed, and the one I ordered – Vol. 3, Issue 3 – was called “Futuristic.”

It blew my mind. In a good way. If you’ve read my reviews, you know it doesn’t happen often that I go off raving about stuff I read.

The stories are imaginative and tightly written, and I’ll get to some of my favorites. But what I responded to, most wonderfully, was the sum of the issue’s parts: wild, conceptual fiction as a platform for queer possibilities, and often queer transcendence.

Most of the authors take the future theme from a dystopian perspective. Warren Rochelle’s “Green Light” posits the rise of a multinational, totalitarian empire, genetically engineered warriors, and a substratum of outcasts fending for survival on a war-ravished frontier. In Christopher Keelty’s “Toll Road,” bio-contamination leads to a politically-fractured state where Catholic knights vie with leather-clad biker dudes called “the Dawn.”

Somewhat smaller in scale, and charming in its quiet way, is Terence Kuch’s “Other I Now.” In Kuch’s future, media technology has born the creepy pastime of ‘voying’, downloading other people’s memories. When Kuch’s narrator Ned rents out a memchip that is uncannily like his own memories, he goes in search of his “other I,” and discovers another life he might have lived.

The struggle to live queerly and authentically is a theme tying many of the stories together. It’s sometimes the main narrative drive, as in the case of Rochelle and Keelty’s stories where an accumulation of heterosexual power has begotten a nightmarish era of persecution for their queer protagonists.

In Derrick W. Craigie’s “Tales of K’Aeran: A New Road,” opportunities for queer living are contrasted when two strangers, from different fantasy clans, band together for survival in a sub-zero neutral zone. The Highborn woman Tatyana comes from an elite society where being caught with her female lover brought about a campaign for her assassination. Her companion Garon, from the martially-centered Nathikan clan, reflects on the more nuanced traditions of his people, who hold heterosexual marriage as a tribal obligation, but believe in the essential practice of choosing additional lovers for personal fulfillment, whether hetero or homo.

Caleb Wimble’s “Singularity” evokes queer otherness through allegory. The central character’s choice to undergo experimental cloning, after a terminal diagnosis of brain cancer, sets off  violent, global organizing by “humanists.” “Synths” are criminalized because they are seen as an affront to the way God intended humankind to be.

I was surprised by the romantic spirit of the stories, a universal thread, which may be a bit too ‘on-the-nose’ for some readers, but it worked quite well for me. Rochelle’s “Green Light” has an outcast teen and a young warrior, trained to exterminate the masses, deferring life and limb to be together. The story invokes the poetry of Walt Whitman. “Singularity” finds love possible between a man and the clone of his former boyfriend.

Not a bad thought that in the future, love will conquer all.

 

Fantasy Movie Review: JOHN CARTER

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Maybe after my huge disappointment with CLASH OF THE TITANS and IMMORTALS last year, my expectations for the latest fantasy blockbuster JOHN CARTER were low.

But I liked it. I really did.

My partner and I saw it in the theatre yesterday, the way – I guess – these movies are meant to be seen nowadays: on a massive IMAX screen with 3D glasses.

JOHN CARTER is a good story. The title character is a young, embittered former Confederate General from the Civil War. After losing his wife and daughter to a fire, Carter is grasping for a reason to live. He finds that reason when he’s stumbles on a magical artifact that transports him to an amazing world on Mars, where some trick of gravity, or bone density? (it’s not explained very clearly), gives him super strength, including the ability to leap great distances. There, he realizes that his abilities are exactly what the strange inhabitants need to save their planet from a tyrant who seeks to conquer all, and in the process destroy Mars.

Taylor Kitsch does a decent job as the movie’s hero. There’s not a lot of emotional range with these type of characters, but my favorite scenes from the movie were where he was overcoming his early dilemmas – a funny sequence of breakaways from the Union mounty who wants to recruit him, his awkward first steps on Mars with super-powered legs, and his attempts to ditch a martian creature, something like a giant, reptilian bulldog, who attaches to Carter hard and fast.

The action scenes are harrowing and great, and the world on Mars Barsoom is well-realized and imaginative.

My complaints are that the movie goes on too long, and I was uninspired by the romantic storyline. Of the former, there’s a point quite early on, when I think the audience gets it that this story is all going to come down to John Carter rallying Barsoom to liberation. But the journey is a belabored by a trip back to Carter’s original captors, the alien Tharks. We know what’s going to happen – Carter is going to succeed, no matter what incredible challenge the Tharks put him up to. They could’ve cut 15-20 minutes of film.

More on Ancient World Historicals: Nick Drake’s TUTANKHAMEN

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Hi. It’s me again. The guy who posts every now and then, letting weekly deadlines go by, and feeling less and less guilty about it.

The functional breakdown I predicted last semester has arrived, and my beloved blog has been the worst victim of my negligence.

Elsewhere, I really have been doing a lot of productive things. An idea for an urban fantasy has turned into a 10K and growing story (novella?). I organized an LGBT writers critique group, which has taken off marvelously.

But this blog has been my rock throughout the ups and downs of my writing life, and it’s time to get back to it. Sorry rock :::rubs cute little rocky head:::

Thus, I retake to the blogosphere with some words on what I’ve been reading.

Despite my quibbles with Nick Drake’s first book NEFERTITI: THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, I picked up the sequel TUTANKHAMEN: THE BOOK OF SHADOWS. Drake’s writing is just so extraordinary, and I love the ancient Egyptian setting.

The second book has Rahotep, a clever Medjay officer, appointed to investigate threats against the young King Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen is despised equally by his great uncle Ay, protectorate of the kingdom during the reign of the child King, and the popular military hero Horemheb who has political ambitions of his own.

Meanwhile, Rahotep is haunted by the horrifying ritual murders of a serial killer, which may have something to do with the subversive campaign against his client.

Drake renders the people and places of ancient Egypt vividly and beautifully. His prose is at times poetic, and always efficient. I thought that Tutankhamen was a particularly successful character here, shown in his complexity: pampered, naive, wounded by the murder of his father who he succeeded to the throne, and wanting to make something of himself.

More actual mystery solving happens in the story than in NEFERTITI, a complaint of mine with Drake’s début novel, and it made for some satisfying reveals. Rahotep comes to life as a man with special gifts for reasoning and deduction, truly an ancient world detective.

There’s a lot to recommend TUTANKHAMEN, and I do. But being the peevish critic that I am, two problems kept the story from lifting from “great” to “excellent” territory.

First, Rahotep’s quest – to protect Tutankhamen – didn’t feel quite profound enough to hold my fascination. Drake has done extensive research to bring ancient Egypt to life, with historical accuracy, but as such, it wasn’t clear to me what the assassination of Tutankhamen would mean to people beyond the inner circle of privileged and oppressive elite. Put differently, I didn’t get the sense that the young King would be any more effective as a leader than his despotic and corrupt rivals.

Perhaps this is the essential challenge of writing an ancient world story for modern readers. We want to be transported to a vivid ancient time and place, but there has to be something there to relate to: a universal human struggle, for instance.

My other qualm is a carry-over from my review of NEFERTITI. Rahotep’s personal conflict – sacrificing his family life in favor of his dangerous work as a detective – is peppered into the narrative through sentimental ruminations and passages of ‘home-sweet-home’ domestic life. I wanted more from the portrayal, or maybe less, or maybe something entirely different. It felt like a convenient device to make Rahotep relatable to modern readers.

Still, TUTANKHAMEN will impress fans of ancient Egypt. The story delves vividly into the worldview and religion of the time as well as the curious details of daily life.