The Book of Gold and Crimson: A review

So I found a suggestion/prompt in one of the writing magazines to look forward to when your current project was complete, then write a scathing review (and, contrastingly, a glowing one, to.) I tried it, and found my negative review to be so amusing that I thought I'd share it. So if/when I actually let people read it and you see real reviews that look like this, you can remember that the author already saw it coming.

Fans of trite slash fiction rejoice, for now a breakthrough author has found an “original” twist, combining clichéd epic fantasy with gay torture porn to create some mutant hybrid that somehow manages to be as engaging as neither. We're given Caliborn, a whiny and personality-free smuggler whose solution to every problem is to run away contrasted with Zakai, a doormat Gary Stu who spends most of his childhood (and half the book) in homosexual escapades, broken by the monologues of—oh yes—his violent alternate personality. While these kind of plots might work for shoujo anime, they fall decidedly flat when the attempt is to write fiction with any kind of literary depth or appeal. With a plot as coherent as runny oatmeal and a cast of cardboard characters that we're stuck with for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of pages, the only thing one can treasure in The Book of Gold and Crimson is the book's utter lack of description. Trust me, you're better off not seeing what's going on.

Review: In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir

I recently had the opportunity to read In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir by Cheeni Rao (HarperOne, ISBN978-0-06-073662-0). On the surface, it's just a story of an Indian-American overachiever who, aimless and rebellious, gets too deep into the dark world of drugs and barely fights his way out. But to call it just a memoir of addiction and recovery is to sell it short. In Hanuman's Hands is a vibrant trip through the history of he and his family, an epic of gods and demons, sex and death, magic and, yes, drugs. It's a story of salvation, and it has some of the best elements of literary fiction combined with the raw emotional power of experience.

As I'm normally a consumer of nonfiction and genre works who has tended to view both lit-fic and memoirs as boring or badly-written, my hopes weren't very high. As soon as I opened the book, however, my fears began to melt away. While it held my attention from the beginning, as soon as I hit the middle of the book, I couldn't stop reading. I stayed up half the night turning pages until I practically passed out. I read in the car and while eating, needing to know what happened next. From the author's note in the front of the book to the very last page, Rao has an incredible poetic voice that combines with an interesting storytelling style in which his story is woven back upon itself and interspersed with vignettes of modern myth and a family's faith, traditions and fate. The story slips between years and at times generations with the ease of thought and yet holds structure enough to make it easily followed. Rao doesn't just tell a story, he takes us on a vision quest into the bowels of his history, the images flowing in a vivid stream of consciousness. In Hanuman's Hands is powerful and satisfying, and when I'd turned the last page and the glow wore off, I felt myself inescapably jonesing for more.

Skritchings on the Page...

Slowly, I'm getting further with this story, even though it took me several months of working on anything but to get back into it and get past the scene I didn't want to write. This blog has been too abandoned because I haven't been doing very much on the literary front except whining how much I want to write and then not doing it.

And reading, when I get the chance. And roleplaying, which sucks up more of my creative juices than it probably should, but also serves as writing practice when it does come time to work solo. Or so I tell myself.

Anyhow. Expect more from this blog. I plan on adding some of my thoughts on writing, some links, some reviews, maybe even an excerpt or (very) short story.

But for now, I leave you with this, some of the worst Pustulant Purple Prose: An Excerpt from a novel called Silk and Steel, posted by vandonovan over on LiveJournal.

Snow Queen Teaser

Prologue for what I'm currently working on, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." Just a rough draft, but please do not share.

Part the First:

On the Goblin Mirror and its Pieces

Beneath the city, the goblins toil. They live in deep caverns, in shafts and places abandoned by man. They steal the sewers and smuggler-holes and stop them with junk and are all the happier for it. Theirs is a land of darkness and flame, of great grinding gears and pistons like devils' drumbeats. The air smells of oil and smoke and dry reptilian waste. Beauty is spurned and comfort unknown and those poor mortal souls who look upon the goblin lands and return do so with tales of hell- and some would say they are not far wrong.

The goblins have no love for mankind. Once, perhaps, things were different and the goblins played their tricks and games with no malevolence, but humans have changed and goblins have changed and the world has gone dark and stifled and the goblins blame only man. At the core of this is the goblins' deep jealousy, for they are craftsmen of the greatest order, yet they lack the ingenuity that humans possess. They made the greatest of magic swords and realized that mankind had moved to guns. They worked for years hobbling horses until the horses turned to cars. And in the end, what they hate most about mankind is mankind's own evil heart, for all the goblins' devices and cruelties can never exceed man's cruelty to himself.

There was a goblin who hated humanity more than any other, and it is perhaps not coincidence that he was also their greatest craftsman. He was a bitter old creature, dark and lanky-limbed with eyes that burned like the coal in his forge. He had many names and titles, locked away under key and padlock and iron bars so that none could ever use them. His students called him Skratch.

On this particular day, however, Skratch was unusually happy. He had labored for years in his dark workshop at night after the school was closed (for Skratch was headmaster of the goblins' Nameless School- so called for it humans who love best to name things.) to discover some way to turn the humans' ignorant malice against them... And at last, the night before, he had succeeded.

Skratch took the glass from bottles that killed drunks in alleys and smashed against walls in broken homes, from television sets that spewed hate and lies, from windows profaned by voyeuristic lusts. He took quicksilver that poisoned children and the cold steel of the addict's needle, and knives and cans and barbed wire and all the awful cutting things. He took a child's loss of hope and a priest's loss of faith and a secret lost into the night, never heard and never missed. From these things and many more, Skratch made a mirror. It was as large as a table, round and slightly cupped and shining with icy light.

Man has crafted cold mirrors that reflect only light and shunt away the heat, and dark mirrors that reflect heat but take in all the light. The goblins, as I have mentioned, are perhaps not uniquely creative, but they are masters of twisting or improving those things humans have invented. So it was perhaps upon these principles that Skratch's mirror worked, or perhaps simply through some strange goblin magic. Whatever the principle, Skratch's mirror had a unique capability: it reflected nothing good. Indeed, it discarded beauty wholesale while ugliness was only magnified. The most beautiful landscape would be gray and dark in Skratch's mirror, the best of men a horrible monster. Loved ones would twist beyond recognition and enemies loom larger than life.

For the first time, Skratch thought, mankind could see themselves and their world as they truly were. For once, they could see as the goblins saw. Skratch looked upon the mirror and saw his wickedness and was very happy indeed.

The young goblins who attended the Nameless School whispered amongst themselves that old Headmaster Skratch had worked a miracle, that he had created the greatest of tricks, kept hidden there in the workshop beneath the catacombs. And because goblins love to snatch and steal and value nothing even of their own, the goblin students endeavored now to take this mirror and use it themselves.

Late one night, they sneaked down to the cellar-workshop and took the mirror from where it lay on the table, and when they understood what it did, they were more joyful than ever. All through the underworld they took it, ferreting out the tiny specks of good that still hid and rendering them dull. Then they carried it up and out into the world of men and had great fun turning the mirror upon the unwary men. Yet still, yet still.. there was more fun to be had. They had found other things within Skratch's workshop, and perhaps the second best were clockwork wings that could turn little goblins into twisted little bats.

“Look here.” said one, whose name was Skreech, “Down here, we reflect little.. a street, a building... but if we carried the mirror into the sky, we could catch the whole city's ugliness at once!”

The other goblins thought this a grand idea. They cheered for Skreech and called him the wisest of goblins (behind, perhaps, Skratch) and they clothed themselves in clockwork wings and lifted the mirror as one to carry it up.

And reflect the city it did, and all the lights were hazy, and all the streets were dark and full of hate, and all the men were monsters and all the women worse. The goblins were gleeful. “Higher!” they cried, “Higher!” and labored their little wings.

Higher they climbed indeed and higher still. The county they reflected, the country, more... and still they strained as if to reach the stars, to catch the whole world in the mirror's evil gaze. Yet the higher they flapped, the heavier the mirror grew, for the world contains much ugliness, and it filled the mirror to the brim. Yet higher they carried it and heavier it grew until they could barely hold it.

High above the world where the mirror glittered in the sky like a malevolent star, the mirror shook so terribly with the weight of its evil that it flew out of their hands and tumbled to the earth. The goblins watched in shock and awe, and tried to swoop down to catch it on clockwork wings, but they were clumsy and the mirror fell true and smashed upon the earth into a hundred million pieces.

This might have been the end of the goblin-mirror, but sometimes magic works in insidious ways, and dark magic most of all, and this was a magic that had held within it -just for a moment- all the darkness in the world. The broken mirror worked more evil than ever before, for each tiny fragment held all the magic of the whole.

Some pieces were large enough to be used as windowpanes, and all those who looked out saw nothing good, and they hid themselves inside until they withered away, lonely and bitter at the horrible world. Other pieces were found and used for spectacles, and when one wore glasses to see correctly, they could see instead nothing right. Some splinters flew sharp and true and struck men right in the heart, and those hearts withered into icy, twisted things. But some pieces of Skratch's mirror were smaller than a grain of sand, and they flew about, blown upon the wind. These pieces would fly and stick in men's eyes, and they would see the whole world perverted, would find joy only in evil.

The goblins saw this and cheered, but they feared still what old Skratch would say, for they had stolen the mirror and lost it all. So they turned on young Skreech and blamed him loudly and forced him to go before the Headmaster and tell him what they had done. So he held his head high and went to the school and told the whole story, and showed the old goblin all the mayhem that the broken mirror caused.

And Skratch laughed and laughed and the little goblins joined in as well until goblin laughter boiled up from the sewer grates and subway tunnels and poured through the city like a pack of jackals... yet even this was drowned out by the hum of human life, their snores and dreams and ever-running machines.

Silent and sparkling, like specks of dust, like crystal snow, the mirrored splinters drifted down upon the sleeping city.

This is how the story begins.