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Things Haven’t Gotten Better: Moral Outrage and Eric LaRocca’s THINGS HAVE GOTTEN WORSE SINCE WE LAST SPOKE

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The most important part of Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is the Author’s Note which opens the novel.

This Author’s Note is not, as far as I can tell, from LaRocca themself, because this is a diegetic author’s note, it is part-and-parcel of the novella itself. I have no idea if those who took such umbrage online with the work took the time to read this critical framing device and understand its purpose.

I. This book exploits queer women

Though it pains me to do so, let’s put aside the rampant anti-queer and non-binary-phobic nature of the rhetoric which equates LaRocca’s work with something written about queer people or lesbians who is also a cishet man. (And even then, the interest expressed would have to be exceedingly prurient for me to start really coming down on a cis heterosexual man for daring to engage the topic. Writing it isn’t the problem, how you write it is.)

One thing I saw a lot online was the accusation that while the work is presented as being a queer relationship between two women, given that the entire thing takes place online, and therefore we have no assurance that either of the protagonists (but especially the “Zoe” character) is who they say they are. People were very quick to suggest that “Zoe” could well be some man pretending to be something he isn’t (queer, a woman, honest, etc.).

[Actually, we do need to take a moment to talk about the exclusionary queer rhetoric and transphobic/non-binary-phobic tone of this criticism:
Intentionally misidentifying and excluding LaRocca from “Queerness,” including misgendering them, while accusing the novel of portraying a character who is not what they “claim” to be—specifically a queer person and female identified in Zoe’s case… You might be able to see where the intersection of these accusations begin to uncomfortably display an inherent prejudice on the part of the so-called “critic” making them.
These individuals are unwilling to recognize LaRocca as a member of the queer community (because of their background, identity, presentation, I don’t know and I don’t care), and justify that prejudice by sublimating it into their “analysis” of the work itself. The accusation that LaRocca is somehow an impostor or fraudulent queer person is transferred onto the narrative of the novella as a means of obfuscating its true purpose: to exclude LaRocca, and propagate personal prejudice.]

“Because the litigation surrounding Zoe Cross’s case remains open at the time of this publication, certain elements of their [Agnes and Zoe’s] communication have been redacted or censored at the behest of the Henley’s Edge Police Department.”

p. 9 (Things Have Gotten Worse… Weird Punk Books, 1st edition)

With this simple statement, LaRocca’s fictional author puts to rest (at the very beginning!) any possibility that Zoe Cross is not who she says she is. We can state, with some degree of confidence, that within the world of the novella, a person exists whose legal name is “Zoe Cross”. Now, it’s true that no personal pronouns are ever used within the Author’s Note to refer exclusively to Zoe Cross, so I cannot say that Zoe for sure uses “she/her” pronouns or would be recognized as a woman by the organs of the state.

At the same time, the whole novella (including the Author’s Note) hail from the turn of the millenium… That’s 2000-2001. For those too young to know or remember those years, it is unlikely that police and judicial records or press coverage of that time would willingly use an individual’s chosen name rather than their legal name (no, it’s not so different now, but it was worse then, I promise). We must, therefore, assume that if Zoe Cross is being identified by police and judicial records as such, that she is, in fact, a woman insofar as the stringent requirements of the legal framework of 20 years ago is concerned. (You want to accuse transwomen of being predators and violators of lesbian spaces, by all means please see yourself to your local TERF assembly and do let the door hit you on the way out.)

So, from a purely formal level, we can lay to rest accusations that somehow Zoe Cross is a mask for some abusive man online, taking advantage of a poor, lonely queer woman who couldn’t have known better.

II. This book is immoral, and LaRocca is a pervert for having written it

Very simply, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is not an im-moral book. It is an a-moral one. (And even that is a somewhat dubious contention, because I believe LaRocca to have plenty to say about abuse, irresponsibility, victimhood and victimization, violence, control via the medium of this work. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)

We are told from the outset that this is a case still under litigation, and is being covered in the media. As many high-profile cases have made exceptionally clear in the last few years, one of the stickier parts of the American legal process has to do with the selection of a jury. Juries need to be “impartial” (not influenced by information not presented in the courtroom), making any, even remotely, sensational case extremely difficult to handle.

Also, the author of this publication requests that the reader be cognizant of the fact that the author is in no way affiliated with either Zoe Cross’s legal counsel or Agnes Petrella’s surviving family. The author remains a nonpartisan entity and instead patiently waits for the balances of justice to trip in favor of the truth.

p. 10 (Things Have Gotten Worse… Weird Punk Books, 1st edition)

The reader is, in this final paragraph of the Author’s Note, placed in the position of juror.

When I say that Things Have Gotten Worse… is an a-moral book, I do not mean that it is disinterested in evaluating the moral responsibilities and failures of the characters or the actions they have taken. I mean that it is not a book which will provide the audience with a pre-determined, tidy, pat moral conclusion to the narrative it presents.

The book demands, clearly and pointedly, at the outset, that the reader prepare themselves to decide if Zoe Cross is guilty, and if so… Of what, exactly?

This is not an easy task.

It is not meant to be.

The most discomfiting part of Things Have Gotten Worse… is that it doesn’t ask the reader to merely agree or disagree with its proposed thesis. It presents a complex, possibly intractable, situation and asks “What do you make of all this?”

The book does not presume guilt or innocence on the part of either of its protagonists. Indeed, the power of the narrative emerges from the several reversals which take place within it. We know something terrible is going to happen, and we know which of the two of our protagonists is going to die, and we know who is considered “responsible” in some manner or degree for that death. We begin the narrative inclined to sympathize with Agnes, and to be mistrustful of Zoe. As their relationship evolves, that mistrust seems justified. But it doesn’t stay that way.

Without getting into too many details for those who have yet to read the novella; assigning power and agency (or lack thereof) to either character quickly begins to feel like thrashing in a pit of quicksand, the more you try to find the answer, the deeper you sink into the quagmire. This sense of who is the “driving” force in their relationship undergoes at least 3 major reversals, each one pulling further and further away from the usual metrics by which these things are measured.

I try to avoid blaming any particular cultural movement or moment for what I perceive as failings in the critical or philosophical skills of those who were most impacted by it. Youth, especially, is idealistic, and that’s sweet. (I’m almost 30, so I’m basically ancient, you know. A walking corpse, really.) But I do believe we’ve ended up in a particularly simplistic and reactionary moment. Perhaps this is because the uncertainty which pervades every aspect of the current human experience (economic, political, social, environmental, occupational, physical, etc) makes it exhausting to deal with extra uncertainty for the purpose of intellectual stimulation. Sometimes it’s nice to say “these are the good guys, these are the bad guys” and leave it at that. (To quote a show by a now disgraced writer-producer: “The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.” To which, of course, the response is: “Liar.”)

Just because we’re hoping for to build a better and more beautiful world, and just because we need hope to do so, doesn’t mean that we can or should or will eradicate pain, suffering, harm, and hurt. These things do not arise merely out of “evil” or “bad” behaviors/actions/ideas… In many ways they are the foundational elements of human existence and while we can try to minimize their impact, and we can strive to act in ways which limit, avoid, or avert those outcomes… We also cannot control each other, ourselves, or reality. We can be better… But we’re never going to be perfect.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is a book in the grand tradition of horror writing which promises that no matter how hard we try, no matter how good we are, no matter how just or kind or true, no matter how deserving, no matter how careful we are, we will fail and bad things will happen. This is not a story everyone needs to hear, nor a lesson everyone needs to learn, all too many people know from hideous personal experience that these things are true. But I rarely see those people who already know trying to tell others not to tell these stories. In fact, my experience has often been that the people who know these lessons best of all are usually the ones who are writing these stories.

No one has to read a book that will hurt their feelings or cause them distress or harm. But, as LaRocca’s novella has the temerity to suggest, we retain a degree of personal responsibility for the things we do to ourselves, even when other people are involved.

To borrow from the introduction by the publisher to a different book which would undoubtedly also raise hackles and fists (Todd Keisling’s Scanlines): “Please, please leave the room if this will… if this will affect you.”

III. Not enough build-up, just violence (Do you have Sade?)

This is a special mention for an unexpected conversation I had about Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.

Someone came into my job asking for the book, because they “need it to make fun of it online”. Points for honesty, I guess? I couldn’t let it slide, because I love making fun of books as much as the next person, but I try not to get my hot takes directly from tumblr posts or twitter discourse. They hadn’t read the book, so I asked them what they thought was going to be wrong with it. I’d actually read it, I pointed out, and therefore my suggestion that it packs a lot into a small number of pages might actually have real merit. (I’ve also read, you know, other stuff. Which might also help.)

We covered the bits that I mentioned above. But then this person said they’d heard that it just… Went too far, and didn’t have enough philosophical complexity or what-have-you to justify the violence within its pages. Shocking for its own sake.

I pointed out that it’s not a Carlton Mellick III novella and therefore, we might have to make sure we’re using the same scale of “shock value” to measure the violence-to-philosophy ratio. I’m not really a fan of splatterpunk, the more outre elements of bizarro fiction, or even mundane horror (which is usually rooted in some kind of physical violence).

Ultimately, my description of Mellick’s The Exercise Bike was dismissed as unappealing, because I couldn’t confirm how much of the book actually dealt with the surgical process of transforming a human being into a stationary bike. In my defense, most of my attention had been eaten up on the bit where a woman is forced to ride the willingly-transformed bike-man for his sexual gratification; that’s where the real horror lay for me.

Ultimately, the discussion came around to the Marquis De Sade.

I felt somewhat offended on LaRocca’s behalf that they were coming up short in comparison to Justine. Sure, 200 Days of Sodom has some moral-philosophical-political criticism embedded in it, because it’s ostensibly a take down of the bishops and other unelected leadership of 18th century France. It’s also a book whose primary goal is to come up with the most depraved acts it can think of… Just because.

LaRocca’s novella is not a celebration of depravity. It’s not a joyful study in perversion. It’s not a titillating narrative of physical degradation and debasement. It’s a book about desire, about obsession, about power—over others, over ourselves, over our experiences—and it’s about the things we think we are, and the things we think we love, and what we think we need to be happy.

It is a book of questions, and it whispers in your ear that maybe, just maybe, the answers will be a bit harder to find than we might like.

Week in Review: 22-29 December 2021

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It’s a little funny to be starting this “week in review” series up again at the end of the year like this. But, start as you mean to continue, right? Also, the depressive haze of “nowhere to go, no one to see, nothing to do” of quarantine and the slow apocalypse has decided to lift somewhat as of late, and my reading has increased in response.

Read:

  • “Compulsory Games” by Robert Aickman
  • “The Mask” by Robert W. Chambers
  • “In the Court of the Dragon” also by Chambers
  • Things have gotten worse since we last spoke by Eric LaRocca
  • Some amount of Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Tara T. Green
  • Dangerous Dimensions

Watched:

  • The Witcher Season 2 (partial)
  • Some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 2)

There was also Christmas and family events and all that, so it’s been a busy week.

Aickman (musings)

Aickman in particular has made a very strong impression on me. I started with his story “Hand in Glove” (all of my reading of Aickman comes from the NYRB collection of his works Compulsory Games edited and introduced by Victoria Nelson). My initial response to that story was, ‘This is too English for me to really understand it.’ Which might seem silly, but there have been times where that particular flavor of English reticence and ingrained class conscious conflict (among other cultural factors) has utterly baffled and alienated me.

My second go-round with Aickman, which I was considering after I wrapped up “Dangerous Dimensions” and had to (sullenly and with much grumbling) reassess my view of Algernon Blackwood (I wasn’t a fan of “The Willows” — the vacillation between unhinged hysteria and obviously doomed attempts to rationalize the supernatural was exhausting and somewhat irritating), I felt it was only just to give Aickman another shot.

I finished the story “Compulsory Games” which I had already begun the previous time I had picked up the book. And after finishing it, no more certain of what I had just experienced that I was at the end of “Hand in Glove”, I turned to Nelson’s introduction to the volume of Aickman’s fiction. While I disagree with some of her points about “the horror genre” as a comprehensive whole (Of black humor she says, “Like sex, this element, and its prerequisite of a sophisticated sensibility, is usually absent in the horror genre.” (p. xii) I also feel that her view that sex is necessarily or usually absent from horror fiction holds true only in certain eras of the genre. But my rapturous and irrepressible rhapsodizing about Livia Llewelyn will have to wait for another day.)

Most importantly, Nelson helpfully contextualizes Aickman’s fiction as being not necessarily “supernatural” so much as “unnatural.” (p. viii) And indeed, thus far it seems best to approach Aickman with the tacit recognition that no explanation is forthcoming, and that any attempts to classify or qualify the experience of his characters according to known modes will result in abject failure. Here, again, Nelson fails to distinguish between the “neatly wrapped up” ending of the traditional ghost story or gothic model of the tale, where the supernatural elements are controlled, contained, and neutralized within the narrative, and the often more ambiguous, unresolved “explanations” of authors generally associated with the Weird.

Indeed, by this measure of irreducible weirdness Aickman can, without a doubt, be counted among the writers of the weird. However, I believe his fiction may leave some readers wanting for something a bit more coherent than what is actually on offer within his stories. He, for the most part, avoids the irritating sensation that he, the author, is as ignorant of understanding as the reader. But nor does he convey the absolute confidence of some other writers (Laird Barron comes to mind, and even Michael Cisco) that he is in full command of his concocted un-reality, and merely choosing to omit an easy answer for the benefit (or frustration) of the reader.

All this to say, more to follow on Aickman soon. I have 13 more stories to go in this volume.

Dangerous Dimensions (1st and 2nd Impressions)

When ordering books for the store, my boss read the title of this book and said, ‘Hey this is the book for you!’

Indeed, I keep threatening that once I get my act together I’ll figure out how to design a t-shirt graphic that conveys “spooky polyhedra” à la “Dreams in the Witch-House.” I love the somewhat ridiculous – though often extremely effective – notion of maddening and mind-bending mathematics. Who needs monsters when you can have equations that rend the very fabric of the known universe?

Unfortunately, Dangerous Dimensions takes us back to the early applications of the discovery of a “Fourth Dimension” (other than time), starting with H.G. Wells’ “Title”. I found this one almost unbearable. Here the fourth dimension becomes a kind of pseudo-scientific purgatory, where the souls of the dead spectate the lives of the still-living. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the story, but it really got into a particular kind of religious- or piously inflected supernatural horror which has never ‘done it’ for me.

The other notable stinker in the collection for me was “Space” by John Buchan. In a sense the introduction to Buchan and his story were of greater issue than the story itself. This volume contains one of the Lovecraft collaborations, and almost the entire introduction to the story/authors for that entry is given over to superficial discussion of Lovecraft’s racism, to the point where I learned nothing about Henry S. Whitehead. Now, “Space” is a story whose entire set-up relies heavily on the notion that Europeans are a more “evolved” form of man and have lost the senses unique to animals and “Savages” which allow them to distinguish the fourth dimension of ‘space’.

I’m not here to rampage against the impolitic and backwards “scientific views” portrayed in the story, but I do take issue with the notion that Lovecraft has become the popular repository for all discussion about racism and eugenic description in genre literature of a particular era. Race featured in a negligible capacity in the Whitehead & Lovecraft story (the 16th century evil Austrian magician or whatever he was had two Black slaves, which is unpleasant and perhaps upsetting but does not really conform with the more egregious elements of Lovecraft’s unpalatable social and scientific views on race). Meanwhile, “Space” displays the very form of ‘eugenic epistemology’ which so tarnishes Lovecraft’s work, and not a single mention of the evolutionary rhetoric is included in the introduction to the story itself.

That is to say: string them all up.

The story itself was fine, but the discussion of the “aboriginal savage” which dominates the beginning of the story definitely left me feeling the strain of having to look past the less than savory socio-political-epistemological aspects.

The stand-out winners in the collection were, for me, Donald Wandrei’s “Infinity Zero” and the Robert Heinlein story “…and he built a crooked house…”. The former has inspired me through its vivid imagery to finally attempt a suitably ‘mathematic’ Weird illustration, as well as being genuinely freaky. The science is also quite good.

Meanwhile, the latter – the Heinlein – was so funny that I’m perplexed no one has adapted it to cinema as of yet. It would make for a very fun, and very funny, little film. Strong visuals, and a lighthearted and enjoyable tone. Some minor “updating” might be required to render the female character a little more palatable for a contemporary audience, but I’m sure there are people who would utterly fail to recognize the light misogyny which persists within the characterizations.

On the whole, it was a solid collection. I felt that the editor tipped his hand a bit including two Blackwood stories (a personal favorite and academic interest of the editor) but I must admit that both Blackwood stories were pretty good. Enough that I’m seriously considering searching up more of the John Silence stories for future reading.

Quick Notes on Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

I have plenty to say about Eric LaRocca’s Things have gotten worse… Though not perhaps as many to say as the run-away hit of the season merits. The big one is that while I expected it to go one way (and then after the first twist another way, and then yet another way after the second twist) it never really went where you expected it to go. This means that though the experience is deeply horrifying and made my skin hurt, it was never banal.

I must admit that I’m not sure the book ever really tips over into the realm of “erotic horror” but the bar/standard I have for that was set by Livia Llewelyn (specifically the collection Furnace), then solidified with Steven Berman’s Fit for Consumption, with an honorable mention for That One Story in Bracken MacLeod’s 13 Views from the Suicide Woods. Which is to say, an epistolary narrative is unlikely to meet the necessary qualifications of embodiment to really make the “erotic horror” grade. This is in no way a criticism of the book itself, but rather the way the presentation implies a particular tone or expectation which is not quite fulfilled.

Mr. LaRocca certainly has my attention. My tastes run toward the more supernatural than the mundane in the annals of horror and weird fiction, but LaRocca’s characters are so vividly painted and pleasingly complete (if utterly unhinged) that I would be willing to venture into the depths of the believably horrible with his prose charting the path.

That’s certainly MORE than enough words on any number of topics. And I’ll be back with some slightly more fleshed out reviews as well as a few musings like “What exactly is appetite in horror?” (Brought to you by Fit for Consumption where food and sex make for natural if discomfiting bedfellows.) Formal reviews for the above mentioned collections should be forthcoming, and something a little meatier for Mr. LaRocca’s work as well, when I finish digesting it. (I only finished the book two nights ago.) As well as hopefully something on Jeffery Ford’s Big Dark Hole collection, which I am part-way through.

Zelda, Calamity, and Living Beyond The End

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I have a much longer, much more theory oriented post which I imagine no one will read in the works, but instead I want to take some time today to talk to you about playing video games under quarantine.

While Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped four days ago and I’ve already sunk almost 19 hours into the game (sorry, Mama), the game I bought to keep me company on the plane and fill some of the downtime while I am here is Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I played it on the plane and in the airport and during my unexpected seven hour layover in Munich (I also took a nap), and I’ve played it while trying not to completely lose my mind cooped up in a house by myself except for my several hundred tiny wingèd roommates whose demise I plot with increasing vigor with every passing day.

AC:NH has been a pleasant way to remain connected to the idea of Outside –– it has bugs and sunshine and weather and fishing and running around and changing outfits (with the exception of the first one I have almost none of those things) –– but BotW has been the most philosophically and narratively poignant choice.

A rough outline of the game’s plot/setting for those who might be unfamiliar:

In BotW you play a newly awakened swordsman, Link, who has been in some kind of mago-technical suspended animation for the last 100 years. He was mortally wounded in battle against a malignant magical entity named Calamity Ganon while defending the princess Zelda of Hyrule as she attempted to banish Calamity Ganon with magic. You take your unclothed self out of the stasis chamber, acquire some pants and another mago-technical device (which, somehow, reminds one of a Nintendo Switch) and go out into the world to discover your fate. (Spoiler alert: Your fate seems to be saving the world from the increasingly powerful, though still contained, Calamity Ganon.)

More importantly, for this moment in time, you step out into a world in ruins. Literally, the first thing you encounter is the Temple of Time, which is in shambles. It’s falling down and falling apart, and you pick through its crumbling bones for arrows and small arms. As you come down off the plateau where the temple sits, you are met with ever more evidence of a civilization, and empire, which did not survive that which befell it.

There are big open fields of grass, dotted with trees, and moss covered, tumble down walls. Wooden structures poke out of the hills like they’ve forgotten they aren’t overgrown stalks of grass. Tattered cloths with faded heralds hang dirtied and limp amongst the ruins.

At the same time, the world teems with life. The plains of Hyrule are largely devoid of humanoid habitation, given over to monsters and history, but wild horses cavort, and everywhere you walk you are serenaded by a million tiny insect orchestras. The natural resources are bountiful and you learn to cook what you can find to restore Link to the picture of health and to aid him on his journeys. Once you get beyond the area given over to a state of nature, overshadowed, as it is, by the swirling malignancy of Calamity Ganon where he-it teems around Hyrule Castle, you quickly realize that you are far from alone.

Beyond that immediate desolation and its ghosts, the rest of the world is populated with entrepreneurial spirits, adventurers, travelers, inventors, villagers, and fanatics. They tell you how their communities and their peoples suffered as a result of the Calamity, 100 years ago (a little less than the average lifespan of the people of this world), but how things have returned to a slightly uneasy peace since then. Every village has children, it has young and old people and they all have stories to tell and little problems for you to solve.

In short, though they live in proximity to ruins, they nevertheless live.

A part of me quickly pulled up the simplistic explanation; I’m sure you’ll think of it – it’s an easy one for American liberal guilt and uncritical, cookie cutter analyses of Japanese culture. All of Japanese popular media can be condensed into the atomic bomb if only the West tries hard enough. And maybe the generational gap between the young adults and the elders who remember the calamity can be paralleled by the generational gap between those who remember the war and those, like me, who make up the main part of gaming’s target market.

But it seems unfair, not only to the Japanese who have surmounted any number of calamitous events both before and since the U.S. dropped its bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to the rich world which has so carefully and painstakingly been built and rolled out in the game. Given that BotW is also another installment in an already extensive (though famously convoluted) narrative universe, and the names repeat (Zelda, Link, and Ganon are staples of every game in the series), one gets the impression that by this point the lessons and metaphors can be allowed to function within their own, self-made space.

There is, from a player perspective, a Sisyphean quality to Link’s existence. He has been carried through time on multiple occasions for the purpose of saving Hyrule from Ganon and yet every time a new game comes out, Ganon returns in some new and horrible form. In BotW in particular the veneer of humanity has been eradicated from Calamity Ganon, transmuting him into a magical infection which poisons the land, bubbling up in places where his control is strongest, creating glowing, pulsating growths that injure you when you touch them. He’s no longer the dark wizard who might be familiar from Super Smash Bros. but instead he is a disease, a pollutant, something which has embedded itself into and become a part of the environment rendering the natural world hostile.

Perhaps it whispers of the reactor meltdown in Fukushima. But again, the one-to-one analogy is bitter and unfulfilling after this sumptuous feast of a game.

To put it another way, this is a game where if you sneak up closely enough, you can ride a deer. The detail and care put into it, the number of hours of coding and sound mixing and rendering and writing and translating and acting, makes it impossible to simplify into historical analogy. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take something from it. (And I don’t just mean the soothing lullaby of the sound design.) I think what we should do our best as we face our own calamitous times to remember the villagers and the travelers. Far from being populated exclusively by those who would see Calamity Ganon freed and bring an annihilating waste to what’s left of life in the territories surrounding Hyrule (though there are always some), there are people who did more than survive. They built towns and families and lives. They planted trees and loved each other and their children and recognized that for all the chaos and uncertainty of calamity, it’s not really that much more uncertain than life itself.

So, be cautious, for now. Wash your hands well and often, avoid touching your face, cover your mouth and nose when you sneeze and try to keep a healthy physical distance from others. But don’t forget to love one another, don’t forget to plan for the future, don’t forget to lean out your window and breath in the fresh air, listen to the night sounds, and remember that uncertainty is just another facet of living. It is no different from trying new foods, telling someone you love them for the first time, or unexpectedly hearing a beautiful song.

No detours, a review of Cemetery Beach

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Rating: ★★★★★

Maybe Warren Ellis is in my head, or maybe what he and Jason Howard achieved with Cemetery Beach is just genius, wrapped in subtlety (a shocking claim, given the number of explosions it contains) wreathed and garlanded in weirdness.

If you want to know what’s going on, if you need answers, if you enjoy carefully laid out intricacies, then Cemetery Beach is not for you.

By a certain measure, the 7-issue story (now collected into a single volume) is nothing more than a series of provocations. I see that more as a feature than a bug. It is entirely possible that a year and change of being subscribed to Ellis’ newsletter – Orbital Operations – has rotted my brain, like the chemical inhaled by the gas mask wearing denizens of the outer ring on the planet where Cemetery Beach takes place.

Cemetery Beach provides a vicious, demented contrast to eutopic visions of a post-scarcity world (such as Corey Doctorow’s Walkaway – more on that soon). The unidentified (though by no means unnamed – protagonist, scout, and Earthling Mike Blackburn provides a number of expletive laden possibilities) planet on which the majority of the story takes place is literally made up of the material necessities for life: a substance, a mix of protein, sugar, etc. oozes out of cracks in the mantle; the planet is ripe with refined nuclear material, providing functionally unlimited energy; and a mysterious pool provides the means of extending the human lifespan – the exact process is (perhaps mercifully) vague, but seems to involve fungal infection and cancerous cell growth in addition to longevity.

Whether the found of this – in their words – Utopia are Nazis or not is never entirely clear. The early-20th century military aesthetic of the ruling class automatically produces the comparison, and knowing that the colony was a result of a secret program in the 1930s does little to disabuse the idea. However, they could just as easily be British or American, handily collapsing the distance between the various strains of fanatical social engineering which sprouted up as we moved from the Victorian into the Modern era.

The lack of clarity regarding the exact quasi-historical origins of the hideous situation Mike stumbles upon, as part of his reconnaissance mission from Earth to this recently uncovered project, is a refreshing break from the unwieldy exposition we have come to expect (and accept) from dystopic and/or apocalyptic fiction. While it might be a stretch to say that its absence lends the narrative anything like ‘realism,’ it, at least, does not demand the attenuated suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, while the native guide explains to the non-native (and the audience) how all this came to be… While they get shot at.

Instead both Mike and the audience are left to speculate and extrapolate as to the processes which resulted in the colorful and horrifying tableaus Mike and dissident Grace Moody (imprisoned for “murderous shit”) make their way from the prison in the capitol (inner ring) out to Cemetery Beach (last outpost before the wastes) where Mike’s transport home awaits. All the visitors from “Oldhome” must make up their own minds about this alien, if not totally foreign, world.

This is the point where I say something like: ‘the guiding principle of an extractive “economy” – one encompassing the physical, biological, environmental, etc. – which guides all life on Utopia can be seen as a caricature of neoliberal, late-stage capitalism. A ruling class – whose sole interest is their own self-perpetuation and maintenance of power, an avarice so fervent they operate without care, or seeming awareness, that the end result of their project will be their “utopia” sitting  atop a blasted, toxic wasteland – can be said to reflect the probable outcome of willful inaction on the part of the ruling classes on our Earth to protect any kind of “greater good.”’

But Cemetery Beach can just as easily eschew any kind of overtly political analytic hack job and instead stand as an oasis, a space apart from the dystopic/apocalyptic mainstream.

Sometime after the half-way point, Mike says, “You know, at some point along the way, this stopped being fun.” They have just breached the outer ring, mercilessly slicing their way through the denizens of this perverse, human “cold storage” – the icy waste that Grace Moody called ‘home.’ She checks over the bodies littering the snow, looking for survivors. The moment, a reprieve in the otherwise non-stop, nuclear-powered, at times literally face melting pace of the narrative-action, provides the opportunity to reflect on the real stakes within the story.

Amazingly, it turns out that a simple demand for empathy might be an effective way to solicit it.

Cemetery Beach stands up to do the job which the previous decade’s cinematic revisitations of 90s graphic novels (an era known for its addiction to unremorseful violence, brutality, and sex) has failed to do. The 2008 adaptation of Wanted fell back on the unimaginative horror of having been duped by a shadowy international conspiracy – and having the hot girl you were lusting after die to save the world, and your ass. Then there’s the cognitive dissonance of Colin Firth in the Kingsmen movies – although by 2014, the shadowy international cabal at least had a veneer of political vitality, following the bank bailouts and the increased willingness of the super rich to outright state their plans to retreat to enclosed havens while the rest of the world burns (I’m looking at you, Peter Thiel). We could include the SyFy channel adaptation of 2014’s Deadly Class (also from Image Comics), with its relitigation of the Reagan-Thatcher era cuts to public services. Secret organizations – especially the kind that assassinate people – proliferate.

Warren Ellis is smart enough to know that the people who are most deserving of our compassion, and the people we are all most likely to become are the incidental casualties. Those with the power are likely to throw themselves into the line of fire to protect whatever travesty sustains their way of life. The rest of us will mourn or die as those who never had the chance to decide whether or not we want a revolution.

This isn’t to say that Ellis doesn’t make room for the political gallows humor which fueled the likes of Transmetropolitan (the work which converted me to an Ellis fan). Mike’s loved ones have all met with tragic ends, comprising a laundry list of social ills resulting from willful political inaction spanning the last three decades. The tragedy has left Mike with suicidal tendencies (a quest for “the good death” according to Grace) and a martyrous inclination to self-sacrifice. These traditional affectations of the male ego are nonetheless more palatable than the sexual assault and provocative political misbehavior which negatively impacts so much of the contemporary work produced by his generational cohort (yes, I mean Alan Moore).

It might be that fridging his protagonist’s entire family and social circle enables Ellis to avoid the sexist under-/overtones of allowing his hero to off-load his survivor’s guilt onto the nearest only sort-of vulnerable female acquaintance. Instead, it takes on a more holistic character, for a Freudian psychological substitution, with Mike seeking absolution for the failure to save one world, by saving another from the ravages of institutionalized madness.

Given that Ellis and Howard had scarcely more than 150 pages to work with, ‘Everyone I love is dead, at least let me save one person,’ is a succinct and digestible motivation. (The motivational Occam’s Razor, if you will.)

Cemetery Beach is a wild, 7-issue ride, and will leave you inquisitive and energized; two things we’ll need to face the coming future. After all, it’s already here. (You’ve been trained for this, hold on tight.*

*: to quote from my favorite part of Mr. Ellis’ newsletter

Trials of Communication and Triumphs of Empathy, a review of Avi Silver’s Two Dark Moons

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DISCLAIMER: I do have a personal connection with Avi Silver, the author of this work. We met in freshman year of college and roomed together the following year. It is up to the reader to decide if that kind of intimacy and co-habitation makes a critic more or less likely to extend unreasonable courtesy towards a given author. I was graciously sent an electronic advanced reader’s copy of the book, and the review that follows is as honest and thoughtful as I am able to render a personal opinion. 

The world of Ateng is one rife with ritual and auspice. 

Ama and Cheheng, the two moons in the night sky over Ateng, govern most aspects of life in the hmun. In Ateng, the heavens do more than assign purported characteristics of personality, as the zodiac is said to do in our world. The moons one is born under determine most aspects of one’s life in the hmun; they govern gender assignation — male, female, or both; they inform what marriages would be considered beneficial; what positions one may hold in the community (leadership, responsibilities, etc); and more, in addition to the more familiar behavior and personality traits. 

The struggle of being out of joint, an interruption in the flow of life and tradition has been a part of Sohmeng’s life ever since her birth. But a catastrophe which resulted in a total collapse (literally) of the traditional migration of the hmun between its two mountain top territories, also ultimately stole the lives of her parents and stalled any chance of Sohmeng and her generational cohort of completing the ritual known as tengmunji which would usher them into adulthood.

The trappings of childhood grate at Sohmeng Par (the second name supposedly denotes the aspect of the moons in the sky on the night of her birth), and her impetuous, “speak first, ask for forgiveness later” character has gotten her into trouble again. The beginning of the novel finds her arguing with her brother as she goes to plead her case to the council of hmun elders.

The narrative of Two Dark Moons is the deceptively simple outer garment of a complex mystery. It follows in the tradition of “Young Adult Fantasy” or “coming of age” novels in that it includes a home, a fall, an adventure beyond the boundaries of what is known, and the journey to return, during which it becomes clear that the person who left the village at the beginning is a stranger to the one who now attempts to return. 

Instead, I believe that the beating heart of Two Dark Moons are the questions of language and communication – epistemology and belonging – which it engages so effortlessly. These questions are so intrinsic to the characters and the story that they are almost rendered invisible.

Every world, every community, every person has a story, a mythology, a structure which defines them and their place in creation. One of the great myths of humankind, passed down from the Ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, that encompass the Torah, the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, ties language to divinity. We need not invoke the fall of Babel and the fracturing of mankind into disparate groups unable to communicate. Prometheus may have given humankind fire but Thoth taught Pharaohs and their priests to write and in so doing changed the fate of humanity forever.

The utilitarian definition of language sees it as a means of conveying information, words become signs which point to objects or abstract concepts thereby allowing individuals to articulate information about the world. It is also the framework within which any group or community makes sense of the world around them, and of their place within it.

Without sliding into linguistic determinism, Silver’s novel carefully lays out how language reflects and perpetuates the knowledge and structures of a given community. It is no surprise to those familiar with the convention of the “coming-of-age novel” that the limitations of culture and community, and the impositions they place upon the conception of the self, are tested by the experience of travelling outside and beyond them. 

Constructed languages (or “ConLangs” [1]) are a misunderstood though increasingly prevalent aspect of science-/speculative-/fantasy-fiction. In Two Dark Moons, Silver does more than apply the anti-censorship obfuscation tactic of TV (“She’s a fracking Cylon!”) or the use of “foreign” language as a way of making the Other more remote and unknown (“Cthulhu fhtagn” or “the practice of Kelno’reem”). Language is a vital component of life in  and structure of communication in the book form an important dimension of the story from the very beginning.

Language is a constant battle in Two Dark Moons. Sohmeng, the hot-headed protagonist, struggles to communicate, her “speak first, apologize later” attitude has landed her in hot water (the ‘again’ is implicit) at the beginning of the novel. 

As she makes her case before the council of elders, 24 total, representing each of the lunar phases, with the exception of Minhal – the darkest night, the “bad sign” of the new moons, when the Gods’ eyes are turned away from the hmun. 

As she prepares and makes her case to the council of elders, it becomes clear that Sohmeng is no stranger to the difficulties of communication. The complexities of clarity and diplomacy are rendered vividly. 

The struggle to remain both truthful and diplomatic (the first of which, for Sohmeng, is fundamentally compromised by the circumstances of her birth), to balance being understood and to convince others to give you what you want, is put front and center. 

At home, among the hmun, Sohmeng has already lost the battle and tipped the scales more toward brutal clarity, and suffers the subsequent social isolation familiar to anyone with an undisciplined tongue. Sohmeng is the victim of another trait of those who find themselves too close to the edge: she sees with great clarity the threads of responsibility and choice that bind her community together. She has the consigned/committed pariah’s certainty that if people would just take her seriously, life might be easier for everyone.

Somheng’s parents were traders and as such, she speaks the trader pidgin used to conduct transactions between different hmun[2], putting her a full step closer to bilingualism than anyone else in her community. The cognitive and intellectual flexibility introduced with any form of bilingualism (a trait the novel engenders through the use of the incorporation of hmunpa into the narrative), a subtle alienation from a unified or totalizing description of the world which can sometimes develop as a result of monolingualism, primes Sohmeng (and encourages the reader) to successfully re-evaluate the world around her and her position within it. 

Two Dark Moons does not limit itself to exploring language as an instrument of epistemology. It also commits itself to the complex project of understanding sentience and communication in both non-human and non-linguistic terms. In our world, the efforts of conservationists, naturalists, and cognitive scientists have done their part to show that the rest of the animal kingdom has as much claim to sensibility and complex cognition as does humankind and, moreover, that the distance between “human” and “animal” is insignificant.

The forests in the valley from which the five fingers of Ateng emerge shelter a reptilian apex predator, the Sãoni. Even from the safety of the hmun they are all too real to be dismissed as some kind of boogeyman. Like the stories European explorers brought back of panthers and leopards – natives ceding territory to the uncontested regents of the jungle – the Sãoni are a death sentence to those exiled or separated from the community. 

Where Silver’s world building and empathic sensitivity shine, setting the shared world of Eiji and Ateng apart, is their refusal to recognize the traditional barriers of intelligence and love. Anthropomorphized animal narrators are a staple of fantasy fiction, as is the reversal of the seemingly “animal” into an intelligent Other. Silver chooses to remind us that speech is not the be-all, end-all of communication. 

Even as our own scientific exploration now shows that elephants, whales, and dolphins possess a greater capacity for complex thought than previously afforded to them by humanity, the colony of Sãoni she joins show Somheng that viewing language-based communication as the pinnacle of intelligent evolution is an affectation of humanity. 

Ultimately, the demand for complex empathy across species is a lesson which prepares Sohmeng (and the audience) for the much more complicated business of empathizing with those human strangers who look and speak in unfamiliar ways.

It is easy to focus on the tradition of social commentary which has defined speculative fiction from early eu-/utopias through the tradition of feminist and queer SF/F, a tradition of which Two Dark Moons is undeniably a part. Indeed, the novel works diligently to challenge the audience’s assumptions regarding the “natural” organization of human beings and expands the possibilities of gender assignations, linguistic conventions, and reproductive configurations, in addition to more common topics in mainstream SF/F such as styles of governance and environmental systems. 

Silver is also able to impart a wisdom so often lacking from the ever-rising tide of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction which threatens to overwhelm every imaginable media outlet. They recognize that a community and a culture, even in the midst of crisis, is often able to carry on with a semblance of normalcy which can conceal impending catastrophe. As an author, Silver is willing to confront the re-traumatization inherent in history and discovery. There are questions which lurk in the caves and hollows which will never yield answers and the grief of them is something Sohmeng, and ultimately her hmun, must learn to live with, without hope or promise of closure. 

There is a transcendental impulse in Two Dark Moons, best recognized and understood by looking out at the world and knowing enough of life and death to be able to name what is before and around us, that great cycle of which we are a part, as “One.” The decision not to hold one’s self apart from the complexity and intricacies of “everything” reminds us that we are governed as much by the salt of the earth as we are by the movement of the heavens.

Perhaps my only complaint, and it’s merely a matter of form and personal preference, is that the story ends not quite on a cliffhanger (that comes at the start of the novel, actually) but with an unrepentant promise of a sequel. There is much still to learn of Ateng, Eiji, the hmun and the travails that await them, but in a world gone mad for sequels, prequels, series, et. al. it can be exhausting to add another to the list. That having been said, I would not trade my experience traveling through Eiji for anything. 

Two Dark Moons is now available at Amazon. Grab a copy! (Not an affiliate link)

1. “Constructed Languages” can refer to a variety of different types of languages which are intentionally developed by individuals. There are conlangs which are nominally dedicated to facilitating global communication or even communication with extraterrestrials, such as Esperanto and AI. However, the kind currently proliferating are those often referred to as “Art Languages” or “ArtLangs” which are languages developed as part of a wider artistic endeavor or for personal use and/or entertainment. The most well-known artlang is undoubtedly Tolkien’s Elvish, though Dothraki (developed for television by David Peterson) and Klingon are not unfamiliar. Both art- and conlangs are held to fairly stringent linguistic standards, and to be a fully developed “language” must meet the same requirements as any organic or naturally occurring language. For example, they require grammars and vocabularies which exceed a specific quantity. Therefore, most conlangs are developed over years and decades and are the result of an astounding quantity of work and thought. For more information about Constructed Languages and the people who love them, check out the Language Construction Society. (They have a really great convention, I went to it once, it changed my life.) ↵

2. I think it is a collective noun, it could follow the plural prefix format and be bahmun as a plural, but that might be a human/animal plural instead. Without a full grammar for the language, this will have to remain speculation. I hope that we do get a chance to dig into the linguistic world of Ateng in the future.  ↵