Secrets of Winnie the Pooh (and other books)

THE POOH PERPLEX: A Freshman Casebook by Frederick C. Crews is a drop-dead brilliant satire on literary criticism. The supposed premise is that the work of A.A. Milne couldn’t possibly have stayed popular so many decades if it wasn’t full of Deep Hidden Meaning, then collecting a set of mock critical essays trying to unearth the meaning.

Could it be a Christian allegory with Winnie the Pooh as Adam? After all, in the story of Pooh and the Honey Tree he’s told not to eat food of a forbidden tree, tries to do it anyway … and falls?

What about Marxism? Remember when Rabbit trapped Pooh in his doorway and used him for one week’s unpaid labor as a towel rack?

Tortured aesthete? (“I have treasured this book since Mummy was swept away by cirrhosis of the liver.”) Freudian? Something else? I suspect some of this is parodying specific critics or critical schools of the day (back in the 1960s) that I don’t recognize, but it still works. I laughed a lot.

EVE by Victor LaValle and Brittany Peer reminds me a lot of Kirby’s Kamandi as a young girl raised in an isolated bunker discovers the post-apocalyptic world outside is nothing like the one she expected. And it turns out she’s not the person she thinks she is either. Lavalle said his inspiration was his childhood fave Battle of the Planets where he got to see kids like himself saving the world; that and writing a story with a black lead where race wasn’t significant. LaValle isn’t reinventing the wheel but he makes the wheel spin really well.KRAZY KAT: 1916-1918 by George Herriman collects the first two years of Herriman’s legendarily bizarre strip. Krazy Kat wanders around his town doing good, mooning over short-tempered Ignatz Mouse and pining for the moments (there are many) where Ignatz brains him with a brick. Peculiar, and I suspect an acquired taste but one I’ve acquired. The book also includes several examples of Herriman’s earlier strips and some background articles.

THE PAPER MAGICIAN by Charlie N. Holmberg is set in an alternate early 1900s where wizards work by bonding to specific materials such as metal, rubber or stone; protagonist Ceony is a scholarship student at magic school, dismayed to learn she’s being apprenticed to a paper magician simply because there’s nobody else who wants it and the authorities don’t want the discipline to die out. Ceony’s mentor proves eccentric but likeable but Ceony still isn’t happy. Then it turns out the mentor’s being stalked by someone whose bound themselves to flesh and blood with all the potential for cruelty that implies.

This started well, expository but focusing on Ceony’s feelings about her situation. However it gets more expository as it goes along and the last third is a long flashback about the mentor’s tormented life. Thumbs down.

A LONELY BROADCAST by Kel Byron has a woman return to her hometown to run the isolated radio station and discover the reason for its many strange rules (announcing an alert when fog rolls in) is that the mountainous forests around the area are as haunted and monstrous as Man-Thing’s hangout near Citrusville. Byron is very good at capturing weirdness but like Welcome to Nightvale she doesn’t build it into a coherent narrative. In the end, it didn’t work for me.

Neither did Clifford Simak’s WORLDS WITHOUT END even though he’s a favorite of mine. The title story is a novella about a technician who provides dreams to order for people going into cryosleep; it turns out the dreams are being covertly reprogrammed, but by whom? This one’s good but the second story is weaker and the third one is way too talkie.

#SFWApro. Eve cover by Peer, all rights to images remain with current holders.