Category Archives: Is Our Writers Learning?

“She attempts a face of what I presume to be her invisible suffering. Her brow furrows as though she’s about to take a difficult shit or else have a furious but forgettable orgasm.” So Miranda Fitch, the pain-ridden protagonist of ALL’S WELL by Mona Awad, describes one commercial for a supposed miracle pain-reliever. She is unconvinced.

Miranda was a stage actor until a fall inflicted her with crippling injuries and chronic pain that nobody has been able to treat. Now she works as a drama teacher, currently staging Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. It’s not an A-list play and the students, and the parents, and the administration, would rather she put on one of the Great Plays, like say Macbeth. Miranda’s pushing back but losing; she’s also disgruntled that the department’s star player, Briana, has the leading role when she’s not the best for it. Everything’s wrong, Miranda’s given up on life and even her friends are growing tired of it.

Then Miranda meets three strange men (linked throughout the book with Macbeth‘s witches) who make cryptic promises of help. When she touches Briana during a rehearsal, Briana comes down with Miranda’s ill health and Miranda starts to heal. The rest of her pain goes into her physical therapist, whom it’s implied is a hack: he doesn’t listen to patients and is happy to earn his pay keeping them in recovery forever. With her renewed energy and some help from the three men she switches from Macbeth to All’s Well, gets a love life — nothing can go wrong now, right? But of course, there’s a price to pay for miracles …

The first part of the book is strictly real-world in its handling of Miranda and her problem but it kept me reading because the flyleaf description implied fantasy would be coming, and because Awad’s writing style is excellent. That said, it feels uncomfortably heavy on disability cliches such as the magical cure and the possibility her pain is all imaginary; if I had any experience with this kind of disability would I have liked the book as much?

The fantasy elements work fine at first but around two-thirds of the way into the book they fell apart. The story becomes surreal, slipping in and out of dreams and normal consciousness — or so it seems — and I’m not sure what was real or what wasn’t. When the three men and a number of other spirits show up to watch the performance it’s clear they’re there for payback but it’s unclear what. Or why Miranda sees her current lover transforming into her ex-husband.

It feels like part of the bargain is that Miranda cross further into evil but maybe not. Absolutely nothing is clear, and as Brandon Sanderson says, when the ending revolves around magic, the author has to make it clear how it works. Awad doesn’t.

I still enjoyed the first two-thirds though.

#SFWApro. Cover by Jonathan Bush.

Ernest Cline’s READY PLAYER ONE is a good example of how books are a product of their time, though like Skull the Slayer, it’s not always in a bad way.

Most obviously, a book that’s drenched in nostalgia for 1980s pop culture will inevitably lose its appeal as the decades and the generations go by. I don’t think this is such a terrible thing: writing a wildly successful, popular book (even if I couldn’t get into it myself) is no small accomplishment, even if it doesn’t become, as they say, an “enduring classic.” Very little of what any of us write will endure.

The setting — the Oasis multiplayer online gameworld/social network where everyone in the dystopian mid-21st century spends their lives — also reflects the book came out in 2011. Social networks had a much more positive sheen then, without concerns about trolling, cyberbullying, online harassment and misinformation. In Ready Player One the bad guys are out to take over Oasis and monetize it, where creator James Halliday was an idealist. The past twelve years have made it clear how the people who create social networks and run online platforms are anything but idealists.

Halliday, as most of y’all probably know, died some time before the start of the book, leaving his fortune and the rights to Oasis to whoever can solve a series of puzzles built around Halliday’s nostalgia for 1980s pop culture. Our protagonist, Wade, is one of the “gunters” trying to win the McGuffin along with his buddy Aech and fellow player Art3mis, whom he crushes on due to her witty, self-deprecating blog posts. Can any of them solve the riddle? Can they do it before the corporate drones succeed and thereby seize control of Oasis?

I’ve often wondered if “show, don’t tell” matters to anyone outside writers and editors and this book is an argument that it doesn’t. It’s very, very Tell: we learn about the creator’s life in incredible detail, most of which is completely unnecessary. Cline tells us lots of other stuff about 1980s pop culture, the Oasis world and more. It didn’t hurt the book’s sales at all.

One thing I wish he’d shown us is Art3mis’ allegedly witty writing. Telling us someone is funny or charming or silver-tongued doesn’t work as well as showing — though that said, it’s better than having them say something dull or trite and having everyone act like they’re clever. Art3mis breaking down John Hughes films into the Dorky Boys Trilogy and the Dorky Girls Trilogy isn’t terribly deep or witty so perhaps it’s good Cline stopped there. In fairness, I’ve seen much worse, like a book excerpt where “you’re still beautiful” is all it takes to qualify as “silver tongued.”

Criticisms about how Cline writes Art3mis/Wade and the gatekeeping aspects of nerd culture are, I think, accurate, but my own dissatisfaction with the book was more personal. The gatekeeping criticism refers to things like Wade effortlessly flaunting his superior 1980s pop-culture knowledge to crush other gunters. This kind of one-upmanship is entirely plausible (and not just in nerd stuff) but I found Wade annoying rather than cool when he did it. I know lots of stuff about Silver Age comics but I don’t feel the urge to use it in the same way (“I’m sorry, do you seriously think “Indestructible Creatures of Nightmare Island” was JLA #42? It was #40, you imbecile!”).

More than that, the sheer, endless quantities of trivia left me numb. It’s less like geeking out over at Atomic Junk Shop and more like talking to someone who can’t shut up about their passion: I admit I don’t follow the show so I can’t discuss the latest episode, they respond by sharing a scene-by-scene breakdown in detail. Sure, there’s billions at stake in the gunters’ exploits but that doesn’t make discussions of Swordquest games or quoting Wargames (Wade’s memorized every line, along with tons of Halliday’s other fixations) any better. Though like Harlan Ellison’s Jeffty Is Five I might have liked it better as a teen or twentysomething when I was much more immersed in fiction. As is, it’s like Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses — the book becomes a deep dive into the life of Brian Wilson and the music of the Beach Boys and I had zero interest in either.

Which is another way of saying that this presses the wrong nostalgia buttons for me. Cline, as he makes clear here, is writing his version of 1980s pop culture; mine has much more comics, more SF novels, different TV touchstones and very little videogames. That’s not something “wrong” with the book, it just makes it hard for me to connect with it, the same as if it were all about 1980s sports nostalgia. It”s also annoying that Cline claims some 1970s stuff, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the TV show Land of the Lost as part of the 1980s. He may have been watching them in the ’80s but by that logic I Love Lucy could qualify as 1980s nostalgia.

Even though John Scalzi at the Cline link above describes the 1980s as “the Cosby era” (which of course is also of it’s time — who’d want to connect a book with Bill Cosby now?) the effect of Cline drawing on his personal nostalgia fest means it’s very white and very male: no Michael Jackson, no hip-hop or rap, more Family Ties references than Cosby Show, passing mentions of Transformers and Gobots but not Jem or anything else primarily girl-coded.

That said, I imagine Cline will do fine without my giving the book a thumbs up.

#SFWApro. Cover design by Christopher Brand, JLA cover by Murphy Anderson, all rights to images remain with current holders.

Rick Emerson’s UNMASK ALICE: LSD, Satanic Panic and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries is a good but flawed book, worth reading but often best taken with a grain of salt.

Emerson’s subject is Beatrice Sparks, the author of the supposedly True Story Go Ask Alice. Sparks actually made the whole thing up, pitching it to celebrity Art Linkletter who blamed his daughter’s recent suicide on drugs. Linkletter’s company published the book, but without any mention of Sparks, creating the impression it was a raw, unedited diary. Drugs were a big, controversial issue (President Nixon made them bigger to justify cracking down on liberals, hippies and blacks) and the book caught the zeitgeist perfectly, despite some reviewers who questioned it’s authenticity. The fact that it’s still being published, read and enjoyed years later shows Sparks did something right

Eager to replicate her success, Sparks wrote several more diaries. Jay’s Journal is the only one based on a real individual, teenage suicide Alden Barrett. His mother gave the diary to Sparks, hoping she could turn it into something other families could learn from (Emerson is very good showing how 50 years ago recognizing and treating depression weren’t much beyond the level of bleeding patients with leeches). Instead Sparks fictionalized it into the story of Jay, a teenager lured into Satanism and witchcraft which led to his death.

It was another fine job sensing the zeitgeist: the 1970s were full of fears about the occult, Satanism, etc., manifesting in fiction with The Exorcist and The Omen and assorted Marvel horror books. Emerson argues Jay’s Journal was a major factor in stirring the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s, though he doesn’t offer any proof: the trigger cited in his accounts was fears about Dungeons and Dragons. And like I said, worries about Satan corrupting our kids were around before the book came out (and I think of them as largely old fears in new bottles)

Turning that family’s child into a monstrous fiction and passing it off as truth was a shitty thing to do. Beyond that, Sparks seems to be a thorough grifter, to the point of writing cover blurbs from non-existent doctors for her date-rape-and-AIDS diary It Happened To Nancy. She also constantly inflated her backstory, claiming she’d received various diaries from her patients when she was a therapist (she wasn’t) and adding a Ph.D. to her name.

I get the feeling Emerson’s more sympathetic towards her than I am: in his eyes she’s desperate to become an important writer, even if she has to bullshit her way to that status (I’ll come back to that point). I don’t believe he mentions how much she made off the books or whether he tried to find out (there’s no index to look for such details so I’m not sure whether that impression was accurate).

Like Bad Blood, Emerson’s account shows how badly the system deals with this kind of scam artist. Despite multiple red flags — Sparks could never keep her story about how she got any of the diaries straight — and factual errors (Nancy dies of AIDS in two years, which is freaky fast), Sparks’ publishers had no problems swallowing or pretending to swallow their truth. Newspaper reporters writing about Jay’s Journal never talked to the Barretts, even though Alden was known to be the basis for Jay.

Nobody questioned Jay’s story any more than they questioned the Satanic preschools or the occult powers of Dungeons and Dragons; as Slacktivist says, there’s always an audience that wants to believe this bullshit is real and the media and the legal system seem happy to go along. Emerson’s sometimes overly hard on the reporters — when I wrote about authors, I certainly didn’t go into fact-check mode to verify the story of their life. Then again, the ability of Satanism “experts” or someone like Sparks to get away with it shows the limits of running on basic trust.

But that brings us to the flaws in the book. Emerson acknowledges that his criticism of media gullibility leaves him open to questions about his accuracy. He states up front that all dialog is an actual quote; thoughts expressed in italics are from letters or diaries; while some of his sources use pseudonyms, he’s kept them to a minimum.

Trouble is, he writes a lot about people’s thoughts without any italics. For example when Sparks is at a major publishing event, she’s simmering that despite Go Ask Alice‘s success, she’s not recognized as the superstar author she is — but at least she’s in the winner’s circle, and that’s something. Most of this is not italicized. Does it have a source? If so, what? Or is it Emerson going the What She Must Have Thought route. That’s legit if marked as such but it’s not.

I could turn to the footnotes to find out — oh, there aren’t any. Emerson asserts there’s no point to having lots of citations when most of the facts can be verified with a Google search or a phone call; he wanted a fast moving book, not one bogged down with citations. But that’s the point of footnotes or endnotes, to provide citations without slowing things down.

I agree not everything needs to be footnoted: I have plenty in Undead Sexist Cliches but I don’t footnote things like who Emma Goldman was. However “you can google it” is not an excuse; “you can find it with a phone call” even less. Without footnotes I have no way to know which is which — and even if I called most of the people Emerson interviewed, would they talk to me? And would google turn up the personal letters and diaries Emerson drew on?

With footnotes I could see where Emerson drew Sparks’ thought balloons from; without them I’m suspicious whether they’re real. It doesn’t help that Emerson holds up Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City as his model because Larson had no qualms presenting speculation as fact. But at least Larson acknowledges the speculation in the endnotes; Emerson doesn’t have any, making accuracy more nebulous.

Unmask Alice is still a good book and I don’t feel the entire thing is a pack of lies. I am not so sure about the truth on the margins.

#SFWApro. Covers by Emily Weigel, Rich Buckler and Kemp Ward, top to bottom.

BLESS YOUR HEART: Fairy Tales of a Trailer Park Queen I by Kimbra Swain is an urban fantasy whose protagonist, Grace, is a fae royal in exile, currently living in an Alabama trailer park. Under the orders of this mythos’ magical council, the Sanhedrin (I have no idea why a magical body composed mostly of fae would pick a distinctively Jewish name) she helps out local law enforcement so she and top cop Dylan Riggs wind up investigating the supernatural murder of two kids, plus dealing with their relationship.

This one didn’t work for me. No sooner do we visit the crime scene, which Grace declares the most horrible thing she’s ever seen than she and Dylan take several chapters to discuss their relationship. I’m fine with this being a fantasy romance but the juxtaposition didn’t work. Nor did one big reveal which I won’t go into. And Grace doesn’t feel particularly fae — if she were a wizard or a djinn it wouldn’t have changed much.

CLARK AND DIVISION by Naomi Hirahira works very well. It’s 1944 and Nisei protagonist Aki Ito and her family have just been released from Manzanar and sent to Chicago (the government doesn’t want Those People back in California). Aki’s adored older sister, Rose, went on ahead to set things up but by the time Aki and her parents arrive, Rose is dead. The police consider it a suicide, possibly linked to her getting an abortion.

Aki can’t believe it so she begins moving through the Japanese-American community in Chicago, and sometimes the white world, trying to find answers. The mystery works and didn’t play out as I expected, but the real pull is the setting. A world of Nisei and Issei (Japanese-born Americans) uprooted from their homes, needing work but having a hard time finding it, dealing with racism and wondering about their friends or family still in the camps or fighting in Europe with the 442nd Nisei. Hirahira knows her stuff — she collected oral histories of post-camp life for a nonfiction book — and it shows.

As it’s Halloween, rather than post a book cover, here’s an unrelated but spooky one by Joseph Eberle.#SFWApro. All rights to image remain with current holder.