Many horror fans would agree that Ramsey Campbell is the quintessential British modern master of the genre. If not, they should give this book a try. Dark Companions is one of the author’s earliest short story collections, but also one of his best. Campbell uncommonly and artfully bridges the Old World Gothic-style tale with the modern horror terrain exemplified by Stephen King and later Clive Barker, and Dark Companions is a prime example of that. These are mostly ghost stories of a sort, and the majority of them are a unique enough riff on that theme, but what really gives Campbell’s yarns their wallop is the absolutely superb writing on display here. Even the less successful pieces in the collection are a worthy investment of one’s time for the sheer beauty of the sentences alone; but luckily, the majority of the tales in Dark Companions are brilliant.
The opening story in this collection, Mackintosh Willy, won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and deservedly so. In it, a young boy’s crime against a homeless man is avenged from beyond the grave. Other standouts are Down There, where an office building’s sub-basement houses something monstrous, Out of Copyright, in which an anthologist of obscure dark stories finds his holy grail . . . an unwittingly releases an entropic evil into the world, Little Voices, where a priggish childless teacher finds herself haunted by the spirit of a puckish but desolate infant that tests her patience and her sanity, and The Companion, which finds its protagonist braving an abandoned fairground ride with unexpectedly creepy results.
But undoubtedly, the real star of this collection is The Pattern, about a haunted field whose evil is not bounded by time. Rarely does a story truly shock me, but the ending of this one caught me right in my quivering heart, and I found myself only vacating my bed to void my bladder quite reluctantly, and then returning to it as quickly as I could. Maybe it was because the main character was, like myself, an artist, or maybe it had to do with me being somewhat agoraphobic. But I think it owed more to the fact that an evil which could freely violate the laws of physics (namely the impossibility of traveling back in time) seemed like it would hardly be constrained by something as paltry as being a mere piece of fiction, and that it could spring wholly into existence simply for the fact that I had opened the pages of Mr. Campbell’s book and read about it. Beyond the tale’s scare factor, its title also has multiple levels of meaning, all the more so for its protagonist being a painter.
A few of these pieces left me with more questions than answers, but they were no less scary for that. The Puppets, for example, is undeniably about a haunted Punch and Judy show (which are pretty creepy to begin with, it must be said), but the question I had at the end is, was Mr. Ince, the proprietor and operator of the show, the poltergeist behind the scenes or simply another puppet? And perhaps that was the point. That kind of thing is hard for veteran horror writers to pull off, much less one only about a third of the way into his career as Campbell was when he penned this. Another such story was The Show Goes On, which had a vague and claustrophobic ending that somehow works despite the confusion. Campbell even manages to inject some dark humor here and there, such as in Heading Home, where the title, it is gradually revealed, is quite literal. And in Baby, an old alcoholic is relentlessly followed by the baby carriage once used by the bag lady he murdered.
Out of the twenty-one stories in Dark Companions, there were really only two that I didn’t care for, both near the back of the volume. The big revelation at the end of Conversion, as well as the second person point-of-view (an unusual choice), felt a little too gimmicky. And The Chimney, after a pretty solid set-up, doesn’t quite deliver on the menacing possibilities of its premise. Even these were enjoyable enough though, and as always, Campbell’s dazzling way with words makes each story a gem to read. These two just didn’t quite have the sparkle of the others. But for my money, two semi-duds out of twenty-one stories makes this collection a real treasure chest for fans of British horror stories in general and Ramsey Campbell fans in particular. If you can find it, this collection is not to be missed!
In the late eighties and early nineties, horror anthologies were being released (or re-released, as the case may be) right and left, and having only recently discovered my love of the genre, I picked up several of them. One of my acquisitions of this period was Cutting Edge, edited by Dennis Etchison, who went on a few years after this was published to become president of the Horror Writers Association. Well, I have decided to re-read these anthologies—at least the ones I’ve kept—and review them for the blog, beginning with this one.
As is customary with these anthologies, Etchison offers an introduction, wherein he laments the sorry state of the genre during the seventies and early eighties. But horror fiction was definitely beginning to mature by this period, and volumes such as this one are the proof. Specialty markets like Cemetery Dance were still largely on the horizon, but the new wave of horror had arrived, ushered in by the advent of splatterpunk and by the phenomenal success of Stephen King, who would drop his atom bomb of a novel It the same year that Cutting Edge was published: 1986.
This book is broken into four loosely-connected sections: Bringing It All Back Home, They’re Coming for You, Walking the Headlights and Dying All the Time. The first section opens with Peter Straub’s Blue Rose, the first piece in what would ultimately become an intricately connected universe spanning several novels, novellas and short stories, anchored by the Blue Rose Trilogy of novels—Koko, Mystery and The Throat. One of the themes that runs through the Blue Rose stuff is child abuse, and that is true in this story as well, though here it’s about the assorted cruelties siblings can inflict on each other when left with little parental guidance. Harry Beevers is a nine-year-old child who enjoys tormenting his younger brother, but it’s clear that it’s cyclical, as Harry’s older brother abuses him, and on up the line. When Harry discovers a book on hypnotic suggestion and finds his little brother to be the perfect guinea pig, his experiments become more and more sinister and send him on a path that will culminate in the vile acts he commits during the Vietnam War, well-documented in the novel Koko. This is unquestionably one of the best pieces in the anthology, and a great choice to set the tone for the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, the other two stories under this heading, Joe Haldeman’s The Monster and Karl Edward Wagner’s Lacunae, are among the weakest entries in Cutting Edge. The Monster is another comment on the atrocities of Vietnam wherein the author plays with the concept of split personality, and it not only doesn’t work as horror but feels dated and borderline racist, while Wagner’s Lacunae offers an interesting premise but ultimately fails to deliver on it.
They’re Coming for You begins with W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Pale Trembling Youth, a punk ghost story that’s moderately better than the two stories preceding it, though it could’ve done with some fleshing out. Marc Laidlaw’s Muzak for Torso Murders steps it up a couple of notches with a darkly funny tale of a serial killer outdone by dear old mom. Roberta Lannes’s Goodbye, Dark Love is one of those stories where the twist at the end inspires you to read it again with the new knowledge in mind (like how you search for all the clues with a second viewing of The Sixth Sense) though the subject matter may put some readers off from another reading. Definitely one of the more disturbing stories, and quite graphic, but all-in-all a solid entry. Charles L. Grant’s Out There is a quietly metaphorical tale of body horror, while Steve Rasnic Tem gives us one the book’s best offerings in Little Cruelties, in which the narrator notes how the city inflicts its little cruelties on him . . . with a heavy dose of irony. In George Clayton Johnson’s beautifully written piece The Man with the Hoe, the narrator justifies his brutality against the neighborhood cats by meditating on Charles Markham’s titular poem. They’re Coming for You is rounded out by Les Daniels’ story of the same name, another piece of black humor in which a man who fears vengeance from the spirits of his murdered wife and her lover gets something far worse instead.
The opening piece of the third section (Walking the Headlights) is Richard Christian Matheson’s Vampire, and it can be classified as either a poem or a story, though in the end it has little to recommend it beyond that novelty. At least it’s brief; I’m not sure I could’ve taken more than a couple of pages of it. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Lapses is also structurally innovative—not to the extent of Matheson’s piece, but it’s far more successful with what it does. Yarbro explores the terror of memory lapses that grow ever more pronounced, drawing them out to their inevitable conclusion. William F. Nolan’s The Final Stone is a modern-incarnation-of-Jack-the-Ripper story that starts off with a good dose of humor but quickly veers off into standard territory.
Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle (whose work I’ve never encountered outside of this collection) is the winner here for sheer suspense, as it follows a teen boy who trails after his girlfriend into her creepy old school building one night in the hopes of losing his virginity and encounters something quite disturbing there. But it’s the next piece, Ramsey Campbell’s The Hands, that wound up being my favorite story in the book. A man decides to take refuge from the rain in an unassuming city church one day, but things immediately take a turn for the surreal, and it only gets weirder . . . and darker . . . from there. This is how you handle religious-themed horror, folks. Campbell is a true master of the genre, arguably the best living horror author produced by Britain, and that’s saying a lot. This story is one of his masterpieces. He makes this stuff look effortless. I recently picked up a collection of Campbell’s short stories called Dark Companions, which just got bumped to the front of my reading pile thanks to this story.
The Bell, Ray Russell’s take on ye olde pact-with-the-devil tale, is modest and mostly forgettable, while Lost Souls gives us an all-too-short episode in the ongoing saga of Clive Barker’s supernatural detective Harry D’Amour. It feels pleasantly anti-Hollywood and down-to-earth, or as down-to-earth as a story about a demon-hunting detective can be. I really wish the author would give us more Harry D’Amour stories like this one; this awesome character is criminally underused.
The last section of the book, Dying All the Time, like the first section, consists of only three stories, of which Robert Bloch’s Reaper is the best of the three. Bloch manages to capture just the right balance of humor and horror in this tragicomic parable of an old man who strikes a deal with the Grim Reaper to postpone his own demise with predictably horrible results; the twist at the end is note-perfect. However, Edward Bryant’s The Transfer—about a woman with an unusual power (I think)—has an alluring premise but ultimately was confusing and unsatisfying. Which brings me to the final story, Whitley Strieber’s Pain. Strieber claims this was the last thing he wrote before he became aware of his repressed memories of alien encounters. Okay. Starting off like the darker side of your uncle’s wacko conspiracy theories (the Vril Society gets a shout-out), it then shifts 180 degrees and becomes a lesson in just how relative pleasure and pain can be, as a beautiful young woman who may or may not be an incarnation of Death introduces the protagonist to an experiment that teaches him to see his dreary life in a whole new light. It’s a surprisingly emotional story that, against all odds, somehow succeeds in landing its message.
Overall, this collection was not as strong as I remembered. Funny how one can experience the same stories very differently twenty-five years later. I did recall the Campbell story being one of the better ones in the book, and that turned out to be the standout here. Straub’s story too had an impact on me when I read it as a teen; indeed, it was this piece, along with the novel Ghost Story, that made me a lifelong fan of this author, and it’s easily my second favorite story in Cutting Age, followed by Nicholas Royle’s Irrelativity, for me the scariest story of the bunch if not necessarily the most disturbing. Beyond that, there are about six or seven really good stories, most of which can probably be found in better anthologies or collections. Severalofthem can also be found online now. Etchison’s intro is interesting but not particularly enlightening, and it comes off a little whiny. Unless you’re a completist, I would pass over this in favor of better anthologies of the same era, like Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces or David G. Hartwell’s The Color of Evil, as well as the collected works of the authors themselves.
Anne Rice—she of the famous Vampire Chronicles—had only recently returned to her beloved New Orleans when she began writing The Witching Hour, which is, among other things, a love letter to the Big Easy. Her descriptions of the city are gem-like in their clarity and beauty, as is much of Rice’s writing here. Perhaps more than anything else she’s written in this particular setting, The Witching Hour perfectly captures the tone of the city itself, with its languid pace and its positively baroque level of detail. Whatever you think of her, one thing you can always count on Anne Rice for is sumptuous writing.
Yet sumptuous writing alone cannot sustain a story, especially one of this length. So, is the story itself any good? We shall see. The first book of Rice’s second epic series (and it is epic, covering around three hundred years of European and American history) follows the long line of the Mayfairs, a family of witches who trace their origins back to Renaissance-era Scotland and a witch named Deborah, the first to summon the dark spirit Lasher, who subsequently haunts and torments each of Deborah’s descendants in turn. But what does Lasher ultimately want from the Mayfairs? That mystery is the heart of the novel’s plot, and it becomes clearer and clearer as the legend of the Mayfair witches unfolds, much of it told in epistolary form as collected by the Talamasca, a sort of early supernatural investigation team that watches and keeps tabs on the Mayfairs but tries not to directly interfere. Despite their best attempts to keep their distance, however, the Talamasca becomes fatefully intertwined with the family as one of their agents becomes sire of an important branch of the Mayfair clan.
All of this is framed by the story of the present-day Mayfairs, particularly Rowan Mayfair, a young doctor who was whisked away from New Orleans as an infant and taken to California for initially unclear reasons, so she has never really known her family. Into Rowan’s life comes Michael Curry, an architect with his own ties to New Orleans who nearly drowns and is rescued by Rowan. As the two become lovers, Rowan seems fated to return to the city of her birth, where she will finally confront the dark mysteries of the Mayfair clan and her own nebulous past once and for all.
At nearly one thousand pages (in the Knopf hardback), it is a massive tome, and with a large part of it being essentially exposition, some readers are going to be put off by the saggy middle of the novel. Personally, I found the history of the Mayfairs to be fascinating, and I almost wish each of the legacy Mayfairs, or at least the more interesting ones, had gotten their own book. Especially those who lived in the early to middle part of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are a lot of family members covered here—indeed, the book would’ve benefited from some sort of timeline chart or family tree to refer back to. Perhaps future runs of the novel will remedy that. As for the Mayfairs whose lives are presented in The Witching Hour, each one feels more decadent than the last. There’s enough drama and suspense in the Mayfair histories for three soap operas: wealth, murder, incest, madness, kidnapping, incest, violence, dark secrets, incest . . . it’s all here.
Did I mention there was incest? Yeah, there’s a lot of that. The thing is, there’s a pretty important reason for it, and it rarely feels gratuitous or exploitative the way it can in the works of, say, V.C. Andrews. But if incest bothers you, consider yourself forewarned. Despite their almost cliched level of gentility and charm, a goodly number of the Mayfair witches are not nice people. What? Bad witches? Whodathunkit? Of course, the aptly-named Lasher is often the driving force behind their wickedness. The Witching Hour is Southern Gothic writ large, and it mostly works. Still, it all unfolds at a pace many fans of more traditional horror fiction will find tedious at the very least, if not outright plodding. But the family is colorful and eccentric enough to be engaging even without the more horrific elements, which really don’t pop up until near the very end of the book. But when they do . . . hoo boy. As someone who grew up in a traditional Southern clan, with a grandmother who canned her own fruits and veggies, there’s one freaky revelation that felt so spot on that it was a pretty solid icicle to the heart of this reader.
Bottom line: This is quintessential Anne Rice. People either tend to love or hate her style. Some may feel it is precious and overwrought. For me, as an admirer of elegant, poetic writing, I could probably read a set of VCR instructions penned by her from cover to cover and be perfectly convinced by the end of it that I had read something amazing. That said, when you dispassionately separate Rice’s writing ability from her storytelling, you may realize that the latter doesn’t always live up to the former. Here, it comes close but falls a wee bit short. There’s a lot of information stuffed into the exposition, and it can be difficult to keep all of these Mayfair women separate in one’s mind. Moreover, given her resolve throughout the majority of the novel, Rowan’s sudden turn near the end feels more than a little forced. Finally, without giving anything away, let me just say that the ending is likely to drive some readers absolutely bonkers. But if you’re willing to follow Rice on this long and often torpid journey, you may be rewarded with some dazzling sights, sounds and smells along the way, and even a well-honed fright or two.
Well, I did one of these things for Hyperion, the first book in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, back in May. I haven’t done much on this blog as of late, but this has been brewing for a while. I’m going to bypass The Fall of Hyperion, the second book in the series, as it would basically have exactly the same cast as the first film, only slightly older. I suppose I could’ve included the second book with the first one, the way I’m doing with the third and fourth books here, but I didn’t, so . . .
Endymion
Raul Endymion (Zachary Quinto)
Zachary Quinto; ‘Raul Endymion’ by saltytowel
So basically, Raul Endymion is your standard old-fashioned, two-fisted, smartass action hero–a little bit Han Solo, a little bit Snake Plissken. Quinto may seem like an odd choice for this role, but with his Italian and Irish heritage, you know he’s got some tough guy in him to spare. Raul is not just some brawler either; he’s smart, resourceful, quick on his feet. Can Quinto pull that off? You bet! This guy is Spock in the rebooted Star Trek film franchise after all. Sure, Quinto hasn’t really had a chance to show off his action chops quite yet, so this would be the perfect vehicle for him to do that. And besides, just look at that big hunk of man-meat. Holy Mother of God, he was born for this role.
When we first meet Aenea in Endymion, she’s a feisty, sensitive, precocious 12-year-old girl. It’s a role that would require a child actress with some depth and real talent, and I think Ms. Rogers has what it takes. She really impressed me last spring as Minx Lawrence in the first season of The Whispers, particularly the season finale episode. I would love to see more of her work, and I think she’d be a knockout as young Aenea. Of course, as with any role for a child, she is bound to outgrow it soon, so in a year or two my answer is subject to change.
Some fans might balk at having Chris Hemsworth shave off his lovely golden locks and paint himself blue, but not me. I would love to see the MCU’s Thor take on the role of A. Bettik, Raul and Aenea’s faithful android companion. A. Bettik is super-strong, super-loyal and built to last, so basically he’s a balder, bluer Thor, right? Okay, not really, but I still think Hemsworth would be fantastic in the role.
Father-Captain Federico de Soya (Javier Bardem)
Javier Bardem; De Soya from ‘Endymion Characters’ by saltytowel
As the primary antagonist and one of the most complex characters in Endymion, Father-Captain Federico de Soya needs to be portrayed by someone with the ability to project all kinds of emotional complexity, a villain that one both fears and respects. As such, I can hardly think of a better person for the role than Javier Bardem, who was absolutely chilling as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, for which he won several awards, including an Oscar. Like Chiguhr, de Soya is unceasing in his pursuit, seemingly unflappable and incredibly thorough. But unlike Chigurh, he is a man of conscience, which ultimately changes the course of his destiny. Added bonus: Bardem is from Spain, and de Soya is of Spanish descent, hailing from a backwater desert planet called Madrededios. So the accent would totally work with this character!
Cardinal Lourdusamy (Simon Fisher-Becker)
Simon Fisher-Becker
Cardinal Simon Augustino Lourdusamy is a very powerful man in the Catholic church of Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, second only to Pope Julius IV (later Urban XVI) in official rank. He’s a shrewd and conniving fellow who plots to replace the reigning pope, and Simmons describes him a very, very large man. Initially I pictured James Earl Jones in the role, but I don’t think Jones has nearly enough bulk. John Goodman was my second choice, but I already cast him as Baron Harkonnen in my Dune film, and I don’t want to always rely on Goodman to play an overweight villain. Thus, I arrived at Fisher-Becker, who is best known for portraying another blue-skinned bald man (sci-fi is full of them), Dorium Maldovar in Doctor Who, as well as the Fat Friar in the first Harry Potter film.
Pope Julius IV / Urban XVI (David Tennant)
David Tennant; ‘Urban XVI’ by Pavel Postovoit
And speaking of Doctor Who alumni, we already established back in the Hyperion dream cast post that the Tenth Doctor himself, David Tennant, would be ideal for Father Hoyt, the weaselly priest who went on the Shrike Pilgrimage with the others in the first book. Since Hoyt eventually becomes the pope in this universe, we have to stick to our guns here. But seriously, who wouldn’t want to see David Tennant play an evil, half-mad pope? I mean, come on, that would be amazing.
Sergeant Gregorius (Terry Crews)
Terry Crews; “Hyperion Cantos – Soldier” by NamelessPL
There are three elite soldiers who accompany Father-Captain de Soya in his pursuit of Aenea and friends across the galaxy, and arguably the most badass of them is Sgt. Gregorius, who originates from a warrior culture where everyone starts out with seven “weakness names” and one “strength name” and only survivors of a series of seven deadly trials get to slowly strip away their weakness names. Only after they’ve survived all the trials are they left a single name: their strength name. Yeah. So, Gregorius (and that’s it, folks) not only made it through all of that, he moved up the ranks of the Pax to become a sergeant in the Swiss Guard, the crème de la crème of an already elite class of warriors. So who do you get to play such a massively awesome specimen of humanity? Why, none other than Terry Crews, of course! Who else?
I’m giving you a two-fer here. In addition to Sergeant Gregorius, two other highly trained soldiers, both of them members of the Swiss Guard, accompany Father-Captain de Soya as he flies across the galaxy trying to catch up with Aenea. They are Corporal Bassin Kee and Lancer Rettig. Kee is described as a small man of Asian descent, while Rettig is, if I recall correctly, a taller man of Native American origin (though the surname is actually Germanic, as it turns out–yes, I looked it up). My choices are Steven Yeun, who is of course familiar to all of Nerddom as Glenn from The Walking Dead, and as it so happens, his schedule has recently become clear. (Thanks for killing him off, TWD!) Gordon is probably most recognizable as one of the werewolves in The Twilight Saga films, though for my money, he did his best work in the more grounded thriller An Act of War.
Rhadamanth Nemes (Deepika Padukone)
Deepika Padukone; “Rhadamanth Nemes”
So, as badass as Francisco de Soya and his crew are, the real threat to Aenea is this TechnoCore-created monster in the guise of an Indian woman. She’s basically the Terminator, only she can stop and start time at will. She even temporarily put the Shrike out of commission! Yeah. To portray her, we can’t just have any ol’ Indian actress. No, we need Deepika Padukone, who is a Bollywood phenomenon in her own country. Although mostly known for comedies and romantic films, I have no doubt Padukone could not only pull off this role as the TechnoCore’s deadliest creation, she could be epic.
Father Glaucus (Michael Caine)
Michael Caine
Father Glaucus is a blind, independent priest who Aenea, Raul and A. Bettik encounter on the frozen world of Sol Draconi Septem (which is one of the most harrowing parts of the book, incidentally). He resisted accepting the cruciform and as a result of this heresy and his admiration for Teilhard de Chardin, he is exiled to the inhospitable, high-gravity, ice-covered hell that is Sol Draconi Septem. It proves to be an important meeting for Aenea, as she learns about de Chardin’s teachings, and her own philosophy ultimately grows out of these teachings. I would love to see Sir Michael Caine, who was absolutely amazing as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, take on the part of this stubborn but kindly old priest.
Consul’s Ship (Jim Parsons)
Jim Parsons; “Retro Rocketship” by MDK Graphics
It’s a sleek spaceship designed to look like the classic rocketships of ’50s and ’60s cinema and pulp magazine covers, it’s expensive as hell, and by the time of Endymion, there are no others like it in existence. It’s the Consul’s ship, which Raul and co. use to escape the Pax. It also has a unique semi-sentient AI (since the Catholic church has officially banned all true AIs from Pax space) running its on-board computers and regulating the ship. Although the ship doesn’t make the whole journey through the book, part of its AI does in the form of a com bracelet worn by Raul. Simmons describes the male voice of the computer as pleasant but a little prissy, and I couldn’t help imagining Sheldon Cooper as the AI’s voice, which would no doubt please Sheldon immensely. So naturally, Jim Parsons has to be the voice of the ship in any film version I okay.
Who do you get to play the preternaturally intelligent, charismatic and super-talented teenage girl we encounter in the early part of The Rise of Endymion? I can think of no better choice than Miss Elle Fanning, who has blown me away as a child actress in such roles as Phoebe Lichten in Phoebe in Wonderland, Alice Dainard in Super 8, and Winnie Portley-Rind in The Boxtrolls. Though she is only in the book briefly, the 16-year-old Aenea is tormented as she struggles with the first pangs of love and the agony of sending Raul away on what for her (thanks to time dilation) will be a years-long mission to retrieve the ship from the primitive world they left it on. You need a top-caliber teen actress to pull this off, and Elle fits the bill. Besides, she has a long history of playing the younger version of characters her sister plays. I think you can see where this is going . . .
Aenea [age 21] (Dakota Fanning)
Dakota Fanning; “The Rise of Endymion” by John Picacio
I’m not even going to try to be impartial here. Dakota has been one of my favorite young actresses for forever, having first won my heart in her role as Allie in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi miniseries Taken. There has always been something eerily precocious and poised about Dakota, even when she was a young whippersnapper just starting out. I know I often say that such-and-such an actor was born for a role, but um . . . Dakota was born for this role. Aenea is not simply a genius; she’s something more than human, as her father was a John Keats cybrid who introduced her to the AI Beyond when she was still in her mother’s womb. Dakota has the acting chops for this part in spades, but more than that, she has a gravitas that few young actors, male or female, have at her young age. This will be important, since she has a romantic relationship with the middle-aged Raul, and we don’t want it to seem creepy or exploitative. She has to be convincing as someone wise beyond her years, and since Dakota already has that quality . . .
Cardinal Mustafa (John Turturro)
John Turturro
Cardinal John Domenico Mustafa is the Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Office, and that means he tortures people for a living. But he also plays a key role in investigating some strange goings-on on the planet Mars, formerly the home base and training ground for FORCE, the Hegemony-era military. He is a cruel and devious man, but not a stupid one. Who can play this part with the nuance it so desperately needs? Why, John Turturro! Let’s just say it up front: over the last decade or so, Turturro has been stuck with a lot of crap roles, which is unfortunate because this is the guy who played Heinz Zabantino in Five Corners, Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink in the film of the same name. He deserves better. I really want to see him channel his inner sadist! Who’s with me?
Kenzo Isozaki (George Takei)
George Takei
Chairman Kenzo Isozaki is the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus, the official trade wing of the new Catholic empire. He’s a shrewd man with larger aspirations, but he isn’t nearly as corrupt as those in the Vatican. He will eventually be a key player in filling the void left by the collapse of the Pax, but throughout the last book he mostly gets in over his head with the TechnoCore, in the process revealing the true depth of the danger humanity faces from the AI collective. I like the idea of having sci-fi veterans performing in major sci-fi films, and as they go, George Takei is one of my faves. It’s okay to be Takei, and it’s better than okay to have him in the Hyperion Cantos!
Lhomo Dondrub (Jackie Chan)
Jackie Chan
Lhomo Dondrub is not a major character, but the few places where he does show up in the book he’s easily the most awesome person in the room (and that includes when Raul and Aenea are around). Tien Shan is a mountain world where the ground level is covered with a toxic fog and the mountains are steep and ragged, so survival at those high altitudes requires some finesse. Dondrub is a hang glider pilot and all-around acrobat with some mad skills, yo. And who could knock that one out of the park? You know who. There’s no question that the only guy to play Lhomo Dondrub is Jackie Chan. It’s not even a contest.
I picked this hardcover anthology up at my local Goodwill store for a song, and what a fantastic bargain! The twenty-two stories in editor Michele Slung’s compendium are, as the cover suggests, thematically linked by the broad concepts of sex and horror, which so often go hand-in-hand anyway. As she points out in the book’s preface, pretty much every horror story is ultimately about sex in one sense or another, and I think she’s spot on there. But in the case of these tales, the relationship between the two is made mostly overt.
Generally these anthologies tend to be full of contemporary work, but Slung draws from every era of horror and suspense fiction from the late Victorian on, a rich well indeed, and with casting such a wide temporal net, she could easily have filled a hundred such volumes with quality fiction. What a job it must’ve been to boil her choices down to a little over twenty stories (though ultimately there was a sequel, I believe). But nearly every piece here is a gratifying read.
The earliest story in the collection, R. Murray Gilchrist’s The Basilisk, is not so much horror as dark Symbolist myth, so drenched in the poetic language of the era that it feels more like a somber dream than a cohesive story, but it works nonetheless. A more traditional piece from roughly the same era is Robert Hichens’ How Love Came to Professor Guildea, wherein a dispassionate man of science finds himself the object of a lascivious spirit’s attentions. The most disturbing story for me was Christopher Fowler’s The Master Builder, which reads like Peter Straub at his best and takes the concept of stalking to a whole new level. Robert Aickman, one of my favorite short story authors, can always be relied on to creep me the hell out, and his contribution, The Swords, is certainly no exception. Another highlight, Hugh B. Cave’s Ladies in Waiting, starts out as a haunted house tale but becomes something far worse by the end.
Some pieces (Michael Blumlein’s Keeping House especially) are morbidly melancholy. Others, like Thomas M. Disch’s Death and the Single Girl, are humorously cynical. A few are uncomfortably erotic (T.L. Parkinson’s The Tiger Returns to the Mountain; Harriet Zinnes’s Wings; Carolyn Banks’s Salon Satin). The rest of the collection is sandwiched between stories by two of horror fiction’s living legends, Stephen King and Clive Barker. Of the two, it is Barker’s story, Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament, that I most enjoyed. Longtime fans of Barker will almost certainly have read this already in his Books of Blood, as I did, but I was quite young when I first read it and remember it being one of my least favorite stories of his. With time I have come to appreciate its true horror, seeing it essentially as the story of a female supervillain with the ability to manipulate human flesh with her mind, a power she utilizes in some creatively awful ways. King’s story too is about a woman with psychic powers, though hers is the more traditional (less interesting) power of telepathy; it’s still a wonderfully entertaining story though, accessible and funny.
Not every piece is wildly successful though. Valerie Martin’s Sea Lovers, her dark answer to the Little Mermaid, doesn’t quite feel fleshed out, May Sinclair’s The Villa Désiréé feels as dated as it is, and Ruth Rendell’s A Glowing Future feels like a rejected Robert Bloch story. Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Conqueror Worm divides its loyalties between humor and horror but ultimately achieves neither, and Angela Carter’s Master, while conceptually intriguing, offers us a cliched and unnuanced antagonist. Still, none of the stories are outright awful, and all but a couple are at least decent enough that you won’t feel like you’ve completely wasted your time. A solid majority of these stories are real gems. All in all, a dynamite anthology that any horror aficionado should be pleased with.
At last we arrive at the final book in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. To be honest, I finished reading The Rise of Endymion in preparation for this review a while ago. I’ve just been hesitant to review it because . . . well, let’s just say it’s easily the most depressing book in the series. And yet, it is the most hopeful as well. That seems like a contradiction, I know, and it is, but there are few writers quite like Simmons when it comes to weaving these contradictions into a story that is somehow satisfying when everything in your gut tells you it shouldn’t be.
The novel begins four years after the events that transpired at the end of Endymion, when Father Captain de Soya turned against his orders to capture the then 12-year-old Aenea and instead saved her and her companions Raul Endymion and the android A. Bettik from certain death at the hands of the Technocore-engineered soldier Radhamanth Nemes, who is a kind of female Terminator, only (like the Shrike) she can stop time. Basically, she is an unbeatable killing machine, but de Soya managed to stop her, giving Aenea and her friends time to farcast to Old Earth, which had somehow been transported to an entirely different galaxy, assuring their protection from the Core and the Pax both for as long as they wish to remain there.
Now 16 years old, Aenea has begin to fulfill her destiny as the prophet of a new belief system, one that can potentially undo both the Church and the Core. As prophets go, Aenea is somewhere between Jesus (which Simmons goes out of his way to compare her to in several obvious ways, including a communion process where her disciples literally drink droplets of her blood), Buddha (self-denial, and Aenea eventually winds up on an Asian-dominant world called Tien’ Shan, where even the boy Dalai Lama looks at the young woman as his teacher) and Charles Darwin. Meanwhile, our hero Raul, who again serves as narrator of the book, is sent off alone on another series of world-hopping adventures in order to retrieve the Consul’s ship, which they abandoned early on in Endymion. But inevitably they will come together again, and here they will hatch a plan to confront the devil in his own lair.
For the most part Aenea’s reluctant messiah shtick works, though there are a couple of times where it feels like Simmons is beating a dead horse. There are a few other sour notes in the book, such as the ludicrous degree of evil displayed by the high-ranking members of the Church, including the weak-minded Pope Urban XVI. There’s even a none too subtle comparison of the Pax to the Nazis early in the story. But this is space opera, and I tend to give a pass to things like this, because these characters exist on a scale almost unimaginable to us, so they almost have to be larger-than-life and twice as evil, or twice as good as the case may be. Of course, in demonizing the Catholic Church, Simmons is certainly playing with fire, though he makes it clear that the Church, like every entity that has endured through the ages, will go through phases. This just happens to be one of Catholicism’s darker periods.
There’s also a lovely sense of the two sets of books, the Hyperion set and the Endymion set, being mirror images of each other. Not just in the titles but in the way the larger plot unfolds in them. Both Hyperion and Endymion deal with a lot of traveling in pursuit of vaguely defined goals. Likewise, if you know what happened at the end of The Fall of Hyperion, you may have some inkling as to what will occur at the end of The Rise of Endymion. To be sure, it was spelled out pretty clearly throughout the book. It somehow felt both necessary and gratuitous at the same time, which is far more frustrating than if it had been merely one or the other. But Dan Simmons is far too clever a writer to give you exactly what you want. This is a book—and a series—that was meant to be debated. That we aren’t much debating it is unfortunate, because it has much to offer those interested in the future of religion and philosophy. Even though it is the weakest book in the series, it is also the most important. To be fair, very few series end perfectly. The Lord of the Rings is the only one I can even think of at the moment that did, and even that is debatable.
Moreover, this is yet another love letter (if a bittersweet one) Dan Simmons has penned to literature itself. Who else but Simmons could concoct a lesson in English and American lit masquerading as an exciting outer space adventure? Perhaps there have been other examples, but none are quite as memorable as The Hyperion Cantos. The last book in the series has its own interesting lessons. I probably learned more about Catholicism and the Vatican from The Rise of Endymion than I have from any other single source. And, as per usual, Simmons’ fantastic world-building skill is on full display. But it is the lessons of the One Who Teaches that resonate most profoundly here. The mystical focus of the book may turn off a lot of hard SF fans, but for me it feels like the flip side of the same coin. In the end the entire Hyperion Cantos, with its overall plot spanning hundreds of years, its large cast of characters, the different structure of each book and Aenea’s messiah parallel, begins to feel something like that most widely read piece of literature of all: the Bible. If so, then The Rise of Endymion is obviously its Gospels.
Lisa Miller has written an excellent, highly detailed article about the events that led to two 12-year-old girls stabbing a classmate as a supposed sacrifice to an internet-born fiend, called Slender Man Is Watching. After reading the piece, it’s clear that Morgan Geyser, the one who did the actual stabbing, is a mentally disturbed girl. The motivations of Anissa Weier are more nebulous, but I sort of get the impression that she had repressed sexual feelings for Morgan that she didn’t really know how to process. As pointed out by Cheryl Eddy at True Crime, this case bears an uncanny resemblance to the Parker-Hulme murder case (exquisitely dramatized in the 1994 Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures).
For some people Endymion is the weakest part of the entire Hyperion Cantos. Those people are nuts.
Let me preface this review by pointing out that each of the four books in the series has a different feel to it. The first novel, Hyperion, being partly inspired by The Canterbury Tales, is essentially episodic. It’s sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, can be considered a political thriller with a bit of military sci-fi tossed in. This third book in the series is undeniably a chase novel, and a hair-raising one at that . . .
Nearly three hundred years after the fall of the Hegemony of Man at the end of second novel, the Catholic Church, once on the verge of extinction, has now filled the void left by the Hegemony’s collapse, becoming the dominant governmental power in the galaxy, largely through its military wing, the Pax. Meanwhile, a certain irascible poet by the name of Martin Silenus is still kicking around Hyperion, though barely, but he still has quite a lot of pull on the planet. He manages to save Raul Endymion, a young man convicted of murdering a Catholic citizen (which Raul himself is not), from execution, and all he asks of Raul in return is the impossible. Raul’s primary task is to escort Silenus’s 12-year-old niece Aenea to her destination across the galaxy. The problem is, the all-powerful Church wants the girl for their own murky and sinister reasons. As it so happens, Aenea is the daughter of another former Shrike pilgrim, Brawne Lamia, and her cybrid lover John Keats, and she is poised to become a powerful and transformative force in her own right, one who may threaten the very existence of the Church. Of course, this being a Hyperion Cantos novel, nothing is quite what it seems. Nevertheless, the Church will pursue Raul, Aenea and their android friend A. Bettik to the ends of the galaxy to capture the little girl.
The primary representative of the Church herein is one Father Captain Francisco de Soya, a devoted priest and soldier of the Pax who believes his mission to capture the girl is a righteous one but eventually comes to doubt whether she is the monster her superiors believe her to be. Perhaps more than any other antagonist in the series, de Soya is a dynamic and three-dimensional character. With any story which sets up a dystopian future where the bad guys are members of some massive ruling entity, it is easy for a writer to sketch them as malevolent, unnuanced caricatures, but Simmons largely manages to avoid this pitfall in Endymion. Instead, we get well-trained, high-tech soldiers who are true believers, which, for my money, makes them even more frightening than if they were just mad finger-steepling scoundrels. De Soya is the ultimate knight of the Church, a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. But he is also a truly moral man, a fact that sometimes puts him at odds with the Church he serves, which has become rife with corruption.
And what of our three main protagonists? Raul Endymion himself is a classic adventuring daredevil, the weary loner who becomes the reluctant hero–something of a cross between Han Solo and every action character ever played by Kurt Russell. Sure, he’s a bit of a stereotype if you get right down to it, but he feels more like an homage to heroes past than just another generic lovable rogue. Aenea is another kind of trope: a wonder child. She’s a super-genius for starters, but she also has some powers which are initially ill-defined but take on greater significance as the story progresses. Then we have A. Bettik, a blue-skinned android, a being genetically engineered to be much stronger and tougher to kill than a normal human. If there is a character who could stand some fleshing out, it is A. Bettik, who is far too subservient (he was bred that way) and often seems to be there merely for the sake of his enhanced abilities rather than as a legit member of the team. Early in the story there is also a sentient spaceship, but it’s hardly there long enough to make much of an impression. Finally, there is our old friend the Shrike, who serves as Aenea’s bodyguard at times (much to her consternation, since the creature’s overriding philosophy seems to be: terminate with extreme prejudice) but mostly just watches from the sidelines.
Though the story zips along at a breakneck pace, Simmons still manages to work in scenes of humor and warmth, particularly near the beginning. One of my favorite points in the book is when Aenea decides to use their spaceship’s advanced force field tech to create a zero-g ball of water that she and Raul use as a floating swimming pool, an early bonding moment for the two and a demonstration of the girl’s ingenuity and fearlessness in the face of danger.
As our plucky heroes make their way through a series of worlds by way of farcasters (which only seem to work for Aenea and her protectors now . . . there’s a reason for that), de Soya and his soldiers triangulate in on them as they race towards their destiny. Yes, it’s a bracing adventure tale, but it’s more than that too. As with the other books in this series, Simmons exploits the literary concepts that undergird his work–mainly the deus ex machina in this case–in exceedingly clever ways, giving it a tasty dash of postmodernism without letting it slip into pretentious territory. As always, the author’s love for the literary medium itself, be it in the form of poetry or fiction, is the very soul of the Hyperion Cantos, and Endymion is no exception. Given that one of the themes of the series is man’s place in the universe and how he holds up against much greater intelligences, some of whom believe mankind to be obsolete, it makes sense that our capacity to create art and literature is the very thing that redeems humanity, and which Simmons celebrates throughout the series both implicitly and explicitly in numerous ways. What else can I really say?
Although I was born in Michigan and lived there intermittently over the course of my forty-two years, I grew up in rural Tennessee and still live there today. I am half Southern by blood (my mom’s family is from Arkansas) and have spent the majority of my life here. I love the South. It’s a beautiful place to live: the mountains, the forests, the wildlife, the winding country roads. But I have to admit that there is something terribly wrong here, and that something is an entrenched culture of poverty and violence. Some of the talking heads here will claim that the problem only exists in the urban areas, but don’t be fooled. I have never lived in a Southern city, only on the fringes of small towns, with the closest metropolitan areas of any real size an hour’s drive away from me, and I see the effects of poverty here everyday.
For privacy reasons I will not identify the town I live in at this point, but I would like to compare it to a town in Michigan I once lived in, also to remain unnamed. That town–let’s call it Town M–was once identified as one of the five hundred best small towns in America (it was in a book!) When I was growing up, it had–at one time or another–an independent book store, an arcade and a music store. Today there are art galleries, bars and microbreweries in the town, and street art is prominently displayed. It has brick sidewalks with permanent metal benches interspersed throughout. It’s a beautiful place. There’s an annual multi-day Summerfest in this town. It even has suburbs for its middle class.
By contrast, the Tennessee town–which I will dub Town T–has virtually nothing in the way of entertainment (unless you consider Wal-Mart and Piggly Wiggly to be entertainment). There is a movie theater, but Town M has one of those too. There are fast food joints, a handful of independently own restaurants, a newspaper, and a whole bunch of stores, banks and churches. That’s about it. It’s a grubby and unattractive town. And it is not a town geared towards young people; nor is it interested in growth. Its leaders are all about maintaining the status quo, nothing more. There was a bookstore here at one time, but it was aimed mostly at serving Christians, and it was short-lived. There is virtually no middle class here–there is a small number of wealthy citizens and a ton of poor people. (Guess which group I belong to?)
And there is the heart of the problem that infects the South. This is a place devoted to the outmoded notion of trickle-down economics, which any decent economist will tell you is nonsense and doesn’t work. But the South is a conservative culture with a lot of desperately poor folks who are still living on the fumes of hope for the American Dream, who are told by their religious leaders that if they bear the hardships of this life, they will be heartily rewarded in the next. And so they continue to endure this hell instead of working on making it better. Meanwhile, it is wholly infested with the shallow and the meaningless, as well as the outright self-destructive–the worst aspects of commercialism run rampant, a strange contrast to its purported spirituality.
This is the reality of the modern South, and it has come with a high price. Let me explain. When I lived in Town M, I knew only one person connected to a murder, and it was a distant one: the father of a girl I went to elementary school with killed two elderly women over money. And I certainly didn’t know anyone who was murdered. Not so here. Since I’ve lived here, I have known of no less than four murders with less than three degrees of separation from me, and in three of the four cases I knew the victims. If we break them down, two of the victims died by firearms, one by stabbing and choking, the last partly by vehicular homicide and partly by being burnt alive. Three of the four were intrafamilial murders, and all four were crimes of passion. Three of the victims were female, one male, and all were killed by males. These murders had different motives: one was over a breakup and the killer being turned in for other crimes, one was over a payment dispute, the third was over drugs, and I do not know the motive for the last murder. But the uniting factor for all of these is that both victim and perpetrator were poor.
Violence is also at the heart of the recent debate over the Confederate flag. The rallying cry of those defending its continued public use is that it represents heritage rather than hate and bigotry, but this argument has been soundly drubbed by Lonn Taylor in his article The Confederate Flag’s Big Lie. The flag in question was not, in fact, the standard of the Confederate “nation” (as it were); it was a flag created specifically for the war, since the official Confederate flag was too difficult to distinguish from Old Glory in the heat of battle. Hence, it is a flag attached to violence by design: a battle flag. Moreover, as Taylor explains, it was never associated with Southern “heritage” until the 1950s, when the Ku Klux Klan adopted it as a way to protest civil rights advances, and Southerners–including some state governments–simply carried that concept further. Segregation itself was a violent affair, predicated on keeping blacks in their own mini-reservations, separating them from white-designated locations and arenas by force if need be. To say nothing of slavery, the continued practice of which Southern Americans fought and killed their fellow countrymen to try to protect.
Today, however, Southern violence is largely directed at other Southerners. For a region of people famous for their pride, it seems they are awful willing to hurt and kill their fellow Southerners. Indeed, the South is consistently the most violent region in the US and has been for decades. Going by state alone, my own–Tennessee–often makes the top of that list every year. Anyway, guess what else the South is tops in? If you said poverty, ding ding, you win the prize! And we’re also number one in obesity, thanks largely to a diet high in fatty and fried foods. I see this as another facet of Southern violence, only turned inward, against themselves. Perhaps it stems from guilt and insecurity, or something similar. Maybe deep down most Southerners really do feel awful about their shameful history, but they can’t express it outwardly because they fear being an outsider in their own society. So they punish themselves by eating badly. Ha! Armchair psychology, I admit.
At any rate, the South is clearly afraid of progress. Many here still resent those Yankees for trouncing them during the Civil War. They may not always say it openly, but it’s just beneath the surface of their conversations about the “federal government” taking away their rights. Here that term is just code-speak for “outsiders”, meaning anyone who comes into the South and mucks up their way of life. And the debate over keeping the Confederate flag prominently displayed really comes down to the fact that Southerners resent being reminded that they lost the Civil War, and that it will never be ‘business as usual’ here ever again. Nobody holds a grudge like a Southerner. Trust me: I’ve seen it too many times. This is, I think, where the violence stems from, at least in part. Far from dying out, racism is still woven into the very fabric of Southern life and thought. Segregation, though no longer enforced in any official capacity, is still imposed unofficially by white Southerners refusing to sell certain property to blacks or other races, and keeping their distances from them in other ways too. Don’t get me wrong: there are some genuinely tolerant and open-minded white people in the South (I’m one of them), but they are a small minority.
Ironically, the newly stoked controversy over the so-called “rebel flag” and the mass shooting of blacks by an avowed white supremacist which caused it happened to fall in the same time frame as the historic Supreme Court vote that assures the legal protection of gay marriage throughout the nation, and the rainbow flag has since been waving vigorously across the land. There was even a meme floating around Facebook which said something to the effect of, “My Facebook looks like a war broke out between the Confederacy and a Skittles factory.” We may make light of it, but there is something intrinsic about the Culture War in there. In the larger sense, the fight between conservatives and liberals is really about fear vs. love, with conservatives defending a culture of fear and liberals defending a culture of love.
Think of it this way: conservatives embrace largely two things, small government and strong religious values, the former because they do not trust others and the latter because they do not trust themselves. Conservatism is an inherently cynical worldview, a highly negative and paranoid way of looking at reality. It suggests that outsiders (be they other nations, other religions, other powers, etc.) are to be feared and violently opposed. Hence, we get a huge military, strong anti-Muslim sentiment, massive opposition to any large, centrally organized government, and so on. Given its attachment to religion–which is ultimately just a glorified death cult (it’s about spending your life in preparation for death and whatever comes after)–and its love of violence to solve problems, conservatism is also about death. In contrast, liberalism is about trust: trusting individuals to guide their own morality and trusting the government to properly take care of its people. Trust arises out of affection, which is to say, love. Liberalism is therefore a culture of love. It embraces diversity for the sake of diversity and human well-being. It says that, no matter what happens, we are going to be okay. We will survive by accepting transformation, not by avoiding it. Indeed, the scientific principle of evolution teaches that those most likely to survive long-term are the ones most susceptible to change. It’s really no wonder conservatives despise it: it goes against everything they believe. So, yes, conservatism is a philosophy of stasis, and stasis is death. Growth comes about through change, and anything that does not change either dies or readies itself for death. There are no other options. To stand still is to give in to entropy, that steady march of the universe towards chaos.
And so, South, I love ya, but it’s time for you to change. It’s time to give up your outmoded and archaic worldview. If you don’t, your culture will eventually perish, swallowed up by its own violence and stagnation. You should’ve learned your lesson by now: you cannot have your Johnny Reb cake and eat it too. Lose the racism, paranoia and delusions of a heritage worth defending and move into the 21st century. Come on, you can make the leap; it’s not that far. And we’ll be waiting . . .
I don’t know why, but I have a bad habit of picking up series during the second book. It seems like book two in a series always falls into my lap before I get hold of book one, and such was the case with Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion. I first read this shortly after graduating from high school, and although I was missing a great deal of information by not having read Hyperion first, I still enjoyed it immensely and knew I had to read the earlier volume, but I set aside this goal for awhile and forgot about it for several years. I’m glad I did, because by the time I returned to these books, the entire tetralogy was complete and I was able to purchase the whole series at once, something I never do. I devoured them all the summer after I graduated from college–an awful summer, in fact, and this series was one of the few saving graces for me that year. I now consider The Hyperion Cantos collectively to be among my top ten books of all time, and that is saying something because I have a lot of favorite books.
The Fall of Hyperion tells us what becomes of the seven Shrike pilgrims now that they have reached the Time Tombs, but it also fleshes out the story of Meina Gladstone, the leader of the Hegemony of Man, as she deals with a coming war with the Ousters that looms large throughout this novel. Bridging these two plot elements is yet another Keats cybrid–this time going by the name of Joseph Severn–whose dreams are linked to the pilgrims. Severn serves as an adviser to Gladstone and is, for all intents and purposes, the narrator of the novel.
What’s particularly beautiful about this book is how absolutely amazingly Simmons ties up the stories of the Shrike pilgrims, whose lives turn out to be more connected than the first book let on. And all of the pilgrims, including the cantankerous poet Martin Silenus (one of my favorite characters in the series) get to be heroes in their own way this time around. Characters with fairly small roles in Hyperion–Amelio Arundez, the Consul’s friend Theo Lane, and so on–appear again with expanded roles. Simmons is extremely generous to his characters in ways that feel both natural and dignified–even those who perish horribly (there is one key character whose death near the end of the novel can only be described as George R.R. Martin-level shocking) are ultimately redeemed.
Then there’s our old friend the Shrike, that time-traveling death machine whose nature is utterly impenetrable. We do learn quite a bit more about him here, and yet it only seems to add to his mysteriousness and his monstrosity. Yet he feels like an essential part of this universe, a sci-fi devil whose cold silver cruelty stands in stark contrast to the golden humanity of the other characters. Even the Ousters–who are a sort of futuristic analogue to the fair folk of fantasy, those beings who are somewhere between human, angel and spirit–aren’t quite the dreadful enemies we learned they were in Hyperion. Indeed, The Fall of Hyperion is a novel that, although it describes the collapse of perhaps the greatest human empire of all time, is ultimately about the unquenchable beating heart of that same humanity. No matter what we are subjected to, mankind endures.
Now, the book does delve a bit into some ideas that will probably prove a little frustrating to those fans of hard SF who don’t like their chosen religion of Pure Science tainted by mysticism. (People who hated Interstellar, I’m looking at you.) But for the rest of us, this all feels beyond true in the same sense that G.K. Chesterton ascribed to fairy tales. This, to me, is what good sci-fi has always been about–not the comfort and safety of the perfectly believable but the very edge of believability, that rich realm of the imagination where the reader isn’t quite sure if its possible or not, and thus it becomes wondrous and transcendent. Modern science fiction has largely gravitated away from this realm, much to its deficit in my estimation. It is a genre that used to be daring and dazzling and even a little dangerous. Now it has become oppressed by the weight of those twin yokes of political correctness and scientific accuracy. Blech. I consider Simmons to be one of a dying breed of sci-fi writers–the inheritors of the New Wave, who took the softness of New Wave sci-fi and brought it down to earth. But enough about that for now–I have a whole essay planned about this very topic coming soon!
Anyway, Dan Simmons . . . this dude can write. This and the horror novel Carrion Comfort (I can’t recall which of these I actually read first) was my introduction to Simmons; I have been a devoted fan ever since. And I think once you have read the Hyperion Cantos you probably will be too. If you love imaginative fiction and good storytelling, you simply can’t afford to miss this series. From the thoroughly original take on AIs to the bizarre nature of the planet Hyperion to the obvious affection Simmons has for classic literature, references to which are spread lavishly throughout the books, this is science fiction at its utmost. It is a thing of beauty, and you know what Keats said about that . . .
Many horror fans would agree that Ramsey Campbell is the quintessential British modern master of the genre. If not, they should give this book a try. Dark Companions is one of the author’s earliest short story collections, but also one of his best. Campbell uncommonly and artfully bridges the Old World Gothic-style tale with the modern horror terrain exemplified by Stephen King and later Clive Barker, and Dark Companions is a prime example of that. These are mostly ghost stories of a sort, and the majority of them are a unique enough riff on that theme, but what really gives Campbell’s yarns their wallop is the absolutely superb writing on display here. Even the less successful pieces in the collection are a worthy investment of one’s time for the sheer beauty of the sentences alone; but luckily, the majority of the tales in Dark Companions are brilliant.
Indigo Xix 