That's what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot. She'd been helping Aster scrub down X deck with ammonia and bleThat's what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot. She'd been helping Aster scrub down X deck with ammonia and bleach, a failed attempt to rub out the stink of what had happened there. Ghosts is smells, stains, scars. Everything is ruins. Everything is a clue. It wants you to knows its story. Ancestors are everywhere if you are looking.
300 years after "our old home went gone" we find ourselves on a generation ship echoing the horrors of the Middle Passage and the antebellum American south. The white passengers have set themselves atop the ship (literally and figuratively) as a religiously-ordained Sovereignty, and everyone else is condemned to the lower levels. It's easy for "X IN SPAAAACE" settings to feel rather trite, but this never does - it's a powerful, intricate, heartrending work start to finish.
Much of this is due to our protagonist, Aster, a young medic/chemist/botanist/savant who would be identified in our world as being "on the spectrum," as uneasy with social interactions as she is (they are?) with gender, chafing under the abject oppression in which she lives, desperate to find out what happened to her mother right after her birth, leaving her an orphan. Her father is never mentioned, because this is a book about mothers, or women (or at least not-men) uninterested in being mothers. Tarlanders (people of the lower decks) commonly have "hereditary suprarenal dysregula," confusing their external sexual characteristics, and the default is to present as women unless there's an explicit need to do otherwise. Indeed the only father mentioned in the whole book (I think) is a white upperdecker abuser. At any rate, Aster's missing mother, gender dysphoria, and neuroatypical socializing leave her feeling cut off from the ancestors and sisterhood of the lower decks. Then again, who among them doesn't feel that way - "[t]his far from the past, no one could truly know their history."
You got to document. That's what our work is, as womenfolk, memorating any way we can. Do you count yourself among us?
Most of the novel is limited third POV focused on Aster, but there are short first person interludes from three of the supporting cast, all of whom are fascinating creations in their own right, but most especially Giselle, an (anti?)heroine worthy of _Sula_ or _Autobiography of My Mother_. _Unkindness_ shares with the latter especially a deep-rooted physicality and love for the bodies of the oppressed using the weapons of the weak to survive and fight through and against a well-sketched and convincingly-inhumane society.
You should read this book.
(Sidenote: There are some interesting parallels here with Gene Wolfe's deeply flawed Long Sun quartet, what with a revolution brewing on a generation ship that may or may not be approaching its destination while its sun burns itself out.)...more
An early (2011) entry in the Lovecraftian-but-confronting-Lovecraft's-awful-worldview genre, which is probably reaching its saturation point these dayAn early (2011) entry in the Lovecraftian-but-confronting-Lovecraft's-awful-worldview genre, which is probably reaching its saturation point these days. Unlike the more recent examples, this one isn't explicitly a Mythos tale, but does take place in 1911, and features not-so-eldritch creatures and backwoods cultists, but also "rational" eugenicists (hence the titular wordplay).
We have two protagonists here - Andrew Waggoner, a black doctor, and Jason Thistledown, a white country boy who just lost his family and town to a mysterious plague, only to be picked up soon after by a conveniently-arriving aunt. Both find themselves in Eliada, Idaho, a planned Utopian community that is, surprisingly enough, hiding a Dark Secret (or two).
Nickle, I believe, is most well-known as a short story writer, and everything here works well on a micro level - there are some super creepy scenes, the dialogue mostly rings true, the prose is solid, etc. I'm not sure that I was convinced on a macro level, though. My chief problem is that, for this to be the rejoinder to Lovecraft that I (and presumably Nickle) wanted it to be, then there would have to be at least the illusion of eugenics as a viable ideology, some sort of real attraction either on the part of the characters or the readers. Thistledown doesn't push back too hard against his eugenicist aunt at first, but he doesn't much care for what she she's preaching, either.
Nickle is more successful when tackling religion, an outgrowth of the narcotic hallucinogen produced by the monsters. A large part of this is due to the fact that this part is Waggoner's story, and he's a much more interesting character than Thistledown. I loved the fact that his visions of "Heaven" were as much about his (relatively) racially-peaceful time in med school in Paris as they are religion. Both eugenics and religion are about better worlds than this one in the hereafter, but it felt at times as if Nickle couldn't decide which he was more interested in tackling.
There are, further, some moral inconsistencies at the heart of the novel that just don't ring true. Thistledown, inheritor of his father's "gunfighter" genes, is noted by the central eugenicist as a heroic specimen of humanity (and don't get me started on her criteria). The monsters, meanwhile, are succored and worshiped by inbred, backwoods mountain folk, an unwashed horde straight out of Lovecraft, who are not exactly striking any blows against eugenicist technocratic ideals. There's a lot of female suffering, but the book is entirely centered on male characters (this culminates in a truly ludicrous sex scene, which itself leads to the even-more ludicrous realization, days later, that the woman in question is now pregnant).
I also wish the monsters hadn't been quite so rationalized. They aren't a million miles off from the xenomorphs from the Alien films (with more hallucinations). This suits a novel about birth and breeding and sterilization and body horror, but if we're setting out to critique an overly-rationalized post-Enlightenment worldview, maybe our monsters should sit outside of it? The only thing not fully spelled out are their origins, which one assumes will be filled by the sequel left quite obviously looming by the end of this one. Of course, Waggoner's medical training is what allows him to understand what the creatures are doing, so maybe anti-positivism was an unfair expectation on my part.
All that said, again, I have to emphasize that a lot of the set pieces worked quite well, and Nickle is masterful at using sound to set a creepy mood, which is an uncommon skill. Overall, I think this was a missed opportunity, but parts of it did work well enough that I remain intrigued by Nickle's other work....more
A collection of horror/dark fantasy/historical fiction stories about the experiences of black, poor and/or female people in the United States - a sadlA collection of horror/dark fantasy/historical fiction stories about the experiences of black, poor and/or female people in the United States - a sadly-uncommon viewpoint in the genre. Thematically, Burke's stories tend to revolve around awakenings of various sorts, and the fact that her protagonists tend to end their stories on an upward trajectory is, again, an unusual one in the genre - there's a lot of breaking free from false consciousness here (what the kids call getting "woke"). The epigraph for one story is a very apropos Du Bois quote about double consciousness.
The stories here are split about 50/50 between previously published ones (dating back to 2004) and new entries (2011), and the latter show a huge increase in confidence and style. The stories are not presented chronologically, which makes reading the collection a very uneven one, but it's worth it to push through to the end. At her worst, Burke's prose is chunky and unconvincing, but when it works it has an appealing folksiness that immerses the reader in the world-weary, worked-past-exhaustion viewpoints of her characters.
Walter and the Three-Legged King (2011) Walter, a down-on-his-luck black laborer, is about to be evicted from his apartment when he starts having conversations with a rat who has also taken up residence there. The recession is over, he keeps hearing, but that doesn't seem to have given him any more options for work - his white landlord, meanwhile, lives off of family money and suffers from agoraphobia - "one could afford to have a paralyzing fear if one had options in life." King, the rat (a by-product of the squalid environment Walter finds himself in), suggests that the solution to Walter's problems just might be "playing white" and he uses this advice to transition from non-existant factory work to the service economy. A smart, important story.
Purse (2011) A quick conte cruel about a down-on-her-luck black woman riding the NYC subway and her descent into paranoia. Introduces the theme of black women's sexuality, which runs throughout many of the stories here, but also prose-wise a weak point of Burke's, who has a strange way of framing illicit subjects like sex and drugs, as in "She never thought that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to steal the priceless valuables that she kept safely hidden under her skirt and between her ebony legs. The one thing her husband had always called his 'special place.'"
I Make People Do Bad Things (2011) Historical fiction slightly weirded - Stephanie "Queenie" Saint-Clair, a numbers-running gangster/Robin Hood-ish figure in Prohibition-era Harlem, was a real person, as was her associate Bumpy Johnson and her rival Dutch Schultz, but here she's also paired up with the daughter of a prostitute who has the supernatural ability to make people kill themselves. Another story of Black Americans with few options in hopeless, miserable places, but this one kind of runs out of steam and falters into a rushed ending.
The Unremembered (2010) A severely autistic girl is in the hospital because of increasingly-frequent seizures and self-inflicted(?) wounds, accompanied only by her distraught and harried mother. She serves as a metaphor for the black diaspora in the US - her grandmother had carried on the tradition of the griots, but her mother had turned her back on it (possibly in favor of a rather predatory Christianity). A series of dreams of Africa awakens her to reality.
Chocolate Park (2004) A Rashomon-style mosaic story set in the projects, focusing on three orphaned sisters and a black magic woman navigating an environment of crime and prostitution and abject poverty. The low point of the collection - like I said, Burke has an odd way of talking about sex and "the drugs," which gives this story a deficit from which it never manages to recover.
What She Saw When They Flew Away (2011) A mother mourns the loss of one of her twin daughters (who loved to run) while setting free their pet birds. The only strictly mimetic/realist piece here.
He Who Takes Away the Pain (2004) A short, odd allegory about a misogynistic cult on a small island off the coast of Africa whose members focus on the titular deity(?) and resist the ministrations of a mysterious nurse even as they all die of smallpox. Like "The Unremembered," the suggestion seems to be that African American faith in Christianity is misplaced.
CUE: Change (2011) In which Burke actually makes a zombie apocalypse interesting by presenting it through the eyes of characters whose lives already took place in a racist hellscape. I've avoided mentioning Butler so far because I think that's a lazy shortcut for people talking about black women writing in genre, but her work gets explicitly mentioned in this one, so... there you go. The apocalypse, it seems, started in the inner cities, wherein the zombies were initially somewhat camouflaged because of the outside (white) world's lack of attention. There's a twist that's thematically opposed to "Walter and the Three-Legged King," and while this was a great story (and kind of the heart of the collection), I think there's a tension resulting from it trying to be two different stories at once that never really gets resolved.
The Room Where Ben Disappeared (2004) A white man returns to the town of his childhood, where his haunted house leads him to reexamine some repressed memories about race in the Jim Crow South. More Jackson/Aickmanish than the others.
The Light of Cree (2006) A girl gets her first period and also the ability to see and guide dead people. This is like an unfinished rough draft of the next story.
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason (2011) The distillation of all the other stories into one novella; by far the best (and longest) work here, it manages to grapple convincingly with racism, misogyny, colorism, sisterhood, communitarianism, generational divides, untrustworthy churches, and agency and passivity, even while shephering along a well-paced and interesting plotline. A witch plies her trade in Colored Town, KY some time in the early 20th century, and finds a set of young twins who need her guidance in harnessing their powers (especially to see and guide dead people). Also, a creepy haunted house!...more
Biography-as-political-economy of the only pre-Swing jazz musician to still be making innovative music in the 1970s; examining his relationship to theBiography-as-political-economy of the only pre-Swing jazz musician to still be making innovative music in the 1970s; examining his relationship to the music industry, the civil rights movement(s), the state department, "genius" and black artistry in the US, and the politics of respectability, of which he was basically the living embodiment.