“Travels With the Snow Queen” (1996)

This story by Kelly Link was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1999 but ultimately lost to another of her stories, “The Specialist’s Hat.” “Travels With the Snow Queen” is one more example of a fairy tale retelling from the 1990s, a certifiable trend likely tracing back to Angela Carter’s work in the 1970s. But Link’s story is more having a go at what is expected of girls in fairy tales. The tone is jokey and ironic and there is a lot of broad winking about fairy tale tropes in general. It’s also told second-person present-tense, which I would have to count as a strike against it—“you do this,” “you see that,” etc. Seems gimmicky to me. YMMV. “You” is a girl on the move, barefoot and heading north. Perhaps the gist and important points of the story may be gleaned (in a way that I couldn’t) by way of the passages I found highlighted in my kindle edition of the Link collection. I realize I might be taking the easy way out for a story I didn’t entirely connect with, but here are three of those passages. “Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread-crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you” (54 readers highlighted). “You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet” (31 readers highlighted). “You’re sick and tired of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you’d like the happily right now. Thank you very much” (32 readers highlighted). I don’t know the original Snow Queen fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which no doubt put me at some disadvantage. Honestly I didn’t get much from this story. Someone on ISFDB gave it a 10 so maybe I am the one woefully off the mark here.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Suicide Commandos, “Try Again” (2017)

[listen up!]

The original Twin Cities punk-rockers, the Suicide Commandos ruled the nascent local scene in the second half of the 1970s, an irresistible live act built out of trash rock ‘n’ roll, heirs to the Trashmen, Monkees, New York Dolls, and others. They entered oblivion as the three principals moved and reinvented themselves in various ways. But punk-rock means never having to say you’re old again just because you’re living forever. Approximately 30 years later the trio reassembled to play comeback gigs, pick up the trash on a stretch of highway in Minnetonka, and, eventually, record another album, Time Bomb. They acquitted themselves well there, with all-original songs and an unmistakable dedication to the ideals of rock ‘n’ roll aging grizzled but still effective, with no overreach, like the old friend of a plainly well-used amplifier they put on the cover of the album. The whole thing is worth checking out. “Try Again” may be as good a place as any to enter in—perhaps one of the best. It’s tidy. It can feel almost effortless. And it sets its hooks deep. With only the preamble of a single drum hit by drummer Dave Ahl it locks into a throbbing groove guaranteed to set heads bobbing. You feel it right away. It bears the potential to grow into something much larger and more significant. The doggy yips no one could have expected only signal the freewheeling dedication to fun—complicated fun, the band’s calling card. “Try Again” is a simple exercise in rock, all sustained control, the singer stalking and riding the surging glides with an air of patience and persistence. Declarations of fidelity like this seem likely to last a lifetime, or at least for the three minutes this song goes. Chris Osgood’s squalling electric guitar answers any remaining questions about this song written by Steve Almaas, my old high school mate who died last week. R.I.P.

True Crime Addict (2016)

James Renner’s quasi-meta meditation on true-crime fascination generally, and specifically on the disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004, is the most un-put-downable book I have read in some time. Renner personalizes his research and investigations, probing himself for the sources of his own interest. It sounds like this is not the first time he has done this. His first book, in 2006, Amy: My Search for Her Killer, is about the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in 1989 when she was 10. Renner is the same age as Mihaljevic and he was impressed with the case as a 10-year-old and has been ever since. The Maura Murray case is slightly different—a baffling disappearance that remains unsolved. True Crime Addict chronicles Renner’s efforts to solve it. I saw the episode of Disappeared about Murray (from that show’s first season) and was impressed and intrigued by the case. It’s tantalizing and mysterious in all kinds of ways. So among other things Renner’s book rekindled my interest in the case. And then Renner takes an interesting approach to his narrative—total transparency (seemingly). Because there are still so many unknowns to the case, Renner can’t structure it around a resolution. There is still not one, and many questions remain open. Renner works a day job as a college instructor, has extensive editorial experience, has written novels as well as nonfiction, and possesses the whole panoply of podcast(s), a blog, and a youtube channel. We learn of his personal experience with crime and abuse in the story of his predatory grandfather. In many ways Renner is on a righteous mission. He says confronting miscreants is one of his favorite parts of his work, allowing that that is also dangerous. We see a lot of doors slammed in his face and hear about a lot of messages he leaves that never get responses. He keeps the focus on the Murray case and pursues his avenues of information. I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this guy. I’m already checking out his podcast but that may not last long. I’m interested in another of his true-crime books and maybe even one of his novels. I really loved True Crime Addict.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

Silver Apples, “Oscillations” (1968)

[listen up!]

Here’s some early—and choice—pop electronica so far ahead of its time it takes some sorting out to get oriented. But the main point, as with Kraftwerk’s deadpan paeans to the PC, is the goofy pleasure of it. The drumming pattern recalls krautrock practically before there was krautrock. Silver Apples is just two guys alone in the studio with a producer. Dan Taylor beats that drum pattern and sings. Simeon works the oscillators and he sings too. They took their name from an album that came out the previous year by composer and electronics experimenter Morton Subotnick, Silver Apples of the Moon. Their self-titled debut LP opens with this song, as if the first order of business were to master the oscillator and now it is time for worship and celebration. The oscillator, Wikipedia tells me, “is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating or alternating current (AC) signal, usually a sine wave, square wave or a triangle wave.” The song wobbles into existence on the angled-off tones, like some moist blind newborn amphibian. The drum pattern puts it in motion, granting it life and propulsion, redolent of a dark, throbbing place. A sound like a steam whistle, as the groove sets, lets us know it’s all in fun. The song trundles directly to your heart. Taylor and Simeon sound hypnotized, chanting, “Oscillations, oscillations / Electronic evocations of sound's reality / Spinning, magnetic fluctuations / Waves of wave configurations / That dance between the poles of sound / And bind my world to soul.” Gary Numan couldn’t have put it any better. Silver Apples was so far ahead of its time their patents still haven’t met yet.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one, a sequel shot at the same time as the original (28 Years Later, itself a sequel), directed by Nia DaCosta (Hedda, Candyman) rather than Danny Boyle. But the story was rarely less than interesting and that helped a lot. Screenwriter Alex Garland has written all the entries in the franchise so far except 28 Weeks Later. That’s good for continuity and he seems to know what he’s doing. Garland also wrote Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, which are also interesting and generally worth seeing, especially Annihilation. The violence here is predictably extreme, with lots of horrible screaming and torture and things you’ll want to look away from. Most of them involve a terrible rampaging gang of teens and a heavy Apocalypse Now vibe. Ralph Fiennes is back from 28 Years Later as Dr. Ian Kelson, a scientist making the best of the zombie armageddon and also the architect of the so-called bone temple, which he primly calls an ossuary as he calls the zombies “infecteds.” In his spare time Kelson enjoys listening to Duran Duran and Radiohead. He is working with opioids to civilize one of the new type of zombies, super-creatures he calls “alphas,” who are giant and powerful and quite dangerous. There’s a lingering sense in all this that we may be witnessing actual devolution. The terrible rampaging gang of teens is led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who calls his various hooligan followers “fingers” and names them all “Jimmy” (or, for a young woman, “Jimmima”) They wear blonde wigs. One is our old friend the young boy Spike (Alfie Williams) from the first movie, an unwilling participant just doing what he has to to survive. This gang is pretty sure Kelson is actually Satan, a view he accommodates and affirms with a somewhat unlikely Iron Maiden interpretive dance set to “The Number of the Beast.” On the whole The Bone Temple is fairly predictable, including a big spectacle at the finish. But it was better than I expected. The end leaves wide open the option for further sequels. My bet would be on a first season of a TV series, but we’ll have to see how these movies do at the box office. I am as dubious about further sequels as I was about this one coming into it. But I admit The Bone Temple was entertaining and I have few regrets about seeing it.

“Dead Air” (1988)

There’s not much information online about Gregory Nicoll, author of this longish story, which has intriguing points—namely, rock ‘n’ roll and Jack the Ripper—in a fast-moving tale set in an isolated broadcasting building late at night. The DJ, Mary Clark, is new to the job but seems to be pretty good at it. It’s a classic rock station, so she’s playing things like a Blue Oyster Cult “superset” (we’re told that means at least four songs). The DJ from the previous night was named Mary Kelly, which is close to Mary Jane Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper connection is strained. Really, the whole thing barely hangs together. Time dilates and a lot can happen in the space of a minute or two. The DJ and indeed the story are busy with incident and motion, not entirely believable. It’s influenced by a lot of Stephen King tricks designed to scare or thrill, lots of action and anxious interior dialogue. On the rock ‘n’ roll side it’s attempting to bring in Screaming Lord Sutch, a self-consciously outrageous British rocker of the early ‘60s under direct influence of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Among other things Sutch wrote a song called “Jack the Ripper” and also adopted a stage persona as Jack the Ripper. Here the song is referred to as “The Hands of Jack the Ripper” and it’s nearly 10 minutes long, which does not appear to be factual. This is thus another story suggesting that Jack the Ripper is some kind of immortal being. It appears that the radio station manager, Bert, is him, even as the story reaches its screaming climax. I like a lot of the elements here, but somehow the whole misfires for me. I was distracted by its strange sense of time, which felt like Nicoll trying to pack too much action into too little time more than an intentional effect. I wasn’t convinced the story knew what it wanted from rock ‘n’ roll or Jack the Ripper, except to invoke them for effect. They are there not so much to scare as to give the story a modern-day gloss. But I might be complaining too much. The story has flaws, it may not all add up, but it’s still a fun one to read.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner
Story not available online.

“The Poacher” (1992)

This interesting story by Ursula K. Le Guin rolls through fantasy all the way back to fairy tales, according to coeditor Terry Windling in her introduction in a Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. “The Poacher” is fantastic and vaguely allegorical, with a mysterious forest, a castle, a sleeping princess (actually a sleeping everyone), and much more. The main character, out foraging for mushrooms and berries, discovers a hedge in the forest so dense and tall it’s impossible to see beyond it. Then he discovers it is encircling a space and he sets out to hack his way through it with tools he steals, or poaches—he is a poacher in many different ways. Even reaching this interior space takes him something close to two years. “The hedge grew unnaturally fast, in season and out, even in midwinter thick, pale shoots would grow across my passageway, and in summer I had to spend some time every day clearing out new growth, thorny green sprays full of stinging sap.” The story takes its time getting to its points—if it takes years to enter the space, what he finds inside is fully and amply described: a castle, a full household of masters and servants busy at their tasks, except—they are all sleeping and remain asleep for as long as the main character is there, which at story’s end is decades. He discovers a princess sleeping in her chambers, and somehow knows that all this is her dream, that even touching her will awaken her with wholly unknown results, potentially including the end of everything. He’s taking no chances. The food replenishes every day, the weather is beautiful, the place is wonderful. He stays. Le Guin’s writing is patient and lovely, in no hurry at all, and thus her revelations are unforced and somehow believable. It reminds me of a 1964 story by Robert Aickman called “The School Friend,” which also concerns a mysterious space in the deep woods with fairy tale appointments. Aickman’s story at least leaves something of a line tracing back to reality but that’s much less the case in “The Poacher,” which seems to exist unconnected from anything we would call reality. We are verging on pure magic here, which Le Guin somehow keeps within range of suspended disbelief as we read, as if casting spells herself.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Unlocking the Air and Other Stories
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Billy Nicholls, “Would You Believe” (1968)

[listen up!]

Some interesting names associated with Billy Nicholls and this luscious confection. The famous and infamous Andrew Loog Oldham hired Nicholls as a staff writer for his Immediate label and gave him an office. Del Shannon was a fan and recorded some of his songs. John Paul Jones plays bass. And the Small Faces are producers, notably with Steve Marriott bawling in the most swirling, dense, and wholly unexpected passages. Financial problems with Oldham’s Immediate label limited the original release and the album was shelved until Nicholls rereleased it on his own in 1998. Amazing that it could stay virtually hidden so long. It starts out barely there, then entertains a soothing lullaby mood by way of the Swingle Singers style, before ultimately exploding with the title line at about 0:45 in a song that runs 2:40. Nicholls’s vocal is clarion, fully aware of its utility as the primary irresistible hook. The title line anchors it from there. The song goes to it frequently, but it’s always good to return to. It might be where you are singing along. This hook does not seem capable of wearing out and they’re not afraid to pummel it. What’s more, the song has an equally beguiling second hook, a gorgeous wheedling violin figure. The rest is clouds of sparkling glitter. Here comes a ... banjo? A tuba? What? Then even more layers: someone calling urgently from a distance (Marriott?). A droning high note that seems to bear the meaning of everything. Finally the song leaves us approximately the way it arrived. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about it is that you can always listen to it again.

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Here’s an unusual picture, a kind of lightly fictionalized, impressionistic memoir of China in this century. It’s directed by Jia Zhang-ke and what makes it unusual is that he has used footage shot by him across this century, both in his personal life and for movies he has made. The only one I can vouch for is Still Life (2006), but I can tell you it’s a great picture, well worth tracking down. Caught by the Tides also includes scenes from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which I intend to seek out. All three feature Zhang-ke’s wife, Tao Zhao, who is rendered a silent woman in this picture for some reason, at least until she lets out a yelp in the last shot. By that point I was too muddled to really get it. There are many lovely shots here—notably those from the Three Gorges area and its massive damming project, featured in Still Life—and some reliably nice musical interludes too, EDM at random to juice up the energy, and pop tunes presumably for the nostalgic feels. But it must be said there’s little by way of obvious narrative here—it’s a guess for me (and largely because of what I’ve read about it) that this is even a historical allegory about China at all. My own sense from my Western perspective, and my distance, is that the 2008 Olympics were a certain cultural high-water mark in China. That seems to be supported by the way this movie goes. My further sense is that China continues to be an economic juggernaut poised well for the future. The commitment to EVs and alternative, sustainable energy sources are just obvious examples. Early scenes in Caught by the Tides gradually give way to scenes of the pandemic, where arguably (again supported by what we see) it was taken appropriately seriously, much unlike the US experience. So the movie may be a good place for testing ideas about China. I take Zhang-ke, based on Still Life, as a great filmmaker and now more than ever want to get to some of his other work. But Caught by the Tides felt confused and weak as much as anything, too allusive and ambiguous for me to get a good grip on what it’s all about.