June 2021 Books Read Standouts: Kaiju Score, Vol. 1 / Perestroika In Paris

 Kaiju Score, Vol. 1: A Monster Affair

    God(zilla), what a fun book. 

    Okay, so let's say there's a crimer, out there doin' crimes, right? And one day, she gets the call that comes to all professional scofflaws if they manage to stay in the game long enough: the call from another crimestype, trying to rope her into One Last Job, the one that will allow her to get Out Of The Life For Good. This guy? Well he's Putting Together A Team, and he needs her Special Set of Skills. 

    See there's this vault, right, nestled away all safe beneath a museum, wherein is kept a cache of arts and such so deliciously valuable that it might as well be made of solid gold. It is, unfortunately, extremely well-guarded, as befits a prize of its ripeness. The location is not, however, unassailable, the vault not impregnable; it would merely take a distraction of sufficient potency to provide the time necessary for the team to ply their trade. And as luck would have it, Mother Nature will be kind enough to provide one in the shape of a GODDAMNED ACTUAL GODZILLA MAKING LANDFALL IN MIAMI.

    I mean. That'll do it.

    Kaiju Score takes place in a world like ours, but they've got Godzillas; they're actually pretty well understood from a natural science standpoint, and are accounted and prepared for to the extent that they can be, much like any natural disaster. So when a WALKING MOUNTAIN comes ashore to flatten the Golden Girls house and have a wee nap in the Florida sunshine after gorging on the school of fish it followed to the Miami coast, YOU GUESS IT, FOLKS: IT'S TIME FOR A GOOD OL' FASHIONED ART HEIST.

    Straightforward heist-media isn't generally my thing; it's gotta be a wizard-heist (like the 15th ((and one of the best)) Dresden Files novels, Skin Game) or a planet-heist (like I feel safe in assuming the upcoming comic Planet Heist is going to be) or a time-heist (like the not-overthought Doctor Who episode Time Heist), but I'm familiar with the story-structure and this hits all the beats: Betrayal, and not from where you'd think! Something goes wrong! "I need more time!" DaneCookWhere'sTheVan dot gif! And the real beauty is that the crew doesn't engage at all with the fact that there's an omegafauna outside, except inasmuch as they would need to if their crimetimes were put at hazard by a hurricane or a dancing-plague or a world-spanning bloodwave or the roving, hive-minded giant pack of feral hounds known only as DOGSTORM. Them treating it like any other challenge presented by The Job grounds the world and invests you in the characters, allowing you--or at least me--to care about a story in a genre that doesn't normally command my attention.

    Look, we all know how the non-superhero-comics dance goes, right: limited series with satisfying but open-ended conclusion in case four issues is all it gets, trade paperback collection labeled 'Volume 1' in case it gets a second one or picked up for full series. Due to that I can't speculate on whether more will be coming down the line, or whether a second volume would take place in Germany and be titled Kaiju Score: Heist Nummer Zweist, as I suggested to my very alarmed, confused wife once she woke up a little bit and realized I wasn't yelling because there was a fire or anything. But rest assured: If there is a Kaiju Score Volume 2, I will be waiting by my phone with bated breath for a call from a team who's pulling off a job and needs a--I dunno like an action-linguist, or like they anticipate encountering a lot of cheeseburgers and need me to handle those so they can steal France or something.

Score: 8/10 Carefully-Planned Timetables Thrown Off By Big Ol' Monster Poops

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Perestroika In Paris, by Jane Smiley

    I was introduced to Jane Smiley by my beloved uncle Kevin, whom an unthinkable number of you were kind enough to GoFund after his cancer diagnosis earlier this year; seriously if you're in the Venn-overlap of people who will read this and people who helped me help him in his time of need, I am in your debt, and though I'm not a member of an amoral noble house in a series of fantasy novels that have aged pretty poorly, I honor my debts.

    That bit of gratitude and vulnerability aside, Jane Smiley is a treasure in general and Perestroika In Paris in particular is a warm, sweet, funny book that I read out loud to my wife at bedtime for a month because it is soothing without being patronizing, strange without being performatively Quirky™, and sad without being depressing or maudlin. 

    LET US SAY that there is a horse, a racing-horse, a champion racing-horse descended from kings of horses and horses of kings. Such is our hero, Perestroika, by Moscow Ballet out of Mapleton, by Big Spruce, heir of Northern Dancer and Herbager and scion of Saint Simon; or just Paras, if, like your humble servant, you didn't realize that horses apparently have fucking dynasties. You'd think it would be more of a sheep thing, what with Ramses. In any event: one fine summer, after a hard day of having more money spent on her mane shampoo than I've spent on Diet Coke this year, Paras notices her stall-door is unlocked and proceeds, as we have all dreamt of doing, to steal her trainer's purse, get the fuck out of the Place du Trocadero while the getting is good, and become a feral foal of the Parisian streets, a local cryptid, beloved by all and feared by some, but not a local stray dog--wises in the ways of Paris--with whom she quickly forms an alliance in the interest of doing twice as much confusing damage. Eventually they meet a bird! And some mice! And a human child who should definitely be remanded to the custody of the state instead of  his impossibly old grandmother! But mainly: chaotic-neutral horse carnage, devoid of direction, thought, or fear of God. 

    Perestroika in Paris is a Big Lebowski of a book: there is a plot, but it's happening at the periphery and doesn't have much impact on anything until the end; the book itself is mostly just Stuff That Happens, like spooking an elderly greenskeeper, weighing in on the domestic squabbles of some ducks, and making a local baker think that she's having a supernatural encounter instead of just getting bilked out of oats like a fuckin' chump, and it is delightful. There is real emotion and sentiment, real human stakes at play, but they are seen through the lens of a horse's big, weird face, and treated much as we would treat any strange creature doing something we didn't understand because it's a lizard, how the hell am I supposed to know how it's feeling or what it's interior life is like? I'm a horse, and I deal in horse-chaos. This is a book that does not require a single thought of the reader, not because it's stupid but because it brings us to a place where thought is largely unnecessary, and in the midst of our lives we are free--but for a moment--to relax, kick off our iron shoes, hook a bag of oats over our faces and poop all over the grounds at the Eiffel Tower.

Score: 8/10 Trainers Receiving An Identity-Theft Alert On Equifax; Get It, Equi--'Cause Horses--It--You Get It, Youuuuuuuuu Get It

herein are photos of ghosts

May 2021 Books Read Standouts: MIND MGMT Omnibus, Vol. 1 / Animeta!, Vol. 1

MIND MGMT Omnibus, Vol. 1: The Manager And The Futurist

    “Mix ingredients. Close bottle with a cork and fix cloth rags around the mouth. Soak rag in kerosene immediately before use. Light and enjoy!”

    If I was dialing up the latest post from a blog I enjoyed--"Operator! Get me that jackass!", I'd say--and saw that the author had reviewed MIND MGMT, my first thought would be "How the hell do you review that bonkers masterpiece? You'd have to be a fool to try! A fool damn'd!" And then I'd look in the mirror and see that I had spoken the truth; ridi, pagliacco, etc.

    Meru, a one-hit-wonder true-crime novelist, thinks she's found her next big project that'll pull her career out of its slump: an aeroplane, Flight 815 (by coincidence ((maybe)), which suddenly found itself at 42,000 feet and filled with people--passengers, crew and pilots--who had no goddamn idea who they were. Meru begs an advance from her agent to investigate and is quickly drawn into a web of what-the-fuck involving psychic spies, a secret globe-spanning metaphysical espionage network at war with itself (the titular MGMT), and a man named Henry Lyme who may be at the center of it all, and who seems to know an awful lot about Meru for someone she's never met.

    MIND MGMT cleverly combines several things I love (cyclical storytelling, melancholy, secret paranormal organizations with secret compounds in the jungle, pervasive existential dread, and gorgeous watercolor pages) and several things for which I do not generally care (spies and spycraft-adjacent skulduggery, amnesia, vaguely-defined 'psychics', and not being able to tell which friggin' side of a friggin' conflict anybody is friggin' on), and the result is...the result is. I'm honestly not sure if I like it or not, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, and I'm sure as hell still thinking about it four months later, so it must've done something right but I'll be damned if I could tell you exactly what. And honestly that's a good thing: I'm a big proponent of shameless junkfood-reading, of gobbling down your favorite warm-hearted if unchallenging comic or trashy hot-werewolf-love-triangle romances or wizard-private-eye novels that get more indefensibly misogynist as the years go by or fuckin' whatever, but you should also tackle, heavy, heady, complex works that put you through the paces and make you ask the hard questions, and they shouldn't all be things you anticipate (or end up) enjoying. Just as it's important not to speak only to people with whom we agree (except Q-Anons, Covid deniers, Nazis and similar, obviously) we must engage with media that we may find disagreeable, for there is something to be learned from any endeavor, even if it isn't what we were intended to.

    That said, MIND MGMT isn't unpleasant or objectionable or offensive; it's complex and complicated, the good and bad kinds of sad, and beautiful and confusing like a wife, or the sea. When I say I'm not sure if I like it or not, I mean I can't decide how it made my heart feel, but honestly that's pretty on-point for the story it tells. In this book, as in life, answers do not come easily, if at all. We are not guaranteed explanations, success, or a happy ending. But when all else fails, we can know this much to be true, always: 

Trust your training, disbelieve your eyes, and burn after reading.

Score: 9/10 Cryptic Excerpts From The MIND MGMT Field Manual Running Along The Edge Of Every Page 

    

Animeta!, Vol. 1

    This one's easier! And sweeter and funnier and lighter; not junk-food level, as described above, but certainly straightforward and intentionally educational.

    Know what Miyuki loves more than anything? Anime, specifically one magical-girl series that blew her goddamned mind when she saw it for the first time and changed her life. Know what Miyuki wants to do more than anything? Work for the studio that produced it and make more anime to show other people like her what stories and art have the power to do for people. Know what Miyuki can't do even a little bit? Draw, like seriously, at all. KNOW WHAT THAT ISN'T GONNA DO: STOP HER FROM ACHIEVING HER DREAM.

    Animeta! wears a disguise: on the surface it's a delightful slice-of-life manga aimed at young adults, and it 100% is that in form, but not in function. Much like Delicious In Dungeon is secretly a cooking manga dressed in the plate and wizardly robes of a sword-and-sorcery dungeon crawl (more on that in a later post), this is actually a really in-depth and fascinating look into the mechanics of producing anime, like down to instructionals on how storyboarding and the physical correction of roughs and inbetweening work, and as with any deep dive into an industry that has evolved in a very specific way it is both incredibly interesting and makes you wonder how literally anything ever gets actually made because holy shit, there is a lot to this. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Shannon Hay (@ShannonSketches), is a professional storyboarder (late of Muppet Babies; they boarded the scene that became the falling-over-potato meme) and one of course does one's best to understand the jobs of one's friends, but Animeta! provides the kind of insight that really emphasizes how little you can actually explain about certain industries to people who aren't in those industries. But as core as those explanations are, they're wrapped in an extremely charming story about a young woman who just decides that god dammit she's gonna make a thing and be a success and nothing is going to stop her, except may an actually humanly unlivable wage, but she'll figure something out! 

    Like anything this specific, detailed and dedicated, it can't go on forever; it's not one of those series that can go on for dozens of volumes, which you only realize after you've already gotten hooked and now you're stuck paying $6.99 for the next one every week for the next seventeen fucking weeks, thank you so much The Devil Is A Part-Timer!, to say nothing of One Piece. It's only six volumes, and they actually happen to be on mega-sale right now on Comixology for I think like $4.99 each, and I recommend them both as a story to enjoy and as a way to learn about how something we love and that can be important to us is actually made, and possibly more importantly, who makes it, and that's always worth our time and effort.

Score: 8/10 Just Seriously Unbelievably Long Transformation Sequences, What The Hell, Even

it's always been the same, same old story

April 2021 Books Read Standouts: Heterogenia Linguistico, Vol.1 / Ring Shout

 Heterogenia Linguistico, Vol. 1

    Honestly, I've been staring at this blinking cursor for a good chunk of this Mad Men, wondering how I can even begin to describe a book that I absolutely cannot be objective about because it feels like it was written exactly, specifically for me. Then I remembered that I'm under no obligation to be objective, just like Pete Campbell is apparently under no obligation to have anything resembling a redeeming or relatable fucking character trait. 
    God, I've started this paragraph over so many times, I'm just gonna go for it. Okay so Hakaba, a young, bookish man is forced by cruel circumstance to take his master's place on a mission into the goddamn land of monsters. For why? To what end, besides INEVITABLE CHOMPENING and the necessary, if tragic, culling of the annual apprentice population? I will tell you, my friends: BECAUSE HE IS A LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST, and it is his job--his privilege--his duty--to assemble the first human-to-werewolf dictionary and visitor's guide to werewolf culture. 

Brb, I think I just qualified for a new loanword

    Okay look, either that sentence grabbed you or it didn't, there's only so much work I can do on behalf of an idea this incredibly specific and niche. If that sounds like your scene, come join the fuckin' party, because it's CHOCK FULLA good shit like Hakaba, being a hu-man, having different respiratory and vocal physiology than his werewolf hosts and therefore having to work around sounds in their language that he physically can't pronounce, which is expressed visually by having his dialogue lisp when he's speaking werewolf. I will die mad that somebody thought of that before me, and I am so endlessly grateful to live in a world full of people smarter, funnier and more creative than I am so I can enjoy their hard work.
    Heterogenia Linguistico has a lot of other things working in its favor as well that, again, seem like they're aimed specifically at me: Hakaba fully immerses himself in monster cultural customs and cuisine as well as language without judgment and in an amazingly pure spirit of real cultural exchange and learning, he gets an adorable wee werepup companion to protect his killable human ass in the Monstrous Country, and as if those weren't enough, every volume includes at least once instance of my actual kryptonite: a detailed list of Hakaba's equipment and supplies, or a description of werewolf tools and cultural items.

    One of the biggest points of Heterogenia Linguistico is that once you spend enough time with them, 'monster' becomes a meaningless term. Every instance of 'monstrosity' is, with context, revealed to simply be a cultural quirk or point of values dissonance; their weird worm-loaf is the tastiest, most nutritious thing they can make out of available local wildlife just like your awful regional sandwich everyone pretends not to hate, and my dude if you should accidentally propose interspecies marriage to a surprisingly amenable lizard-lady then you just let her down easy, because your own societal marriage norms are probably just as baffling to them. Ultimately, like any work that boils down to an honest, good-hearted exploration of the way others live, it comes to an inescapable conclusion of joyous cultural relativism, and it doesn't hurt when the food is good.

    I love this series so much and I am genuinely shocked every time a new volume comes out, because like, how, man? How can a title like this survive in a market fulla spiky-haired orphans with special destinies and teams of uniformed solar-system defending girls and One-Punching Men? I don't have the answers; I'm just glad I'm still able to ask the question, and I'll ask it for as long--and in as many languages--as I can. 

Score: 9/10 Humans Trying To Translate From The Lizardmannish Dialect Of Werewolf Into Standard Werewolf Into The Humannish Dialect Of Werewolf Into Human, Like In That Lucy Bit

Ring Shout - P. Djèlí Clark

    Okay I'm gonna take a step back from what I said a second ago; sometimes 'monster' does just mean 'person/being I just don't understand yet', but yeah sometimes it does also mean 'person who has actively extinguished the light of humanity from their soul', and sometimes it can also mean 'six-eyed, pointy-headed gangrel-nightmare from the Dimension of Meat and Teeth'. SUCH IS THE CASE HERE, CITIZENS.
    So, what if a work of art could change the world--not just metaphorically, but metaphysically? What if a film could portray its version of the truth so powerfully, so convincingly that the warp and weft of reality actually began to shift and melt, the crystal and grain of the plane we inhabit twisting like the splintered flesh of a green branch to match the image on the screen?
    And what if the world on the screen, the world that's trying to infect yours and lay glistening eggs in its belly, is a world where all you will ever be is an animal, bred to be eaten alive and screaming?

    P. Djèlí Clark is the fuckin' guy, is what. All of his Cairoverse stories are incredible, starting with A Dead Djinn In Cairo, which is bite-sized but absolutely packed with mouthwatering worldbuilding-chunkums, and his steampunk novella The Black God's Drums, which I haven't read yet--
    --sorry, I just lost three literal goddamn hours and many dollars hunting through various SF&F/Speculative/Weird Fiction anthologies trying to see where the shit I can read his short story The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, which as far as I can tell has never been published as a digital single; what the hell, Tor? Get on that, jeez! Don't worry, I'll yell at them about it on Twitter, put the fear of Blog into them, that oughta do it. Anyway dude is very possibly the presiding monarch of alternate black history; N.K. Jemisin would naturally also be up for the title, but she likes to speculate far and wide, whereas Clark seems to prefer--and is very good at--versions of our actual world. 

    Okay so Ring Shout takes place in our world, and supposes that D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation--which I will remind the reader was singlehandedly responsible for the revivification and second era of the Ku Klux Klan after it had been dead and fallow for forty years, it was that fucking racist--is literally a magical Working, a spell on celluloid, designed to fertilize our world for the arrival of parties from...Somewhere Else, whose footsoldiers are already here: ten-foot-tall, six-limbed, pointy-headed, six-eyed tooth maelstroms called Ku Kluxes, which KKK uniforms and regalia are pathetic human imitations of.
    But! Fortunately! And as always! Black women and men are here to save our asses and get none of the credit, and no small portion of the blame, somehow. And they've got mystical firepower of their own, blades and blessings on behalf of the benevolent Powers That Be from the New World and the Old, both of which are aggressively interested in making sure the Management that the Ku Kluxes answer to don't get their foot in the door.
    Ring Shout kicks ass, and is sad, and frustrating, and funnier than you'd think, and if you're a linguistic anthropology nerd like me the strings of Carolinian Gullah dialect are gonna crank your pupils wide open. Racism is monstrous, and in our world that's an internal quality, but it's--not exactly nice, but maybe satisfying--to be reminded that internal or not, visible or not, to consider another less than human makes you less than human, and we would do well to question what powers are served in this world or others by imagining that for us to be more than what we are, others must be less, for surely we will not be the only ones making that consideration.

Score: 9/10 Restaurants Where 'How May We Serve You' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does

i'm gonna bribe the officials, i'm gonna kill all the judges