Archive for the 'Random Stuff' Category
Review: Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard
December 9th, 2008
I have several books by fantasy/horror author Tim Powers—On Stranger Tides, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, and, of course, The Stress of Her Regard—but the only one I’ve ever been able to finish is The Stress of Her Regard. Even though the other novels are substantially shorter and less dense than Stress, and despite the fact that On Stranger Tides has zombie pirates in it, I’ve lost interest in all of those other works before I even made it to page 100. Now, why is that? Is Powers a bad writer? No. Are his ideas lacking in creativity or fascination? No. So…what gives here?
Simply put, I think Tim Powers is one of those rare authors who only has one good book in him—one titanic text that embodies every last scrap of that author’s literary abilities. All books that come before it are merely preludes, prolegomenae, test drives; and all books that come after it are weak, watery things utterly lost in the long black shadow cast by The Book. J. D. Salinger is such an author (Catcher in the Rye was amazing…but, really, has anyone ever bothered to read Franny & Zooey?), as is Truman Capote (he wrote something other than In Cold Blood? Really?). There aren’t many of their kind, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy/weird-fiction genres, where authors often have imaginations capable of generating reams of quality texts. But you certainly cannot dismiss them as One-Hit Wonders—their one “hit,” after all, is so monumentally good that no matter how many other, irrelevant texts they may crank out, nothing will ever diminish the sheer genius of their Book.
The Stress of Her Regard is Tim Powers’ Book…and thanks to the folks at Tachyon Publications, for the first time in over fifteen years the novel is back in print (in a very handsome trade paperback edition).
While Powers’ many other books have either remained in print for years or have been periodically reissued, The Stress of Her Regard has been almost entirely ignored since its brief life as a Berkeley paperback in the early ‘90s. My cherished copy, purchased at the Waldenbooks in the Uniontown Mall in the interregnum between my sophomore and junior years in highschool, has never left my sight in the subsequent years; and the few people I know who have been lucky enough to find their own copies of this book (usually after I badgered them into seeking it out) are just as possessive. Until the blossoming e-commerce market brought used booksellers to Amazon.com and other such sites, it was virtually impossible to find even a beaten-up, broken-spined copy of this book—but even now, a quick Amazon search quickly reveals that most used copies of The Stress of Her Regard start at $17…and that’s not for a special signed or rare edition. That’s just for the mass-market paperback. The special editions, such as the lovely limited edition produced by Charnel House the same year (1989) that the novel was released, generally start at $200.
In many ways, this novel has had the mystique of the “lost classic” for the last fifteen years—a tome jealously hoarded by those who’ve been touched (or tainted) by its tragic magic—and considering the plot of the book itself, and the characters that people it, such a fate has been somewhat apropos. But finally—FINALLY—The Stress of Her Regard is once more available to the reading public…whom I sincerely hope will glut themselves on this printing and insure that this true classic remains in print evermore.
“OK, fine,” you say. “What’s the damned thing about, anyway? What’s so special about it?”
The Stress of Her Regard is a Gothic novel—one of the very few hardcore Gothic works produced in the Twentieth Century—and is generally regarded as one of the most original takes on the concept of vampires and vampirism ever written.
“Oh, jesus,” you sigh. “Yet another ‘Gothic’ novel about vampires? Do they sparkle? Are they ridiculously sexy? Do they spout poetry?”
My gods, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…yes, they sparkle. Yes, they are savagely sexy creatures. And yes—honest to Nyarlathotep, there’s poetry involved.
But this novel is not only lightyears distant from any of Stephanie Meier’s wangsty teenybopper tripe, it doesn’t even exist in the same galaxy as today’s ridiculous “vampire romance” literature—even though it is, indeed, filled to brimming with Romance. Because, when I say “Romance,” my usage of the term has nothing to do with treacly saccharine sexuality or hand-stapled-to-forehead Gothic stereotypes. When I say “Romance,” I mean the Romantics—as in the Romantic movement in British poetry, that delicious, decadent movement propelled by the likes of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In fact, Byron, Keats, and Shelley are all major characters in the novel. Though the story is primarily focused on the protagonist, turn-of-the-19th-Century obstetrician Michael Crawford, the plot itself revolves entirely around the lives of these three great poets…and the stony succubi who drain their blood and slaughter their families even as their bites drive their beloveds into whirlwinds of poetic ecstacy.
The “vampires” of the novel are not undead corpses who creep forth by night to plague the living, but rather ancient lamiae—identified with the nephilim, the “giants in the earth” of the Bible—who seem to be made of some sort of sentient, spiritual stone. They manifest as mountains, or as statues, but can also appear as glittering, electrophosphorescent serpents, or as everyday humans. For centuries, these awe-inspiring but life-draining creatures have lived amongst humans, often “marrying” themselves to one person, whom they love exclusively, to the detriment of their lovers’ families or anyone who may come between the lamia and her adored. They have traditionally allied themselves with poets, though, because their presence proves to be a mystical source of inspiration for the poetically-minded.
Michael Crawford is not a poet—he is, in fact, a baby-doctor—who accidentally finds himself wed to a lamia of his own. On the way to his own wedding, Crawford and his groomsmen one night find themselves drunkenly celebrating the forthcoming nuptials at an English country inn built on ancient Roman pavement. At one point, trying to recover a friend driven half-mad by the sight of something unnatural in the storm-wracked dark, Crawford finds himself confronted by a statue in the yard—a statue with an outstretched finger. In his pocket is the expensive wedding ring he’d purchased for his beloved, so to avoid losing it in the dark and the muck, he slips it on the statue’s finger. When he attempts to retrieve the ring later, though, the statue is nowhere to be found, the ring gone with it.
Crawford eventually makes it to his wedding and marries his betrothed…completely unaware that he has inadvertently taken another bride. When he wakes the next morning in bed with the butchered remains of his human wife, the story of Crawford’s subsequent wanderings throughout the Continent, entwined by fate and by “marriage” with the lives of the three great Romantic poets, begins in earnest.
The Stress of Her Regard is at once a retelling of the “secret” lives of the great Romantics and a startling, effective evocation of the classic Gothic novels that the Romantics adored. Its plot is labyrinthine, filled to brimming with subterfuge, dire deeds, and devious evil. It wends its storm-wracked way from the ancient lands of the first Britons to the peaks of the ancient, godlike Alps; from the foetid slums of London, where “neffers,” or nephilim-addicts, attempt to lure lamiae of their own by shaking handfuls of kidney stones, to the politically-charged environs of Prussian-occupied Italy. The novel is liberally drenched in all the elements of the Gothic: spooky castles, tumultuous weather, nefarious conspirators, familial curses, a brooding sense of inescapable doom, and, of course, beautiful, seductive evil. The multilayered plot, which takes place over several decades, is oftimes reminiscent of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, and, naturally, the inevitable influence of Frankenstein is quite apparent.
But what’s most fascinating about this novel is its portrayal of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. We meet Keats as a young medical student in London, Byron and Shelley at Lake Leman (shortly after the magical night that eventually gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and again and again throughout their entire lives. The various poets’ tragically short lives are brilliantly reinterpreted in light of the lamia/vampire mythology that Powers has created. Of course, in the hands of a lesser author (such as Anne Rice or Stephanie Meier), the whole “Romantic poets suffering from attacks from vampiric creatures” could easily be sheer tripe…but Powers knows his history, and the lives of the historical characters, very well. Regardless of the fact that the novel is historical fiction, I learned a lot about the characters through this book. In fact, this was the novel that truly got me into the Romantic poets. Once I’d read about their lives—which certainly were haunted, though not by supernatural sparkling serpents made of living stone—I sought out everything I could find about them, and was thrilled to discover that almost everything in this novel did indeed happen…though, of course, not quite as Powers describes.
Powers’ prose itself, however, is this novel’s only weakness—though it’s a weakness completely overshadowed by the monumental imagination of the story itself. I’m one of those folks for whom a perfectly good narrative can be thoroughly wrecked by an author’s bland style. I’ve liked a number of early Dean Koontz novels (Phantoms still remains a favorite), but his prose is…workmanlike, at best—and utterly mechanical at worst. Considering the nature of the story Powers is telling in The Stress of Her Regard, the simple, straightforward writing is a little jarring. One would expect a somewhat more flowery, more Romantic prose apropos for a plot involving the Romantics themselves. However, Powers’ straightforward, no-nonsense prose is the complete antithesis thereof. Though that detracts a tiny bit from my overall pleasure with the book, the story itself is just so damned good that after the first fifty pages I was completely enraptured by the tale and no longer noticed any deficiencies in the prose.
All things considered, this is a terrific book. It is most assuredly the best book in Powers’ entire oeuvre, though by all means check out his other works if you particularly like this one. That I found them a little lacking is irrelevant to anyone but me. But truly, had I produced a book like The Stress of Her Regard, I would’ve never written another word. It’s truly a shame that this novel has been so overlooked—but now that it’s back in print, it may finally get the chance to gather a true cult following. Go ahead and just buy it. Now. Then read the first twenty pages. If you’re not hooked by then, you may be more stone than flesh. (Of course, I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.)
Technorati Tags: tim powers,the stress of her regard,books,book reviews,review,historical fiction,fantasy,horror,keats,shelley,byron,frankenstein
A New Song: “Fuck You, Melissa”
October 19th, 2008
Here’s a new “song” for you all to enjoy:
Derek C. F. Pegritz, “Fuck You, Melissa”
It’s seven minutes of vituperative, bipolar spleen and disappointment. I’ve classified it as “industrial,” but lest you ridiculous cyber-goth children who believe that bad trance music with ridiculous vocals is industrial be misled, I’m talking “industrial” in the oldskool “machine noises, distortion, and jagged audio sculpture” sense, a la Einsturzende Neubauten or early Skinny Puppy. There is a bit of IDM thrown in, though, and lots of twitchy, glitchy atmospherics and raging feedback.
All Things Pegritzian…and I do mean ALL Things!
August 31st, 2008
Here’s a quick heads-up for fans of all things Pegritzian: I’ve just started a tumblelog over at Tumblr.com.
“Jesus, Pegritz,” you say, “why the hell do you need another freakin’ blog? You’ve already got this one, plus your Footnotes to the Human Species thing, your NONFICTION! thing, and that Oneirophrenia site you never update…not to mention countless others that even you forget that you have!”
Well, here’s the cool thing about having a Tumblr log: it acts as an aggregation site for the RSS feeds of all my other sites. Whenever I post something new here on PEGRITZ(.com)!, a link to it with an explanatory excerpt is automatically posted on the tumblelog. Whenever I post a new chapter to a story over at Footnotes to the Human Species or any other site, the same thing happens. Anytime I update any of my sites, links to those new updates will technomagickally appear as links on the tumblelog! It’s basically a one-stop shop for all things Pegritzian—and, best of all, it has its own RSS feed. In essence, subscribing to the tumblelog feed is like subscribing to all relevant Pegritz-related RSS feeds at the same time.
But wait! There’s more! Tumblr.com also provides a nifty little no-nonsense interface for posting Random Junk, like cool quotes, pictures, links, and…hell, just about anything else you can think of. This is not the kind of material I’d post on, say, this blog or on Footnotes because I don’t like to clutter up content that I regard as more important or relevant to a site with random videos of cats doing silly things, links to amusing articles, miscellaneous pictures and other such errata. But I still like to share that kind of information with folks who enjoy little tidbits of weirdness along with more substantial content. So, not only will the Pegritz tumblelog index the meatier content of my primary sites, it’ll also serve as a dumping ground for the assorted, individually-wrapped chunks of mind candy that I’m constantly stumbling on around the ‘Net.
So, hey…if that’s your kind of thing, or you’re just trying to tidy up your RSS feed collection, then enjoy The Collected Works of Derek C. F. Pegritz.
Technorati Tags: tumblr,tumblelog,rss,pegritz
An Ancient Emptiness
September 4th, 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day - maybe Easter Sunday - maybe even Labor Day (though I think only WalMart and the little fruit stand over the hill from me actually honor that holiday anymore) - and I’m off to visit some friends in Uniontown this evening. No matter whose margarita party or DVD-fest I’m going to, the route I take from my middle-of-nowhere digs into the Capitol of Fayette County will take me right through Uniontown’s center of commerce: the square of malls, shopping centers, gas stations and restaurants bordered by Matthew Drive, Route 21, New Salem Road, and the hoary ol’ National Pike itself, Historic Route 40.
Joe Hardy and the other County Commissioners can pretend that their newly-renovated(-and-gentrified) Downtown is the economic heart of Uniontown, but everyone knows that the county’s cash-flow pulse really originates from that Quadrangle of Retail Titans on the city’s western flank. The place is a fecund swamp of capitalism, with the Uniontown Mall (home to the venerable old department-store chains Sears and JCPenney), WalMart, KMart, Lowes, Home Deport, and now Target rising like lotus-blossoms above the concrete lillypads of their parkinglots, and all manner of smaller businesses and restaurants crowding around them like so many eager frogs poised to snatch with their tongues some of the innumerable dollars buzzing around the big stores’ honeyed bargain-bins. Take a drive past the area some afternoon. The intersection of Routes 21 and 119, right below the WalMart/KMart/Lowes plazas, will be choked with traffic drawn by the sweet pollen of Falling Prices and Blue Light Specials. The parkinglots will be packed solid, people swarming like ants in the glare of so much windshield-shattered sunlight. The strip of restaurants along Route 40 by the Mall will be crowded with hungry shoppers and a hundred different species of thirsty vehicles will be queued up at the nearby Sheetz like beasts at an oasis. Hell, even if you drive through the area at four in the morning, you’ll still find the place abuzz with activity, because most the restaurants, and the WalMart, are open 24-hours-a-day.
But today….Today, this holiday, is different.
As I come round a bend on Route 21, I can see the WalMart plaza on my left, the KMart/Lowe’s plaza just a bit beyond it. And - just as I expected them to be - they’re empty.
The halogen lamps burn atop their metal trunks but their light falls on bare, filthy asphalt gridded with chipping yellow paint, shining with a strange, confused glare in puddles of melting snow or rain or motoroil. The WalMart’s doors are bright with empty light and the big red letters flicker with alertness…but no one’s there to justify the light. The smaller stores along the plaza’s crescent, even the Shop n’ Save, are dark and still. A chilly, hollow feeling shivers through me, a pleasant melancholia. I slow down. There are other cars on the road, sure - other people no doubt going to visit friends or family, too - but none at all where I’m so used to seeing them.
I hang a left at the stoplight by the Taco Bell (also cold and dark, even its neon OPEN LATE sign snuffed) and slowly, reverently, drive through the eerie stillness of the WalMart lot. I turn my car’s CD player off and listen to the minimalist whispering of my tires on the pavement. Even empty as it is, I can’t bring myself to violate the order of the painted lines and drive slantwise across the lot - that would be tantamount to driving against the grain of ley lines. I drive slowly up an aisle to the front of WalMart and sit there for a moment, letting my mind drift like a piece of windlifted litter through the…the nothing. Here, where there’s usually so much - cars and trucks going in and out, here and there, back and forth; folks pushing squeaking carts, pulling squeaking children; sun- or moonlight splashing over everything - now there’s just…artificial light falling like luminous dust on vacant benches, speedbumps covered in frost, squashed pop cans and random pieces of paper, a lone shopping cart lying on its side in its corral like a sleeping calf. And me. My mind busies itself with metaphors to fill the cathedral silence of the empty lot.
A day or two before, most likely, I had been a part of this place’s usual hustle-n’-bustle. My car sat in one of those handicapped spaces over there. I crossed the sideways-striped pedwalk in front of the sliding doors with hundreds of other folks, going in with a wad of bills rustling quietly in my pocket, coming out with a bunch of stuff rustling loudly in a blue plastic bag. I’d probably been singing quietly to myself, as usual, as I went about my business, and when I’d hopped back into my car and fired her up, the sonorous booming of my woofers had muscled into the air.
Now, just the gentle purr of my idling engine sounds huge in the ceremonious silence. I’m not in a hurry to grab my purchases and go, to escape the mercantile hubbub and go home to my quiet house. The world is quiet tonight.
I take a quick turn through the equally-empty KMart parkinglot - and spot a lone figure pushing a mop within its locked doors…a ghost earning time-and-a-half haunting the still light and the silent ranks of registers.
A moment later, I’m cutting across the Uniontown Mall’s parkinglot as I head for Route 40. I’m a little more familiar with this place’s emptiness, as my friends and I have spent many a late night at the 24/7 Eat n’ Park just below the Mall - but there’s a qualitative difference between that familiar afterhours emptiness and tonight’s more pure emptiness. If you drive through the Mall parkinglot at 3am on, say, any other Saturday night, you can practically sense the tension of the next day’s workaday crowd, smell the future exhaust, feel the rumble of tires on the macadam. But tonight…this is rest. This is one of the Mall parkinglot’s few days off. Well, except for the small huddle of cars clumped up against the front of the Carmike Cinemas - the movie theatre’s always open - and, perhaps, the Boston Beanery at the other end of the structure…but even they lock their doors and turn off their sign on some days. Regardless, the Zen vacancy of so much untrammeled asphalt seeps through me like a cool, gentle breeze as I pass through it, enjoying the sight of quiet where usually there is so little.
These moments of abandonment are growing fewer and fewer with every year. They used to be familiar, a run-of-the-mill sight, back when I was but a pup in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Almost nothing was open twentyfour hours then, and many businesses - even massive retail chains like KMart or Montgomery Ward - didn’t even open up on Sundays at all. The Sabbath was the first empty-lot feast to fall beneath our civilization’s exponentially-accelerating consumer culture. Now every streetcorner has a 24/7/265 Sheetz, or a GetGo, or even little mom’n'pop convenience stores populated at all hours by bored teenagers begging for a holdup just to add some pep to their allnight shifts. The world doesn’t rest anymore: our American civilization eats No-Doz for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; our economy has beaten the tyranny of night and sleep, religious observation and tradition. There are kids being born right now who will regard the old 9am-to-9pm era of business as being hopelessly primitive, wasteful, and tedious.
Is this a bad thing? No, not really….I’m always stopping at WalMart at 1am when my shift at the Herald-Standard’s composing room/ad-design department elapses. If I run out of peanut butter at 4am on a Thursday morning, I can just run out to the Sweet Pea’s on Route 21, or the Giant Eagle in Uniontown for my fix. Hell, if I need a new mouse or a new keyboard for my computer at midnight on Labor Day, I can always swing by WalMart for that. I haven’t enjoyed a “typical” 9-to-5 lifestyle or work routine since 1997: working the night shift at the newspaper has gradually rendered me nocturnal, and were it not for 24/7 superstores like the Big W and allnite gas oases like Sheetz, my life would be flatout impossible.
But still….There are times when it’s comforting to see the world at rest. To see the sliding doors of Capitalism locked and all the lights turned off for just a little while. To see empty parking spaces and to feel no urge to duck into the ”sweet spot” closest to the front of the store before someone else snags that primo chunk of parking realestate. There’s an eerie peace to be found in a paused world, because it’s now so uncommon. Peace and quiet are rarer than radium today, and I relish the handful of minutes I get to spend once or, at most, twice a year passing like a ghost through sleeping parkinglots.
What Is It?
August 29th, 2006
No, we’re not talking about Crispin Glover’s transcendentally-weird film, we’re talking about this very dead, very strange thing found in Russia.
Is it a dead Skeksi? Or one of their “good guy” counterparts, the Mystics/urRu?
Or maybe a giant ground sloth?
Whatever the heck it is, credit for its “discovery” on the ‘Net goes to the lovely Monica, who managed to dredge it up and deliver the pics to me so as to redeem an otherwise boring morning with awesome cryptozoological specimens!
