Camp NaNoWriMo

So, there I was perusing FB when a fellow Friend's post smacked me in the face --it was a link to their blog (http://reviewmetwice.blogspot.com/) encouraging people to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo (http://campnanowrimo.org/about).  Well I first heard about NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), the parent for the Camp, a few years ago.  It is an annual writing "workshop" (for lack of a better term) that occurs each November.  People sign up with the goal of starting (and finishing) a novel of a set number of words all to be written in one month. There is no prize.  It doesn't get published.  It is simply held to encourage people to write. The problem, for me, has always been that I simply do not have time to participate in this event during November due to work constraints.  Well, lo' and behold, I now know that NaNoWriMo has two similar writing workshops to occur in April and July -- the Camp! They are less stringent with the word count (you set your own goal) than with the Nov. NaNoWriMo, which is really good for people who work and only have a limited time frame to devote to this endeavour.

So here's to the challenge.  If you feel the urge to set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as in my case), join the fun. Hope to see you there!

The Other Side of the Mountain -- Michel Bernanos

Title: La Montagne Morte de la Vie (The Other Side of The Mountain) 

Author:  Michel Bernanos (translation by Gio Clairval) 

Publishing Information: Included in The Weird, a Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, published in the United States by Tor of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York (2012), and in Great Britain by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltc., London (2011) [n.b. An older version of this work, translated by Elaine P. Halperin, can be found in a standalone volume published by Norman S. Berg by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Co., Dunwoody, GA (1973)] 

Source: Currently available through any seller of new books [for the Norm S. Berg version, which is no longer in print, try finding it at www.abebooks.com or any other used book source]

Short Bio: (January 20, 1923 – July 27, 1964) Michel Bernanos was born in France, the fourth of six children of George Bernanos, a Catholic writer and critic of bourgeois French politics, and Jeanne Talbert d’Arc, a direct descendant of the brother of Joan d’Arc (Joan of Arc).  After a brief flirtation with the fascist Franco regime in Spain, George moved his family to Brazil in 1938 to escape the deterioration of the Europe.  Michel, then in his teens, spent his time working on the family farm, penning his first poem at the age of fifteen.  In 1942 he moved to London where he joined the France Libre resistance fighters and then a submarine unit, in which he served until the end of World War II. Even though his parents moved back to France after the war, Michel decided to return to Brazil (1946) to run a rubber plantation.  In 1948, after the death of his father, he moved to Chantilly, a suburb of Paris, where he lived with his wife and daughter until one day in 1964 when he suddenly disappeared.  He was found dead three days later in the forest at Fontainebleau, a victim of suicide. During his lifetime, he wrote numerous crime and fantastical stories under the pen-names of Michel Talbert and Michel Drowin, purportedly using pseudonyms so as not to ride the coattails of his father. All of his works were published during his lifetime, with the noted exception of The Other Side of the Mountain (first published in France in 1967) and some of his other fantastical fiction. Unfortunately, this was all I could find out about him online, at least that was written in English. Per the Wikipedia article I read, there is one biography on him written by Salsa Bertin called Michel Bernanos, l’Insurgé (Michel Bernanos, The Insurgent), but, alas, it is in French and I am not blessed with the skill to read that language.  If you are and have read it, I would very much like to hear your opinions on it – to see if it provides more details to flesh out this mysterious and conflicted man’s life.

Comments on the Story: [Spoiler Alert] 

The Other Side of the Mountain, is the third installment in a tetralogy consisting of Le Murmure des Dieux (The Murmur of the Gods), L’Enverse de l’Eperon (The Back of the Sporn), La Montagne Morte de la Vie (The Other Side of the Mountain), and Ils ont Déchiré Son Image (They Have Destroyed His Image), and, as far as I could find, is Michel Bernanos’ only story translated into English. Hopefully someday an ambitious translator will rectify this situation, but until then, if you do not have a command of the French language, you can at least enjoy this gem of Michel Bernanos’ genius.

This story is broken into two distinct sections – the first a sea adventure and the second a divergence into the weird. Though they tie together perfectly, in my opinion, I found in my research that some people felt they couldn’t get past Part One. I have to suppose that this was in no small part due to an expectation they might have had as to what the weird genre should deliver. Though written well, if you anticipate jumping into something like George McDonald’s Phantastes right from the first paragraph, the opening of this story certainly isn’t going to deliver. However, if you press on and read the novella in its entirety, I feel certain that you will find that the dichotomy created by the juxtaposition of something cut out of reality set next to the absurd can actually heighten the impact of the latter. However, for someone who may already have been turned off by their initial reading of the story, it might be hard for them to go back and give it a second try.  To this I hope some will reconsider. In an effort to assist those who may be on the fence, I am going to give a brief synopsis of Part One so that they can simply jump to Part Two and see if their opinions change. As such, for anyone who has not yet had the opportunity to read any of the story, consider this a spoiler alert.

The story opens with an unnamed young man of eighteen, whilst drunk one night, rashly signing up to be a ship’s boy.  The next morning, to his dismay, he awakens to find himself aboard a galleon bound for Peru.  Greeted by a kick to the ribs and a command to go see the cook, he attempts to obey, however, reacting too slowly for his tormentor, he soon finds himself the object of a terrible hazing. Restrained by members of the crew, he watches as a rope is dropped over the prow of the ship and dragged backwards until it straddles the hull with both ends draped over the deck. Another rope is then tied around his waist and he is forced to suffer the agony of being slowly lowered over the side of the ship until fully submerged in the water. But his torture doesn’t stop there. His descent continues in painful increments until he finds himself suspended  at the very nadir of the hull.  His last memory before passing out is of the deep dark ocean stretching out endlessly beneath him.

As the story progresses we find our narrator in the company of the ship’s cook, Toine. An old veteran of the sea, he shows the boy the ropes and soon our narrator is able to make his own way without further harassment from the crew. Things start to look up for our narrator and we are graced with absolutely beautiful descriptions of the sea and the sky as the days pass endlessly by. But what kind of sea story would this be if there wasn’t more conflict?  Well, just as the vessel reaches equatorial waters, a dead calm besets it, a calm that stretches on for days, then weeks, then months.  The food rots, the potable water runs out and the crew suffers the agonies of starvation – rotting teeth, scurvy, bloated bellies.  Toine and the narrator survive by eating flour that the wily cook had hidden in the galley, secretly filling their stomachs while their minds struggle with the conflicting emotions of feeling shame for their deception and understanding that the rest of the crew would do no different given the opportunity. When it seems their circumstances can get no worse, a horrific storm arises, sucking the ship into a maelstrom. Chaos ensues as the crew fight one another for the life boats, but to no avail. Every man is thrown into the sea except for Toine and the boy, who manage to strap themselves to the mainmast after it is ripped from the deck. Exhausted and beyond hope, our narrator passes out – his fate in the hands of nature.

An unknown amount of time later we find our two characters afloat in an ocean the color of blood overseen by a crimson sun which surmounts a brick colored sky. Soon they are surrounded by massive sea creatures who undulate through the water and, as the sun sets, glow with an eerie phosphorescence. Our narrator describes the situation as follows:

“Something malefic hovered in the air, without a name but palpable. A dimensionless cavern was swallowing me alive, its vaults riddled with shining worms vitrified in death by their own lights.” (page 388)

But the creatures leave them undisturbed and night passes into day. The water begins to lose its salinity, and our characters drink their fill then kill and eat an octopus. But their greatest salvation comes when they spot land.

Here starts Part Two of the story – the part that makes this tale so unusual and mystifying. The pair is washed ashore on a beach of red sand and make their way inland to look for food and shelter. What they find is viscerally disturbing, presented in incremental snippets so well plotted that you are irresistibly drawn forward in the story. As far as they can tell, they are alone, or at least seemingly so.  Everywhere they find signs of human life – pottery, tools, shelters and most strange of all, perfectly carved statues of people – but not one single living soul. They push on through the endlessly red days, discovering forests full of carnivorous plants that seem to have the power of locomotion, even of cognition, seeking out the mysteries of the island and finding at its source an indomitable mountain range which contains horrors beyond their imagination.

This story runs on so many levels, it will probably strike every reader in a completely different way.  Man versus nature. A devolution into madness. The hallucinatory last gasp for life of two dying men. It even has the fairy elements of entering the world of the Fae and finding you are trapped there once you unwittingly eat their food. If it weren’t for the poetic nature of the writing, which leaves the reader with a deeper sense of meaning within every word, these simple plot devices might suffice, but ultimately they do not. If you want to partake of your own endless journey, read this fantastic story and you will find yourself thinking about it for years to come – constantly twisting your thoughts around to find fresh meanings in each lovely and memorable image.

As a final note, I read both English translations that I cited in the publication information above, and though I found Elaine P. Halperin’s to be more than sufficient to convey the beauty of this story, the new translation by Gio Clairval seems to me to have captured more of the poetic feeling of the words. If you have read the original French text as well as either of these English translations, I would be delighted to hear your comments on what you think of their comparison. 

Additional Information: 

Though both English versions of this story translated the title as “the other side of the mountain”, to me the literal translation (“the mountain of death from life”) imparts more clearly the metaphorical feeling of the story itself – that the mountain, which dominates the island upon which our protagonists are shipwrecked, has literally gained anthropomorphic life by causing death.

Sources for Short Bio: 

The first two articles are exceptionally well written comments on the story and well worth reading. 

http://gioclairval.blogspot.com/2011/11/essay-on-michel-bernanos-mountain-dead.html

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/michel-bernanos-the-other-side-of-the-mountain-sin-destruction-and-forgiveness/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bernanos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Bernanos

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bernanos.htm

Usher's Passing - Robert McCammon

Title: Usher’s Passing 

Author: Robert McCammon 

Publishing Information: Ballantine Books, New York (1985), originally published Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1984) 

Source: My library (paperback) 

Short Bio: (July 17, 1952 to present) Robert Rick McCammon was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, by his grandparents who took him in after his parents divorced.  He was expected to take over the family furniture business when he grew up but instead chose a much different path.  After graduating in 1974 from the University of Alabama with a B.A. in Journalism, he obtained a job writing advertising copy for various Birmingham based businesses and newspapers. However, thank goodness for us, his writing skills did not languish there.  He soon tried his hand  at writing short stories, with little success, but in 1978 he received an acceptance letter for his first horror novel, Baal. After that his career blossomed with the publication of  twelve novels (including They Thirst (1981), Usher’s Passing (1984), Swan’s Song (1987), and Boy’s Life (1991)), one approximately every two to three years, until 1992 when he decided to take a break from writing to spend time with his family after the birth of his first child. Three years later, he once again took up the pen, but felt at that time that he had outgrown the horror genre and decided to write a historical fiction set in Colonial America (Speaks the Nightbird). He chose a new publisher to present his book too, but they wanted to change the  premise to make it more of a historical romance, which was unacceptable to McCammon. He tried to sell it to other publishers, but no one wanted it, stating in various ways that it was outside the established genre of his readership (horror) and thus they didn’t think it would sell. So, he withdrew it from consideration. Trying to get his feet back under him, he embarked on a new novel, one set during World War II (The Village), but the impact of rejection hit him hard and he found himself spiraling into a deep depression. Three years of struggle later, he finally dug himself out and finished The Village.  At that time (1998) he wrote a heartfelt letter to his readership *, explaining a little bit about what had occurred during his long six year hiatus, specifically touching on his need to pursue topics other than horror as a writer and his understanding that this decision might spell the end of his writing career.  Thankfully, though The Village has yet to be published, in 2002 a small publishing house, River City Publishing, decided to give him a chance and printed 50,000 copies of Speaks the Nightbird. The novel was well received and has since been reprinted by Pocket Books. (It is an incredible book and well worth the read – I’ll post another review on it later). Nightbird broke McCammon's writer’s block and he has now successfully placed three new additions to his Colonial American series (The Queen of Bedlam, Mister Slaughter, and The Providence Rider), a handful of other novels (The Five and I Travel by Night) and a short story collection (The Hunter from the Woods).

* http://www.robertmccammon.com/articles/9812_letter.html 

Comments on the Story: 
Usher’s Passing was my introduction to McCammon, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Right from the first paragraph I was mesmerized:

“Thunder echoed like an iron bell above the sprawl of New York City. In the heavy air, lightning crackled and thrust at the earth striking the high Gothic steeple of James Renwick’s new Grace Church on East Tenth Street then sizzling to death a half-blind drayhorse on the squatter’s flatlands north of Fourteenth. The horse’s owner bleated in terror and leaped for his life as his cart overturned, sinking its load of potatoes into eight inches of mud.”

Immediately I was there, ankle deep in mud with the driver, soaking wet from the rain, devastated by both by the death of the horse and the man’s livelihood. Powerful. Detailed. Atmospheric writing. And it only gets better from there.

As the narration continues, we find ourselves in the year 1847, traveling the streets with Hudson Usher as he seeks someone amidst the many seedy bars of lower Manhattan.  That someone is none other than Edgar Allen Poe. Hudson wishes to confront this man about his authorship of The Fall of the House of Usher, a story, which Hudson claims, is not fiction, but based on the actual death of his beloved brother, Roderick, who perished in a flood that destroyed their family home in Pennsylvania.  Poe refuses to apologize for the story itself, and though he admits that he may have been inspired by tales he’d heard about the incident, he denies any intention to malign the Usher name. He wishes the man a “long and profitable existence." And Hudson, seeing the man reeking of alcohol and dressed in filthy clothes, responds, “And may your fortunes continue their course.” To both men, these adieux prove true.

Flash forward to the present and we meet the main narrator of the story, Rix Usher, a struggling horror story writer, who is meeting with his publisher in New York City when an unexpected visit from his brother, Boone, calls him back to the family home, called Usherland and now located in North Carolina. Their father is dying. Reluctantly, Rix agrees to return, but only after being asked a second time by the man who raised him, the groundskeeper of Usherland, Edwin Bodane. The Usher family, to put it mildly, is overly eccentric and riddled with intrigue. They have built an empire out of designing complex armaments for the government – weapons used to level cities. Rix from an early age, never fit in with the family and spent most of his adult years trying to distance himself from them. Returning takes an act of will that exhausts him.

He arrives home to find his father ensconced in the attic, no more than a rotting corpse on a life support system.  He is succumbing to the final stages of the Usher Malady – an acute sensitivity to all sensory impulses.  It is an illness which plagues the entire Usher line, and worsens the further one gets from Usherland.  Rix has suffered from it for years, and as a result returns to his childhood home thin and sickly, not much more healthy than his father, and definitely not equipped to deal with the family.  He is verbally assaulted by his mother, a woman who is definitely in denial about something, abused by his brother, taunted by his debutant sister and caused to suffer the sickening advances of Boone’s overly painted, past her prime, former beauty queen wife. And all of that is before he goes up to see his father – a meeting punctuated by a  series of belittling and ego-shattering comments about Rix’s decision to be a writer rather than go into the family business (there are a lot of similarities to McCammon’s early career here).  At this point Rix is ready to leave and never return, but his father softens and asks that he stay, at least for a few days, for his mother’s sake. Reluctantly, again, Rix agrees, but little does he know, the old man has a lot more up his sleeve than just bones and festering wounds. He has plans for Rix, plans far beyond even Rix’s abundant imagination. Plans that will take him to hell and back again, with a twist.

McCammon takes us on a roller-coaster ride of suspense and horror, some quite grisly, as he weaves this wonderful tale.  In a very daring move, he uses  one of Poe’s most beloved stories as a spring board and gives it a brand new life full of rich characters and incredible scenery. But his inspiration from Poe doesn’t stop there.  Throughout the novel he intersperses various allusions, both big and small, to some of Poe’s tales. Some of the more overt ones consist of a legendary big black cat, called Greediguts by the locals (The Black Cat), who allegedly roams the mountains of North Carolina abducting and devouring children, and the Lodge (The Fall of the House of Usher), the massive and foreboding  ancestral home of the Ushers. It contains hundreds of rooms, most built by Erik, Rix’s grandfather, as a way to continually produce noise and vibrations throughout the house so as to drive his father, who was wracked with the Usher Malady, to suicide and thus allow Erik to take over the family business. A few of the more subtle tie-ins include a description of Hudson’s face in the first chapter as being “free of any telltale wrinkles” (The Tell-Tale Heart), and, a few paragraphs later, Poe offering Hudson some amontillado (The Cask of Amontillado). There is an interesting (though not very well written, in my opinion) article written by Marian Motley-Carcache (which can be found on McCammon’s website **) outlining even more of these allusions.   

All in all, I found this book to be at the very top of my good reads list.  After turning the last page, I felt such a nagging pain of loss at having finished the story that I had to immediately sink my teeth into McCammon’s Swan Song and then Speaks the Nightbird.  If you enjoy exceptionally well written description and cracker-jack dialog, I suggest you give McCammon a try.  However, a word of warning, his descriptions and plots can tend towards the absolutely horrific and demonic. His imagination seems to have no bounds.

** http://www.robertmccammon.com/articles/the-call.html 

Additional Information: 

Websites used to prepare the Short Bio consist of: 

http://www.robertmccammon.com/articles.html 

Note to anyone who enjoys McCammon's work, he has made a decision to refuse any republication rights to his older works.  So if you have his first few novels, hold on to them.  And if you do not, check out www.abebooks.com or other used book stores for copies.

Mrs. God -- Peter Straub

Title: Mrs. God 

Author: Peter Straub 

Publishing Information: Published by Pegasus Crime, an imprint of Pegasus Books, LLC, New York (1990). 

Source: Science Fiction Book Club

Short Bio: (March 2, 1943 to present) As is succinctly stated on his website: “Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, (Wisconsin)… the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.” This passion for the written word turned into a Godsend throughout his childhood, keeping his mind active and alive through the pain of recovery from a terrible car accident and the ridicule of dealing with a stutter, and carried him further into his early adulthood as he sought and obtained a B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin and a MA from Columbia. At first he was drawn to teaching rather than writing, taking a post as a literature teacher at his alma mater, the Milwaukee Country Day School, but eventually, while in Ireland pursuing his Ph.D. (1969), he tried his hand at writing. During this period he wrote two books of poetry, Ishmael and Open Air, but eventually found the pull of narrative more to his liking.  His first book, Marriages, was published in 1973, after which he moved to London and wrote Under Venus (1974), Julia (1975), If You Could See Me Now (1977) and finally the novel we all know him for, Ghost Story (1979). In 1979 he moved to New York City where he lives to this day. Since the success of Ghost Story, Straub has written numerous short stories, poems, novellas and over ten novels, including two collaborations with Stephen King (The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001)) and explored various literary devices such as metafiction* and the use of unreliable narrators (the "Blue Rose Trilogy" consisting of Koko (1988), Mystery (1990), and The Throat (1993)). He is the recipient of the August Derleth Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award.

*Metafiction: Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of "reality" in a work.  (http://web.cn.edu/Kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html)

Comments on the Story: 

Mrs. God is the tale of a college professor, William Standish, caught in a triangle of disappointments: with his job at a second rate college, with his wife who had an affair, and with himself for not being able to produce the necessary critical essays required by his profession. Just as he is about to succumb to the pressures of his life, he receives a coveted Fellowship at an English manor house called Esswood, owned by the Seneschal family**. This ancient manor, to which few scholars have been invited, is reputed to have an incredible library full of the personal writings of the great, and not so great, modern writers who spent time there. As for Standish, he sees this as a prime opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: a) take a much needed break from the strain of his marriage and b) research the personal papers of his relative, Isobel Standish, a minor twentieth century poet whose only published work, Crack, Whack and Wheel, delved into the power of words by deconstructing language into only its essential parts. The latter he plans to turn into a series of essays and books which when published will ultimately save his career.

This is the story of a journey, both physical and psychological. On the surface, Standish is taking a perfectly normal trip to conduct research, something that every collegiate professor is expected to do, but below this lies an undercurrent of his shifting state of mind. Right from the start, it is apparent that Standish is unhappy in his life, and the narrative is rife with allusions to occurrences in his past. As the story progresses, these allusions are fleshed out to a certain extent, though the reliability as to their veracity comes into question as you realize that he is spiraling deeper and deeper into madness (good example of the use of an unreliable narrator). This realization comes near the end of the story, after Straub has cleverly deceived you into believing you are reading a dark and disturbing ghost story. However, after finishing the book, and looking back at all the clues, the descriptions of what Standish encounters can easily be viewed as the developing delusions of a megalomaniac. In the end, Standish peels back all the layers of his being and becomes the monster he perceives within, ultimately destroying not only himself in the process, but something ancient and beautiful as well. Out of destruction, creation. Out of deconstruction, the essence of life, though that life be twisted and wrought of pure evil.

A shorter version of Mrs. God originally appeared in a collection of Straub’s works called Houses Without Doors (1990). Since I have not read that version, I am not sure if the additional text in the standalone book adds or detracts from the overall story. Whatever the case may be, the version that I read gives the reader an impression of delving into a novel, with all the expected complexities of background and character development, but reads like a short story, and as such, I’m not sure that it really works. By the time I got to the last few chapters, I felt a creeping sense of disappointment come over me, not necessarily as to where the story was going, but more as to the pacing, which ultimately, and unfortunately, proved to me to be too abrupt. I felt that the story, as presented, was too complex to render as a short work. It felt to me as if Straub had simply gotten tired of the characters and decided to stop writing. All in all, though a very intriguing story, I cannot consider this an overall good read.

** I found it interesting that the name of the family, Seneschal, is actually a medieval word for a steward who was in charge of taking care of a lord’s estate. In a sense the Seneschals are the stewards of this incredible library, which ultimately, is the heart of the story. Also, the only people Standish actually meets at Esswood are the housekeeper and the caretaker of the library -- both stewards of the house.

 Additional Information: 

Following is a link to a review of Houses Without Doors written by Putney Tyson Ridge, Ph.D., a professor at Popham College. I include it because it gives a very distinct point of view on Straub, one that addresses Straub’s over inflated view of himself as a best-selling author. As for myself, while researching the Short Bio, I got a sense of this side of Straub, but I’m not completely convinced that when conducting interviews or otherwise describing himself he doesn’t simply have an overwrought sense of tongue in cheek humor. In any case, the article is worth reading if only for the lovely use of bitter sarcasm.

http://www.peterstraub.net/ptr_crit/crit17.html 

Update Feb. 24, 2014: It was brought to my attention today by a reader, who was kind enough to send me an email on this post, that Putney Tyson Ridge is an alter ego of Straub's.  He did not exist.  I'm afraid I fell into the category of someone who did not do their research well enough.  For this, I apologize to you, dear reader.  In any case here are a few links confirming this new bit of information:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-58767-165-4
http://hellnotes.com/slides-by-peter-straub
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_straub_sides.html

Websites used to prepare the Short Bio consist of:
http://www.peterstraub.net/bio/bio_home.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Straub