Author: Rebecca Demarest

My Kind of Fantasy

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If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a sucker for fantasy, and I blame it all on my father. He started me young with the speculative books, and I’ve never forgotten them. One of the series that I have had on my shelf as long as I can remember are the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede. Like, I have no idea where they actually came from, I’ve owned them that long. And they have had a profound influence on my taste in books and my style of writing.

And the best part? I went back and re-read them just last month and they are still just as good as when I was reading them as a child. Do you know how hard that is to pull of as a YA author? Go on, I dare you to go re-read your favorites from before puberty. You’ll wince. But not these; the writing and the characters, and all of it are so vivid and excellently written that they withstand the scrutiny of an MFA wielding writer 25 years down the line. Now that’s just impressive.

But back to the books themselves. They are the most delightful parody of classic fairy tales you could ever wish for. On her site, Ms. Wrede claims inspiration from the land of Oz and the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of Rocky and Bullwinkle. You can certainly feel it in the quirky and determined heroine Cimorene in the first book all the way through to our overly polite hero Daystar in the last book. They take every fairy tale trope and turn it over, shake it hard, set back upright and paint a new face on it.

The reason I went back to these stories now was because I wanted to capture that feel of intelligent irreverence before going back to edit my own fantasy novel, Mark of the Storyteller. Ms. Wrede’s grasp of language, comedic timing, and knowledge of fairy tale lore is unique in her genre, and it is worth studying—and studying hard—before moving on to your own fairy tale parodies. Or for reading when you’re stuck sick in bed because it can always make you laugh, even when you have the majority of it memorized.

What Would You do to be King?

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Rudyard Kipling has long been a favorite author of mine because of his Just So stories. They filled my childhood with wonder and I can still picture the animated version of “How the Elephant Got its Trunk” that I must have watched hundreds of times. Then when I was hunting for novellas for research on the form, I came across The Man Who Would be King. 

Yes, a movie version of it came out in ’97. Yes, I was too young to actually watch it, but you can be sure I’m going to hunt it down now. ‘Cause…Sean Connery, how can you say no to that? But back to the novella…

This story is structured like many adventure tales of the time: there is a narrator who is not at all an actual part of the story, but serves as a vehicle for the actual adventurers to expound upon their tale. This format worked great for The Time Machine, it doesn’t work so well with this one, unfortunately.

Basically, you’ve got a reporter who ends up being nice to a couple of gentlemen down on their luck, watches them ride off, determined to make themselves kings in the Middle East, then watches one come back broken and nearly dead who tells him of the marvelous time they had wherein they did indeed become kings and then were betrayed by the desire for a woman. And I didn’t give one whit about the reporter, I wanted to be off gallivanting with the adventurers because they seemed like they were having so much more fun than the poor writer. The way in which the story was told kept the reader at arms length from the action, unlike the time machine where the story still managed to be immersive. And this story had such amazing potential, too! I could have been riveting.

Someone obviously agreed with me on that front, so they made a movie. Which I’m now going to go watch, because if Connery gets into the same kind of trouble that these men did, its going to be amazing…

Don’t Ever Be the Redshirt

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I love sci-fi. I am an avid fan of it in all formats and I am even more fond of the parodies that bad sci-fi inspires. Galaxy Quest, anyone? So I was particularly happy to hear that John Scalzi had written a new parody entitled Redshirts.

For those of you who are not familiar with the genre slang, Star Trek, in their original series, had a bad habit of sticking extras in red shirts on away teams for the sole purpose of killing them off. Or grievously injuring them. You get the picture: red shirt = bad news for your character.

Now along comes Scalzi’s new book were our protagonist and all his supporting characters are Redshirts; fully expendable, high casualty rate, Redshirts on the good ship Intrepid. Its not long after they are assigned to the ship that they start to notice just how absurd the casualty rate is, nor do they content themselves to hiding from the officers like the rest of the crew seems to be. No, Andy Dahl and compatriots take it into their hands to figure out why such ridiculous things keep happening. I mean, Ice Sharks? Really? That’s almost as bad as the crewman who was eaten by the Morgrovian Sand Worms.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable book, if a bit slow to start off. The prologue had me a bit confused as to who the main character was (he’s not there, fyi, his name is Andy Dahl and he shows up a few pages later) and a lot of the secondary characters I had trouble keeping straight, but that’s because they functioned as tropes, and very well, at that. Once you get past the slow start and into the meat of this story though, you won’t want to put the book down. It takes meta to the meta in poking fun at poorly written sci-fi series and Scalzi certainly did his homework. I wonder just how many bad shows he had to watch for research…and I wonder how I can convince my SO that watching the entire series of Pretender while I’m working is research as well…

Overall, this was a fun, if occasionally mind-bending, read. I can’t tell you much more about it without ruining some of the fun twists, but if you like a good B sci-fi movie, you’ll love this book.

Who is the Crazy One Now?

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In investigating classic novellas, I stumbled across Machado de Assis‘ The Alienist and subsequently couldn’t put it down. This Brazilian work was written at the end of the 1800’s and explores the rising field of psychology and the dangers of judging what is sane or insane.

Now, I really don’t want to ruin the various twists in this rather short novella, so I’ll only give you with a short summary. The protagonist is a doctor who learns of psychiatry and decides to build a sanitarium in his town to which he starts to commit most of his neighbors. But that’s just the first third. Suffice it to say you are left a distinct impression that no one in the town is strictly sane by the end of it all.

But this book explores some interesting themes on the topic of mental health, ones we can relate to today. How do we define what is normal and what is insane? Are we, as humans, even capable of making that distinction for ourselves? And if everyone around us could be dubbed unstable, does that not make the stable ones the abnormalities?

Beyond these heavy philosophical arguments, the book is stunningly well written, with a compelling plot and characters. You definitely feel sorry for the doctor’s wife by the time all is said and done. And, of course, it’s gorgeously presented by Melville House.

But I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on these philosophical quandaries, particularly if you’ve gotten a chance to read some of Machado de Assis’ work for yourself. What do you classify as insane, what gives the medical community the right to make these judgment (and if you didn’t know, this week marks the newest release of the guidelines for those judgments)? What if we’re entirely wrong about who is the normative human beings, and which are the non-normative?

A Lot Funnier Than I Thought It Would Be

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I feel like I’m going to go to hell for this, but Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt made me laugh, a lot. Everyone I’d ever talked to about the memoir said it was horribly depressing if well written and so I’d put off reading it as long as I could, but the guilt of having it sit on my shelf unread got to me and I finally picked it up.

Then I couldn’t put it down. Yes, it is the really rough story of growing up dirt poor in Limerick, Ireland with siblings dying around him and his father drinking away any money he earns, leaving his poor mother perpetually pregnant and begging for food for her children. This memoir follows McCourt from his birth through till he earned/stole enough money to get himself passage to America.

But beyond this dark and dingy situation, there is the shining humor and strength of Frank shining through. You’ll be going along reading a really horribly depressing scene about the death of someone down the lane and then you get this one liner that just has you busting at the seams. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a horrible person. Or maybe McCourt is just that good of an author and he ratchets your tension so high with the deaths and the disease that when he throws you a “Kids Say the Darndest Things” line, it hits you harder than most and you laugh to keep from crying about everything else that happened to him.

I would very much suggest people pick this book up as it is worth every moment of your time. Beautifully written, and a stunning look into times past in a country that has not had the smoothest of histories.