Post by Calenture on Nov 22, 2008 19:52:56 GMT
Millennium edited by Douglas E Winter (Voyager, 1997)
Chiliad: A Meditation – Men and Sin by Clive Barker
The Big Blow by Joe R Lansdale
If I should Die Before I Wake by David Morrell
Aryans and Absinthe by F Paul Wilson
Triads by Poppy Z Brite and Christa Faust
Riding the Black by Charles Grant
The Open Doors by Whitley Strieber
Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo by Elizabeth Massie
Whatever by Richard Christian Matheson
Dismantling Fortress Architecture by David J Schow
and Craig Spector
The Word by Ramsey Campbell
Chilliad: A Meditation – A moment at the River’s Heart
by Clive Barker
The End (An Afterword) by Douglas E Winter
A unique book for a unique time. An anthology novel that begins in the year 999 and reaches its shattering climax in the year 2000.
Millenium marks the end of an epoch, and the end of a century which has generated a remarkable escalation of skills and knowledge. It is also a century which has witnessed the worst excesses of human ingenuity – the killing of millions by the dropping of a single device, organised genocide, and dangerous meddling deliberate and accidental, with the Earth’s fragile eco-systems.
So has the human soul evolved? Can we, as a race, overcome our fatal flaws? Encased within a challenging novella, courtesy of the master magician himself – Clive Barker, Millenium explores the workings of the human heart in the ten decades that comprise the twentieth century.
A prize-fighter goes for the kill during America’s worst storm… A Jewish mystic launches a pre-emptive strike against Hitler… two unconventional lovers defy the Triads… a Manhattan Project scientist atones for the monster he has unleashed… a diabolical plan to restore the Third Reich is assembled from the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
These are only a few of the narrative strands woven into this collective work of unique fiction by the greatest horror and fantasy writers of our day. The result is one of the most unusual and powerful statements of our time – a novel that is both an apocalyptic warning and a visionary answer for all humankind.
From the cover blurb, natch. I wasn't happy about the synopses I wrote for this anthology a few years back, they were too lacking in detail, so I'll be re-reading and revising them. But if anyone else is familiar with any of these stories, please just go ahead and start adding to this thread.
The Big Blow by Joe R Lansdale: The problem I'm having with most of the pieces in this anthology is that they seem too lacking in humour, to the point of being pretentious and tiresome. However, when a story begins:
On an afternoon hotter than two rats f**king in a wool sock, John Mc Bride...built like a wild boar and of similar disposition, arrived...a six-gun under his coat and a razor in his shoe.
...when a story begins that way, you know you're in for a real good time.
Forest Tucker has been beaten by 'Lil' Arthur John Johnson in a fist fight at the Galveston sporting club; which is bad news for 'Lil' Arthur, as he's black, and this is the year 1900 when a black man can't knock down a white man in an honest fight and get away with it. Tucker's backers bring in John McBride to fight 'Lil' Arthur. But before the fight begins, a storm blows up, the kind of storm no-one on the island has ever seen before.
Lansdale presents a riveting and frightening multi-viewpoint novella, where the two boxers share misadventures and the boxing match is finally held in a ring surrounded by drowned bodies being picked over by seagulls.
If I Should Die Before I Wake by David Morrell: Joey Carter developes a fever after swimming in the creek. His father is convinced that it's been brought on by the dirty water; but in that case, Dr Jonas Bingaman wonders, why aren't the other boys ill, too. Before much longer, they are.
When I first read this, I doubted if such a plague could have happened without it remaining common knowledge; but of course since then we've had the Bird Flu' thing and people have remembered and discussed the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed more people than the Great War. More people died of it in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death, and that's what's remembered in this story, which I have to say is pretty good if inevitably grim.
Aryans and Absinthe by F Paul Wilson: Ernst Drexler is making a fortune by investing in American dollars at a time of runaway inflation, but he wants a friend to share this entertainment with; so he cultivates Karl Stehr's company.
The two men make a fortune while others around them starve, and the ground is prepared for Hitler's road to power. Wilson tells a good story, and his description of Hitler is convincing, never more than in the small details, such as the future dictator chewing on a finger nail while he waits to confront a political opponent in a Munich beer hall.
The rate of inflation described in this story, like other events, the attempted assasination of Hitler, his brief imprisonment, then return to power and rise to dictatorship, is so fantastic that it strains belief, which I guess just proves that life really is weirder than fiction.
Triads by Poppy Z Brite and Christa Faust: A boys opera school in Hong Kong, 1937, is the setting. Ji Fung has been given to the school eight years before, as a small child, by his mother. According to the contract, he may be beaten to death for disobedience. The only brightness in Ji Fung's life is his fellow-dancer Lin Bai, who is beautiful and talented, and so is always given the leading female roles.
His beauty also marks Lin Bai for special attention by tyrranical Master Lau, meaning repeated and graphically described homosexual rape.
Brite has described herself famously as a homosexual male trapped inside a woman's body. Her writing is, at the same time, stunningly beautiful and horrific. And it has to be said that in the hands of a less skillful heterosexual writer, would probably be wide open to the charge of pornography.
Following an horrendous attack, the two boys escape the school and run away. They are rescued from a street gang by the sophisticated and rich Perique LeBon. Together the three of them explore the wonders of Hong Kong and Chinese society at its most decadent in the stinking streets of Shanghai, until Li Fung is discovered and returned to his Triad-leader uncle. At the same time, Japanese warships are at anchor in the harbour, and war is imminent.
Brite's Exquisite Corpse is the most horrific work of fiction I've ever read - although of course it's based on fact, the Jeffrey Dahmer murders, some of them revisited in excrutiating detail in Brite's novel. Christa Faust was working on a novel of her own, Control Freak at the time of this collaboration with Brite. It seems to be a marriage made in hell, and I thought this story was great.
Riding the Black by Charles L Grant: The 1940s. Rob Garland is the last cowboy, an anachronism, living alone in a shack between civilisation and the wilderness, riding into town to eat at Dinah's cafe and tell stories of a time when the prairies were black with herds of buffalo.
The shadow of the bomb hangs over all, and television and telephones are throwing their webs across the land. Some people are not content with shadows; now they know what the bomb looks like. This is an elegiac song of the old west, with a slightly ambiguous end. Beautifully written.
The Open Doors by Whitley Strieber: Dr von Neumann dreams of an alien race whose view of reality is so different to ours that in this world they literally are not real; they require human belief as a bridge.
Von Neumann has seen them. Nature has rejected his knowledge, and was rejecting the disorder it implied by filling him with cancer. Infuriating and impressive by turns.
Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo by Elizabeth Massie: Someone pushes a leaflet into Gary's hand at a student demonstration, and he sets out to find the place called Sunrise - a place where a person can live in peace. On the way, he meets Sharon, pregnant and suicidal, and they continue the journey together.
Sunrise, it transpires, is a commune run by a man who insists they each name him after the thing they need. Gary names him Friend. But stranger than this, are the deformed children and the continuous state of lethargy exhibited by the commune's members. Gary believes that Friend has a secret, and determines to find out what it is.
I had a try at reading Whatever by Richard Cristian Matheson last night, but lost patience with it. It seems to be about rock groups, real or imagined - Whatever is the name of a band. There are references to ancient cities and a crashed aircraft full of religious iconography. It's probably just a mood I was in that I couldn't get into it. I'll try again soon.
The same applies to Dismantling Fortress Architecture by David J Schow and Craig Spector. I've read books by both these authors and found them hugely entertaining - I enjoyed The Light at the End, a vampire novel by Spector and John Skipp - but couldn't get into this. And the same applies to the Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell entries here, all of these latter mentioned pieces striking me as boring and humourless.
It really must be a mood I'm in, I was always useless at holidays. In the event, last night I started reading Dan Simmons' collection Prayers to Broken Stones, which so far seems excellent, and I can't find any mention of it here, so probably it will be next up.
Chiliad: A Meditation – Men and Sin by Clive Barker
The Big Blow by Joe R Lansdale
If I should Die Before I Wake by David Morrell
Aryans and Absinthe by F Paul Wilson
Triads by Poppy Z Brite and Christa Faust
Riding the Black by Charles Grant
The Open Doors by Whitley Strieber
Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo by Elizabeth Massie
Whatever by Richard Christian Matheson
Dismantling Fortress Architecture by David J Schow
and Craig Spector
The Word by Ramsey Campbell
Chilliad: A Meditation – A moment at the River’s Heart
by Clive Barker
The End (An Afterword) by Douglas E Winter
A unique book for a unique time. An anthology novel that begins in the year 999 and reaches its shattering climax in the year 2000.
Millenium marks the end of an epoch, and the end of a century which has generated a remarkable escalation of skills and knowledge. It is also a century which has witnessed the worst excesses of human ingenuity – the killing of millions by the dropping of a single device, organised genocide, and dangerous meddling deliberate and accidental, with the Earth’s fragile eco-systems.
So has the human soul evolved? Can we, as a race, overcome our fatal flaws? Encased within a challenging novella, courtesy of the master magician himself – Clive Barker, Millenium explores the workings of the human heart in the ten decades that comprise the twentieth century.
A prize-fighter goes for the kill during America’s worst storm… A Jewish mystic launches a pre-emptive strike against Hitler… two unconventional lovers defy the Triads… a Manhattan Project scientist atones for the monster he has unleashed… a diabolical plan to restore the Third Reich is assembled from the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
These are only a few of the narrative strands woven into this collective work of unique fiction by the greatest horror and fantasy writers of our day. The result is one of the most unusual and powerful statements of our time – a novel that is both an apocalyptic warning and a visionary answer for all humankind.
From the cover blurb, natch. I wasn't happy about the synopses I wrote for this anthology a few years back, they were too lacking in detail, so I'll be re-reading and revising them. But if anyone else is familiar with any of these stories, please just go ahead and start adding to this thread.
The Big Blow by Joe R Lansdale: The problem I'm having with most of the pieces in this anthology is that they seem too lacking in humour, to the point of being pretentious and tiresome. However, when a story begins:
On an afternoon hotter than two rats f**king in a wool sock, John Mc Bride...built like a wild boar and of similar disposition, arrived...a six-gun under his coat and a razor in his shoe.
...when a story begins that way, you know you're in for a real good time.
Forest Tucker has been beaten by 'Lil' Arthur John Johnson in a fist fight at the Galveston sporting club; which is bad news for 'Lil' Arthur, as he's black, and this is the year 1900 when a black man can't knock down a white man in an honest fight and get away with it. Tucker's backers bring in John McBride to fight 'Lil' Arthur. But before the fight begins, a storm blows up, the kind of storm no-one on the island has ever seen before.
Lansdale presents a riveting and frightening multi-viewpoint novella, where the two boxers share misadventures and the boxing match is finally held in a ring surrounded by drowned bodies being picked over by seagulls.
If I Should Die Before I Wake by David Morrell: Joey Carter developes a fever after swimming in the creek. His father is convinced that it's been brought on by the dirty water; but in that case, Dr Jonas Bingaman wonders, why aren't the other boys ill, too. Before much longer, they are.
When I first read this, I doubted if such a plague could have happened without it remaining common knowledge; but of course since then we've had the Bird Flu' thing and people have remembered and discussed the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed more people than the Great War. More people died of it in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death, and that's what's remembered in this story, which I have to say is pretty good if inevitably grim.
Aryans and Absinthe by F Paul Wilson: Ernst Drexler is making a fortune by investing in American dollars at a time of runaway inflation, but he wants a friend to share this entertainment with; so he cultivates Karl Stehr's company.
The two men make a fortune while others around them starve, and the ground is prepared for Hitler's road to power. Wilson tells a good story, and his description of Hitler is convincing, never more than in the small details, such as the future dictator chewing on a finger nail while he waits to confront a political opponent in a Munich beer hall.
The rate of inflation described in this story, like other events, the attempted assasination of Hitler, his brief imprisonment, then return to power and rise to dictatorship, is so fantastic that it strains belief, which I guess just proves that life really is weirder than fiction.
Triads by Poppy Z Brite and Christa Faust: A boys opera school in Hong Kong, 1937, is the setting. Ji Fung has been given to the school eight years before, as a small child, by his mother. According to the contract, he may be beaten to death for disobedience. The only brightness in Ji Fung's life is his fellow-dancer Lin Bai, who is beautiful and talented, and so is always given the leading female roles.
His beauty also marks Lin Bai for special attention by tyrranical Master Lau, meaning repeated and graphically described homosexual rape.
Brite has described herself famously as a homosexual male trapped inside a woman's body. Her writing is, at the same time, stunningly beautiful and horrific. And it has to be said that in the hands of a less skillful heterosexual writer, would probably be wide open to the charge of pornography.
Following an horrendous attack, the two boys escape the school and run away. They are rescued from a street gang by the sophisticated and rich Perique LeBon. Together the three of them explore the wonders of Hong Kong and Chinese society at its most decadent in the stinking streets of Shanghai, until Li Fung is discovered and returned to his Triad-leader uncle. At the same time, Japanese warships are at anchor in the harbour, and war is imminent.
Brite's Exquisite Corpse is the most horrific work of fiction I've ever read - although of course it's based on fact, the Jeffrey Dahmer murders, some of them revisited in excrutiating detail in Brite's novel. Christa Faust was working on a novel of her own, Control Freak at the time of this collaboration with Brite. It seems to be a marriage made in hell, and I thought this story was great.
Riding the Black by Charles L Grant: The 1940s. Rob Garland is the last cowboy, an anachronism, living alone in a shack between civilisation and the wilderness, riding into town to eat at Dinah's cafe and tell stories of a time when the prairies were black with herds of buffalo.
The shadow of the bomb hangs over all, and television and telephones are throwing their webs across the land. Some people are not content with shadows; now they know what the bomb looks like. This is an elegiac song of the old west, with a slightly ambiguous end. Beautifully written.
The Open Doors by Whitley Strieber: Dr von Neumann dreams of an alien race whose view of reality is so different to ours that in this world they literally are not real; they require human belief as a bridge.
Von Neumann has seen them. Nature has rejected his knowledge, and was rejecting the disorder it implied by filling him with cancer. Infuriating and impressive by turns.
Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo by Elizabeth Massie: Someone pushes a leaflet into Gary's hand at a student demonstration, and he sets out to find the place called Sunrise - a place where a person can live in peace. On the way, he meets Sharon, pregnant and suicidal, and they continue the journey together.
Sunrise, it transpires, is a commune run by a man who insists they each name him after the thing they need. Gary names him Friend. But stranger than this, are the deformed children and the continuous state of lethargy exhibited by the commune's members. Gary believes that Friend has a secret, and determines to find out what it is.
I had a try at reading Whatever by Richard Cristian Matheson last night, but lost patience with it. It seems to be about rock groups, real or imagined - Whatever is the name of a band. There are references to ancient cities and a crashed aircraft full of religious iconography. It's probably just a mood I was in that I couldn't get into it. I'll try again soon.
The same applies to Dismantling Fortress Architecture by David J Schow and Craig Spector. I've read books by both these authors and found them hugely entertaining - I enjoyed The Light at the End, a vampire novel by Spector and John Skipp - but couldn't get into this. And the same applies to the Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell entries here, all of these latter mentioned pieces striking me as boring and humourless.
It really must be a mood I'm in, I was always useless at holidays. In the event, last night I started reading Dan Simmons' collection Prayers to Broken Stones, which so far seems excellent, and I can't find any mention of it here, so probably it will be next up.