#it's dreamlike prose which i can never really get into. i feel like i need SOMETHING to be true and tangible when i read.

[wewontbesleeping]

first dnf of the year. may god grant me the serenity to finish the books i am struggling with, the courage to dnf the books i won't get anything out of, and the wisdom to know the difference :-)

[brywrites]

Flight Risk VI

Summary: An answer to the age old CM question, “who’s flying the plane?” And the story of a pilot and a profiler. Part VI: In which things are lost and found and borrowed.

(Series Masterlist) ( Previous  |  Next )

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The case is of a vengeful Cinderella is closed, but as they prepare to head to the airport, Kate isn’t feeling so well. Rossi offers to drive with her to a pharmacy to pick up some saltines and Dramamine, and the rest of the team heads to the airport to wait. Reid spots Y/N chatting outside the plane with Dobson, and he instinctively starts towards her. She must see him out of the corner of her eye because she turns to greet him, but before either of them can say anything a strong hand finds his shoulder, holding him back.

“Hold there, Pretty Boy. I wanna hear the details of your Prince Charming moment back there,” Morgan says.

Y/N raises her eyebrows and he can feel his face flush. “There’s um, not much to say,” he stammers.

“Spence, come on, you were totally prince-like,” JJ laughs. “Kneeling down on one knee with a glass slipper and everything?”

“A glass slipper?” Y/N asks. JJ describes, in detail, how he played the part of the knight in shining armor at the cemetery to get Claire Dunbar to leave with them. He’s embarrassed through the whole tale, but by the time JJ gets down on one knee to kiss Morgan’s hand as he did the unsub’s, he’s sure his face is scarlet. Y/N is laughing along the entire time at his fellow agents’ melodramatic reenactment.

“Anyways, it was all very romantic. He totally swept her of her feet. The poor girl fell for him in a heartbeat,” JJ says. For a moment, Reid tries to discern what Y/N is thinking. Her face is unreadable other than a bemused smile. Her body language tells him nothing. But he can’t help but wonder – hearing about his heroics in the field, would she be jealous? Hearing how he played Prince Charming for Claire and kissed her hand. Then he wonders if he wants her to be. Is he curious because there’s a part of him that wants her to want him? Is he secretly hoping that she’d feel slighted by any hint of romance towards someone else? And if he is hoping for that, what does that mean?

But Y/N just says, “I sure would have liked to see that.”

“Next time we’ll get it on camera,” Morgan teases, ruffling Reid’s hair. He swats his friend’s hand away.

“You know, I love a good fairytale,” Y/N says, turning to him.

“Well this one was more Grimm than Disney,” he admits, trying to push the memories of the men Claire killed out of his mind. The story is over now. No more dragons to slay. Kate and Rossi return seconds later and it’s time to go.

Y/N follows Captain Dobson up the steps of the jet, and he follows close behind her. Lost in his thoughts, he nearly loses his balance at the top of the stairs. Y/N immediately reaches a hand out to steady him. Her hand is soft around his. He holds tight, both to maintain his balance and to keep a connection to her. All his life he’s been uncoordinated, but he’s willing to fall over his own feet a million times if it means having the chance to finally hold her hand. With her help, he ascends to the top step, finally making it onto the jet. It strikes him, this sudden reversal of roles. Only a few hours ago he was offering his hand to a distressed damsel to lead her away, using his words to woo her. But now Y/N is the one coming to his rescue. She is steady. Confident. She doesn’t need anyone to save her. If she did, he’d be there in a heartbeat. But she’s saving him. Little by little. Maybe they’re saving each other. One thing is for sure – she sweeps him of his feet without even trying. Knocks him out with a single smile. Quite literally puts his head in the clouds. And that’s better than any fairytale.

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She’s turning the pages of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so taken by the story that she jumps when he calls her name. She turns to see him standing there, offering an awkward half-wave. Y/N can’t help but smile at the sight of him. His cardigans and ties are becoming familiar. He always looks more like a librarian or a professor than a special agent. Not that she minds one bit. The clothes suit him well, though at this point she’s convinced he’d look good in just about anything.”

“Is it good?” he asks, nodding at the book.

“Extremely. The prose is incredible and the narration is really unique. It manages to make a story so painful sound so beautiful. You can borrow it when I’m done if you’d like. I’m sure you’d finish it in a single flight.”

“It’s quite likely,” he laughs.

“So I hear we’re off to New Mexico,” she says. The flight is long enough that she could easily lend him the book now, but she knows the trip there will be spent reviewing case files and preparing for the work to come.

“Yeah, there’s five women dead already.” Spencer sits beside her on the bench. “The unsub seems quite advanced. It’s not looking pretty.”

“We’ve got to find you at least one pretty thing to see on these cases,” she says. It doesn’t seem right for him to travel across the country and return with nothing but memories of police stations and a handful of nightmares. She still hates the idea of ferrying him and his team to and from monsters. To and from danger.

He raises his eyebrows. “Oh? Like that coffee shop you found for us last weekend?”

She laughs at his pointed accusation. When they made plans she had insisted on visiting a new pop-up that Yeeqin had shown her on Instagram. The drinks were dreamlike pieces of art with cotton candy fluff, impeccable latte art, ombre iced teas, and donuts carefully placed over the rims of mugs. The line to order had been long, and the shop was crowded with people taking photos in front of the murals and installations throughout the shop. When they finally got their drinks, they were both disappointed to find they were more watery than the sad coffee found in police stations and tiny airports. The coffee didn’t taste nearly as good as it looked, especially for the pretty penny it had cost.

“Okay, okay,” she giggles. “You have a point. I will refrain from taking food recommendations from social media influencers in the future. But I’m sure I can find a nice bookstore or a garden or something worth paying a quick visit to in Santa Fe.” She pulls out her phone for a quick search. “Oh, like this bookstore! It’s called Collected Works and it’s lovely.” Suddenly she can smell coffee and the sharp spice of aftershave. Spencer is leaning over to look at her screen. She turns her head towards him and he shifts his gaze from the phone to her and she realizes how incredibly close he is. There’s only inches between them and when his hazel eyes find hers any words she had die on her lips. Lovely, is all she can think.

After mere seconds that seem to slip into eternity, she quickly breaks eye contact and looks down at her hands, her heart thudding loudly in her ears. “Um, but, uh, maybe there’s somewhere else…” she says.

“Oh my god, Reid, you are not going to believe what I saw this morning!” A cheerful voice calls out from across the hanger and Spencer practically leaps up from the bench. The voice is familiar somehow. A brightly-dressed woman is heading towards them surprisingly fast considering the height of her stilettos. Her shockingly orange dress matches the bright hue of her lipstick and the flowers in her hair. When she reaches them, her eyes widen, and a neon grin spreads across her face as she regards Y/N. “Oh! You have to be Y/N! You look just like Morgan described!”

Y/N’s eyes flicker to Spencer who gestures towards the newcomer. “Y/N, this is Penelope Garcia. Our technical analyst.”

Garcia holds out a well-manicured hand. “Technical analyst, internet goddess, and oracle of all knowledge. But tomato, tomahto.” Y/N stands to shake her hand. “JJ was right, you’re totally cute.”

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Spencer turn tomato red. She chooses not to question it and instead asks, “Why haven’t I met you before?”

“Well, usually when these crimefighters are flying all over to world to do their crimefighting thing, I stay hunkered down in my Quantico batcave ready to scour the interwebs for their every demand. But our creep of the week is particularly creepy – he’s hacking into his victims computers to stalk them and erasing almost any trace he was there. So I’m coming along for the ride to try and pull any data I can from their devices.” She grimaces. “Believe me I would much rather be staying put and calling them from my office.”

That explains why her voice is so familiar, she’s heard it in the background a million times as the team prepares for a case in the cabin.

“Well Captain Dobson and I will do our best to make the trip a little more comfortable. We restocked the galley and deep cleaned this weekend, so Geff should be in perfect form.”

“Oh my gosh I still love that our jet has a name. Geff is so cute. I’m never calling it the jet again.”

Y/N smiles. “Right? I feel like planes have a personality all their own. They deserve a name, too!”

“I feel the same way! I name all the things in my life, but none quite compares to Esther. She’s an orange 1975 Cadillac Eldorado and the one true love of my life.”

“An Eldorado? She must be gorgeous.”

“She absolutely is, and she drives like a dream. You should totally come take her for a spin sometime! If you can handle Geff you can totally handle Esther.”

“Hey!” Spencer protests. “You wouldn’t let me drive your car!”

Garcia rolls her eyes in mock annoyance. “See, calling her a car is exactly why I don’t let you drive her! Besides, you drove us to Comic-Con and your maneuverability did not exactly inspire confidence.”

“Well if you ever need a co-pilot for a convention, let me know,” Y/N offers.

“You’re into the con crowd?” Garcia asks.

“Please, I’m a total geek,” she laughs. “If it’s got a flying craft of any kind I’m in. Firefly, LOST, Doctor Who, Star Wars – you name it.”

“I totally love you,” Garcia declares, linking her arm through Y/N’s. “I love her!” she tells Spencer.

“Well I hope you have a little love left for me, Baby Girl,” Morgan teases, walking up behind them.

“Always, sugar,” Garcia throws back. She let’s go of Y/N’s arm but says, “We have to talk later.”

“Of course,” Y/N assures her, and she hurries over to catch up with Morgan.

“I didn’t realize you liked all those things,” Spencer says.

“Of course,” she laughs. “I guess it just never came up in conversation. We were too busy with books and stories. But I’m guessing you’re also a fan?”

He nods. “Although I’ve never seen LOST. Is it good?”

“Is it good?” she asks, incredulous. “It’s incredible. It revolutionized television. And it’s right up your alley. Mystery, psychology, recurrent numbers . When this case is over we are absolutely watching it together.” She only realizes after she says it that she’s practically inviting him over to her place. Or inviting herself over to his. Is that too much? They’ve been spending more and more time together, and she has yet to stop enjoying his company. If she’s being honest, she’s always looking for excuses to see him again.

“I would love to,” he says immediately. Relief washes over her. So it is okay. It’s okay that she wants more of these moments with him, that she’s trying to commit of these little conversations to memory for fear they’ll slip away and she’ll forget the butterflies she feels when he looks at her. And when Arthur calls her away to ready Geff for takeoff, the smell of coffee and aftershave lingers in her in mind long after she walks away from him.

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Three days later, the case is solved. The unsub is in custody. The victim is in the hospital with their family, where she will hopefully make a full recovery with time and with therapy. The Santa Fe sun is sweltering though. The team sits inside a small room at the little airport. The air conditioner is on full blast and everyone is sipping on water to stay cool. All of them are exhausted, and Reid wants nothing more than to take a long nap on the plane. Even Garcia is quiet. It’s a relief when Captain Dobson appears to inform them that the jet is ready for takeoff. They board Geff and settle down into chairs and couches, ready for well-deserved rest.

As soon as he does so, Reid realizes he’s left his book in the air-conditioned room. He quickly hurries back down the stairs and inside, grabbing the paperback that sits on the table where he left it. As he walks back out, he spots Y/N, standing at a locker in the hangar. She waves at him a with a smile.

“How was the case?” she asks.

“It ended as well as it could have,” he says. “But it was long. I think we’re all pretty tired.”

“I’m sure this heat isn’t helping. It’s worn me out. I’ve been putting off getting in uniform as long as I could.” She wears black pants and a short-sleeved white button-down, but the rest of her uniform is still in the locker. “So the missing woman is okay?”

Reid explains that she is, but he’s hardly aware of the words he’s saying. His focus is on her fingers as she buttons the top of her collar and ties her black tie with a careful and practiced knot. It’s looks far nicer than any of his slapdash crooked knots. She slips her blazer over her shoulders and adjusts the cuffs. He’s seen her in these clothes so many times before but he’s never realized before how good she looks in uniform. Or at least, he’s never let himself think it. It fits her well, tailored perfectly to her body. Reid is absolutely entranced as she buttons the front of her blazer, the little gold pair of wings shining above her pocket. He can’t explain why he suddenly finds this incredibly attractive, but when she puts her cap on and turns to smile at him, he completely loses track of any thoughts in his head.

It’s only when she closes the locker and says, “Let’s get out of here,” that he regains his ability to form coherent sentences.

“Wait,” he says. She does. Her cap is ever so slightly off-kilter. He reaches out to straighten it for her. As he does so, it catches a strand of her hair, and he brushes it out of the way. The gesture feels so intimate, and she stares at him the entire time. “There,” he says. “Perfect.”

“Thanks, Doctor.” The smile she gives him is different from the one she wore seconds ago. It’s softer somehow, and if he were to melt right now it wouldn’t be the result of the Santa Fe sun. They climb back into the plane. Y/N disappears into the cockpit. He puts his book back into his bag and then walks to the jet galley to grab another cup of water. Garcia joins him. As she pours herself a cup of coffee she says, “I had no idea you liked a girl in uniform.”

Reid nearly chokes on his water. “I – wait – what?”

“Oh come on, I saw you staring at Y/N.  The way you were looking at her? Ooh you are in deep, loverboy.”

“It’s – it’s not like that,” he sputters. “Not at all. We’re just – she – she’s my friend. That’s it.” Garcia quirks an unconvinced eyebrow. Reid sighs. “Look, even if I liked her, it would never work out. She’s…” There aren’t enough words to follow that adequately describe her. “Her. And I’m me. And besides, I’m pretty sure there are rules. Even if I felt that way…” He couldn’t. He can’t.

Garcia’s mischievous grin fades. “Reid, do you really think that-”

“Please, Garcia.”

She bites her lip and grabs her coffee. “Hey,” she says quietly. “No one else was paying attention. They didn’t see. And I’m not going to say anything.” She takes a step past him. “I just wish–” But she doesn’t finish the sentence. Evidently deciding against voicing her wish, Garcia returns to her seat. Reid prepares to do the same, only to notice the book sitting beside the coffee maker. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. With a little note that says, you can give it back when I see you for LOST.

In spite of himself, in spite of all the things he can’t and shouldn’t do, he smiles. He can have this. Sharing words and stories with her, and wondering which ones resonated with her when she read them. He picks up the book and sits back down just as Dobson’s voice comes through the speaker  to ask them to ask them to fasten their seatbelts and secure all loose items. Reid opens the book. That nap can wait until he gets home.

[christabelq]

REVIEW OF...

DREAMS OF DARK AND LIGHT: THE GREAT SHORT FICTION OF TANITH LEE

I’ve never read a Tanith Lee book that I didn’t like and this was no exception. It’s a retrospective of her first ten years as a writer and contains twenty-three short stories. They all fall under the heading of fantasy, horror or science fiction, yet no two are alike, and even when the subject is familiar (e.g. vampires), she manages to come up with a completely fresh take on it. The prose is wonderful as well – highly descriptive, but with an almost musical quality. There really isn’t anyone else who writes like her. I have to confess, as a would-be writer myself, she leaves me a little in awe.

Some of the stories in the book are based in the past, some in the present and some in the future, but they all have a timeless feel to them. They are filled with evocative images that remain with you long after you have finished reading and characters who are both memorable and well-rounded. When I think about them now, it almost feels like I didn’t read them, but they were actually dreams… voyages into an infinitely inventive imagination. It would be too ambitious to try and cover them all in this review, so I’m just going to focus on a few favorites. BITE-ME-NOT / FLEUR DE FUR This is a story that often appears in anthologies and is a great introduction to Lee’s work, because it includes many of her hallmarks – an original premise, a timeless fairy-tale quality, striking imagery, beautiful use of language, etc. It is about winged vampires who hunt the skies like birds of prey. These vampires have an angelic beauty and sing hauntingly as they fly, but are driven by instinct alone and have little capacity for thought. They live in a remote land and have laid siege to a castle, desperate to feed on the blood of the inhabitants. The castle is securely locked up at night, but this only makes them more determined to get inside, and one night, their prince manages it. Unfortunately for him he is wounded in a fight with a menagerie lion and captured. Meanwhile, the Duke who owns the castle has come across a servant who bears a striking resemblance to his dead daughter. He believes his daughter has somehow returned to him and adopts her as his own. Then she encounters the prince of the vampires and falls in love with him, but this is Tanith Lee, so don’t expect a conventional happy ever after love story. This really is a great story which stays with you long after you have finished it. The characterization is good and it has some nice twists. The themes include love, family, secrets, beauty and power. Definitely a highlight of the collection. A DAY IN THE SKIN I’ve picked this story out, because it is the first science fiction one and has a very different tone to BITE-ME-NOT. It is set on a planet occupied by colonists from Earth. A terrible accident has killed off most of the inhabitants, but the technology exists to keep their souls in storage and an arrangement has been in put in place that allows them to take turns inhabiting the few surviving bodies. The actual owners of the bodies are displaced and have to take turns along with everyone else, and the story is narrated by one of them as he is placed into the body of a woman for a day and meets one of his friends in the body of man. It’s a fascinating concept and Lee handles it well. She does a good job of getting into the head of the main character and does some nice world-building. The themes here include friendship, freedom, technology and survival. I didn’t like the story as much as BITE-ME-NOT, but it definitely shows the author’s versatility. A LYNX WITH LIONS This story, which I think may have been original to the anthology, is a second adventure of the character Cyrion, who appears earlier in CYRION IN WAX and in other stories not included in the collection. This time, Cyrion has gone to the aid of the leader of a tribe of nomads who used to be his mentor. The leader tells him he believes his son is planning to murder him, but as Cyrion quickly discovers, there is more to the situation than meets the eye. It is a tale of magic and demons with an Arabian Nights feel to it which I really enjoyed and which suits Lee’s writing style very well. Lee skillfully brings the world of the nomads to life and really keeps you on the edge of your seat with the twists and turns. Otherness is a key theme here, along with power, loyalty, truth and religion. MAGRITTE’S SECRET AGENT This is one of the few stories in the book with a contemporary setting. It is told in the first person and is about an art student who becomes infatuated with a man in a wheelchair after his mom brings him into the shop where she is working to collect an order. The order isn’t ready, so she offers to deliver it to their house, so she can see the man again. She finds out he is unable to care for himself, but can’t get him out of her head and comes up with another excuse to visit him. His mom then tells her a strange story about his conception, which gives her the idea that he might like to see the ocean. His mom is resistant to the idea, but she takes him anyway. I won’t tell you what happens next, as I don’t want to spoil the ending. The story is named after a real Magritte painting, which is used a framing device and ties in nicely with the surrealist narrative. The writing is wonderful as always and the characters felt very real. Things I especially enjoyed were the way the narrator’s growing obsession with the man in the wheelchair is dealt with and the way the fantastical slowly encroaches on reality. MEDRA This is another science fiction story, but the fairy tale quality that Lee is so good at is much more in evidence than in A Day in the Skin. It takes place in a partly ruined city on a planet that has been abandoned by everyone except the title character, who lives on the 89th floor of a luxurious hotel. The hotel is entirely automated and Medra never leaves it, spending most of her time projecting her consciousness out across space. Then one day, she is visited by an adventurer, who is searching for a powerful war machine. The two fall in love and make plans to leave together, only to find that Medra cannot go. It’s a bitter sweet story about love and duty, which really makes you feel for the main character who has everything she needs to survive, but is consigned to a life of perpetual loneliness. The idea of her living alone at the top of a hotel very much put me in mind of Rapunzel, though unlike Rapunzel, Medra is not rescued from her fate by the hero. The story has a dreamlike narrative which immediately pulls you in, but only gradually yields its secrets. The world building is excellent too. There is just the right amount of detail and images like the abandoned city, the skeletal birds and the hotel with its wedding cake architecture and climbing lizards are among the most memorable in the whole book. All in all it’s a story I would highly recommend. NUNC DIMITTIS I wanted to talk about this one because it’s another vampire story, yet completely different from BITE-ME-NOT. It’s about the human servant of an ancient vampire who finds he is close to death and sets out to find someone to replace him. He goes to a café for a drink and as he leaves a young man attempts to rob him. The man is just the kind of person he is looking for – handsome and strong – so he overpowers him and takes him to meet his mistress. The changing of the guard then begins. The aristocratic vampire in this story is very much in the traditional vein and is even called Darejan Draculas in a tip of the hat to the famous count. It is beautifully written (as usual) and although you anticipate the ending, it keeps you guessing about how it is going to get there. Some of the ideas are reminiscent of the novel LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (and its two movie adaptations), though I have no idea if this is just coincidence or if Lee’s story was an influence. Personally I don’t think this story is as good as BITE-ME-NOT, but I do feel it shows how good Lee was at finding different ways to explore a theme. SOUTHERN LIGHTS If I had to choose a favorite story in the collection, this is probably the one I would go with (after a lot of deliberation). It takes place in a quasi-historical land and is about a woman called Jaisel, who rather than becoming a wife and/or mother as society expects, has chosen a life as a wandering warrior. She likes the freedom, but it is a lonely existence and she often has to put up with being jeered and spat at. One evening, as she is travelling through some mountains in winter, she decides to seek shelter in a convenient town. The gates have been locked for the night, but she is able to bribe her way inside. As she wanders the streets looking for an inn, she meets a girl who has come to collect water from a well. She fills the girl’s buckets for her and carries them back to her house, hoping she might be able to stay with her for the night. The girl invites her in to meet her father, a blind alchemist who specializes in making clockwork devices, and they agree to let Jaisel stay with them. Then as the girl shows Jaisal to her room, she propositions her. Jaisal thinks the girl has mistaken her for a man and tells her she isn’t, but the girl says, “What does it matter? Love is love?” Jaisel is attracted to her, but suspects (rightly) that things are not quite as they seem. There are lots of things I love about this story – the atmosphere, the air of mystery, the pacing, the clockwork toys and automatons. It’s the characters and their interaction that really caught my attention, though. Jaisal was my favorite, as I love to see strong female characters defying the constraints of a patriarchy, but the alchemist was great too – quirky and a little sinister. I was kind of disappointed that the attraction between Jaisal and the girl didn’t lead anywhere, but can understand why that wouldn’t have worked in the context of the story and felt it was very nicely handled. The themes here include otherness, loneliness, love, family and the concept of life. It’s a story I will certainly remember and heartily recommend. WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES I’ve mentioned a few times how a lot of the stories in this collection have a fairy tale quality to them; this one actually reimagines a fairy tale, namely CINDERELLA. The Cinderella character (who refers to herself as Ashrella) is the daughter of a witch who is attempting to use magic to take revenge on the ruling Duke for murdering her family in his rise to power. Ashrella aids her mother in this and when her mother commits suicide to evade punishment for witchcraft, continues the work in her place. Ashrella’s father remarries and it is the introduction of the stepmother and her two daughters which first alerts us to the CINDERELLA connection. When she reaches the age of seventeen, Ashrella succeeds in killing the Duke and his son replaces him. The famous ball takes place in honor of the prince’s birthday as in CINDERELLA, but the outcome is somewhat different. It’s an intriguing story which subverts the traditional tropes of the fairy tale. Gone is the goody two-shoes heroine who needs to be rescued from a downtrodden existence by a fairy godmother and ends up being swept off her feet the handsome prince, replaced by a powerful woman of action who is seen to be in control of her own destiny and achieves everything she sets out to. This is not to say that she is entirely likeable, however; she very much loses our sympathies when she punishes the virtuous prince for the sins of his father. All the characters in this story are morally complex, rather than being either good or bad, and no one lives happily ever after. If you like reinterpretations of fairy tales then this really is essential reading. WOLFLAND This story really put me in mind of Angela Carter’s collection, THE BLOODY CHAMBER. It is about a girl called Lisel who receives a summons to visit her fabulously rich grandmother. Lisel hasn’t been in her grandmother’s presence since the day of her birth and doesn’t want to go, but agrees because she hopes to inherit her grandmother’s wealth. She puts on a hooded cloak of scarlet velvet (in true Red Riding Hood style) and sets out for her grandmother’s chateau with some of her father’s servants. They are intercepted on the road by two of her grandmother’s servants, who insist that she dismiss her father’s servants and travel the rest of the way with them. Wolves run alongside their carriage as they go, but they make it safely to the chateau. Understandably the encounter with the wolves makes Lisel uneasy and her uneasiness grows as she starts to spend time with her grandmother, who is not only eccentric, but as it turns out, is hiding a dark secret. I won’t tell you what this secret is, though I may have given it away with the references to Angela Carter and Red Riding Hood. Instead let me tell you what I like about the story. The imagery is great as always (the wintery landscape, the isolated chateau) and the characters are memorable, especially the grandmother and her beautiful dwarf servant. Again, it reads like a fairy tale, but like WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES very much subverts the genre. The grandmother is a strong woman who has managed to find a way to escape an abusive marriage and we very much get the sense that Lisel is cut from the same cloth. Spoiler alert – they do not get eaten by the wolves and no rescuing huntsmen is required. If you’re a fan of THE BLOODY CHAMBER like me, then you are definitely going to enjoy this story. *** That’s all the stories I’m going to talk about, though to be honest I find it hard to stop, as there were things I enjoyed about all of them. What’s great about this book is you don’t have to read it all in one go, but can just dip in and out of it. That wasn’t what I did, mind you – once I’d started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. My only real criticism is I don’t think the book is very well-structured, which is obviously the editor’s fault, as opposed to Tanith Lee’s. The stories are simply set out in alphabetical order, which seems a bit random. It also means BECAUSE OUR SKINS ARE FINER is placed at the beginning, when I personally feel it isn’t one of the strongest stories and doesn’t do a very good job of drawing you in. Perhaps it would have been better for the stories to have been chronological, so we could follow Lee’s development as a writer, or for there to have been some kind of thematic grouping. It certainly didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it – it just seems like it could have been better thought out. Anyway I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that my final conclusion is this is a book I would definitely recommend.

[senadimell]

couldn’t find a good high resolution picture online, so here’s my battered copy.

Cover art by Tim Zeltner and design by Lizzy Bromley. (Oddly enough, I couldn’t find a website for Tim Zeltner, but I did find a collection of his art here: https://i2iart.com/tim-zeltner)*

I adore the original cover of Princess Academy. It transformed a “book I’m probably not that interested” in into a “I need to read this book now” kind of book. I love the folk look, and it matches the chapter heading quarry-speech poems perfectly. The color scheme is beautiful, and the overall quality is dreamlike, yet homely. It also captures the feeling of the book in a way few covers do. 

I just love the girls on the cover. It avoids the trap that so many more recent renditions fall into: they have a smiling picture of the main character, or maybe a few of them, and while pretty, most of them hit a particular pet peeve: they’re just too current. They look like models, and I can easily see them being dated in 15 years just like so many bad 80s fantasy covers. The girls are cute and their dresses are something you’d want to wear, but they’re feminine and Generic!fairy-tale with lace-up fronts, blousy under-layers and fluffy sleeves. 

These girls don’t wear form-fitting dresses.Their dresses are muted, but patchwork and colorful. Their hair is loose or braided, and some girls have quite long hair in simple styles. They look like mountain girls: they are not sophisticated, but they are honest and strong. The girls in Princess Academy have grown up poor, and going hungry is a daily reality for them, so I like how the cover reflects the simplicity in their lives: the academy is the only “fancy” thing in sight. It reflects one of the poems from the book:

Water in the porridge

And salt in the gruel

Doesn’t make a belly

Full, not a bellyful

Another detail I love is on the back cover: who is the girl left behind? One of the main themes of the book is community, and deals with both the promise of belonging and the struggle of loneliness and isolation. There are at least three candidates for the left-behind girl: 

Miri, our spirited main character who uses humor to make a place for herself in a world where she feels too small and useless to be valuable. She isn’t allowed to work with everyone her age in the quarry and constantly feels like she’s catching up. Despite a generally gregarious personality, she struggles to deal with the strict school environment and ends up isolating herself from most of her peers for a good portion of the book. 

Britta, a girl from the lowlands sent up to live on the mountain. Until Miri befriends her, she’s completely isolated from the tight-knit community. She has a completely different upbringing and conceals a lot about herself so she won’t ostracize herself.

Katar, a girl who’s whip-smart and poised. She can knock anyone down to size, but for all her talent she’s deeply insecure and lonely; you just wouldn’t be able to tell by looking. 

You also get a strong feeling that we’re in a village on top of the world, up in the clouds with swirling mists below. The mountains stand close around, and you can’t really see the world below, which is fitting, as most people have never even left their village. The sense of place sets this book apart from so many others; the prose is evocative and I can’t think of the book without thinking of the rocks and the dust in the stream and the mist below and the tiny flowers where little green grows. 

Possibly my favorite idiosyncratic thing about the cover: the girls are holding hands. That’s a small detail in the book: people hold hands because they live in a quarry surrounded by abandoned quarries. There’s loose rock and old holes, and in the winter, you can’t see solid footing. I love that kind of casual human contact. Boys and girls stop holding hands when they’re older, but the girls continue it as a sign of casual friendship. It’s a small detail I’m in love with, so I’m thrilled it made it to the cover. It also makes the themes of loneliness more compelling: even in a tight-knit community, it’s so easy to feel alone.

All I know are

Scraps, flakes, chips, rocks

All below are

Stones, shards, bits, dross

One thing I love about this cover is the sense of community you get while looking at it, which is a huge theme in the book. The climax of the book is achieved by teamwork: first the girls, who have been divided from the academy’s competitive nature, and then the villagers, who have been divided from their girls. 

As an aside, I love the font as well. 

Now, for more fun, let’s compare covers. 

What is this airbrushed version doing here? It’s the cover picture for an Amazon listing, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. As a general rule, I don’t like pictures on my covers, but at least the first one looks like Miri would: freckles, slightly windblown hair, and the hint of a smirk. You can tell she’s a girl with a sense of humor and an opinion. More than that, she looks like a girl, not a teenager in suburbia. Her dress could also be homespun. Then we get the above picture? Shiny cheeks, little-mermaid/Ariel lips, smooth “I used silicone conditioner then blowdried then straightened my hair before braiding it?” She just looks photoshopped, which is the opposite of Miri.  

And here’s another airbrushed version!

I get it: she’s in the city and looking pretty. But really? For someone who spends her time split between university and salon-style revolution with a few jaunts to a stone carver’s studio, I can’t help but think Miri’s not going to spend much time plaiting her hair with flowers (despite what the robin’s-egg-blue color might have you believe, those are university-issue robes) Ugh. Not a fan of these.

These next few ones are the most recent US covers, I believe. I think they represent an appealing, marketable cover--I imagine they probably sell better than the original cover. 

The thing is, they just look kind of generic to me. The setting is such a powerful part of the story, but I’m not getting it from these pictures, though the last one does a better job. They also faintly scream “fairytale retelling,” but these books actually aren’t fairy-tale retellings, unlike many of Shannon Hale’s other books. Still: for all that, I think they probably sell better than the original cover. 

For fun: Here’s a post about the international art for the covers. None surpasses  Tim Zeltner’s, in my opinion, but there are some beautiful ones!

https://www.squeetus.com/2012/04/an-international-gallery-of-princess-academy.html

And now for some shenanigans: 

This monstrosity is apparently the Norwegian cover. What even...The font on Shannon Hale’s name? He is wearing no clothes? They are wrapped in a blanket? This looks like some bad Norwegian version of those Scottish laird romance novels... I guess at least there are flowers in a token to Miri’s namesake?

*Tim Zeltner seems to use a lot of green in his work, but there’s almost none here. Again, that’s fitting to the setting, where little grows.

**I was originally planning on sharing some of Shannon Hale’s other books bearing beautiful covers in this post, but this turned out longer than I expected. Now they’ll get separate ones!

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

The Night Circus. By Erin Morgenstern. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: fantasy

Part of a Series? No

Summary:  The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

***Full review under the cut.***

Overview: If a book is fairly popular, it’s more likely than not that I’ll end up reading it years after the hype dies down, and this is precisely what happened with The Night Circus. I’ve had a copy on my shelves for years, but I decided to finally pick it up after making my way through a string of non-fiction books. I really enjoyed the atmosphere Morgenstern creates, especially the dreamlike quality that her prose evokes. But while most of the fairy tale elements worked for me, I do wish she had dome more by way of characterization for the two main protagonists and plot. Even so, this book was memorable, and so it earns a 4 star rating from me.

Writing: Morgenstern’s prose has a dreamlike quality to it. The entire novel is written in the present tense, which I usually dislike, but in this case, it felt appropriate; present tense, for me, tends to keep the story at arm’s length, but for something like The Night Circus, that uncanny distance actually enhances the feeling that the circus is not quite real or that it has secrets that we, the readers, are not privy to. In other words, the present tense lends an air of mystery that worked in this story *because* so much of the circus revolved around dazzling, mystifying and tricking patrons into thinking magic isn’t real.

That being said, I do think the periodic interruptions in which Morgenstern describes the experience of the reader going to the circus felt jarring. Every so often, Morgenstern has a section narrated in second person, with phrases like “you make your way to the tent” attempting to immerse the reader in the atmosphere. While these sections were wonderfully written and evoked the senses in pleasing ways, I ultimately felt that they distracted rather than complimented the story.

However, I really did adore Mogenstern’s creativity and imagination. I loved the attractions she envisioned for the circus, as well as its black and white color scheme. Instead of feeling gothic or threatening, the circus felt rather elegant and inviting while still maintaining and air of mystery. In this way, I think Morgenstern struck a nice balance between alluring and unsettling, one that doesn’t drive people away but ignites their curiosity.

Plot: From the summary of the book, it seems as though the majority of the plot will revolve around a “fierce competition” between star-crossed lovers, and while that narrative was present, it often faded into the background for me. The “competition” never seemed to pose a threat or create suspense - there was not really a strong back-and-forth pattern of one-upmanship that challenged the characters to push themselves and their abilities. Instead, the details of the challenge are rather foggy, so even the competitors don’t know the rules or the consequences, and they don’t seem to feel constrained or imprisoned by the competition in any way. I think this could have worked better for me if the whole challenge started competitive but then became forgotten in favor of the two romantic leads outdoing themselves for the sake of making one another happy, and while there was some of that, it didn’t feel like it was much of a guiding thread throughout the book.

I did think that the plot about Bailey and the red headed twins was better constructed, even if some readers found it uninteresting. Even though it was simple (Bailey wanted to get back to the circus and find the girl he had met years ago), Bailey clearly had goals and conflicts that influenced his decisions, from feeling constrained by his family’s expectations to the uncertainty of his future, and I think his arc complemented the main plot nicely - Bailey felt trapped by everyday life, and the circus served as an escape, whereas the circus is a kind of gilded cage for Celia and Marco.

That being said, I do think Morgenstern’s attempt to make the “moral” of her book about the power of stories and storytelling rather ham-fisted. Morgenstern clearly has a love of storytelling herself, and the whole book is an exercise in the power of storytelling, but I don’t think stories had a strong enough presence in the narrative itself to make the whole point of The Night Circus about those topics. Instead, I think the secondary theme of “the future is unwritten” to be much more compelling, and I think the conclusion of the novel should have ended on that note rather than Widget agreeing to tell a story.

Characters: While this book follows a number of characters, the summary primarily focuses on Celia and Marco, two “magicians” of sorts who are thrust into a competition by their mentors in order to prove whose method of doing magic is superior. Celia is more intuitive, performing magic through her “natural abilities,” while Marco is more studious, using things like signs and anchors to guide his magic. Aside from these defining qualities, I didn’t find either of them very memorable. Celia supposedly had the tendency to lose control of her emotions (and magic), but we never really saw that manifest in ways that were threatening to the competition or the people around her. Marco is also somewhat of a blank slate; he’s organized and works hard, but that’s about all I can say about him. I didn’t quite see what qualities attracted the two to each other, much less why they fell in love other than they admired one another’s magic.

Their mentors were a bit more interesting in that the had contrasting personalities. Celia’s mentor (her father), is overbearing and egotistic, whereas Marco’s mentor is reserved. I liked the mystery that surrounded Marco’s mentor and the way his emotions never seemed to get the better of him until certain points. Celia’s father, on the other hand, was a bit annoying and cruel.

I did enjoy reading about the other protagonists, Bailey and the red headed twins (Poppet and Widget). I thought that Bailey had enough external pressure to make his goals and desires feel real. Poppet and Widget also complimented each other nicely; though they are twins, they felt like separate people rather than a duplication of one another, and I liked how they were inquisitive, playful, and caring.

Supporting characters were also incredibly compelling and memorable. Chandresh, the proprietor of the circus, is eccentric, and I loved reading about his house of curiosities and his lavish midnight dinners. Tsukiko, the contortionist, has an appealing attitude that is simultaneously warm and matter-of-fact. Isobel seems like she would serve the role of the jealous lover, but I liked that she was warm and found a home with the circus. Herr Thiessen, the clock maker, encourages others to see the circus with wonder without becoming dangerously obsessed. Other members of the “circus board,” such as Mme. Padva, the Burgess sisters, and Mr. Barris, were also interesting to watch as they left their thumbprints on the circus.

Other: This book didn’t have a lot of worldbuilding (if that’s the appropriate word for it) in that none of the magic systems are fully explained, nor are we told who or what the mentors really are, but I don’t think these things were needed. The lack of full clarity enhanced the sense of mystery about the circus, and in some ways, this book was more “magical realism” than full fantasy.

I do think, however, that the ending to Celia and Marco’s story was rather unfulfilling, in part because it relied on the performance of a kind of magic that I didn’t quite understand. I think it would have been fine if the two had simply disappeared together and their “souls” (or something) still hung around the circus, so readers get the impression that they’re together, but the details aren’t quite clear. The matter of controlling the circus also seemed convoluted, and I’m not convinced that the magic required to do this was seeded into the story ahead of time, so it felt somewhat random. As a result, the ending seems to require us to understand how separate types of magic work, but the details of these systems throughout the book are vague, so the sudden specificity at the end feels strange.

Overall, though, this book was memorable and enchanting, which made up for the shortfalls. I still enjoyed it immensely, and I think Morgenstern is a phenomenal storyteller.

[soybeantree]

the world to me

pairing: jaebum x (reader) genre/warning: fluff word count: 1941 description: a little marriage fluff never hurt anyone. based on got7′s “you are” from their new album 7 for 7.

A questionably long kiss for being in public. Pained cheeks haphazardly covered in icing. Group dances that would no doubt look embarrassing later on camera.

Memories that would stay fresh in your mind for years you hoped. Well maybe not the way your cousin had tried to lead a line dance, which she had no room doing, that much was clear to everyone in the large reception hall. Still, regardless of the few not so planned moments (and months worth of stress that you supposedly weren’t suppose to feel) the wedding had gone of without a hitch. Beautiful and serene. Large enough to incorporate both families and a speckling of friends, without become a huge production that neither you nor your new husband wanted.

Husband.

You could call him that now. After the near year long engagement tacked onto almost four years of seeing one another you could now call the wonderful man next to you yours. Well legally by law. He had been yours’ for some time now. A fact surprisingly he liked to point out quite often.

His dark hair was coming out of its coiffed design, softening tendrils now laying more lax against his forehead. Turning to face him now, you find the view just as stunning as the one outside your plane window. Glistening blue ocean separating islands as far as you could see held no candle to Jaebum in your opinion. Not in the slightest.

The man in question was staring intently at his phone, one earpiece of his headphone snug, the other, turned away and facing you, in case you spoke to him. But the two of you hadn’t said a word to one another for the past hour or so and that was okay. Content to stare out the window, your mind drifting, you didn’t feel the need to fill the space with meaningless chatter. And neither did he. A similarity that drew you to one another even from the beginning. Besides, the two of you would have the rest of your lives together to talk. The rest of your lives and this two week honeymoon you were currently embarking on.

So that was why while you had been observing your near approaching destination, Jaebum had been writing. Something you knew he couldn’t stop doing, even though you had told him no work on this trip. And although you didn’t want him to stress, he had assured you before you left he wasn’t going to be. But you knew that when the mood struck him he couldn’t stop himself. He had to get it out. And with the look adorning his face through half the flight you figured this song in particular would be a good one.

The pilot’s voice reverberated over the speaker and you watched your new husband look up from his device. His lips pausing in their silent march. As if feeling your eyes he turned to face you, a smile lifting the corner of his mouth, an eyebrow raising in silent question. You simply shook your head, grasping then squeezing the hand that was now moving towards yours.

“We’re almost there.” You whispered. Eyes smiling he leaned in to ghost a kiss across your lips. Deciding to finish his work later he powered his phone down. Then leaning over the arm rest he placed his chin on your shoulder, content to watch the island approach as the aircraft descended. Your home for the next 14 days.

Turns out you were to be trapped inside that beachfront property for more time than you thought, and it wasn’t the good “after marriage” time. It was the “someone forgot to fully hammer down the walkway to the beach thus endangering the guest in such a way that one would nearly break their ankle” time.

The first few days had been spectacular. A dream during the moments you left your rental to explore the ocean and small town that found it’s livelihood by it. And the moments you didn’t leave, well those were also quite dreamlike in their own way. Spectacular really. But on your fourth day there, heading to the beach for a snorkel session, your shoe snagged on a loose plank and down you went. Quite dramatically for not breaking anything and Jaebum in his chuckling hadn’t known you were hurt until he observed the grimace on your face. A trip to a nearby clinic resulted in you being advised to stay off it for the next week. At least. You had argued you only had a short time here but the island doctor simply shrugged, guilty that he couldn’t do much more for you.

Jaebum, as loving as he was, tried to make your time inside as nice as possible. The first day he had opened the patio doors completely to let in as much of the ocean breeze as possible, but by the second day you were hobbling outside. Determined to spend as much time outside; you didn’t let your ankle, those stupid crutches, or a mothering Jaebum keep you from sitting in the sun. It was for yourself but a large part of you felt sorry for your husband. This trip was as much for him as it was for you. But he would never tell you he was upset. To be quite honest he probably would have been sitting there next to you the entire trip. But it was your honeymoon. It wasn’t just a normal weekend and you wanted it to count.

“Babe?” His reply was a soft grunt, not looking up from the notebook in his lap.

“Do you want to go down to the water?” Silence was your answer. Once again you felt bad for bother him, but this trip was about relaxing. His music could wait a couple days.

“Im Jaebum.” Confused eyes met your own, the sharper tone of your voice bringing him into the conversation finally. “Can we go down to the water? Will you help me?”

You could read the hesitancy in his eyes as he reclined back in his chair, his back no down stiff from hunching over that darned notebook for the past hour. Clearly he didn’t want to risk something bad happening to you to worsen your injury, but you’d take cutting your own leg off to the boredom floating around your restless mind.

“Please.” You whined. You weren’t ashamed. If it got the two of you closer to that beautiful ocean. If it got your husband to relax from being a mother hen for five seconds you would do it.

His sigh was expected. No doubt battling with himself about the possibilities. What was not expected was how quickly he gave in. How he set down his things and moved to help you back into the house.

“What do you want to bring?”

Boredom must have been killing him as well. Or perhaps a writer’s block. That would be the only thing that could explain why the two of your were hobbling your way down the pathway towards the water. You holding your bag of goodies and Jaebum holding you. On his back. Much to your insistence that you would be fine leaning on him. The stench of male pride was so strong in that moment that you decided to relent.

“Right over there.” You pointed. “We can put the blanket there and it won’t be too close to the water, just in case of the tide.”

Angling the two of you towards your indicated spot your husband softly grunted. The sand under his feet making it more difficult to not jostle you. It was sweet, his attempt to get you there without straining yourself, but completely unnecessary.

“Let me down here. I can make it.” You could drag yourself through the sand if he would just let you. He ignored you, walking the next few yards before stopping to set you down.

“This good?” Noticing the beginning of sweat on his forehead you just nodded. You would let Jaebum work out whatever providing instinct his alpha male tendency needed to prove. Besides you weren’t too opposed to being the doting wife if it came to that.

After laying out the blanket he helped you maneuver into a position that was the most comfortable before sitting down himself. The sea air smelled better now that you were closer. An over dramatic exaggeration most likely from your part but you didn’t care. You finally felt like you were back on your honeymoon. Next to you Jaebum was clearing items out of the bag, snacking on the occasional piece of fruit he came across. The light of the sun hit him square on and although you were never one for long standing prose, you felt at that moment you could run with the best of them in waxing poetically.

Thoughts of gratitude and peace flew through your mind as it hit you again that this was your husband. This kind caring man who would do anything for you.

“I love you.” You blurted out. Once again his started eyes met yours. It wasn’t that the two of you never confessed your feelings for each other, but neither of you were ever PDA heavy. Nor did you tend to blurt things out without a preceding reason.

But as your words sank in his face fell softly. Stopping what he was doing he moved towards you. A long arm wrapped around your waist, gently pulling you into his side. The other following a hand to your cheek, sliding around your neck. He held you there, suspended in time now that his smiling eyes stared into yours. And that’s were you stayed for what felt like years, but was probably only minutes. His eyes scanning everywhere on your face. Not wanting to miss any detail that he had truly cataloged long ago. But as if he was seeing you again in a new light, the sun framing you from behind in a golden hue. The blue sky the perfect vibrant backdrop. This moment that he wished he could freeze and save forever.

“You didn’t say it.” His lips quirked up in warning.

“What?”

“You know. We talked about this.” The confusion causing creases in your eyebrows relaxed as you realized where his train of thought was leading.

“I didn’t technically agree to that.” Unconsciously your eyes rolled in mock annoyance and in response his right hand tightened around your neck. He pulled you closer to him as his thumb teasingly stroked your skin.

“Come on. How about just this once?” Although he voice was pleading you took note of the predatory glint in his eyes.

It was the look of him that broke you. He was so beautiful sometimes that you could actually cry. Crazy. But it was almost unfair most days how he could wake up so ridiculously good looking. So relaxed and rumpled but still as if he could walk right into a photo shoot. It was that look coupled with the fluttering in your chest as he continued to stroke your now warming skin.

“I love you...husband.” The response in his posture was immediate. His back straightened and the teeth that were previously torturing his lower lip now filled his smiling mouth. It was as his eyes disappeared into charming little creases and his hands were pulling you closer towards him that you heard it. Barely a whisper over the waves crashing next to you, Jaebum’s lips a little more than a breath from yours.

“And I love you, wife.”

[sammyspreadyourwings]

META ASKS FOR WRITERS - 1 3 4 5 6 7 9 11 14 16 17 18 20 23

hoh boy  Answers under a read more!

1) Tell us about your current project(s)  – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Uh lets go with my current four so

Supernatural AU - It’s existing and completely plotted I just need some push to finish it, but I do just love the world I built, its one of my favorite when it comes to just the overall feel

Witch AU - is being a spoiled baby, but I think that this plot is one of my favorite I worked in, especially because I can see the consequences of everything so clearly, and its really fun!

Teddy Bear + Brian - it’s just this little soft piece where Brian has a Teddy bear from his childhood and the reactions the boys had to it

Secret WIP - Its about Brian being a sad and stupid lad (I’m keeping it pretty under wraps because I want a genuine reaction to it. I think I’m almost finished writing it and then I cry about writing. Honestly, I’m really loving the prose style on this one.

3) What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

So this question is really funny, because this is how most of my longfics start and then I have to sit here and write out the context for all of it. 

so like, I just write things that I want to write which isn’t super helpful lmao  

4) Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

The wall with the balcony is entirely windows. He sees the lights of London twinkle like fallen stars. Brian nervously shuffles over to the bed pulling his coat off and setting it across the chair. He feels underdressed even standing in this room. The jeans are new and his socks don’t have holes and he found a woman’s shirt that hugs him in all the right places but leaves his shoulders open to the world.

I don’t really have a reason but I really love this paragraph. It’s from the secret WIP

5) What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?

Honestly, Brian. To no one’s surprise, there’s just something about sad souls that I relate to.

6) What character do you have the most fun writing?

Brian, most of the time for perspective but I really do love writing Roger from an outsider’s pov because he is just so interesting.

7) What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

I like to think there’s an easy simplicity to my writing. The themes and words might be complex, but I like to think that I avoid getting bogged down in prose and dialogue and let people explore it on their own because they can understand it.

Honestly I have no clue. Let me know what y’all think!

9)Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

Oh longfic. Certainly. I’m usually a little bit of both? Like everything is plotted but I let the story take its own path even if it just leaves my outline in the ditch, and I’m quite happy with that.

11) What do you envy in other writers?

PROSE. God I’m always so jealous about other people’s prose. It’s always so beautiful and compelling and I feel like when it finally gets posted mine as this weird lacking in prose. I love my style but man if I could write a good purple prose fic then I would. EVERY time.

14) At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Honestly, at the end like as I’m posting it.

16) Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

Yes actually, I tried to write my latest drabble as something a little dreamlike, nothing concrete and nothing vague. I had to ignore a lot of the sensory prose that I might otherwise include.

17) Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

Oh certainly. I am a writer of many hats - and at the end of the day what I write is never going to be completely interperated as I meant it to be you really do lose control of the work once its out in the world - but I don’t think there’s anything that is that miraculously surprising about my writing.

18) Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Looks at Witch AU - absolutely not , but seriously when I world build I tend to see how things would react if you changed the date a little bit and that tends to create different versions. But yea there are more than a few plotlines I abandoned just for the sake of making the work bearable. But for the most part what I publish is probably the best form of the work that I can manage.

20) Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

HHHHHHHHHHHHH my favorite question of course I can’t think of anything at this moment, so come ask me again when my secret WIP is published because that has A Lot

23) What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

Story Idea that I haven’t written but live rent free is the Groupie AU (I have no idea where that draft went) a close contender is the runaway Bri au too.

I have a couple of concepts that I want to explore one day - like an ace character in an ABO au, but like one day.

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

WHAT CAN WOMEN’S bodies do? This is a question that preoccupies Sophie Mackintosh in her debut novel, The Water Cure. Straddling dystopian fiction, mythology, and allegory, Mackintosh has created a world in which danger and possibility live side by side. In writing the lives of Grace, Lia, and Sky, Mackintosh exposes the fine line between the imagined and very real threats to a woman’s bodily autonomy. Her prose at once dreamlike and violent, this debut novelist has produced a fiction underscored by a relentless unease.

The story opens on the death of the patriarch, aptly named King. He, his wife, and three daughters have lived alone on a remote island for many years, sharing a large villa with several unused and unoccupied rooms. The couple fled from the mainland in search of somewhere safe to raise their daughters, but we are never quite sure what the parents need to protect their daughters from; on the mainland there seems to be some kind of mysterious disease that men give to women, but we never know exactly what it is. The three daughters are told stories by their parents about the dangers of the world, and particularly of men: “There is no hiding the damage the outside world can do, if a woman hasn’t been taking the right precautions to guard her body.” These “precautions” are taught to the girls as a variety of bizarre rituals, also referred to as “therapies.” These activities include fainting rituals, drownings, and an ultimate act of purification, the so-called “water cure” from which the novel takes its name. However, the promise of protection is proven false: as the novel continues on, Mackintosh reveals the true extent of the cruelties the parents have wielded, both individually and as a couple, on their daughters.

The novel is split into three sections, “Father,” “Men,” and “Sisters,” written from the perspective of either Grace or Lia, or sometimes from the perspectives of the three in tandem, suggesting a shared position, like a Greek chorus. However, this promise of unity is undercut by the difficulties they face, and though there is a definitive split between the girls and their parents, the girls forge uneasy alliances. Through mental manipulation, the girls are taught to think about love in counterintuitive ways, picking favorites through a ritual of drawing irons. After the death of their father, for example, the mother instructs, “No more love!” and then, “Love only your sisters.” This sisterly love is also tested: the middle sister, Lia, often volunteers in such practices as killing toads or encouraged acts of violence, in order to spare the feelings of another. The idea of love in general is subject to strange testing, analysis, and suspicion.

These tests and rituals indicate Mackintosh’s engagement with the historic medicalizing and pathologizing of women’s bodies. The “therapies” seem to directly link to various treatments used by doctors in Western medicine for a variety of “feminine” ailments. The relationship between women’s bodies and water has a long history in the treatment of women, particularly young women experiencing the symptoms of hysteria. Mackintosh plays with the word “cure” as both a treatment and the process of preservation, suggesting the double-meaning that haunts the girls’ lives. She contrasts the promise of protection and health with an eradication of desire and autonomy. To keep women “healthy” in the world of the novel is to keep them contained.

This is also the case in the way that the characters treat their feelings. As Lia explains at one point: “My feelings are limping, wretched things.” She cries often during the novel, and maligns her needs for love and touch. She explains that feelings are “[e]specially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not. It was a wonder that there were still safe places, islands like ours where women can be healthful and whole.” Through many moments like this, we get a glimpse of the reasoning that led the parents to isolate themselves in the first place and their utopian vision inherent in their promises of safety. Increasingly, however, the promise of utopia is set against the fundamental problems of agency and consent.

Throughout the novel this problem is found most pressingly in the way that the parent’s control of their daughters affects the way they think of their bodies, making them scared of their own capabilities, their strengths, and, importantly, their desires. A constant fear underscores this novel. It is never clear how much the anxieties that the girls’ parents have filled them with are based in reality. At some point in the not-too-distant past, other women were making their way from the mainland to the island in search of refuge, but this was also fraught with mystery. Things wash up on the beach, things that the girls refer to as “ghosts,” which they imagine, or have been told, are the decomposing bodies of sick women — something that we never know for sure. As Lia engages in a sexual relationship, she begins to notice things about her body, a loosening of teeth or increased bruising, but it is never clear whether this is from her own undernourishment or caused by the man she is sleeping with. Toward the novel’s end, Grace reflects on the time when their house was filled with women from the mainland and what their presence taught her: “The violence came for all women, border or no border. It was already in our blood, in our collective memory. And one day the men would come for us too.” In this way, Mackintosh depicts the terror of moving through the world in a woman’s body, with a profound but unspecific sense of dread.

In a world of fear, questions of desire become extremely difficult. What does this fear do to love and to the incommunicable desires of each of our bodies? All of the relationships between men and women in this novel are fraught and, at times, extremely unpleasant. The death of the patriarch in the opening page does not diminish his presence, and his predilections for creating the rules of his daughters’ lives continues. In the second part of the novel, two men and a young boy wash up on the shore, complicating the lives of the young women further. Lia’s relationship with Llew replays some of the most familiar clichés of heterosexual romance, but it does not make it any less painful for her, as she wrestles with her own physical desires and her need for love and contact. Grace’s pregnancy is explained to her sisters as a result of supernatural forces, but in her account, given at the end of the novel, she reveals that she was in an incestuous relationship with her father — though he claims she was not really his daughter it is difficult to know for sure — which transforms his promises of protection into much more sinister confinement and control. Similarly, when suspicions increase between the men and the girls, the men lock them in a room, under the guise of protection. Again, Mackintosh comes back to the difficult terrain of the control of women’s bodies as determined by men. The book’s repeated use of the word “toxic” is extremely loaded, chiming as it does with growing attention to and discussions of toxic masculinity, its symptoms and its effects. Though the book is written in a series of first- and third-person accounts by the three young women, the desires of the men are an overshadowing force. The male characters are ambivalent and controlling, seeking to coerce women into assuming possessions that repress them.

Though this is undeniably bleak, Mackintosh seeks to find solace in the relationship between sisters. In a recent essay for LitHub, Mackintosh thinks about her own sister and the composition of her writing: “There were times during the writing of my novel, so many years later, that I thought: sisterhood has failed me! And I also thought sometimes, darkly, I have failed at sisterhood.” We see this ambivalence recur: though it clearly thinks deeply about the distinctive relationship between sisters, it does not necessarily present any answers to its many questions. One way that the novel does delve into an interesting area is through its complex portrayal of desire: Mackintosh shows desire in its many forms, not simply as sexual or sensual, but also as a wolfish need to be close to each other, in packs. The sisters strive to overcome their fears and jealousies through living together in close proximity, accepting each other and loving each other selflessly. There is a central belief throughout the novel in a shared understanding between women that can emerge in the most unlikely of places.

Mackintosh writes in a very particular palette — lavenders, blues, and whites — and in textures — muslin, cotton, and linen. There is something of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in her costuming of her three sisters, and like that film, she contrasts a dreamy aesthetic with a constant threat of violence — the thin white material of the dresses they wear at points serving to mop up blood. But the violence that infuses this text does not give way to an unadulterated pessimism. Instead, there is something that holds firm all through her writing: Mackintosh believes that there can be some escape. In the final few pages of the novel, as the girls leave the home that has also been a prison, these “new and shining women” move out of the territory of supposed safety and into the unknown future.

¤

Katie Da Cunha Lewin is a writer and tutor based in London. She writes on literature, culture, and film and can be found in the Irish Times, The White Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others.

The post Boundary Lines: Sophie Mackintosh’s “The Water Cure” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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CRITICS GENERALLY DEFINE “Lynchian” as the cohabitation of the macabre and the mundane. The severed ear hidden in the field in Blue Velvet may be the most iconic representation of this junction, but it’s everywhere in David Lynch’s work: from Twin Peaks’s sweet, brochure-like title sequence of a mountainous town that, as it turns out, hides Laura Palmer’s corpse and many other monstrosities, to the arrival of Naomi Watts’s aspiring actress Betty in a dreamlike Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, before the nightmare of that city consumes her. In Lynch’s early work, the small town is the theater of this dance of innocence and evil, but in his later films, namely the loose trilogy of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), the macabre and the mundane coexist in the individual soul. Upon reading Room to Dream — Lynch’s newly released experimental memoir — one’s tempted to say that the same coupling exists in David Lynch himself.

With Lynch treading into his 70s, it’s an appropriate time for Room to Dream. This hybrid of biography and memoir by Lynch and journalist/critic Kristine McKenna offers hope of understanding an artist who, four decades into his career, remains a subject of much mystery and misinterpretation. Even his old school friends still don’t know the source of Lynch’s Lynchianism.

McKenna and Lynch alternate chapters, starting with McKenna, who covers a period of her subject’s life through extensive interviews with those who know and have worked with him, in turn prompting a chapter from the director about the same period. In sum, the book presents a quirky but ultimately lovable — and widely loved — man. With output as dark as his, one expects the outward oddity of an Alan Moore or a Tim Burton, or the intensity of a Terry Gilliam. When I describe him as one-part “mundane,” then, I don’t mean that Lynch is tedious in any sense, but that his persona is so endearing, so enamored of life and film, so — indeed — normal, that it’s confounding to think that behind this childlike chirpiness is the mind that gave us the ear and the depraved Frank Booth who severed it.

A straightforward summary of David’s upbringing, largely devoid of turbulence, would be a bore. The value of this book is in getting closer to the origins of Lynch’s art, which, as McKenna eloquently puts it, “resides in the complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide.” His early years seem to have provided the foundations. Born in 1946, he spent his childhood in Boise, Idaho, before moving to Alexandria, Virginia, as a teen, where he discovered his first love: painting. Nostalgia for Boise seems to have turned the middle-class small town into an ideal in Lynch’s heart that echoes in his work. McKenna writes:

The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes […] classic rock ‘n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sweaters and pleated plaid skirts — these are all elements of Lynch’s aesthetic vocabulary.

There’s an elegy to this aesthetic in Mulholland Drive’s opening title sequence: splices of all those boys and girls swing dancing as if in a jitterbug contest. Hollywood is radiating ’50s congeniality as Betty emerges from the airport, escorted to her cab by a warm elderly couple expressing full confidence that they’ll soon see her on their TV screens. “Won’t that be the day!” Betty merrily replies. But the garish frozen smiles on that elderly couple as they leave Betty, like that of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, offer a warning that this affable setting, like the vivid rosebushes that open Blue Velvet, will be subverted in due course.

Lynch’s father, Donald, worked for the agriculture department. McKenna posits, “Perhaps his father’s work dealing with diseased trees imbued him with a heightened awareness of what he has described as ‘the wild pain and decay’ that lurk beneath the surface of things.” In Lynch’s hands, however, decay is not a function of time and history as it is, say, in the writings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, but of the permanent presence of something threatening in humanity’s character. In part, his art is a parable of the rural-urban transition. Anxiety about big cities harassed him early, derived perhaps from childhood visits to New York. Lynch writes, “Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound — I’d see different things in New York that made me fearful.” A move to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, after unsuccessful attempts to keep a steady menial job in Alexandria, seems to have refined this anxiety into an artistic doctrine. According to McKenna, “The chaos of Philadelphia was in direct opposition to the abundance and optimism of the world he’d grown up in, and reconciling these two extremes was to become one of the enduring themes of his art.” The city was “dangerous and dirty,” providing “rich mulch for Lynch’s imagination.”

In Philadelphia, like the gushing water hydrant that gave Saul Bellow a new writing style, Lynch found his epiphany when, supposedly, some wind caused “a flicker of movement” in a painting he’d made of a figure standing among foliage. “Like a gift bestowed on him from the ether,” McKenna writes, “the idea of a moving painting clicked into focus in his mind.”

Some well-received shorts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts yielded an opportunity, upon moving to Los Angeles, to make his poem to urban horror, Eraserhead (1977). An underground success, the film caught the attention of influential studio players, including Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch the opportunity to make The Elephant Man (1980), which would go on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards. Dune came next in 1984, an artistic and professional debacle that ended up being a necessary turning pointing, from which Lynch emerged more resolute to fully own his material. “You die two deaths […] And that was Dune,” he writes. “You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure.” (Whereas with the 1992 critical and commercial flop, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, he feels he only died once, since it was authentic Lynch.) Two years later, he got his revenge with a movie that was completely his.

Three things comingled to produce Blue Velvet in Lynch’s mind: Bobby Vinton’s song of the same name, which on a second hearing (after finding it “schmaltzy” the first time) summoned the image of green lawns, red lips, and, finally, a severed ear in a field. “I don’t know why it had to be an ear,” Lynch writes, “except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body […] The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind, so it felt perfect.”

It is indeed captivating to read both McKenna and Lynch on the origin of his stories. Many like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and 1990’s Wild at Heart (based on a Barry Gifford novel), do have a basic plot, but their artistic merit is in their accumulation of effects and moments. As Julian Barnes wrote of a net in Flaubert’s Parrot: rather than “a meshed instrument designed to catch fish,” each can be seen as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” Room to Dream shows us how Lynch went about collecting his holes — from dreams he barely remembered, to a mysterious line spoken at the other end of a receiver, to people spotted on the side of the road who move him in some way and end up playing a role in one of his films. Collaborations were equally critical to his career. The most famous of these are Mark Frost, who co-created Twin Peaks and its reboot, and Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the series’s musical score, but others like Jack Fisk, a fellow painter and friend since the Alexandria days, and Dean Hurley, who mixed the sound of Inland Empire, also get their due.

As Lynch’s net gets wider, so, too, do the holes. By Lost Highway in 1997, the narrative barely coheres. Instead the pleasure is in a growing radicalism in Lynch’s storytelling: the Mystery Man who tells Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison not only that that they’ve met before, at Fred’s house, but that he, the Mystery Man, is at Fred’s house at that very moment, and goes on to prove it; Fred’s metamorphosis in prison into Pete, played by Balthazar Getty, a young man with a completely different life, though it does ultimately intersect with Fred’s again, at which point Pete turns back into Fred. Lost Highway offers a kind of quantum theory of personality, where you’re only probably who you are. Inland Empire, the most encrypted of all of Lynch’s movies, largely abolishes narrative altogether and instead ties disparate Lynch ideas — a sitcom of people in rabbit costumes, Polish prostitutes, psychosis — to a central story about a cursed film set.

¤

Lynch’s prose has all the innocence of the deceptive first part of a Lynch movie. The same guy who, McKenna tells us, finds pleasure in collecting human remains — embryos in bell jars, for example — and who once asked a woman who was about to have a hysterectomy if he could have her uterus, addresses the reader with things like, “I’ll tell you about a kiss I really remember.” About that encounter: “That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.” About masturbation: “So I thought, I’m going to try this tonight. It took forever. Nothing was happening, right? And all of a sudden this feeling — I thought, Where is this feeling coming from? Whoa! The story was true and it was unbelievable. It was like discovering fire.” He doesn’t sound the least bit boastful when he says, “They thought I was so handsome. It was really great.” Or the least bit intimidating when he describes how “[a]nger came up in me like unreal.” His writing is sprayed with “sort ofs” and “kind ofs” and “so cools.” The hard work required to get Eraserhead into Cannes “almost killed me” — not because of the long hours themselves but because this meant giving up milkshake breaks. That, for Lynch, is one of the crises of fame.

There is, however, a problem with this kind of charm. It’s ultimately a performance, not in the sense that it’s inauthentic, but because it’s the voice of a raconteur; there’s something inevitably impersonal about it. Lynch doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a one-on-one with him, but instead like you’re one among several sitting on barstools around him. When McKenna writes of a divorce, she prepares us for Lynch’s perspective, but that never comes. His mother’s 2004 death in a car crash gets little attention from McKenna and none from Lynch — even as his ex-wife Mary Sweeney suggests “he was changed by his mother’s death.” Meanwhile, Lynch, a transcendental meditation devotee, devotes but a few pages to the death of the Indian guru Maharishi, whose funeral he flew to India to attend.

McKenna ends up not being too big a help here. While she understands her subject well, she’s also too close to him. Her fondness for her subject is not in itself a problem, especially given how universally loved Lynch seems to be. But when McKenna says, “Lynch is good at tuning out static,” or that “you’ve got to hand it to him” that he could make a film like Lost Highway, or that “[h]e doesn’t like it when things get too big and unwieldy, and he wants to be left in peace to make whatever it is he’s decided to make; it’s never been about fame or money for him,” she sounds less like a biographer than a friend. Even in discussing flops like Fire Walk with Me, McKenna seems keen not to hurt Lynch’s feelings. She seems much more comfortable calling a Lynch film a masterpiece.

Indeed, once we get to start of Lynch’s movie career, Room to Dream is less a biography than deep reporting of each of Lynch’s major projects, and some minor ones. Divorces are mentioned, for example, because they coincide with a film. Part of the problem is conceptual. Because Lynch would read the preceding McKenna chapter, it’s unsurprising that McKenna isn’t inclined toward too probing an account. But this sacrifices candor and revelation, and it’s hard to see the value of this peculiar framework. The fault may lie more with Lynch than McKenna, since he isn’t given to confession. His current wife, Emily Stofle, says, “We’re still very sweet to each other […] but he’s selfish, and as much as he meditates, I don’t know how self-reflective David is.” This comes not long after McKenna claims Lynch “has a unique gift for intimacy.” What draws readers to a biography or memoir like this is the question of how a great artist lives in and with the world. We don’t get the whole story here.

We do nevertheless get a sense of how Lynch’s imagination works, and how he brings that imagination to the screen. Blue Velvet’s editor seems to represent the majority view when he says, “It’s an honor to work with his material, because that’s sacred clay he produces.” If we don’t get enough of Lynch’s warts, at least we get to see him and the people around him playing with that clay.

¤

Shehryar Fazli is a Pakistan-based essayist, political analyst, and novelist.

The post David Lynch’s Sacred Clay appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[topmixtrends]

CRITICS GENERALLY DEFINE “Lynchian” as the cohabitation of the macabre and the mundane. The severed ear hidden in the field in Blue Velvet may be the most iconic representation of this junction, but it’s everywhere in David Lynch’s work: from Twin Peaks’s sweet, brochure-like title sequence of a mountainous town that, as it turns out, hides Laura Palmer’s corpse and many other monstrosities, to the arrival of Naomi Watts’s aspiring actress Betty in a dreamlike Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, before the nightmare of that city consumes her. In Lynch’s early work, the small town is the theater of this dance of innocence and evil, but in his later films, namely the loose trilogy of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), the macabre and the mundane coexist in the individual soul. Upon reading Room to Dream — Lynch’s newly released experimental memoir — one’s tempted to say that the same coupling exists in David Lynch himself.

With Lynch treading into his 70s, it’s an appropriate time for Room to Dream. This hybrid of biography and memoir by Lynch and journalist/critic Kristine McKenna offers hope of understanding an artist who, four decades into his career, remains a subject of much mystery and misinterpretation. Even his old school friends still don’t know the source of Lynch’s Lynchianism.

McKenna and Lynch alternate chapters, starting with McKenna, who covers a period of her subject’s life through extensive interviews with those who know and have worked with him, in turn prompting a chapter from the director about the same period. In sum, the book presents a quirky but ultimately lovable — and widely loved — man. With output as dark as his, one expects the outward oddity of an Alan Moore or a Tim Burton, or the intensity of a Terry Gilliam. When I describe him as one-part “mundane,” then, I don’t mean that Lynch is tedious in any sense, but that his persona is so endearing, so enamored of life and film, so — indeed — normal, that it’s confounding to think that behind this childlike chirpiness is the mind that gave us the ear and the depraved Frank Booth who severed it.

A straightforward summary of David’s upbringing, largely devoid of turbulence, would be a bore. The value of this book is in getting closer to the origins of Lynch’s art, which, as McKenna eloquently puts it, “resides in the complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide.” His early years seem to have provided the foundations. Born in 1946, he spent his childhood in Boise, Idaho, before moving to Alexandria, Virginia, as a teen, where he discovered his first love: painting. Nostalgia for Boise seems to have turned the middle-class small town into an ideal in Lynch’s heart that echoes in his work. McKenna writes:

The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes […] classic rock ‘n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sweaters and pleated plaid skirts — these are all elements of Lynch’s aesthetic vocabulary.

There’s an elegy to this aesthetic in Mulholland Drive’s opening title sequence: splices of all those boys and girls swing dancing as if in a jitterbug contest. Hollywood is radiating ’50s congeniality as Betty emerges from the airport, escorted to her cab by a warm elderly couple expressing full confidence that they’ll soon see her on their TV screens. “Won’t that be the day!” Betty merrily replies. But the garish frozen smiles on that elderly couple as they leave Betty, like that of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, offer a warning that this affable setting, like the vivid rosebushes that open Blue Velvet, will be subverted in due course.

Lynch’s father, Donald, worked for the agriculture department. McKenna posits, “Perhaps his father’s work dealing with diseased trees imbued him with a heightened awareness of what he has described as ‘the wild pain and decay’ that lurk beneath the surface of things.” In Lynch’s hands, however, decay is not a function of time and history as it is, say, in the writings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, but of the permanent presence of something threatening in humanity’s character. In part, his art is a parable of the rural-urban transition. Anxiety about big cities harassed him early, derived perhaps from childhood visits to New York. Lynch writes, “Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound — I’d see different things in New York that made me fearful.” A move to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, after unsuccessful attempts to keep a steady menial job in Alexandria, seems to have refined this anxiety into an artistic doctrine. According to McKenna, “The chaos of Philadelphia was in direct opposition to the abundance and optimism of the world he’d grown up in, and reconciling these two extremes was to become one of the enduring themes of his art.” The city was “dangerous and dirty,” providing “rich mulch for Lynch’s imagination.”

In Philadelphia, like the gushing water hydrant that gave Saul Bellow a new writing style, Lynch found his epiphany when, supposedly, some wind caused “a flicker of movement” in a painting he’d made of a figure standing among foliage. “Like a gift bestowed on him from the ether,” McKenna writes, “the idea of a moving painting clicked into focus in his mind.”

Some well-received shorts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts yielded an opportunity, upon moving to Los Angeles, to make his poem to urban horror, Eraserhead (1977). An underground success, the film caught the attention of influential studio players, including Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch the opportunity to make The Elephant Man (1980), which would go on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards. Dune came next in 1984, an artistic and professional debacle that ended up being a necessary turning pointing, from which Lynch emerged more resolute to fully own his material. “You die two deaths […] And that was Dune,” he writes. “You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure.” (Whereas with the 1992 critical and commercial flop, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, he feels he only died once, since it was authentic Lynch.) Two years later, he got his revenge with a movie that was completely his.

Three things comingled to produce Blue Velvet in Lynch’s mind: Bobby Vinton’s song of the same name, which on a second hearing (after finding it “schmaltzy” the first time) summoned the image of green lawns, red lips, and, finally, a severed ear in a field. “I don’t know why it had to be an ear,” Lynch writes, “except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body […] The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind, so it felt perfect.”

It is indeed captivating to read both McKenna and Lynch on the origin of his stories. Many like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and 1990’s Wild at Heart (based on a Barry Gifford novel), do have a basic plot, but their artistic merit is in their accumulation of effects and moments. As Julian Barnes wrote of a net in Flaubert’s Parrot: rather than “a meshed instrument designed to catch fish,” each can be seen as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” Room to Dream shows us how Lynch went about collecting his holes — from dreams he barely remembered, to a mysterious line spoken at the other end of a receiver, to people spotted on the side of the road who move him in some way and end up playing a role in one of his films. Collaborations were equally critical to his career. The most famous of these are Mark Frost, who co-created Twin Peaks and its reboot, and Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the series’s musical score, but others like Jack Fisk, a fellow painter and friend since the Alexandria days, and Dean Hurley, who mixed the sound of Inland Empire, also get their due.

As Lynch’s net gets wider, so, too, do the holes. By Lost Highway in 1997, the narrative barely coheres. Instead the pleasure is in a growing radicalism in Lynch’s storytelling: the Mystery Man who tells Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison not only that that they’ve met before, at Fred’s house, but that he, the Mystery Man, is at Fred’s house at that very moment, and goes on to prove it; Fred’s metamorphosis in prison into Pete, played by Balthazar Getty, a young man with a completely different life, though it does ultimately intersect with Fred’s again, at which point Pete turns back into Fred. Lost Highway offers a kind of quantum theory of personality, where you’re only probably who you are. Inland Empire, the most encrypted of all of Lynch’s movies, largely abolishes narrative altogether and instead ties disparate Lynch ideas — a sitcom of people in rabbit costumes, Polish prostitutes, psychosis — to a central story about a cursed film set.

¤

Lynch’s prose has all the innocence of the deceptive first part of a Lynch movie. The same guy who, McKenna tells us, finds pleasure in collecting human remains — embryos in bell jars, for example — and who once asked a woman who was about to have a hysterectomy if he could have her uterus, addresses the reader with things like, “I’ll tell you about a kiss I really remember.” About that encounter: “That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.” About masturbation: “So I thought, I’m going to try this tonight. It took forever. Nothing was happening, right? And all of a sudden this feeling — I thought, Where is this feeling coming from? Whoa! The story was true and it was unbelievable. It was like discovering fire.” He doesn’t sound the least bit boastful when he says, “They thought I was so handsome. It was really great.” Or the least bit intimidating when he describes how “[a]nger came up in me like unreal.” His writing is sprayed with “sort ofs” and “kind ofs” and “so cools.” The hard work required to get Eraserhead into Cannes “almost killed me” — not because of the long hours themselves but because this meant giving up milkshake breaks. That, for Lynch, is one of the crises of fame.

There is, however, a problem with this kind of charm. It’s ultimately a performance, not in the sense that it’s inauthentic, but because it’s the voice of a raconteur; there’s something inevitably impersonal about it. Lynch doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a one-on-one with him, but instead like you’re one among several sitting on barstools around him. When McKenna writes of a divorce, she prepares us for Lynch’s perspective, but that never comes. His mother’s 2004 death in a car crash gets little attention from McKenna and none from Lynch — even as his ex-wife Mary Sweeney suggests “he was changed by his mother’s death.” Meanwhile, Lynch, a transcendental meditation devotee, devotes but a few pages to the death of the Indian guru Maharishi, whose funeral he flew to India to attend.

McKenna ends up not being too big a help here. While she understands her subject well, she’s also too close to him. Her fondness for her subject is not in itself a problem, especially given how universally loved Lynch seems to be. But when McKenna says, “Lynch is good at tuning out static,” or that “you’ve got to hand it to him” that he could make a film like Lost Highway, or that “[h]e doesn’t like it when things get too big and unwieldy, and he wants to be left in peace to make whatever it is he’s decided to make; it’s never been about fame or money for him,” she sounds less like a biographer than a friend. Even in discussing flops like Fire Walk with Me, McKenna seems keen not to hurt Lynch’s feelings. She seems much more comfortable calling a Lynch film a masterpiece.

Indeed, once we get to start of Lynch’s movie career, Room to Dream is less a biography than deep reporting of each of Lynch’s major projects, and some minor ones. Divorces are mentioned, for example, because they coincide with a film. Part of the problem is conceptual. Because Lynch would read the preceding McKenna chapter, it’s unsurprising that McKenna isn’t inclined toward too probing an account. But this sacrifices candor and revelation, and it’s hard to see the value of this peculiar framework. The fault may lie more with Lynch than McKenna, since he isn’t given to confession. His current wife, Emily Stofle, says, “We’re still very sweet to each other […] but he’s selfish, and as much as he meditates, I don’t know how self-reflective David is.” This comes not long after McKenna claims Lynch “has a unique gift for intimacy.” What draws readers to a biography or memoir like this is the question of how a great artist lives in and with the world. We don’t get the whole story here.

We do nevertheless get a sense of how Lynch’s imagination works, and how he brings that imagination to the screen. Blue Velvet’s editor seems to represent the majority view when he says, “It’s an honor to work with his material, because that’s sacred clay he produces.” If we don’t get enough of Lynch’s warts, at least we get to see him and the people around him playing with that clay.

¤

Shehryar Fazli is a Pakistan-based essayist, political analyst, and novelist.

The post David Lynch’s Sacred Clay appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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