When Motorbooty lampooned "rock lit", they went after some easy targets: Bob Dylan, Henry Rollins, Jim Morrison. In mocking tone, they basically decried the axeman who trades his guitar for the pen. Sonic Youth's Lee Renaldo, thankfully, has transcended the rock lit scourge to present his own collection of writings that--like his music--have an ambient, experimental tone. You may recall the spoken word piece on the Ciccone Youth album in which Renaldo tells the surreal tale of a sinking Ferry Boat, loaded with the band's equipment. Combine this kind of short, surreal vignette with the haunting photography of Leah Singer, and you have Bookstore, a beautifully-designed small press book. Diary-like entries, random word collages and traditional poetry fill these pages like a bunch of old books placed on the shelf. Pull one out, leaf through it, put it on the table, pick out another. A very casual series of word bursts and images, this book deserves a prize for design alone. --E.T.

(review date: 5/17/97)

One of the seminal and main practitioners of the venerable Evil-Genius-Attempts-to-Conquer-the-Planet school of escapist fiction was Sax Rohmer, a.k.a. Arthur Sarsfield Ward, a British hack who bears sole responsibility for creating the racist (yet, paradoxically, powerful, intelligent and sympathetic) character of Dr. Fu-Manchu, "insidious" personification of the Yellow Peril. When he wasn't cranking out Fu-Manchu novels to capitalize on the Occidental world's irrational fear of "Mongol hordes", Rohmer wrote similar stories featuring non-Chinese villains. One such book is The Day the World Ended (1925), a silly, yet diverting tale of three International Crime Fighters and their Desperate Race Against the Clock to infiltrate a Global Conspiracy that could mean the End of the World as We Know It (per the title). In this case, the villain is the misshapen dwarf known as Anubis, who plots to wipe out most of the earth's population with a sonic radio wave generator and establish a Utopian society with his cult of devoted death-worshippers after the devastation is inflicted (the fiend!).

The plot is classic Rohmer, framed as the earnest, first-person account of Brian Woodville, a British journalist sent to the German resort town of Baden-Baden to uncover the perplexing mystery behind recent sightings of the area's mythical giant vampire bats. During his investigation, he begins to hear a disembodied Voice in the dead of night giving him three days to abandon his efforts and flee or face the consequences--which of course merely serves as impetus for our brave hero to get to the bottom of things. When two other suspicious characters turn out to be fellow investigators (one a beer-swilling, tough-talking American, the other a snappy-dressing, flowery-speaking Frenchman--stereotypes, anyone?), the three join forces and close in on the abandoned Castle Felsenweir, from whence the supranormal activity seems to emanate.

Unlike a Fu-Manchu tale, where the reader always knows who is behind the nefarious scheme du jour, the structure of the story hangs on the piecemeal revelation of what is really going on (Who is The Voice? What are the giant armored figures manning the Felsenweir battlements? Why is the exotic and beautiful Mme. Yburg visiting Baden-Baden?), and this technique, bolstered by the three-day deadline of the threatening Voice, is fairly successful. Although Rohmer's writing is perpetually hampered by a narrow stylistic range and wooden characterizations, he nevertheless possesses a certain skill for devising grotesque super-scientific wonders. For example, a genuinely disturbing moment occurs when Woodville, captured by the enemy, has his requisite face-to-face meeting with Anubis, and discovers that the beautiful, statue-like slave girls who attend the dwarf are in fact surgically-altered semi-humans, modified from childhood to serve his pleasure:

He snapped his fingers and spoke rapidly in a tongue which sounded unfamiliar. The ivory statue stood upright. Raising white arms, she turned slowly, dreamily, like a mannequin. I was conscious of a definite embarrassment, and I suppose I showed it, for:

"Pray, do not consider the feelings of my attendants," said Anubis. "They have none."

He snapped his fingers again. Isa resumed her former pose.

"That unpleasant quality which women are fond of referring to as their soul is absent in Isa, Mizmûn, and the others. Twelve in all, Woodville, and as nearly perfect as Nature will permit Science to rear a human being. The members of my Corps of Pages approximate as closely to the hourïs of Mohammed's paradise as one could reasonably expect to approach."

(review date: 5/16/97)

I almost hate to admit it--I didn't like Software (too cutesy)and as a result have sorta avoided Rucker. But this book puts himsquare in the center sights of my preferred canon, somewhere betweenBlaylock and Shiner. Somewhat related to the shortlived "steampunk"genre, this book hides behind the guise of a "lost" nineteenth-centurymanuscript written by a contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe. Or, moreaccurately, a mirrorPoe: the real Poe resided on the alternate earthat the opposite end of an Einstein-Rosen bridge in the core of this earth (uh, mirrorearth). Etc.

Young Mason Reynolds leaves his father's farm in Virginia to go buy a wife for his "man" Otha, a slave. But in Lynchburg, Mason has an unfortunate run-in w/the local constablary and is forced to flee to Richmond where he meets Poe and becomes embroiled in a scheme to reach the hollow earth. In the course of his subsequent journeys,he encounters the elder gods, confronts his prejudices towards Otha, falls in love, and emerges onto a mirrorworld where he finds (much to his dismay) that he is black.

Sort of an extension of Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, with that novel taken as fact, this is more than just anotheralternate-earth novel... like Howard Waldrop's One Dozen ToughJobs, this is an allegory for race relations and conditions existingright now. As such, it deserves far more attention than it'll receivein the "sci-fi" section at B. Dalton. --T.C.

(first appeared in Reign of Toads #2)

last update 7/30/97


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