wot i red on my hols by alan robson (pullus clamitatio)

Today Is Road Crossing Chicken Day – Please Remember To Hug Your Chicken

It is always a pleasure to come across a new story by Cherie Priest and Cinderwich is a particularly delightful one to have discovered because it came out of a dark place and restored some joy to Cherie Priest’s own life.

In an article about the book which she published on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, she tells us that she had made the mistake of taking on a job that she hated, a job that made her question her initial decision to be a writer. She says that she seriously considered giving it all up and going back to being a teacher or something. She doesn’t tell us what the hated job was, but after it was all over, she was burned out and she didn’t write anything for months and months. When she did finally manage to drag herself back to staring at a blank screen and trying to fill it with words she decided that she was going to write something just for fun, just for herself, and she didn’t really care if nobody else ever read it – the important thing was that she had to enjoy writing it.

The result of this decision was Cinderwich, and it’s a marvellously spooky story in which two people set out to solve a very strange mystery indeed. And along the way Cherie Priest has filled her story with all the things that delight both her writerly and readerly heart:

...old libraries, haunted houses, decrepit train stations, overgrown cemeteries, creepy hotels, a half-empty town, and some Waffle House hashbrowns for good measure...

Who could possibly resist reading such a story? Not me…

The story is based on an incident that actually happened in England in 1943 when four teenagers found the skeletonised remains of a woman trapped in a wych elm tree in Hagley Wood in Worcestershire. The autopsy concluded that the general condition of the body suggested that the woman had died some time in 1941. She was never identified and the whereabouts of both her skeleton and her autopsy report have long been lost both to time and to circumstance. No official record remains of the investigation into her death.

In 1944, a graffito related to the mystery appeared on a wall in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham. It read Who put Bella down the wych elm – Hagley Wood. This graffito has reappeared sporadically in various places over the years since then. Starting in the 1970s and continuing on to the present day, variations on the graffito have occasionally been painted on the Hagley Obelisk, a structure close to the wood where the body was found. The obelisk itself was built in the eighteenth century by Sir Richard Lyttelton for no other reason except that he felt like it. It has no known connection to the body in the wych elm tree.

Like the identity of the woman, the author of the graffito remains unknown.

Cherie Priest transplanted that story to Tennessee and let her imagination run riot with it. She filled it with ghosts, a clootie well (whatever that might be), some peculiar townspeople, and merry caricatures of all of her close friends. Tennessee doesn’t have any wych elms, so she found another tree with a similar cadence to its name and she modified the graffito to read Who put Ellen in the Blackgum tree.

The narrator of Cherie Priest’s story is one Ellen Thrush. She is named after an aunt who went missing long before she herself was born so of course she has never met her namesake.

Ellen thinks that her absent aunt might have ended up in Cinderwich, Tennessee because that is where the body of a woman matching Ellen’s description was found in a tree round about the time that the first Ellen disappeared.

The first Ellen Thrush had seemingly run away from home twice. Once to be with her lover Judith Kane and once shortly after joining Judith when she vanished into thin air one day never to be seen again. Judith, now elderly and retired, joins the young Ellen on a road trip to the tiny town of Cinderwich, both of them hoping to solve the mystery and both of them looking for closure.

It is clear that Cherie Priest had an absolute ball writing this story. She specifically says:

...this is the story that got me back on the writing pony again. So to speak.Therefore, sink or swim, succeed or fail, this little novella will always take up more space in my heart than it does on my shelf.

I am pleased to report that I had an absolute ball reading it.

Jason Apsley's Second Chance is the first book in a series of (mildly illogical) time travel novels by Adrian Cousins.

Jason Apsley is a forty-two-year-old divorced dickhead living in the twenty first century. Driving to work one day, he is killed in a car accident. Well, sort of killed anyway. After he dies, he awakens in 1976, six months before he's due to be born. His essence(?), life-spirit(?), whatever it is that makes him Jason Apsley is now trapped in the body of another forty-two year old Jason Apsley whose parentage remains obscure, but which clearly isn’t his own since, of course, he himself hasn’t been born yet.

Jason retains all his memories of the twenty first century and so, from the perspective of 1976, he knows quite a lot about what will happen the future – this turns out not be be particularly useful though occasionally it does have some advantages, particularly when it comes to the placing of bets on the outcome of formula one motor racing – an obsession of Jason’s. He can recite the names of all the winners of all the races dating right back to the year dot.

Jason has no access to the memories of the Jason whose body he has usurped so he knows nothing about this Jason’s twentieth century life and background. However he does have access to Jason’s physical skills and abilities, all of which complement his own and which therefore stand him in good stead. By and large, life is good.

Philosophically speaking, it seems that, for inscrutable reasons, Jason has been given a second chance to live his life, albeit in the past. Can he use this opportunity to rebuild himself differently? And as an aside, can he do anything to help his twenty first century friend Beth? She had been a young child in 1976 and Jason knows that her childhood had been very, very traumatic. Jason would dearly love to do something to make her childhood more pleasant and therefore hopefully ease the pain of her adult life. Will he be able to alter history to such an extent? Only time will tell. (Sorry about the pun…)

One of Jason’s biggest and most immediate worries is, of course, the problem of just what will happen to him when he is born (again?) in six months time. Can the timeline support two Jason Apsleys, one brand new and the other one middle aged? The answer to that paradox turns out to be more than a little tragic. The book is marketed as a comedy, and it certainly does have its amusements, but there is absolutely nothing at all funny about the events surrounding Jason’s birth.

In many ways this book is a fairly routine examination of the paradoxes inherent in the idea of time travel. Certainly jaded old SF fans like me will find nothing new in the novel’s rather banal speculations. The attraction of the story lies far more in its depiction of life in England in 1976 than it does in the SF trappings that surround that depiction. And here Adrian Cousins has done a first class job. Speaking as someone who actually lived in England throughout the 1970s I can safely say that Adrian Cousins has painted a very accurate picture of what life was like in that era. The social and political organisation of the time is spot on. Even the slang is accurate!

Death at Whitewater Church and Treacherous Strand are the first two books in a series of six mystery novels by Andrea Carter. Judging from these first two, each novel is complete in itself in the sense that the mystery which drives the plot is resolved. But there is an over all story arc which is still left open ended in these two stories. I presume this arc will all come together over the course of the next four books with, probably, some final resolution in the last novel. All of this suggests that it would be a very good idea to read the books in their published order…

The stories are set in a village called Glendara on the Inishowen Peninsula, a sparsely populated area in the Republic of Ireland. Benedicta O'Keeffe, known to one and all as Ben, is a solicitor. Once she was a high flyer working in a big city office, but following a personal tragedy, she has come to live on the peninsula to lick her wounds and (hopefully) to sever her connections with the past, as far as she is able. It is this past life and its implications for her future that form the long story arc. We don’t learn the details of Ben’s past tragedy until quite late in the first novel, and even then there are some things that we don’t find out until the second and (presumably) subsequent books. So for the sake of avoiding spoilers I’ll say no more about it. Instead, I’ll just concentrate on the setting, the characters and the nature of the mysteries that lie at the heart of each individual novel.

As Death at Whitewater Church opens, we meet Ben for the first time. She is in Whitewater, a small, abandoned village in the wilds of the peninsula. The only building of any note remaining in the village is a semi-derelict deconsecrated church which is owned by the Kelly family. They have been trying to sell the church for quite some time and now they think they have finally found a buyer. Ben is acting for the Kelly’s, handling the conveyancing details of the sale. She has come to Whitewater with a surveyor in order to get a report on the structural state of the building. Inside the church’s crypt the surveyor finds a skeleton wrapped in a blanket. Ben reports the discovery to the Garda (the Irish Police). The Glendara Garda (a nicely euphonious phrase!) are well known to Ben, indeed for quite some time she has been having an on-again, off-again relationship with Tom Molloy, the sergeant in charge.

When news of the discovery of the body leaks out, everybody in Inishowen assumes that the remains must be those of Conor Devitt, a well-known local character who disappeared without trace on his wedding day a number of years previously, leaving his bride waiting in vain for him at the altar. Who else could the body possibly be?

But you know what people say about assumptions and how they make an ass of both you and me…

From this point on things get very complicated very quickly, and the gradual working out of the plot’s twisted ramifications is particularly satisfying.

Treacherous Strand opens with the discovery of a woman’s body washed up on a remote Inishowen beach. It isn’t long before the body is identified as being that of Marguerite Etienne, a French lady who has recently moved to Glendara. The official police investigation dismisses Marguerite’s death as a suicide, but Ben is not convinced of the truth of that verdict. Shortly before she died, Marguerite had employed Ben in her capacity as a solicitor. Marguerite wanted to change her will and Ben set the bureaucratic wheels in motion. However Marguerite died before she could sign the new will. Given how very insistent Marguerite had been about the importance of the will, Ben finds Marguerite’s death rather suspicious…

She starts to dig more deeply into Marguerite's past. She finds that Marguerite used to belong to a French doomsday cult called The Children of Damascus. The cult was founded by one Alain Veillard, who was himself the father of Marguerite’s daughter, Adeline. Marguerite had left The Children of Damascus more than twenty years previously, but she had not been able to bring Adeline with her. Following the death of Alain Veillard, Adeline has risen high in the ranks of the cult and is now its de facto leader, a surprising development given Alain’s (and the cult’s) notorious misogyny.

Again, things start to get complicated from this point and once again the final explanation of what is really going on beneath the surface is very satisfying indeed.

There are several things that make these novels work so well. There is a very strong sense of time, of place and of people. You can positively smell the sea spray that hangs over Inishowen and the intertwined lives of the villagers are solidly sketched in. Add to that the ever-changing relationship between Ben and Tom Molloy together with Ben’s own tragic past and her problematic future and you have a very solid base on which to build a nicely complicated mystery. I will definitely be reading the remaining books in the series. They are far more than just the simple cosy mysteries that the blurb suggests them to be.

One of the trends in SF during the late twentieth century was the so-called shared world anthology in which many different writers contributed stories which all take place within a single well defined scenario. At one time there were more of these things than you could shake a spaceship at (science fiction) or shake a sword at (fantasy). By and large they have pretty much died out these days. But one of them is still going strong: Wild Cards edited by George R. R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass is still very much with us. About thirty volumes have been published so far. By the time you read this article more may well have appeared…

I’ve been mildly disappointed with some of the later Wild Cards books so I decided to go right back to the beginning and re-read the very first book in the series. It’s called (not surprisingly) Wild Cards. It was originally published in 1987 by Bantam Spectra, an imprint which no longer exists, so these days it is published by Tor.

Because it is the first book in the series, it establishes the basic premise upon which all the stories in all the books in the series depend. It all begins just after the second world war in an alternate United States. An airborne virus has been released which eventually spreads around the world and turns into a truly global pandemic – with 2024 hindsight, that scenario really starts to sound very familiar indeed…

The virus rewrites its victim’s DNA in random ways thus inducing extraordinary physical mutations many of which are almost immediately fatal. However some victims do manage to survive and often the mutations induced in them by the virus turn out to be some rather odd superpowers.

Because the virus affects each person differently it is quickly dubbed the Wild Card virus on the grounds that it is impossible to predict how any one person will react to it. The few people who do survive, albeit horribly deformed are known as Jokers. The very, very few who remain human in appearance but who also develop super powers are known as Aces. Those Aces whose super powers are too trivial to be of much practical use are called Deuces.

It turns out that the virus itself was originally developed as a bioweapon by aliens from the planet Takis. The Takisians are using the Earth as a field laboratory to test the effectiveness of their virus because humans are genetically identical to Takisians. Again this scenario sounds uncannily similar to some of the wilder covid conspiracy theories that circulated during our own pandemic. Not only that, the complete inability of the United States government to do anything meaningful to slow or contain the spread of the Wild Card virus also makes the book sound alarmingly prescient.

The alien known as Dr. Tachyon is a Takisian who objects to the weapon test on moral grounds. He has come to Earth to try to prevent the release of the virus. Unfortunately, his interference just makes the spaceship that is carrying the virus crash thus releasing the virus accidentally rather than on purpose. But the net effect is exactly the same. The results of his own actions sit rather uneasily on Dr. Tachyon’s conscience.

The book opens with "Thirty Minutes Over Broadway" which I think is the very best story that Howard Waldrop ever wrote. It sets the scene in 1946 and describes in detail the events leading up to the release of the virus (these are rather more convoluted and elaborate than I indicated in my synopsis). It effectively defines the direction all the other stories in all the other books will have to take in order to keep themselves consistent with the overall premise. The last time I read the story was in 1987 was when I bought the Wild Cards book. I only read it the once. But rather to my astonishment when I read it for the second time just a few days ago I found that I remembered every single detail of it. Somehow that first reading had seared it permanently into my brain. There are several other Waldrop stories that I remember, to a greater or lesser extent, but this one outshines them all. It is an astonishingly powerful story, a true tour de force.

As I settled down into my re-reading, I was amazed to find how well all the stories still stand up today almost four decades after they were first written. Every single one of them is just as strong and just as pointed now as they were the first time I read them. In the interim I’d forgotten how full the stories were of sometimes quite biting social and political commentary. That was a joy to rediscover.

For example, in "Witness" by Walter Jon Williams, much is made of HUAC (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee) which in our world was Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt that pretty much crushed informed political dissent in 1950s America. In the Wild Cards world HUAC devotes itself to chasing down dangerous Aces with communism playing second fiddle. However the end result still means that a lot of good people go to prison and get put on a black list that turns them into social and political pariahs. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A lot of events that actually happened in our world in the middle decades of the twentieth century are viewed through the distorting lens of the Wild Card virus in this book. The civil rights marches, the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam and the sabre-rattling confrontation with the Soviet Union caused by the Russians shooting down the spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers high over Soviet territory – indeed, this last is actually a whole story in its own right: "Powers" by David D. Levine.

Lots of little asides in story after story add verisimilitude to the wild card world. I was amused to learn that Mick Jagger gets arrested for lycanthropy. Somehow that seems very appropriate!

In short, the Wild Cards shared world began with a bang and held firmly on to the high ground so perhaps it is not really surprising that the series has managed to stick around for as long as it has. I still think that the later books are not as strong as the earlier ones, but that might well be due to the fatigue induced by familiarity. After thirty or so books that explore the same theme a certain ennui inevitably sets in. So it goes.

Despite this feeling, I still think that the books are well worth seeking out. The early ones have aged very well indeed and the longevity of the series as a whole speaks well for its cleverness.