Last week the Binary System Podcast was on vacation (check out the BSP Facebook page for pictures taken in and around Niagara Falls), and traveling means picking something I want to read, something out of a list of books I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Adam-Troy Castro’s short story collection Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories was the perfect choice for some light reading while waiting around in airports.
Keep in mind that “light” in this case refers to the size of the book. It does not mean “happy”.
Shakespeare wrote that art is “a mirror held up to nature”; for this book Adam Troy-Castro is using a funhouse mirror with a magnifying glass, reflecting some of the very worst that human nature has to offer. These stories are dark like you wouldn’t believe. They’re also fascinating, thought-provoking, hard to put down and, in several cases, deeply upsetting. You could plow through all eight stories in a matter of hours, but I’d recommend following the suggestion David Gerrold wrote in the intro: don’t read all of them at once.
As I’ve mentioned in my reviews of two of Mr. Castro’s books (here and here) I’ve been a huge fan for about thirteen years now. His writing has some of the best examples of world-building I’ve seen, containing bizarre types of reality where aliens can bypass things like time and aging, or planets where physics doesn’t really count anymore. But he has a way to convey all that strangeness in a way that’s easy to understand, and a big reason why is that the main focus in his kind of science fiction isn’t on the science, it’s on the beautifully (and sometimes grotesquely) flawed characters. All of them are very believable, and all trying to live what passes for a normal life on their worlds. Or just survive.
The first story “Arvies” throws us right into one of the author’s bizarre out-of-left-field versions of reality, with a world where citizens are kept in a fetal state indefinitely, and “born” humans are raised to be dispensable mindless hosts. On the one hand it’s the Pro-Life argument taken to a ridiculous extreme (protecting the unborn is more important than the suffering of billions of born humans, including the one carrying the fetus), but there’s also a dig at a stereotype of the Pro-Choice side (pregnancy is something that can be started on a whim and stopped as soon as it’s inconvenient). The story doesn’t really take a side, it’s more about the twisted society that’s created when the entertainment of the wealthy is the only thing that matters.
The title story “Her Husband’s Hands” stretches medical science to the point where soldiers killed in battle can be brought back to life and returned to society, even if only part of their bodies are salvageable. All of the usual PTSD and wounded warrior tropes are brought into play (including that ever-so-unhelpful suggestion that someone going through the worst moment in their life should be grateful because other people have it much worse), and oddly enough it has one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking declarations of love I’ve ever read.
“Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” is a horror story, one that’s even more disturbing due to the fact that most if it is about a paradise world. Castro pulls out all the stops to describe life on the best vacation planet in the universe, where you can have beauty and true love and perfect landscapes and an endless carnival and become the version of yourself you’ve always dreamed of. And then the story asks some nasty questions. How much suffering would Paradise be worth? What price would you pay, and how often would you be willing to pay it?
When I read in the description for “Our Human” that the story was about bounty hunters looking for a man named Beast Magrison, I was looking forward to finally hearing more about Magrison’s Fugue, a world-destroying tailored plague that was mentioned in Castro’s book The Third Claw of God. Turns out the story doesn’t even mention the Fugue at all, or provide any details about Magrison’s war crimes. You get a fascinating taste of other alien races and their societies, but mostly this story is a pin that pops the ego of anyone who thinks their crimes are important to anyone except themselves.
We don’t even learn the name of the planet or race that’s featured in the story “Cherub”, we only know that they’re born permanently attached to a demon that reflects all of their sins, even the ones they won’t commit for decades. So in a society where everyone has the worst parts of themselves on display, what happens when a baby is born with a demon that shows the child will be completely sinless? Obviously that child has it much, much worse.
What to say about “The Shallow End of the Pool”? It’s vicious and terrifying and gruesome, it’s Castro holding his funhouse mirror up to the concept of a divorcing couple using their children against each other. The characters suffer a lot. There were a few times when I had to put the story down, and then immediately pick it back up again to find out what happened. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it does have an oddly satisfying ending.
If that story was too much, then you might not even want to get into “Pieces of Ethan”, which touches on how a long illness transforms everyone connected to it. It feels like Castro was trying to work through some rage and helplessness in a big way with this one. The “condition” involved is another one of those physics-defying inventions of the author, so whatever you imagine has happened to six-year-old Ethan, it won’t come close to what he’s actually going through. There are horrific images and a nightmarish amount of pain, and almost as disturbing for me was the fury of someone who’s been suffering for so long that all they have left is hate for anyone who isn’t going through the same thing.
(And I’m still not sure what I feel about the ending. It’s either genius, or unnecessarily weird. Possibly both.)
The last story is going to be the most problematic for some people. If “Arvies” was poking the pro-choice/pro-life movements, then “The Boy and the Box” is telling a whole section of the population, “Come at me.” I was sure at first that this was the little boy from the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”. And you can almost imagine this is what that boy eventually became: someone with a magic box that he could put all of reality into, and then pull things out one by one when he wanted to play. Take that kind of power and combine it with the mindset of a little boy…yeah, you can probably imagine the point Castro is making with this one.
If it sounds like I thought these stories are terrifying and grim and more than a little disgusting in places, well, I did. And I liked it! They’re all brilliantly written, and I’ve still got a little more to read, since I was determined to not read the Author’s Notes until after I’d written this review. Excuse me…
…okay I’m back. I think we can add Adam-Troy Castro to the list of authors who write the best author’s notes, right along with Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. I love getting little tidbits of the writing process, like the fact that “Her Husband’s Hands” started out as a failed story called “Her Husband’s Eyes”, or that “Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” started as the author’s response to 911 (or at least to the people who insisted they were staying away from Manhattan forever because of it). I would have liked more information about “The Shallow End of the Pool” and “Pieces of Ethan”, but his thoughts about “The Boy and the Box” were pretty much exactly what I was expecting.
While I planning my vacation I also picked up a Nook copy of With Unclean Hands, an Andrea Cort story (the main character from Emisaries from the Dead). It’s excellent, naturally, and it’s part of the author’s plan to eventually release all of his Andrea Cort stories in e-book format (including the long-delayed War of the Marionnettes) so you should all go over to Barnes and Noble and buy a copy, and maybe send a note to the author encouraging him to continue with the plan. Nicely.