Untold riches! Following up on the success of her book Space Opera, Catherynne Valente has released a second book this year, this one a collection of her short stories.
And what a collection it is. Absolutely everything I love about Valente’s writing is on display here. These stories defy description, so click the jump to watch as I flail around trying to describe them anyway.
How to sum up Valente’s prose? It’s lyrical, occasionally earthy, usually dreamlike. The writing wanders all over the place, sings, does a little dance, and then sometimes laughs in your face. Sentences rarely end up the way you expect them to, and whether the tone is somber or out-of-its-skull crazy, the images it paints are always gorgeous.
The stories don’t always follow the rules, they don’t behave, and sometimes (like with the story “Snow Day”) you’re left wondering what on earth just happened. But Valente has a way of coming up with the most outrageous concepts and then setting them out so you can follow the bizarre logic and even believe in it, for a little while at least.
For example, the title story “The Future Is Blue”. Imagine that sea levels have risen to the point where there just isn’t any land anymore, and then picture the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Big as a continent now, meticulously sorted into its individual components, and turned into a floating country where the neighborhoods are each made of a different type of trash and have names like Far Boozeaway, Pill Hill, and Scrapmetal Abbey.
All night, from far away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows, it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender, and Fresh Linen Scent and New Car Smell.
And it isn’t that you’ll suddenly want to use gasoline for cologne and want a birthday cakes made from decades-old Twinkees, but the author takes you into the mindset of someone who sees those things as beautiful. It’s a glorious way to open the book, and at the same time it made me feel horrible, since the young narrator is the most hated and abused person in all of Garbagetown. By law.
Two of the stories reminded me of paintings by the artist Tomek Setowski (do a Google image search for him, you won’t be disappointed.) “Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave” (the title is based on an early twenty-century poet’s list of the ten most beautiful words in the Hungarian language) features a little girl born with a deformity that’s never been categorized before.
He flipped through the pages of his book, illuminated with oxblood and emerald headers that read: Animalia, Missing or Additional Parts, Mineral Contamination, Disorders of the Blood, Skin, or Hair, Disorders of Doubling or Tripling, Disorders of Selfhood, and wrote, somewhat experimentally: Architectural.
“No One Dies in Nowhere” leans a little closer to a subdued Hieronymus Bosch painting; an eternal city on an endless plain, where bird-headed warders punish citizens for breaking the rules in a place where rules matter almost as little as everything else. It’s grim, mostly cheerless, and oddly enough one of my favorites, a murder mystery in a town where nobody can die, and even decomposition doesn’t follow the usual rules.
On the third day, the stench began, and the watch-room filled intolerably with the smell of frankincense, and then wild honey, and finally a deep and endless forest, loamy and ancient. On the fourth day, Belacqua held his ear to her mouth and heard the sound of gulls crying.
Some of the stories are fairytales (“Two and Two is Seven” is a children’s story with something very nasty tucked inside), or about fairytales (many famous authors had a Muse to inspire them. No one ever asks the Muses what they think about being inspiring. “The Flame After the Candle” takes a look at that, and the possibility that some Muses might have been telling their own story that the authors got wrong.) And some children’s stories like “Badgirl, The Deadman, and the Wheel of Fortune” don’t have any magic in them at all. Or if they do, it’s the magical way that children have of seeing the world around them. Even if that world isn’t particularly nice. Or safe. Or recommended for children at all.
But don’t think these are all so serious. Valente can have some merciless fun with a genre or a concept. In “A Fall Counts Anywhere” she takes the existential conflict between the gods humanity used to worship and the technology that’s threatening to replace us, and turns it into a WWE-style Battle Royale with two of the most hilariously mismatched (ie: the best kind) of color commentators imaginable.
And Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos gets its own treatment by telling “Down and Out in R’lyeh” from the point of view of moping five-thousand-year-olds, practically children. Because if there’s three things universal to teenagers, it’s that your home town is the most boring place in the universe, stupid thrills can be the only thing keeping you from going crazy, and the older generation will sleep forever and hoard all the damned souls and never get around to devouring the universe.
Okay maybe that last one doesn’t apply to everyone.
And that’s how it happened. That’s all it was. Our foetid, degenerate quest, the dark crusade that would echo down through the centuries like one of Cthulhu’s grand farts was just a Hadean beer run through the toilet bowl of the cosmos. Lurk this and lurk it well: the fancier the history reads, the trashier it really was.
“The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek or The Luminescence of Debauchery” says everything you need to know in the title; a decadent story of transformation and material success, told by a poor glassblower’s youngest offspring who finds a unique way to see the world. And the hallucinogenic “Planet Lion” sees the world through the eyes of an apex predator who also sees through the eyes of all the other apex predators on the planet, and they learn about things by eating them. Something terrible has happened to a human settlement, but we don’t know what, because the lions have all the information but they don’t understand the words.
The emerald shoulders of one lion called Osmium droop miserably. He tosses his mane at the four moons of coming night and cries out:
“Christ, Susie, why did you leave me? Wasn’t I good enough?”
I love the way Valente deals with the concept of love in her stories. Even when it’s at its most painful, it’s something that’s worth centering your entire life around. There are so many delicious little details about how battles are fought in “The Lilly and the Horn”, where no one does anything as barbaric as fighting with swords anymore. Warring nations settle conflicts like civilized people, with a glorious banquet; winner is the last person who dies. But even with all the many many horrible things that can happen in the banquet hall, at it’s core it’s still a love story.
And then there’s my favorite in the collection, “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild”. This is the kind of story that’s like a fever dream, a Wild West adventure of love and loss, told with a child’s logic and a whole box of crayons. It’s set in a land where sorrow and love mean different things depending on what country you’re in, about a girl who lives in a wine-bottle house and rides out with her father every day to herd six-legged Time Squirrels.
That’s the Nowboy life. Saddle up with the sun and bring in tomorrow’s herd – or next week’s or next decade’s. If we didn’t, those nasty little rodents would run wild all over the place. Plays would close three years before they open, Wednesdays would go on strike, and a century of Halloweens would happen all at once during one poor bedraggled lunch break. It’s hard, dusty work, but Papo always says if you don’t ride the present like the devil it’ll get right away from you because it’s a feral little creature with a terrible personality and no natural predators.
The collection wraps up with “The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End and Further Still”, a prologue to Valente’s Fairyland series. It finds the Green Wind and his companion the Leopard of Little Breezes trying to comfort the heartbroken Wyverary A-Through-L as they wrap their brains around the fact that someone as awful as the Marquess could never have been able to take over Fairyland unless a huge part of the population wanted her in charge.
The story tells you that the world is an easy and simple place, and you – yes, you! – are the very center of it. You are a hero, the hero, and nothing beastly that has ever happened to you is your fault.
It’s a very on-point summary of how the best stories inspire us, but the worst people use stories to control us. A very gloomy but appropriate way to end the book, since one way to get through a terrible ending in real life is to tell yourself that the story isn’t over yet.
Just saw the news as I was writing this review: congratulations to Catherynne and Heath on the birth of their son Sebastian!