Tag Archives: Humorous Fiction

Angelmaker

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Angelmaker [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Nick Harkaway.

Harkaway’s second novel Angelmaker is a far better book than his first, despite showing a similar range of preoccupations. There are still martial arts training, a big showdown with a fearsome villain, strange conspiracies, and incomprehensible technology with basically metaphysical effects.

This story has for its hero Joshua Joseph Spork, a “clockworker” with a gangster heritage, and it concerns the immanentization of the eschaton by means of mechanical apiary. Although set in the early 21st century, the novel includes recollected episodes from throughout the 20th–largely thanks to a key alternate protagonist, superspy Edie Banister. The whole thing is told in a hectic Pynchonesque style that I greatly enjoyed.

A lot of the sensibility of this book has been taken up again in the later Jack Price novels by “Aidan Truhen,” and while the tale of Crazy Joe Spork is sometimes as funny as Jack Price, it also includes a little more serious reflection and attempts to deal with “deep” concerns.

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy: The Royal Imperial Boxed Set by Ian Doescher has arrived at the Reading Room, a gift from the Librarian’s mom (presumably in celebration of my new prescription for glasses coming soon, which means I may be able to comfortably read again). This box set includes Verily, A New Hope [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]; The Empire Striketh Back [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]; The Jedi Doth Return [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]; and an 8-by-34-inch full-color poster. This collects the adaptations of the original trilogy from the ongoing William Shakespeare’s Star Wars series. (This might seem tangential, but these are, after all, books with monomyth in iambic pentameter, and more, so I felt like I’d mention the arrival. Plus, I intentionally and willfully cross the Town-Gown-Tau divide all the time …)

“Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialogue by everyone from Darth Vader to R2D2.

This Royal Imperial Boxed Set includes all three New York Times best-selling volumes in the original trilogy: Verily, A New Hope; The Empire Striketh Back; and The Jedi Doth Return. Also included is an 8-by-34-inch full-color poster illustrating the complete cast and company of this glorious production.

Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy.”

Lull

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Lull by Kelly Link, which can be found at Weird Fiction Review and in Magic for Beginners: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Kelly Link, illo Shelley Jackson, with an exclusive conversation between Kelly Link and Joe Hill.

I really groove on the sort of nested narrative that this story supplies, and the complicating elements of time travel, phone-sex oracle, diabolical magic, and possible extraterrestrial involvement make it a real doozy. I have read this story twice: from its original published version in the Peter Straub-edited 2002 volume Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists and the later anthology Sympathy for the Devil. Since 2014 it is also available online from Weird Fiction Review.

The biggest laugh item for me on my second read was probably the description of Ed’s latest game release: “The one with the baby heads and the octopus girlies, the Martian combat hockey.” But I thought the tone of the story was impressive for bringing together that sort of comedy with genuine pathos, in a sort of matrix of overdetermined absurdity.

The Jennifer Morgue

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Jennifer Morgue [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Charles Stross, book 2 of the Laundry Files series.

“The Laundry operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport oneself when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.” (167)

The Jennifer Morgue is one of Stross’ hacker-gique occult espionage books about Bob Howard, agent of Capital Laundry Services. (The initials of the organization are never written as such, so it took me until the middle of this second volume to get that BASIC joke!) Like its predecessor The Atrocity Archives, it is a terrific romp. Where Stross drew his literary spy inspiration from Len Deighton in the first book, this time around sees him looking to Ian Fleming and the Bond movies. Given the more “exoteric” — okay, crassly pop-cultural — status of the Bond material, Stross elects to make his nods to it more overt, metafictional even. Protagonist Bob is put in a position to exploit his memories of “the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two” (187), since he is fighting a supernatural opponent who is using the Bond plot formula as a magical mechanism. Stross manages to pack sardonic hilarity, genuinely stomach-churning horror, and sentimental uplift into this single novel. Oh, and weird sex.

As with the first book, this one contains the titular novel, a bonus short story, and an essay reflecting on the espionage-adventure genre. The story “PIMPF” is a completely office-bound yarn, contrasting with the exotic travel and international entanglements of the novel, and it is funny in the nerdiest possible way. The essay didn’t seem as insightful as its counterpart in the first volume. Having chosen to place special attention on Bond villains, it seems to me that Stross erred terribly in neglecting to observe that Le Chiffre (from Casino Royale) was allegedly based on noted occultist Aleister Crowley, with whom Fleming was acquainted from their mutual employment by British intelligence services.

We Are in a Book!

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews We Are in a Book! [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Mo Willems, part of the Elephant & Piggie series.

Children’s picture-book superstar Mo Willems (of bus-driving pigeon fame and confirmed disregard for the “fourth wall”) here entices budding readers into the pleasures of literacy by demonstrating the power of text to exert mind control. You will now think of a banana.

Further significance of the story might be found in the notion that Elephant and Piggie acquire agency by becoming conscious of their own containment in narrative. Their final yea-saying is an aspiration to eternal recurrence.

Dumb and decent can often look the same. It’s depressing, but the truth often is.

Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library]

Ella Minnow Pea

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Ella Minnow Pea [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Mark Dunn.

This fable of alphabetic elision seems more urgent now, I think, than even in in the burgeoning days of the so-called Global War on Terror when it was first published. So much of our discourse is now mediated and overruled by algorithms intended to incite and/or placate that a Bureau of Letter Enforcement seems superfluous–and yet we are more thoroughly surveilled than ever.

The happy ending of the story, while cleverly constructed, rings a Lyttle hollow.

I despise him, and as such, I will have a hard time pretending not to enjoy every second of his downfall and humiliation. That’s my burden to bear.

Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library]

“Look,” Phillip said, “the world can be described as a war between two sides. The problem is that everybody has a different idea of what those two sides are.”

Scott Meyer, Off to Be the Wizard [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library]

“Look, there’s no point in freaking out about the trials and ruining your day,” Phillip said. “I know,” Martin agreed. “Freak out tomorrow. That’s when the trials are. Today is meant to be a day of fun. Possibly your last.”