The Bageler

WILLIAM RETURNS, but this isn't called William Mills Could've Been Stopped BECAUSE LET US NOT DECEIVE OURSELVES: he couldn't have been.

Mahāla makes her way into the City of Absalom with the help of a LITTLE WIZARD BOY, manages to secure lodgings without setting herself on fire and meets a pair of MYSTERIOUS TRAVELERS who may hold the key to completing her quest, despite how early in the module it is!

Reviews of my June 2021 Books Read Standouts, Kaiju Score, Vol. 1 and Perestroika In Paris, by Jane Smiley

MIND MGMT Omnibus, Vol. 1: The Manager And The Futurist

“Mix ingredients. Close bottle with a cork and fix cloth rags around the mouth. Soak rag in kerosene immediately before use. Light and enjoy!”

If I was dialing up the latest post from a blog I enjoyed--"Operator! Get me that jackass!", I'd say--and saw that the author had reviewed MIND MGMT, my first thought would be "How the hell do you review that bonkers masterpiece? You'd have to be a fool to try! A fool damn'd!" And then I'd look in the mirror and see that I had spoken the truth; ridi, pagliacco, etc.

Meru, a one-hit-wonder true-crime novelist, thinks she's found her next big project that'll pull her career out of its slump: an aeroplane, Flight 815 (by coincidence ((maybe)), which suddenly found itself at 42,000 feet and filled with people--passengers, crew and pilots--who had no goddamn idea who they were. Meru begs an advance from her agent to investigate and is quickly drawn into a web of what-the-fuck involving psychic spies, a secret globe-spanning metaphysical espionage network at war with itself (the titular MGMT), and a man named Henry Lyme who may be at the center of it all, and who seems to know an awful lot about Meru for someone she's never met.

MIND MGMT cleverly combines several things I love (cyclical storytelling, melancholy, secret paranormal organizations with secret compounds in the jungle, pervasive existential dread, and gorgeous watercolor pages) and several things for which I do not generally care (spies and spycraft-adjacent skulduggery, amnesia, vaguely-defined 'psychics', and not being able to tell which friggin' side of a friggin' conflict anybody is friggin' on), and the result is...the result is. I'm honestly not sure if I like it or not, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, and I'm sure as hell still thinking about it four months later, so it must've done something right but I'll be damned if I could tell you exactly what. And honestly that's a good thing: I'm a big proponent of shameless junkfood-reading, of gobbling down your favorite warm-hearted if unchallenging comic or trashy hot-werewolf-love-triangle romances or wizard-private-eye novels that get more indefensibly misogynist as the years go by or fuckin' whatever, but you should also tackle, heavy, heady, complex works that put you through the paces and make you ask the hard questions, and they shouldn't all be things you anticipate (or end up) enjoying. Just as it's important not to speak only to people with whom we agree (except Q-Anons, Covid deniers, Nazis and similar, obviously) we must engage with media that we may find disagreeable, for there is something to be learned from any endeavor, even if it isn't what we were intended to.

That said, MIND MGMT isn't unpleasant or objectionable or offensive; it's complex and complicated, the good and bad kinds of sad, and beautiful and confusing like a wife, or the sea. When I say I'm not sure if I like it or not, I mean I can't decide how it made my heart feel, but honestly that's pretty on-point for the story it tells. In this book, as in life, answers do not come easily, if at all. We are not guaranteed explanations, success, or a happy ending. But when all else fails, we can know this much to be true, always:

Trust your training, disbelieve your eyes, and burn after reading.

Score: 9/10 Cryptic Excerpts From The MIND MGMT Field Manual Running Along The Edge Of Every Page

Animeta!, Vol. 1

This one's easier! And sweeter and funnier and lighter; not junk-food level, as described above, but certainly straightforward and intentionally educational.

Know what Miyuki loves more than anything? Anime, specifically one magical-girl series that blew her goddamned mind when she saw it for the first time and changed her life. Know what Miyuki wants to do more than anything? Work for the studio that produced it and make more anime to show other people like her what stories and art have the power to do for people. Know what Miyuki can't do even a little bit? Draw, like seriously, at all. KNOW WHAT THAT ISN'T GONNA DO: STOP HER FROM ACHIEVING HER DREAM.

Animeta! wears a disguise: on the surface it's a delightful slice-of-life manga aimed at young adults, and it 100% is that in form, but not in function. Much like Delicious In Dungeon is secretly a cooking manga dressed in the plate and wizardly robes of a sword-and-sorcery dungeon crawl (more on that in a later post), this is actually a really in-depth and fascinating look into the mechanics of producing anime, like down to instructionals on how storyboarding and the physical correction of roughs and inbetweening work, and as with any deep dive into an industry that has evolved in a very specific way it is both incredibly interesting and makes you wonder how literally anything ever gets actually made because holy shit, there is a lot to this. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Shannon Hay (@ShannonSketches), is a professional storyboarder (late of Muppet Babies; they boarded the scene that became the falling-over-potato meme) and one of course does one's best to understand the jobs of one's friends, but Animeta! provides the kind of insight that really emphasizes how little you can actually explain about certain industries to people who aren't in those industries. But as core as those explanations are, they're wrapped in an extremely charming story about a young woman who just decides that god dammit she's gonna make a thing and be a success and nothing is going to stop her, except may an actually humanly unlivable wage, but she'll figure something out!

Like anything this specific, detailed and dedicated, it can't go on forever; it's not one of those series that can go on for dozens of volumes, which you only realize after you've already gotten hooked and now you're stuck paying $6.99 for the next one every week for the next seventeen fucking weeks, thank you so much The Devil Is A Part-Timer!, to say nothing of One Piece. It's only six volumes, and they actually happen to be on mega-sale right now on Comixology for I think like $4.99 each, and I recommend them both as a story to enjoy and as a way to learn about how something we love and that can be important to us is actually made, and possibly more importantly, who makes it, and that's always worth our time and effort.

Score: 8/10 Just Seriously Unbelievably Long Transformation Sequences, What The Hell, Even

it's always been the same, same old story

I am joined by my VERY FIRST GUEST, longtime pal, supporter of various pods and the actual Y2K bug WILLIAM MILLS!

We discuss what a Pathfinder is, how it's different from a Dungeons & Dragons, and put a character together for me to play and him to run an adventure for in the first installment of this limited series!

Reviews of my Books Read April 2021 Standouts, Heterogenia Linguistico, Vol. 1 and Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark

My reviews of my March 2021 Books Read Standouts, The Way Of The Househusband, Vol.1 and The Scumbag, Vol. 1: Cocainefinger

Reviews of my February 2021 Books Read Standouts: Brandon Sanderson's The Way Of Kings and Giant Days, Vol. 1

My reviews of my January 2021 Books Read Standouts, N.K. Jemisin's How Long Til Black Future Month and Lumberjanes, Vol. 6: Sink Or Swim.

SPECIAL REVIEW:

Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, by Edward M. Erdelac

(Note: I would definitely have bought, read and reviewed this no matter what but I was given an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for this review, which is the coolest fucking thing that has ever happened to me.)

Ed Erdelac came to my attention first when I was devouring all the Lovecraft Lite I could lay hand to--your Titus Crow, your Atrocity Archives, Meddling Kids, Lovecraft Country, Southern Gods and Ballad of Black Tom--and was also in the grip of a fever for Weird Westerns--The Sixgun Tarot, The Sisters Brothers--when I came across The Merkabah Rider, a four-volume series about a Hasidic gunslinger who fights demons and monsters from his own spiritual milieu and other, older darknesses in the Old West. Religion-as-magic? Angels, Devils and Squid? KABBALAH COWBOY???

Description: a Simpsons gif where Barney wins a tanker truck of Duff and yells "Just hook it to my veins!"

Sadly it would be some years before I'd be able to read the Rider's adventures because they were out of print at the time and didn't have any e-texts in any dark corner of the internet I could find, but eventually they were reissued on Kindle and my WORLD BEGAN TURNING AGAIN. Shortly thereafter I started following Ed on Twitter and chiming in like a jackass where I didn't belong and just recently saw his call for advanced readers for his new novel, and I decided to make myself a problem that could only be solved by throwing a Mobi file full of monsters into the marsh and running in the opposite direction.

A Twitter Direct Message where I say 'ED GIVE ME ALL OF YOUR WORDS' and he replies 'oh god please I have a family'

He was kind enough to oblige, BECAUSE HE KNEW WHAT WAS GOOD FOR HIM.

To my shame, I did not realize that Zora Neale Hurston--famed author, cultural and linguistic anthropologist and moviemadame--was a real person prior to Rainbringer; I had of course heard of Their Eyes Were Watching God and, considering my longstanding interest in Hoodoo and Vodun I've actually done myself an enormous disservice by neglecting her work, but what can I say: You go to Christian school, you avoid anything that sounds Jesusy afterward; if only I had known. Also, in my defense, the real Zora led a life so sensational and adventurous that one could easily print her actual, sans-monsters biography as a fictional account and it would both sell out immediately and be lambasted as wildly unrealistic and exaggerated; the dame Lived, you guys, and honestly 'fighting squamous intelligences from the darkness behind the stars' would really only figure in maybe her top five. To this point, and to preserve my own suspension of disbelief, I intentionally didn't look her up or fact-check any timelines or the appearances of any then-working-artist-now-mythologically-legendary-creators characters; both because I trust Ed to have both done his homework and know when story should supersede historical accuracy and because it would surprise me nothing at all to learn that the real Zora did work on a play with Orson Welles or hung out with Moms Mabley at the club or was contentious-working-partners with Langston Hughes or was actually inducted into the Mysteries by a Hoodoo Doctor. My favorite books, fiction or otherwise, always provide a starting-point to research into a dozen other topics; I'll be undertaking an education in Zora's work among other things, so I'm sure I'll come to know more about her life and times before too long.

To give the elevator pitch, Rainbringer is a collection of short stories and novellas (Ed's preferred format) wherein Zora just tries to be allowed to goddamn exist as a black woman who wants to write books in the first half of the 1900s, and is stymied at every turn by racism, misogyny and intellects from Another Place that are so deeply strange and hostile to our layer of reality that the only way they can interact with humans is to use them as finger-puppets that eventually explode from the strain.

One thing he does really well that's becoming more and more popular among Mythos and Mythos-adjacent authors is to place the various monstros and abominawhatsits and shoggamagoths of Lovecraft's canon less in their original context of a cold, cruel, amorally random universe and into the framework of Angels, Devils and Squid; that is to say, roughly, the Good, the Bad, and the So Horrifically Alien That Good And Bad Might As Well Be The Same Thing. The forces with whom Zora is aligned are pretty explicitly those of Abrahamic religion, although the loa of Vodun and other belief systems are also definitely players on the board with a vested interest in the outcome of the game. This removes the inherent hopelessness and futility of human existence that was central to Lovecraft's whole deal, and while we can talk about the virtues of anti-nihilism and choosing to fight for something in a world where nothing fundamentally matters, I think it can generally be agreed that 1.) This is more interesting and more fun, and 2.) Fuck HPL, everything he stood for and his dead racist skeleton bones forever. It's also important to note that like many stories making use of the AD&S framework such as Hellboy, The Dresden Files and your various Buffyverse offerings, Good in Rainbringer doesn't necessarily mean Nice, and it is implied with some regularity that the higher levels on any side in the war are ultimately all mind-shattering nightmares from beyond the places light can reach.

Rainbringer is not just some of the better Lovecraftian fiction out there right now, it's also a deliciously detailed and intricate look at Zora's attempt to catalogue and preserve various cultural aspects of black life in America (and beyond) at the time, particularly those inhabitants of the Carolina shores known as the Gullah, and their language, religion and ways of life feature heavily not only in a sort of True Detective way but as part of the story and experience of being black in the United States, which is to say pretty much against one's will. I'll be honest: Ed, like myself, is a white dude and I wasn't immediately sure how comfortable I was reading his take on life as a black woman in the 30's, especially once the (era-and-context-appropriate) n-words started dropping, but it immediately became clear that he knew what the hell he was talking about and that his understanding was born of a pure, borderline alarming love for Zora Neale Hurston and everything she sought to achieve by existing; Rainbringer is not an excuse to cram a historical domain character into his world of monstros and Very Bad Frogs, it is a love letter and him bringing his skillset to bear as his best way to interact with and honor a creator that clearly means the world to him. It occurred to me while reading that his previous novel Conquer, which appears to basically be Shaft: Monster Hunter in the very best way, was probably something of a dry run for this to make sure he could handle certain elements of telling a black hero's story right; I haven't made the time to read Conquer yet (I'M SORRY ED THERE'S A LOT TO READ AND ALWAYS MORE OF IT), but gone is what hesitation I might once have felt about reading the adventures of a literal soul-brother written by a dude as pale as myself. This is 100% not to say "Go ahead and write from the perspective of whatever specific cultural and ethnic group you want with impunity", ha-ha, no, it is not that, it is to say that if you're gonna try such a thing, you'd better be as good-hearted about it as Ed Erdelac. To quote him quoting Joe R. Lansdale: We learn about one another by trying to step into one another's shoes; they may not always fit as well as we would like, but we ought to try walking in them.

As is natural with any collection of stories, the individual reader will gravitate more to some than others; I'm personally always a sucker for Nyarlathotep and references to Judaism and the King in Yellow and cultural and linguistic anthropology, and so I was not disappointed, and even the stories that didn't feature my specific favorite Mythos beasties or academic disciplines had plenty to surprise me and to recommend them, such as what I'm pretty sure was a reference to KING SOLOMON'S MINES, a book I was fairly certain I was the last person ever to read back in 1999, that caught me completely off guard in the most delightful way.

Bottom line, if you're a fan of anthropology, black history, montros, and kick-ass women, Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos is for you. Support one of my favorite authors in supporting of one of his favorite authors at a bafflingly reasonable price. I'll be buying a copy despite the ARC he was good enough to send me, and recommend you do the same with all haste.

Score: 9/10 Saturday Nights On Sunday Night

I wish I was different, but this feels essential

My review of my December 2020 Books-Read Standouts, Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box and Alien: The Original Screenplay.