Category Archives: Folklore

The Devil Has His Due

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Sorry to bore you guys with this, but sometimes I get yelled at if I don’t mention these things, so this is just to point out that I have a new mini-collection out on the Kindle today, The Devil Has His Due. It contains a group of four stories about our least favorite place, a sort I sometimes do for fun because there’s no real market for them outside rolling your own, attested to by the fact that, of the four, three are original to the volume. There will be a Nook version too, it just takes longer.

When we try to be good, that’s plan A, but that route is harder than it looks. And when virtue just isn’t working for you, there’s always plan B—like it or not. The Devil Has His Due contains four stories about dealing with the consequences when plan A doesn’t quite come together.

“Closing Time” – Maybe the worst part of Hell isn’t being there. It’s remembering why.

“One Blissful Night at the Inferno Lounge” – The night life in Hell. Care to dance?

“Boiling the Frog” – Appearances can deceive, the Devil does deceive, but neither as well as we can do ourselves.

“Subversion Clause” – Down through the ages there have been mortals who thought they could beat the Devil at his own game. So. Doesn’t the Law of Averages suggest that at least one of them might be right?

Four stories for $.99, it just doesn’t get any better than that. At least, not when I’m doing it.

Edited to add: The Nook version is now live.

Review – The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price

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The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price, Del Rey(Ballantine Books), 1979.

 E. Hoffman Price (1898-1988) was an old-school pulp fiction writer (“fictioneer” was his term for it) who, long after the pulp era ended, renewed his career by becoming a novelist in the emerging sf/fantasy field of the 1970’s and remained active right up until his death. He had a great and abiding interest in Asian mythology and religion, and both sides of that coin are evident in The Devil Wives of Li Fong.

The premise is that two female snake-spirits take on mortal form in a quest to become fully human. Why they do this and why they would want to be human in the first place is closely tied to Buddhist beliefs. In short, being human is a step or two above spirit/devil-serpent on the great wheel of Death and Rebirth, a sort of spiritual boost on the way to eventual Transcendence. The two snake-women, Mei Ling and Meilan, become wealthy by discovering an abandoned villa with a buried treasure, and soon after meet an apothecary’s apprentice named Li Fong, who they think is an agreeable young man and they decide to marry him, again as a further step in their quest to become fully human. Li Fong, charmed by their beauty and not exactly reluctant to part ways with his current master, agrees. Things are going swimmingly, until… Continue reading →

It’s Better Than That

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Late last night I was watching a rather obscure Japanese movie (though filmed in Hong Kong in 2007)  called Dororo. It’s based on a manga series by Ozamu Tezuko (he of Astro Boy fame). Here’s the pitch/teaser: “A female warrior who was raised as a man joins a young samurai’s quest to recover 48 of his body parts from 48 demons and to avenge her parents death.”  There’s a longer version, but it’s still a variation on this basic premise, and as the movie played I realized that I had a problem with the way it was pitched. It’s not that the pitch was inaccurate—as a capsule summary it covers the basics of what they movie’s about fairly well. The premise is, of course, ridiculous. No one’s going to lose 48 body parts (some fairly important like, say, the heart) and still survive long enough to be discovered by just the right magic shaman who knows how to replace body parts. Even in a pure fantasy like this one it stretched credibility past the breaking point.

Regardless, I didn’t come here to review the movie, as such. I am here to make the point that, despite the nonsense premise, despite the rather gruesome imagery of the pitch, I liked the movie quite a bit. Which was when I realized that I had a problem with the movie’s pitch itself. It wasn’t that, as I said, it was inaccurate. No, I think it’s mostly that it managed to be both accurate and very misleading. Why? Because the movie was so much better than that. The hero’s plight manages to be both grotesque and sympathetic at the same time. The heroine in her own way is as much damaged as the hero, and yet is just as heroic, plus by turns poignant, amoral, and laugh out loud funny. The cgi is a bit lacking at times, but it captures the esthetic of the Japanese monster tradition beautifully—the group soul ghost baby is almost worth the price of admission itself. And yet the pitch, brief as it has to be, conveys absolutely none of this. Pitches tell you what a movie/story is about and simultaneously tell you almost nothing.

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Word of Podcast

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If you’re interested in the sf/f field in general, the SF Signal web site is probably already familiar to you. This week they’ve put up one of their regular podcasts, this time a panel discussion on the state of the Swords & Sorcery (S&S)subgenre and where the genre is at the moment, (Episode 108): 2012 Sword & Sorcery Mega Panel Part 1
.    Panelists were:

Lou Anders is the editor of Pyr Books, Scott Andrews is the editor of  Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Violette Malan and James Sutter are authors, Jaym Gates and Patrick Hester are the SF Signal podcast moderators. Besides being an interesting discussion in itself for anyone even remotely interested in the subject (and I’m looking forward to part 2), it was interesting to me personally because my name came up several times as a modern S&S author in connection with the Lord Yamada stories.

I can see it. For one thing, as subgenres go, S&S is pretty mecurial. Any subgenre that can encompass at various times Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, G.R.R. Martin, and Michael Moorcock, has to be a bit of a moving target. For another, at various times in my development I was very deliberately writing S&S. For one thing, I went through an early phase where I didn’t read much else. For another, when I was first trying to break into the fantasy magazines (all maybe three of them at the time), S&S was in the ascendant, as hot or hotter than Steampunk is now. I wrote a fair bit of it, and apparently I still am.

I’ll grant you, I wasn’t thinking of Yamada as S&S when the series first came to me. I had him envisioned more as a Heian-era noire detective, sort of Sam Spade with a tachi. He quickly grew past that limited conception, and thank heavens for that, but the tone remained that of a generalist fantasy with mystery overtones. And yet the stories still easily fit under the S&S umbrella. I hadn’t thought of them that way, but it’s true, and perfectly fine with me.

Categories aside, I think this is the first time that my name and work has come up in a podcast that wasn’t a podcast of one of my own stories. Getting a reminder now and then that other people do read and like what you do doesn’t entirely suck.

In Which I Diss Zombies

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I’m having a bit of an internal monologue, which I’m going to share here in lieu of actual content. Sometimes I have to think about these things, whether there’s any good reason to do that or not. My thought for today is a mediation on why I’ve never written about zombies.

Yes, why? Good question, and I’d like to thank me for asking it. Not that I have a good answer; I don’t fully understand my motivations for doing or not doing anything. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s for the same reason I have never written a story about werewolves or unicorns: they just aren’t very interesting. Ok, I know that some people who read here are very fond of zombies and/or werewolves and unicorns, so before you get the knives out, let me explain: They just aren’t very interesting. ‘Kay. Now you can get the knives out.

 Is there a point buried in this pile of nonsense somewhere? No promises, but maybe I can borrow a few knives to dig it out, as we seem to have a few handy. I could dwell on why zombies aren’t interesting–there’s the lack of complex motivation (ala Romero) or the lack of any higher brain function (ala traditional). Scary? Sure. Horrifying? You betcha! Interesting? Not so much. Yet I know that these are simple rationalizations after the fact. It’s perfectly possible to write a zombie story where neither of those restrictions apply, just as it’s quite doable to write a good werewolf or unicorn story. I’ve read a few. One or two I’d rate as classics in the field, so it can be done and has/is being done. Just not by me.

Why? They just aren’t very interesting.

And here we are again. It’s not even that, as subjects, they’re pretty cliché. Subjects become cliché for a reason, and just because their ubiquity level has been raised to cliché it does not mean that new and interesting work can’t be done. As penance for my lack of appreciation, I will now inventory fantasy clichés in my own work:

  • Fairies/fey? Check.
  • Vampires? Only twice, but check.
  •  Dragons? Multiple offenses.
  • Witches/Wizards? Ditto.
  • Sphinxes? Yep.
  • Ancient Gods/Goddesses? Darn right.
  • Demons? Uh-huh. Just ask Yamada.
  • Monsters? Duh.
  • Ghosts? All the time, and Eli Mothersbaugh’s specialty.
  • Deal With the Devil? And proud of it!
  • Mermaids? Of course.
  • Personifications, as in Death or Fate? Guilty.

Let’s face facts here—anyone who’d willingly write a “Deal with the Devil” story is capable of anything. So why no zombie, unicorn, or werewolf stories? They just aren’t – [Visual of the blogger being whapped on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Heaven knows where they found one] Besides being painful, that interruption reveals the true answer. Why no zombie, werewolf, or unicorn stories? Because there aren’t any, as in “aren’t any rattling around in my brain.” No matter how many times I turn the notion in my head, it just comes back to this. I’ve already talked about recognizing a story when you see one, and this is the real reason I’ve never done unicorn stories or zombie stories or werewolf stories–I just don’t recognize anything relating to them as a story.  It’s really as simple and ungrammatical as that. The fact that I don’t find them interesting is effect, not cause.  I haven’t had a zombie or unicorn or werewolf story to write. In the case of the unicorn, I can’t see the point. Until and unless I come up with something that is at least as interesting to me on a story level as Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn or Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Silken Swift,” the subject is a closed door. If I ever do get such a notion, the door will spring open and I’ll find that particular subject is as interesting as anything I’ve ever written about and I’ll eat whatever steaming plate of crow is required. Will it happen? Dunno. I’d say it’s even odds. But until then, “They just aren’t–”

[Whoosh] Ha! Missed me!