Monthly Archives: June 2009

Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio

Books, Weirdness, , , , ,

The cover of Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio.

Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio is a great, odd book. It doesn’t quite fit any contemporary category. Some of these stories are folktales or fairy tales; some are the kind of “I swear, this really happened!” supernatural yarns you find in books of “true hauntings;” some are news of the weird. Pu Songling never drew these distinctions; to him, they were all Strange Tales. Penguin’s volume of excerpts from his apparently massive collection of stories mixes them as randomly as he did.

The fairy tales are the most developed as stories but the least interesting. Most involve fox sprits and attractive ghosts, and once you’ve read a few they all seem pretty much the same. Usually a minor scholar or bureaucrat—actually, these were almost the same profession—meets a beautiful ghost (or fox spirit) and has sex with her. Then he meets a beautiful fox spirit (or ghost) and has sex with her, too. In the end the scholar and the fox spirit and the ghost get together in a sort of group marriage. Pu Songling was a minor scholar himself and I think he needed to get out more.

The other stories, though, are weird—and, yes, they’ve been translated from a foreign culture and there are references and allusions I’m not getting, but allowing for that these are still damn strange. In one tale, the ghost of an elderly woman is seen inexplicably hopping around a courtyard, water spraying from her mouth. In another story a man sneezes and small animal falls out of his nose; it runs up his leg and fuses to his belly, and the story ends there, inconclusive and gnomic. To find these uncanny, surreal moments, it’s more than worth skimming through pages of fox spirits helping bureaucrats salve their mid-life crises.

Knights of the Cornerstone

Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

Every so often I think I ought to start writing about the books I read, just to keep my brain in shape. I never seem to keep up with this. I’m going to try it again, but given how long it took me to finish this rather badly written review maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

The Knights of the Cornerstone is about learning to engage with the world. Cal, James Blaylock’s hero, is a thirtysomething guy who lives alone, collects books, draws cartoons, and spends his time standing aside and watching life. As a thirtysomething cartoonist who lives alone, accumulates books—it doesn’t rise to the level of “collecting,” I fear—and doesn’t get out much, I may or may not be this book’s ideal reader. I was distracted by the subconcious expectation that, at any moment, the characters would turn to the reader and ask “Are you getting all this?”

Beyond that, for anyone who’s read Blaylock before this book is not particularly striking. It’s not bad. It’s like… have you seen Spellbound? The Alfred Hitchcock movie? Spellbound is worth seeing. More than once, even. It’s not a great movie; Hitchcock was not pushing himself. It says something that the best part of Spellbound was the work of Salvador Dali. But it is a Hitchcock movie, and it does the things Hitchcock movies do.

Knights of the Cornerstone is a James Blaylock novel, and it does the things James Blaylock novels do. Continue reading Knights of the Cornerstone →