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Book Review: Lady Bits by Kate Jonez


Lady Bits by Kate Jonez

Trepidatio Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1947654815

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Lady Bits is a collection of stories with struggling female protagonists: daughters, mothers, sisters, young women with dreams, cynical and desperate older women. In addition to their other fears and strategems, almost all of them are living in poverty, without a support system. They are the invisible women and girls, inhabiting the shadows in an uncaring world. Jonez’ spare language leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder through the words.  This means that while some stories, like “Francie”,  where a runaway teenage girl is offered a potentially lucrative job, are predictable, the writing is enough to keep the reader going.  Many of the stories have an imaginative creature, such as a hobgoblin, fairy, or demon, at the center, but in an everyday environment that throws the fantastic into sharp relief. “Mountain”, in which a former diner waitress returns from college to discover the owners’ new baby is a nightmare, is a gruesome example of this. Other stories have protagonists who have an unreliable grip on reality. “Fairy Lights,” in which a mother discovers the perils of partying with the fairies, and “A Thousand Stitches”, in which a young seamstress is encouraged by her colorful coworker to escape to the city, use this to advantage.

Jonez is not afraid to venture into the gruesome and squicky, as she does in “Rules for Love”, in which a woman prepares for an unusual Valentine’s Day with a helping of arsenic and body horror, and in “Envy”, in which a wealthy white woman uses her privilege in disturbing, extreme, and deadly ways. “Accidental Doors”, in which a woman who botched her business partner’s murder finds she can step through portals to the past to fix her mistakes, also gets pretty gory. When Jonez’ women decide to do evil, they aren’t worried about getting their hands bloody.

I did start to feel beaten up by the number of stories featuring murderous or uncaring mothers. “A Flicker of Light on Devil’s Night” and “The Moments Between”, in particular, felt very repetitive, and the choice to put one right next to the other was not well thought-out. Followed by the gripping, if incoherent “Poor Me– And Ted”, this is a trio of stories that nearly did me in from exhaustion.

Other stories in this collection included the colorful “All The Day You’ll Have Good Luck,” an entertaining and exasperating story about a girl who is flattered into a dangerous position by a strange young man;  “Effigy”, in which a job interview for a nanny position goes very, very wrong; “By the Book”, in which a murderous babysitter discovers patience; “Like Night and Day”, in which Marla Ann’s new neighbor turns out to be more dangerous than he seems, although not enough to keep her from inviting him in for sweet tea; “Silent Passenger”, in which a truck driver discovers a way to alleviate her pain and grief over her husband’s death; and “No Fear of Dragons”, in which the narrator encounters a girl who is not what she seems.

It’s nice to see a variety of female characters taking on different roles in the story, instead of always being passive or victims, but I also wish some of the characters had been easier to relate to. Although feelings were communicated clearly, many character motivations seemed unclear, and that made it hard to get into the flow of the story. This isn’t a collection you can just power through; it takes time to explore what’s going on in each story, and it’s difficult for me to do that and also feel the intense emotions Jonez is trying to evoke. Lady Bits is an interesting, if imperfect collection, and moving forward, I hope we’ll see more strong stories with varied female characters.

 

 

Contains: Violence, murder, rape, necrophilia, child murder, terrorism, body horror, sexual situations.

 

Editor’s note: Lady Bits was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

Posted on April 14, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Stephen King Gets Schooled on Diversity in the Media

Awards are not the end-all and be-all, but they do have meaning: libraries make purchases based on lists of award winners and recommended titles, and so do readers. When a well-regarded organization hands out an award, there is a ripple where often that book, or movie, or theater production, will also be held in high regard and rise to the top. It might even stay there decades later, after it has become dated or recognized as problematic (true of a number of early Newbery and Caldecott winners).

Many award-granting institutions have undergone upheavals in the past dozen years or so: debate over the World Fantasy Award Fantasy Award, the Sad Puppies fiasco that attempted to taint the Hugo Awards, the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the recent cancelling of the RITA Awards. There has also been a more obvious scrutiny of the Oscars, starting with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Any hope that public criticism of the Oscars’ lack of diversity would have an impact on judges’ considerations was dashed this year  as the Oscars failed to nominate any woman for Best Director, just three nominations for artists of color, and, despite acclaim for both Us and Midsommar, zero nominations from the horror genre (I’m also baffled that Frozen 2 didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Feature: it is a gorgeous film).

I haven’t felt like the Oscars were worth my attention for years, but with Joker, The Irishman, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood racking up the nominations even I couldn’t escape the blinding whiteness and maleness of the slate. It has to make you question, are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino really the only directors capable of making an Oscar-worthy movie? I know  women and people of color are making great movies, and that there are outstanding horror movies that deserve a look. There are stories out there being told from a fresh point of view that deserve to be seen and heard.

Author Stephen King is a judge, and decided this was the time to put himself out there and tell us:

 

I guess now that he’s won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he’s become on authority on what makes quality art. Which is apparently not diversity?  Twitter does not seem to agree.

He later backtracked a little, saying everyone deserves “a fair shot”, whatever that means (marginalized people start with less than a fair shot so..?). Here we’ve got an old white guy (he comes within a day of sharing a birthday with my mom, who is in her seventies) who has locked down the bestseller lists for decades.  There can’t be too many people who haven’t heard of Stephen King, read one of his books, or watched a movie adaptation. At this point in his life, could he identify a fair shot if it walked up to him and tapped him on the nose? How many promising writers could have “New York Bestselling Author” on the cover of their books if King didn’t have a permanent place there?

Stephen King is positioned in publishing in a way that he could make a big difference in making available quality work from diverse and #OwnVoices creators, maybe not so much in the movies, but definitely in fiction. My background is mostly as a K-12 librarian, and maybe you aren’t familiar with the authors for that age group, but one of the big names is Rick Riordan, who gained his recognition writing contemporary fantasy with kids who discover they are demigods from various world mythologies. Riordan was able to use his privilege as a popular, bestselling, writer to start a publishing imprint with the specific mission of finding #OwnVoices authors who have stories to tell grounded in their own mythologies and legends. Riordan is a name, but he certainly isn’t in Stephen King’s league when it comes to name recognition, number of books written, or number of copies sold. For King to say he would never consider diversity, but only quality, is a blind spot I hope is rectified by the reaction to his tweet. Because he has the ability to find and promote #OwnVoices creators in a way that most writers do not. And it would be wonderful if he did.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

Pegasus Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1643130200

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

‘Tis the season for ghost stories, and with so many out there, Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger had some difficult choices about what to include in this anthology. They have chosen eighteen tales of the supernatural with varying tone, from comic to terrifying, by authors well-known for their ability with supernatural fiction, authors from both Europe and America, authors well-known for their other works who also wrote supernatural fiction, and some authors barely known to the reading public at all.  There is a brief introduction, and each story is preceded with a short paragraph about the author and his works. When necessary, the editors included annotations, but the annotations do not impede the flow of the story; rather, they enrich it.

The anthology begins with a ballad, “Sweet William’s Ghost”,  which is followed by a gothic tale by Johann August Apel, whose work may have inspired the beginnings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Sir Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber”, which Morton and Klinger identify as the first modern ghost story, is next.  They then cross the ocean to America for the next two stories, “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Ligieia” by Edgar Allan Poe. Certainly no one can argue with either Poe’s brilliance or madness in his writing, and both are depicted in full force here.

Three lesser-known  women writers of supernatural fiction all write powerfully of ghosts driven by their emotions towards the ones they left behind. “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is a compelling vision of what follows death, narrated by a just-deceased woman observing her lover’s grief, and is one of the outstanding stories in the book. “The Shell of Sense” by the little-known Olivia Howard Dunbar, details the vengeance, and eventually forgiveness, of a recently-deceased wife on her husband and sister when she discovers they have fallen in love.  In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s “The Substitute”, a lonely woman is visited by a friend who is desperately in need of her help.

Charles Dickens, M.R. James, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Charlotte  (Mrs. J.H.) Riddell all tell stories of mysterious and terrifying ghosts.  Ambrose Bierce creats a nightmarish, fantastical world in “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”, and Frank Stockton’s “The Philosophy of Relative Existences” is almost science-fictional in nature, a thoughtful puzzle of a story.  Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” , based on actual news reports, described a battle during World War I where one of the British servicemen summoned St. George and his bowmen to defeat the Germans. The brief descriptions of the war, and the detail in which Machen is able to vividly portray the men and their despair in very few words, are very powerful. One of my favorites, a surprise to me, was Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story”, which had me laughing out loud.

The variety in this collection of ghost stories is impressive, and I really appreciated the inclusion of both lesser-known women writers of supernatural fiction, and supernatural stories by writers better known for other work. Over the past several years I have done a lot of reading on my own on early women writers of supernatural fiction and until very recently it’s been difficult to find any work by some of them at all– and for those who are better known for their other writing, their supernatural tales have often been disregarded or kept under wraps. It would be easy to lean back on just a few authors already known for their ghost stories, but the effort that went into making sure this carefully curated anthology was varied in its authors and contents is something I really appreciate. Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense is a perfect read for this Halloween season.

Posted on October 26, 2019 by , Reply
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