Yay! It works! It's alive!

Well, like I said in the last post, I know "One Big Crunch" is going to be nigh impossible to sell, and evidently Horrorfind thought so too, since they sent it back. But they did give me a few places it might fit, which was a nice thing to do.

I just finished The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll this morning, and it was a wonderful, bewildering experience. Reading Carroll is like talking to that exciting friend of yours; you know the one, the person that makes you go places you wouldn't normally go, see things you wouldn't normally see, talk to people you would normally stare at quietly from across the room. If you EVER see a book by Jonathan Carroll on the bookshelves (he's typically listed in the Literature section, alongside Don De Lillo and Chinua Achebe and J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut and those fortunate enough to have escaped genre classification), grab it and don't let go. His books are very hard to find nowadays, and it's a rare treat to see one in a store. Tor, lovely book publisher that they are, have taken to reprinting some of his earlier books in a trade paperback, and The Marriage of Sticks is one of them, though it only came out a few years ago. (The Land of Laughs, Carroll's first novel, is another one, and I have to say that honestly, though I love the man's prose and slightly skewed way of thinking, you'd be best to just leave this one on the shelf. Now, I don't consider myself literati or anyone who examines literature with a fine toothed comb looking for symbolism and the impact to humanity a work will have, but I was simply let down by this book. It's pretty obvious that this was Carroll's first novel-length story; the characters are well-actualized, but the relationship between them seems forced and unnatural. And the book ends on a climax, one of my pet peeves; as a reader, I badly need denouement, a slight epilogue, something to let me down easy after rollercoasting through a narrative. The big reason I was disappointed, was that the first book I picked up by Carroll, The Wooden Sea, blew me away with its style and technique and sheer storytellingness. It's a fantastic novel, and Caroll's latest. Some stores will still carry the hardcover if you go out and pick it up now.) The Marriage of Sticks is Carroll's second-to-latest novel, and is the most similar to The Wooden Sea, in respect to style and technique and storytellingness. And characterization. Carroll's characters simply leap off the page and whisper their story in your ear. He has the phenomenal ability of drawing you into the story, like a big brother at a campfire. Carroll's books are to be treasured, and to be snagged wherever you can manage to find a copy.

Before that, I read The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint, the master of the urban fantasy here with another fantastic novel. This one is about Jilly, an exuberant painter who seems to peek her head in on most of de Lint's stories, whether they be short stories or novels. De Lint sets a majority of his tales in the North American city of Newford, and whether Jilly has a small or large part in the story, she is at Newford's heart; all the characters seem to have been affected by Jilly's kindness, charm and buoyant good nature. Jilly is the Onion Girl, however, and we see a much darker part of her than ever imagined before. This book is about the past, and how it can come snapping back to us, teeth blazing, when we least expect. This is one of those Chihuahua-smooshing burglar-stunning kinds of books, but it reads as fast as a 250 page-sized version. As usual, there is magic, and creatures far older than you or I, who were old when the world was created. But the thing I admire the most about de Lint's fiction, and this book is no different, are his characters. They are the ones who help out at soup kitchens and take in stray cats and bring people in off the street. These are people who have seen hard times themselves and go out of their way to help others. It is the simple fact that these people are good, in the purest sense of the word. And at the end of the novel, I truly wished Jilly was a real person that I could phone up and tell exactly how much I admire and love.

Well, I've blabbed on enough for one day. I need to get working on my sister's (incredibly belated) website. Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. Be good to one another.