A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

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A to Z Reviews

Brennan Wysong’s “The Sin-Eater’s Tale”  opens with the introduction of the sin-eater in the post-Civil War  south.  The  sin-eater’s task is to go around to the funerals of the boys whose bodies have been returned home after their deaths and force people to confront the evils that their sons and brothers and friends had done. Once all the sins were enumerated and the sin-eater wrote them down, he would charge the family and eat the paper, thereby giving the family closure and providing absolution to the dead for the evils they committed during their lives.

Reading the story, the sin-eater is, in some ways reminiscent of the role Orson Scott Card provided Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, a way of summing up a person’s life, warts and all, although Wysong’s sin-eater also offers a means of expiation for the dead. Once the sin-eater is paid and the sins are swallowed  , the family and friends can pretend the cruelties and crimes of the dead no longer exist.

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Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin Books, February 1, 2005). Cover by Tal Goretsky

Shadow of the Wind is the English rendering of  La sombra del viento, the 2001 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the first (though a standalone story sans cliffhangers) in his five book Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, translated by Lucia Graves (a serendipitously appropriate last name and, as it happens, the daughter of poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, he of I Claudius and The White Goddess fame). I hope this is a literal translation as Shadow of the Wind perfectly captures the story’s gothic and noirish essence. We can’t actually see wind, nor does wind cast a shadow; rather we feel the wind, detecting by inference the sometimes destructive aftereffects of high winds. Or, to paraphrase as someone else famous put it, the allegory is blowing in the wind.

The titular Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a somewhat fantastical labyrinth repository of rare books. Unlike Julia Alvarez’s Cemetery of Untold Stories, where texts are buried and talk to one another in their afterlife, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books could be some idiosyncratic bookshop with obsessively weird stock accessible only to certain people, which is not that all different from certain kinds of booksellers.

But the touch of fantasy  is when our hero, Daniel Sempere, taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his bookshop owning father, is tasked to select one volume, and one volume only, he feels drawn to from among a complex maze of shelvings. That book is Shadows of the Wind  by Julian Carax, and, yes, we’re getting metafictional here. What kicks the plot off is that there are no other surviving copies of the work, Carax’s output having been destroyed in a warehouse fire of mysterious origins.

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Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

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Having just finished a very lively and thought-provoking book, I did something I almost never do — I decided to write the author a fan letter. Naturally, I hopped on Google to get his contact information, only to discover that he died almost three years ago, in February of 2022. Why do these things always happen to me?

The book I just finished, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies was published in 2019, and is the third book in a loose cultural criticism trilogy written by Paul A. Cantor, a well-known Shakespearian scholar (Shakespeare and Rome: Republic and Empire) who was for many years a professor of English at the University of Virginia. The other volumes in the “trilogy” are Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2001) and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012).

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Maybe I Am Romantic

Maybe I Am Romantic

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I love them.

Good afterevenmorn (whenever you happen to be reading this), Readers!

I’m still on a Chinese costume drama kick. It has been my crutch when dealing with the terribleness of the world of late. I don’t know why, but there we have it. Everyone who knows me is sick to death of me proclaiming my love for The Untamed, which remains the golden standard for serialised Chinese costume dramas for me. Since then, and since I last mentioned it here, I’ve watched a number of them (when I tell you I’ve spent the majority of my time rotting on the couch watching unfairly beautiful people swan about in obscenely beautiful clothing, I mean it). Some were silly. Most of them were entertaining. One in particular I have added to my ‘would really like to own on DVD/BluRay’ list. It has a dumb as hell title (Wonderland of Love. Had I not seen a short of one of the battle scenes in the series on YouTube, I would not have watched it at all based on that title), but was a great story. I did a review of it on my personal blog.
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What I’ve Been Listening To: November 2024

What I’ve Been Listening To: November 2024

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So, I did not update you last month, on what I’ve been listening to most recently. Let me tell you, the FLOOD of emails and comments, wanting to know what’s been running through my Audible, was deafening. Wait. No. I mean, deathly silent.

MISTLETOE MURDERS 3

I like Hallmark Christmas movies. They’re all similar, but they’re enjoyable. My ex-wife and I even got our son to kind of enjoy them. He would laugh at the tropes when they occurred, like the snowball fight, the misunderstanding, the plot twist at 90 minutes EVERY time.

Sometimes I watch the Hallmark Mystery movies, and the general ones. Mistletoe Murders is an Audible Original series, included with my membership level. On its third season. This radio show about a gift shop owner is like a Hallmark Mystery Christmas series. But with more emphasis on the mystery side, than the ‘sappy/silly’ Christmas side. She has a past that makes her far more than just a store owner.

Seasons have varied in number of episodes and length, running about an hour and-a-half first time out, and between four and four and-half-hours in the next two seasons.

If you like Hallmark Mysteries (which I wrote about here long ago), this wont’ do much for you. If you do like them, then this is pure bonus for your Hallmark-loving heart.

Just a few weeks ago, the first season of a streaming series started on Hallmark+. I don’t have that channel, so I haven’t seen it. But I think it’s cool they took the audio series and put it on screen. I hope to catch it soon.

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A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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Impossible Creatures (Knopf Books for Young Readers, September 10, 2024). Cover by Ashley Mackenzie

Katherine Rundell is a British writer who has been publishing YA novels for some time now, though I was unaware of her. Last year she published the first novel of a prospective series in the UK: Impossible Creatures. This became a big hit, and has now been published in the US. The book is quite good, fun to read, clever, also serious and quite moving, with real consequences to the characters.

There are two protagonists, Christopher Forester and Mal Arvorian. They are children of roughly the same age (early adolescence or just on the cusp of it, I think … somewhere between 10 and 13, I suppose.) Christopher lives in London, but has been sent to Scotland to stay with his grandfather, while his father is away on business. (His mother is dead.) Mal lives in an island in the Archipelago, with her great aunt. (Her parents are dead. Dead or absent parents, of course, being one of the most common situations in YA novels.) Both Christopher and Mal are special, of course. Animals of all sorts are attracted to Christopher, to an unusual degree. And Mal — Mal can fly (with the help of a magic cape.)

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Alien Overlords, Part III

Alien Overlords, Part III

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Cosmic Sin (Saban Films, 2021), Empire of the Apes (Polonia Brothers
Entertainment, 2013), and Dune Drifter (4Digital Media, 2020)

This is Part III of a new, 20-film marathon. The rules:

Must include aliens
Cannot take place on Earth
I haven’t seen it before
Free to stream

Cosmic Sin (2021) Netflix

Aliens? Alien… zombies…? Not sure.

CGI heavy? Plenty, with varying degrees of success.

Any good? A bit of a disappointment, really. I loved Bruce Willis once upon a time. Loved him I tells you. So it’s doubly sad to see him limp through the last decade or so, phoning in performances and generally not having a good time.

This film is no exception, but Bruce is the least of its problems — there’s the germ of a great idea about genocide and first contact, but the film doesn’t deliver, instead falling back on Frank Grillo scowling his way through some firefights.

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A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

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A to Z Reviews

Peter J. Wacks’ short story “Black Box” appeared in the 2023 anthology High Noon on Proxima B, edited by David Boop, a collection of stories that mix tropes of the Western with science fiction to varying results. Unfortunately, spaceships are horses, planets aren’t ranches, and treating them as interchangeable results in stories that feel as if they were written for the early to mid twentieth century pulps. “Black Box” falls into that category.

“Black Box” is set in a world where spacecraft are used to travel between planets, but once landed, horses are used to cover the terrain rather than motorized vehicles. The Crystal Colony, the solar system’s governing organization, has sent multiple ships to visit a planet (or planetoid, Wack’s terminology changes). After a ship from the planetoid opens fire on them they shoot it down a dn discover that the pilot is the sole survivor of the planetoid, which has apparently suffered an apocalyptic war amongst its inhabitants. The survivor doesn’t view himself as a member of the Crystal Colony and refused to help with their inquiries.

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Goth Chick News: Somebody at Mattel Is Getting Fired

Goth Chick News: Somebody at Mattel Is Getting Fired

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Though this sounds like something I would plot to do to get around Black Gate Big Cheese John O’s moratorium on any of my content that isn’t family friendly, this is for real, and I’m not responsible.

You can’t spit a piece of gum these days without hitting some type of promotion for the upcoming theatrical adaptation of the musical Wicked. There is the Aldo Wicked shoe collection, the Vera Bradley Wicked cosmetic bag, Wicked makeup, perfume and coasters – and that’s just what I found doing a quick search. Considering the film about to be released is part one of two, the Hollywood promo machine is just warming up.

What all these items have in common is that they are marketed toward adults. The list of items aimed at kids is even longer, starting, of course, with dolls. However, there is one unintentional crossover item that will likely go down as the collectible of the decade.

Unfortunately, instead of getting a promotion for a level of buzz money simply can’t buy, the responsible party over at Mattel will likely be filing for unemployment before the holidays.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Arthur and Out

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Arthur and Out

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Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox, 2006)

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the last Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords article, at least for a while.

I’ve enjoyed hanging out with you here on the regular, but circumstances have changed for Your Cheerful Editor, and my writing output must adapt to accommodate them. For a good while, I had reached an equilibrium in my writing, balanced between work for the day-job at Larian Studios, making progress on my nine-volume Musketeers Cycle of Alexandre Dumas translations, and churning into the 21st century for the Cinema of Swords review series.

But life is change: I’ve finished the Dumas translations, we’ve gone into pre-production on Larian’s next game, and perhaps most significantly, my health is not what it was, as over the last year, in addition to the other indignities of late middle age, I’ve developed late-onset asthma. And it’s hit pretty hard, diminishing my energy and forcing a decline in productivity in my side projects.

In addition to these articles for Black Gate, for a year or three I’ve been making two weekly postings over on the Substack platform, one for the Musketeers and one for Swords. I’ve had to face the fact that it isn’t sustainable and I need to get off that treadmill. So, both Substack series have been suspended, and likewise this is my last regular article for Black Gate.

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