The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening

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The boy squats in the dust and the roadgrime tracked in on their shoes. He has his mother’s raven hair, eyes as blue as a fabled sea. They call the boy a mixed blood and he watches father, aging reminder of a faraway land he will never see, the room dark day or night. Eight years old. Already the boy understands much. He sees and he listens.

Father drinks. He speaks the common dialect poorly and when he isn’t drinking he takes the boy out and shows him the city. Cramped backstreet restaurants and shops, father’s memories strewn across a chaos of hammers and horns. Holding the boy’s hand at the city’s many lakes, distant cranes and buildings across the silver waters, skeletal sketches of New China halfbloom in the construction dust.

The haze floods the sky and swallows the sun. Read more “The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening”

The Boy with Blue Eyes

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My new book is out, so I guess I’d better say something about it before my website gets hacked again.

The Boy with Blue Eyes is about a boy (with blue eyes) who goes on an adventure in a smoggy metropolis, the metropolis in this case being an unnamed Wuhan, where I spent three years in the late 2000’s. But it’s about more than that: the boy is half-American, half-Chinese, and he looks fully Chinese, minus a pair of striking blue eyes. He is the son of a jianbing cook and an alcoholic, failed writer who hasn’t been living in China legally for quite some time. His father drinks and spends his nights banging away on a typewriter, his mornings puking last night’s excess. His mother does her best to take care of them both, cooking jianbing for a living and yelling at her husband for being such a shitbird.

The plot kicks off after the boy’s father suffers a fatal stroke. Though the boy’s mother has warned him never to go out by himself (he has no hukou and can’t go to school), he heads out to find her, only to get carried away by the people sea. A run-in with the police leads to him being “rescued” by a man who also looks fully Chinese…minus a pair of striking blue eyes. From there they do work for a corrupt official, and the man might not be quite who he seems…

I told the story in an unconventional style, inspired in part by Requiem for a Dream and ee cummings. Other influences include Blood Meridian and Manhattan Transfer. I tried writing it in 2012, naming it Street Children in Wuhan and intending it as a very different story…the eight-year period has seen a lot of changes, and though I didn’t work on it constantly for eight years, I’ll claim I did–it makes the book seem better somehow, the product of years of grueling labor.

Every book is a labor of some kind–of love, of hate…and though you might find the style hard to follow, we can’t all be workshop drones, describing our characters’ hair color every time they speak and besides, this isn’t exactly Finnegan’s Wake.

Buy it here.

The Flock of Ba-Hui (And Other Stories)

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I got the review copy for this book back in December. I wrote the review in April and now I’m posting a shortened version of that bloated mess here, in October.

You can’t say I don’t finish what I start and here we have The Flock of Ba-Hui (And Other Stories), a translation of a series offbeat and original horror stories set in the Lovecraft universe by Chinese authors. I’ll admit I’ve never read anything by Lovecraft–my horror experience began with Goosebumps in elementary school, jumped to Edgar Allan Poe in junior high, and then pole-vaulted over Lovecraft all the way to The Stand. So I don’t have an opinion of Lovecraft’s work to influence what I think of Ba-Hui, and while if you spend two seconds googling Lovecraft you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn that a white man born in the 19th century harbored some racist leanings, it has nothing to do with this review.

Like I said, The Flock of Ba-Hui is a translation of a series of Lovecraftian stories. What makes these stories different is that they’re set in China, written by Oobmab, a fan who originally posted them on the Call of Cthulhu subforum on The Ring of Wonder (http://trow.cc), an online fantasy and gaming community. Doing the translating are Arthur Meursault and Akira, two dedicated Lovecraft fans themselves, who had the tall task of translating these stories while preserving the tone of the originals and making them understandable for Western audiences.

The four tales of horror range from the mountains of Sichuan province (the titular story, The Flock of Ba-Hui) to an ancient tower (Nadir) to the former German colony of Qingdao (Black Taisui, with a nod to Xu Fu, whose ultimate fate might’ve been as Jofuku in Japan to Tibet (The Ancient Tower). To help explain certain references to Western audiences, the translators have provided footnotes and a framing device linking all stories together, with a nice ending.

If you enjoy action-packed horror, look elsewhere. But if you like atmospheric slow burns, then you’ll have a great time with The Flock of Ba-Hui. For me, I can appreciate the atmosphere, as well as the dedication needed to translate these stories in the first place. I thought the titular story was the best, and I hope The Flock of Ba-Hui will provide an impetus to rescue other Chinese stories from obscurity. There’s much to be discovered, and we can’t let big publishing force-feed us the same boring, workshopped shit forever, right?

Check out The Flock of Ba-Hui, and get the paperback copy; leaving it out on your desk at work sparks some interesting conversations.

All shall love me and despair!

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Watched The Fellowship of the Ring recently with my six-year-old daughter. Some thoughts:

– Uneven film overall. I feel about the first hour and a half or so (up until the Hobbits arrive at Rivendale) in 2018 the same way I felt when I saw it in theaters: some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen (and by the way, you can tell a lot about a person based on how they describe movies they like: One of the best movies I’ve ever seen or Some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen or Some of the finest cinema ever made).

Seeing it in the theater was an amazing experience. I didn’t read the books before I saw the movie, and I found out about it in the old way, in the days before spoiler websites were clamoring for everyone’s traffic: in a magazine.

Yahoo Magazine, if I remember correctly, bought from the old WalMart in Springfield. They had a nice feature on the film, I thought it looked nice, and I later saw a trailer.

Seeing the movie in theaters allowed me back then to overlook its faults. My daughter and I watched the original edition. I’ve only seen the Extended Editions of Fellowship and Towers. To this day, I’ve never been able to sit through Return of the King’s half-day epic.

– Galadriel doesn’t work. The performance is over-the-top. Read this, sounding as intimidating as you can:

“In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”

A campy performance mixed with a special effects failure, but reading that, you get the impression that Laurence Olivier himself couldn’t make that work.

– Someone on a forum described the Gandalf-Saruman fight as two lightsaber-less Darth Vaders fighting each other. I can’t view this scene without thinking about his description. Thanks, random forum user from 2001.

– Gandalf’s death. This hit my daughter hard. She didn’t cry, but she kept asking me why Gandalf had to die. I explained it to her and she was very quiet afterwards. The emotional impact Gandalf’s sacrifice has on the story, not the mention the stakes it builds…to see how this effects someone who doesn’t know he comes back, I agree with George R.R. Martin: Gandalf should have stayed dead.

– Boromir’s death. “I would have followed you, my brother. My captain…my King.” Gets me every time.

– and Viggo Mortensen is Danish. Why did I think he was Australian this whole time?

Watching the movies has another effect, same as it did in 2001: I want to read the books. Say what you will about how slow the first book is, it provides wonderful escapism. The world Tolkien constructed is unlike any before or since, and calling GRRM the “American Tolkien” could be interpreted more than one way. For as rich and engaging as the Game of Thrones world is, it can’t rival Middle Earth.