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From: Antheros <antheros@gREMOVEmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.d
Subject: {ASSD} Antheros's reviews [20060305]
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:23:29 +0100
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#####
These reviews are only opinions, which I supposedly held for as long as I was
writing them. I try to be constructive and keep the sarcasm level low, and I
will only review stories which interest me somehow (so no extreme codes and
writers who write long sentences like this one who do not know what is a comma),
and I'm sure I'll be biased towards stories that are more to my taste. If you
want to submit your story for review, email me, but remember I'm doing this as a
hobby. I welcome people commenting the reviews, particularly if they disagree
with me. If you find yourself reviewed, please do not hesitate to take your
revenge and review my own stories. Well, as M1ke Hunt said, "These standard
disclaimers are really boring." So go read the reviews.
###
Editorial
It's been a while. There was no December issue, because it was a remarkably weak
month for stories. But who has time to write in December? So I thought January
would make up for it. It's winter in half of the world, and what are you going
to do when it's freezing outside? I can only think of two things, writing and
having sex (what a bunch of perverts you are, I bet you thought one of them was
eating). But then I had too much work to do and there was no time to read or write.
The good news, however, is that there are good news ahead (great phrase for a
motivational workshop, uh?). I was delighted to see Yotna's reviews, as well as
a couple by Van Falmouth. There were some interesting stories in
January/February. The deirdre Festival is coming up, thanks to H. Jekyll, Mat
Twassel and PleaseCain, and so is a brand new number of the Journal of Desire.
The Journal of Desire (http://users.aol.com/myfrthal/JoD/) was published by Mat
Twassel and Mark Aster from 1999 to 2001. The new volume will follow more or
less the idea and layout of the first volume. Yes, we would love to publish your
work in JoD: stories, essays, poems, photographs, drawings, whatever your
imagination creates. It's supposed to be ready by the end of April, so there's
still plenty of time to write something for it. Don't be shy, email me about it.
###
From the vault: Richard Rivers
URL: http://www.asstr.org/~Richard_Rivers/
Starting in this issue is a new section, "From the vault." It's a shame that
many great authors are forgotten in the memory-less usenet. Since the whole
point of these reviews is to bring attention to good stories, I'll rescue
authors who are not posting anymore and bring them back for another 15 seconds
of fame, or whatever the average attention span is these days.
The first one to have the dubious honor of being reviewed by me is Richard
Rivers. Rivers posted two of his stories to the Journal of Desire v1n3, "Yoko"
and "Bay Bridge Soliloquy." His site is still online, but he hadn't posted for a
while and his email bounced (if anyone is still in touch with him: please, let
him know that I'm looking for him).
Rivers is enticed by Oriental women. His stories are often tinted with Japanese
and Chinese women, who are described in a delicate way, non-stereotypical but
typical. While the sex is explicit, in his best stories River doesn't linger in
a mechanical description of actions and fluids. He's more concerned with the
turmoil in the souls of his characters as they experience lust and love, which
he does in strokes that remind me (sure, there's a strong suggestion behind it,
but still) of the brush strokes of Chinese caligraphy.
"Bay Bridge Soliloquy" is the kind of story that I enjoy; the narrator is stuck
in the bridge, slowly unfolding the current events and the past in parallel,
switching the narrative as we switch thoughts. "Diary from Seat 26 J" has the
piquancy in the narrator's perverted behavior that other authors seek, but
destroy by being excessively pornographic; he achieves it again in "She Let me
Pull it."
"A Cautionary Tale" reminds me of the fantastic stories I used to read when I
was ten or twelve, like Poe's stories, Jacobs' "The monkey's paw," Stevenson's
"The bottle imp"--but with a little extra spice. In the "most original title"
category, the award goes to "Not a Stroke Story."
So, who are your favorite retired authors?
###
"The House at the End of the Street" by A Strange Geek
URL: ASSM, http://www.asstr.org/~A_Strange_Geek/novels/TheHouse/index.html,
http://storiesonline.net/story/47533
Right, so this is not the kind of story you would be expecting to find in my
reviews. What can I say? There is a sort of Bradbury-esque feeling in it (though
I suppose Ray Bradbury would want to kill me if he read this comparison; I hope
Strange will feel honored). The summer, the thirteen-year-old hero, the mystery
with a shadow of darkness hovering over it. I started to read it to know what it
was about, found all these treats, along with the rich prose (sometimes just
bordering the excess, but never quite overflowing the glass) and the
unpredictability of what was going to happen, and I just ended up reading the
entire thing.
I must say that writing this particular review is a little odd. I usually don't
care much about stories about teenagers. Actually, I avoid them. They are often
insipid, and either the teenagers have more sex than nymphomaniac porn stars, or
they experience epiphanies that teenagers never experience---and all that not
very deep coming-of-age stuff that gets old fast. Last, but not least, I
consider the shape of a twenty-five-year-old way more enticing. In fact,
teenagers are hardly enticing at all; they lack, well, ten years of life and
hormones.
Part of what attracted me to this story was the careful detail of the writing.
Geek did a great work in building characters and, in particular, the
environment. How rare is the story in ASSM that describes rooms and places! I
loved how the characters started to spiral, losing control and going farther and
farther, knowing that they'd pay back for their actions later. So stupid of
them; so real. I won't tell the ending, but I was a little disappointed by it. I
welcomed the fast pace that the story took by its 16th chapter, because it was
dragging a little by then. The problem is simple: longer stories make sex scenes
more irrelevant. In a stroke short story, the sex scene is the story, so if you
read it, you're reading for the sex. In a longer story, the sex scenes get in
the way if they come too often (pun intended), unless they are important to the
plot. If John and Mary have fucked each other in every possible way for the
entire book, I don't want yet another description of what they did to each
other. I want to know what is going to happen to their relationship. Sex becomes
like a funny TV advertisement: you find it great the first time, you smile at
the second, and you think "oh, no, not again" by the tenth.
Hm, I think I understand marriages a little better now.
But I was talking about the ending of the story. I wish it had been a little
more original. It's too much modern-politically-correct-fairy-tale to my taste.
And then it just lies, there, begging for a sequel. Great for Hollywood, but I
somehow don't think that they will make a movie depicting orgies between
teenagers anytime soon (they made Kids, but it was supposed to be a critique to
society. Wasn't it?).
Now that I complained about what I liked and what I didn't like, I want to close
this review with a comment on the MC side of the story. This story is an example
of how MC can be used in a creative way. There's none of that sex-zombie plot
that most MC stories fall into. Sure, there are times I wish I could control
other people with my thoughts. There are also times I wish for a club sandwich,
but I don't write stories about either. The role of MC in this story is
interesting and is about "how far would you go if you had power?", not a lame
excuse for the lack of a plot that makes sex believable.
###
"The Bastard" by H. Jekyll
URL: posted to ASSM
I was a little torn between writing this review or not. I've already told Jekyll
what I thought of his story, and I often think about the writer when I'm writing
a review--I try to be constructive, though I'm probably more negative than
positive. For a brief moment, the Machiavellian part of my mind thought that I
could be really vindictive and trash his story (Henry knows why. The rest of
you, please skip the inside joke. Thanks.), but then I said to myself, nah, he
needs to do better than that to earn his own trashing.
So I'll be nice to him. I'll start with the title. When you name a story "The
Bastard," I expect that the main character will be a complete sleazy SOB, not
someone who has a consciousness and listens to it. I'll skip the long
psychological analysis of his behaviour, and stick to the short bulleted list
version: his relationship with women is due to a fear of being known and losing
the façade that he set up for himself, a comfortable form of not getting hurt by
deliberately not attaching himself; he does not realizes that even his shallow
affairs are deeper than he actually gives them credit for, as his care for his
drunk friend and his wife (even though one might say that sleeping with her
isn't particularly nice of him, but it does make her feel good). I'll leave the
problem of his anal fixation as an exercise to the reader. He has too much
Jekyll in him to be the Hyde that I was expecting; perhaps the first-person
telling of the story helps to show his good side, as we join him in his
questioning of himself and his doubts and regrets. I'm not excusing Edward's bad
behaviour, but I've seen plenty of worse devils.
There is a minor imperfection in how the story is told; the past tense is
sometimes sprinkled with present tense; this is not a problem per se, but if
read with the knowledge of what happened and of when Edward is telling the
story, one notices the small cracks. I don't have a perfect solution for it,
however; perhaps if there was a coda and Edward told it from a distant future it
would have been better. But I'm just being extremely picky here.
Elizabeth is a delightful character. She reminds me of someone I once met (yes,
Henry, part of my gaggle), which may be part of my empathy for her. Even more,
she reminds me of a character I once created; she was also a cellist, shy and
reserved (what a sexy instrument. I can't help but remembering what Sir Thomas
Beecham said to a female cellist once: "Madam, you have between your legs an
instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands all you can do is scratch
it."). And no, you won't find her in my online stories. Jekyll does a great job
in painting her character with the large brushes of Edward's narrative. I felt,
however, that her alluring naïveté and passiveness at the beginning of the story
contrasts with the the active and more mature behaviour that she shows at the
ending; I don't think she could have changed so fast. Maybe Edward's perspective
distorted her, but it is not clear in the prose.
The ending is distinctively Jekyll-esque.
###
"We All Want Something Beautiful" by Kenny N Gamera
URL: posted to ASSM
I suppose one could define influential like this: "one who can make other people
add Thesauri to their stories after writing just one story with a Thesaurus
himself."
"We All Want Something Beautiful" is unlike Gamera's humorous stories. It's
about someone in a cafe, watching life. I've done that myself. I can't help it.
I'm sitting in the cafe with a bunch of friends, or a lovely date, and I'm still
paying attention to the brunette who looks lonely and sad, the guy who's bored
chatting with his girlfriend. Perhaps I do that because I write, but I've been
writing for long enough not to be sure that it's not the other way around. Cafes
are great for inspiration, with glimpses of people behaving almost like they
would in their own homes. It was not once or twice that such a glimpse ended up
inspired one of my teardrops; like this one, inspired by a group I saw (and
fictionalized, but she really did have the cutest pointy nose) while I was
having a mid-afternoon cup of coffee with some co-workers:
I saw her at the cafe, sitting with some friends--all male--and playing chess
with one of them, though she seemed to be as little interested in them as I
was myself. I was sitting close enough to see the complete and utter
destruction she was making on the board, but he seemed only slightly aware of
his awful position. I watched her; she played as good players do: watching
something other than the pieces, having the game in their heads, just fuzzy
and abstract concepts that jog around in a sort of daze, wordless and
shapeless, a swift flow of barely existing thoughts. She had the cutest little
pointy nose, an angelic face which carried something of her childhood--maybe
her flawless skin, maybe the expression of a very compenetrated child playing
her favorite game--, clear eyes shining with pleasure, wavy hair with a lock
falling over her face. I wished I knew her, I wished I could sit in front of
her and clash my little wooden pieces against hers; that we'd have a memorable
game, that the shapes on the board would be a more deep and intimate talk than
any that we could carry with words, and that we'd smile at the best plays of
each other and keep our eyes away of the menacing knight, ready to jump to a
very dangerous spot if that bishop moves. Of course, the end of many chess
games is not unlike that of life; the queen takes the king, and not the other
way around. Then I played a Luzhin defense, paying my bill and leaving the
friends to themselves, with a vague hope, once I walked out to the street,
that I might someday see her again, and this time she'd be alone with her
board.
There's an infinite loneliness in this voyeurism: people stay in the cafe only
for a few minutes, and the inspiration each one gives us is hardly enough for
more than a few words---like Gamera's narrator, with too many ideas and too
little inspiration. You don't write a book after someone you saw in a cafe, you
write a flash story. Or a paragraph. And your desire to write is not quenched.
And in the end, like Ernesto Cardenal wrote:
This shall be my revenge:
that one day the book of a famous poet falls into thy hands
and thou readest these lines that the author wrote for thee
and thou shalt not know it.
Damn, I should have written a review, not the sketch of an essay with a flash
story in the middle. It's Gamera's fault.
###
Little more than spotlights
"Christmas Alone" by Joesephus
URL: http://storiesonline.net/story/46976
Lovely rendering of the sadness of losing a love.
"The Sex Guide to the Universe" by just-this-guy
URL: http://storiesonline.net/story/47418
I could summarize this as "yet another variation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy" and move on, but just-this-guy has a good enough sense of humour to
deserve a few more words. I wonder what Douglas Adams would have written if he
posted to assm (maybe he did. Maybe he was M1ke Hunt. And he faked his spelling
to look American, of course. On second thought, nah.). We'll never know, so
just-this-guy is the best we can get. What can I say, I like this sort of humor
every now and then. This is an old story, recently reposted to SoL.
"Gravitation Is Not Responsible For People Falling In Love. (Albert Einstein)
[Neils Bohr]" by Gary Jordan
URL: posted to a.s.s.m.
One of those "funny punch-line" flash stories. I like Jordan, the story brought
me a grin and inspired me to write one as well.
"Saint and a Sinner" by Daniellekitten
URL: http://storiesonline.net/story/47097
If you are into the best-seller-detective-novel genre, here's an opportunity for
saving a few trees and some bucks, and not buying yet another paperback whose
pages will be yellowish and awful in two years.
"Lost" by C.C.C.
URL: http://storiesonline.net/story/47741
While unremarkable, it is almost the sort of short story that I like.
"Vox" by f.aces
URL: posted to ASSM, http://www.asstr.org/~f.aces/vox.html
I'm not a fan of concrete poetry, but Vox was an interesting experiment in
concrete prose. Original, odd, playful to the mind.
#####
--
Antheros [antheros A T gmail.com]
http://www.asstr.org/~Antheros/