Asatru is the pagan path that follows Norse tradition. For laypersons, this means Odin, Thor, Loki, their stories and their kin. Ask any pagan their views on Asatru and you’ll get mixed responses. While many people, especially men, find their spiritual home as followers of the Asgardians, it’s also been adopted by hateful, racist sects. Asatru, however, is not a racist belief system, in fact it’s one of the few ancient paths that holds men and women equal. Goddesses and gods are equal, Odin accepts men and women into his ranks of warriors and in the Norse lifestyle men and women could both own land and hold respected social positions.
Because of Asatru’s adoption by small groups of racists, and the reputation even centuries later of the Viking invaders, books on the subject often hint at the faith only being applicable to those of Northern European decent. However, Essential Asatru is different.
To begin with it points out that the Vikings traveled so far, to the Americas, even into Africa, that it’s possible that many people who don’t look Nordic might still have Norse blood.
Essential Asatru also focuses on the other thing that makes Asatru different from other pagan paths. Asatru is a functional religion, it’s designed to blend into a life, not rule it. In Asatru the gods are allies in every day life, not overlords who must be appeased for humans to survive. Interacting with the religion is, and was, a low priority (which is not surprising when considering that the original Vikings lived with 9 months of winter a year, implying that they often had little time for anything other than survival.)
Essential Asatru is the first fully satisfying non-myth book we’ve added to our collection on Asatru. It’s a choice pick for those interested in the faith, readers interested in religious studies in general and writers looking for research books on the Norse faiths.
“Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss is a fairy tale at its heart. It’s beautiful in imagery and language and has an exotic feel that’s easy to relate to a heroine trying to earn the right to marry her love through cleverness. The story threads a delicate line between familiar and legendary.
“The Witch’s Headstone” by Neil Gaiman is actually a chapter from his upcoming release, The Graveyard Book, about a boy growing up in a graveyard. In this tale Bod ventures outside of the graveyard in a quest to get a witch her very own headstone. What he finds instead is human greed and a curiously shaped curse. Gaiman is a master of creating characters readers can relate to, spinning vivid worlds and lining his fantasy with morbid curiosity. “The Witch’s Headstone” is no exception.
A tale straight out of an episode of The Universe, “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter is an exceedingly sad tale of The Big Rip, that is a wormhole swallowing the Galaxy. Told primarily through conversations between a woman and her daughter, both scientists, it’s beautifully written and heart ripping at the same time. A very human take, it might be the most graceful story of The Epic End out there.
“Jesus Christ, Reanimator” by Ken MacLeod is a satirical look at the Second Coming. The world’s disillusionment in Christ is equally matched by his disillusionment at the world. As he himself points out: “I am the embodiment of the Logos, the very logic of creation, or as it was said in English, ‘the Word made flesh.’ Just because I am in that sense the entirety of the laws of nature doesn’t mean I know all of them, or can override any of them.” Story events unfold ironically close to the original stories, but most satisfying of all is how MacLeod, like many other authors in this book, adds a level of humanity to the character and events, using the contrast between the possible reality and the version of religion that extremists want others to believe in as a framework for the story.
“Sorrel’s Heart” by Susan Palwick is a startlingly dark tale that opens up with a young girl laying in the dirt trying to cut off her own heart. It continues from there morbid bits flung casually at the reader wrapped around a surprisingly powerful love story between freaks and outcasts in a future world where normal people hunt those born different in very obvious ways.
Michael Swanwick’s “Urdumheim” is a creation tale every bit as vivid as the stories found in Greek, Norse or Egyptian myths. Strange, and sometimes cruel(though no crueler that the Greek story of a god swallowing his children, or the Norse story of Odin forming the world from the blood and bones of a giant), this is an epic story of how the world came to be, solid enough to base a mythos on.
M. Rickert’s “Holiday” takes child pageants to a whole new place with a tale of a murdered pageant queen who begins to haunt (and perform for) a writer who is ill prepared to add the baffling problems of a murdered child to his already struggling life. There’s a real sinister mix if innocence and wickedness in this tale. It certainly sticks out even from the others in this book, leaving the reader unsettled and unsure, wondering if they were supposed to enjoy the story at all.
“The Valley of the Gardens” by Tony Daniel combines science and superstition (or outright magic) in curious ways, building a world that is tech heavy, but has every bit of the magic woven into the prior fantasy tales. Here are the twin tales of a man fighting a horrible enemy that seeks to destroy all life in our galaxy and a farmer whose memories are literally tied to the land who falls in love with a woman from the wilds of desert where strange magic/technology grows rampant. The two and their worlds are more closely related than the reader might suspect. This gem of a tale transcends both genres yet is firmly rooted in epic space opera, transporting readers into a magical world far beyond our future.
“Winter’s Wife” by Elizabeth Hand is a tale of the strangely exotic set in a small town with something familiar for most everyone, even if they aren’t familiar with Maine woods. Justin, friended before birth through his mother, has a close bond with Winter, a modern imagining of the wizard of the woods. The friendship leads to Justin being immediately accepted by Winter’s rather unique bride and treated as an adopted child. The close bond leads Justin through several extraordinary events that could make readers believe that magic does still exist in the woods of America.
Chris Roberson’s “The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small” has exotic down pat with a tale of a Chinese researcher who travels to a prison each day to hear the reminiscent tale of a prisoner who once traveled across the sea to Mexica to study the people there. A tale to remind readers that aspirations and man’s imagination and spirit are essential parts of science this one is satisfied to suggest a future of star traveling and leave those imagined stories to other authors.
“Orm the Beautiful” by Elizabeth Bear is sheer magic, the tale of a dying dragon who will take with him more than just his life, but will also relinquish control of the world to men and technology. Here Bear sets the beauty of fantasy to war with the potential of science fiction. But it also shows how the genres can work together as Orm the Beautiful, last of the dragons, goes to the humans to protect his species’ memories from other humans. Another sweet-sad tale in this collection the prose in this one echoes in the readers head like a nearly forgotten song.
Finally comes “The Constable of Abal” by Kelly Link, a complex tale of respectability, ghosts and blackmail. Zilla, famous in a society recently struck by plague for making charms that draw ghosts to the fashionable remains of the town, also happens to be using her daughter, Ozma to gather the secret evidence that Zilla uses to blackmail the highest of Abal. Until the day that Zilla, in a terrible temper, kills the constable, sending herself and her daughter into flight. But Zilla’s escape is truly a quest, as she drags Ozma and others through strange events in her search for something even she can’t put words to. It sets a fitting tone for the end of the anthology, not an end of sadness, such as “Orm the Beautiful” or “Last Contact”, but one that can lead readers to feel as if the stories in this book have at last released them to live their life anew.
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“Life’s pornographic”, a line from this issue, sums up the vibe of Death and the Maiden, from part one to this installment. This issue is very pornographic, with nude and nearly nude sexed up scenes and characters that look like blow up dolls. The story is serious though, a dark struggle between empowered women who serve a lustful goddess and men who resent the female rule of the universe and have split off and formed an effort to bring them down in the most vicious way possible.
The problem with this series is the presentation. Past the fact that the artificial look of the characters turns some people off the art does a mixed job of setting the mood. Panels looking up at Flip, our heroine, as if from the floor, in an almost up-skirt style, add to the explicit (but not necessarily erotic) feel of the story, but next page over the page might be overpowered with red, the backgrounds like a photo with the brightness turned up and the contrast turned down. It’s jarring.
At times I suspect that the visuals weigh heavier in importance than the story. It’s hard not to wonder how this series would play as a book rather than a comic where the visuals could not possibly pull away from the story.
In this issue Mr. Death is missing and Flip the cat girl (excommunicated servant of the sex goddess of Babylon) goes back to the District (where the story started) to find out where her love is. To her great dismay she discovers that Jules, Mr. Death’s archenemy and a Black Knight (one of the men who want to destroy the female rulers), is holding Mr. Death hostage. Surely Jules plans to force Mr. Death to be judged for turning on the Black Knights. Flip was exiled from the Babylonians because she was primed to fall in love, but looks like Mr. Death will be the one to pay for their love. And it doesn’t help that Jules is running a morbid, dangerous side business that makes flip and even bigger target.
There’s an interesting theme of Flip, since she’s a Cat Girl, being hopelessly attracted to the the people who would be the cruelest and most using of her, and yet she has to hold herself together if she wants to save the man she loves.
Moving from a strip in Murky Depths magazine to its own comic series has opened up this world to more depth and emotion. Despite the jarring visuals the story is interesting, super sexual and energetic, which is what keeps me reading.
Zoë Martinique lives in a strange life. Her mom runs a tea/occult shop out of an old Victorian house, with the help of the ghostly gay couple that haunts the house and Rhonda, an urban fantasy cross between Penelope Garcia and Abby Sciuto. And Zoë herself is a strange character, possessing the ability to shuck her body and astrally travel about the city at will. It’s Zoë’s career path, auctioning her services as a super spy off on ebay, that leads to trouble when on an out-of-body spy mission she witnesses a creepy, Vin Diesel look-alike kill and reap the soul of a vice president of a major Atlanta company. Worse the creep marks her somehow, binding the two of them together and sending Zoë on a life changing mission to save herself and others.
I have very mixed reactions to this book. To begin with it was very hard to get into. Zoë makes a lot of TV/movie references, she speaks directly to the reader often and her attitude is rather childish. Zoë’s mother, the ghosts and Rhonda come off flat, and, honestly, annoying. The flow of the action, and therefore the tension, is consistently interrupted by Zoë’s comments to the reader or attempts to be funny (usually with pop culture references) which nine times out of ten aren’t. At one point, after the plot finally starts to be interesting, the flow is completely broken by a scene in which Zoë’s “loving” mother holds Zoë at gunpoint and forces her to submit to an exorcism. I very nearly stopped there. Even though she’s 28, Zoë’s mother, Nona, treats her like child, even to the point of drugging her and physically restraining her to keep her from following the plot. Not only does this make Zoë seems even more childish, and disrupt the core plot, dragging it out more than needed, but the later references to Nona only acting out of love just don’t coincide with her actions making the mother-daughter dynamic feel more like an abuser/Stockholm syndrome relationship.
However, there are some interesting ideas in Wraith. Primarily is the reoccurring theme of people using Zoë’s body against her. She gained her power during a traumatic rape and even after she becomes comfortable with it over and over people capture Zoë’s body while she’s out running around astrally and use it as leverage against her in a variety of ways. Whether Weldon realizes she’s layered this theme into Wraith or not I’m not sure, but I did find myself continuing, wanting to see Zoë overcome this problem as much as I wanted her to have beat off her original rapist.
The dynamic between Zoë and the two leading males in the book is also interesting, especially as unlike other urban fantasy books that stick closer to the romance Happily-For-Now ending this series seems poised to go into some very dark, rule-free territories that are interesting and new.
There’s also something to be said for the plot itself, which has unexpected twists of mystery, centers around planes of existence rather than the ways the character exist and spans into a multitude of human races that are sometimes missing from other urban fantasy tales.
I’m not sure I can recommend Wraith at this point, but I can’t exactly dismiss it either, making it one of the more difficult reads, and difficult reviews I’ve done in a while.
Catacombs and Photographs is Brandy Schwan’s second collection of dark veined poetry. Schwan is a word lover and it shows. Each of the poems is a rich, visual, sensual experience which is typical found only momentarily in modern prose.
Like bits of stories stolen from a new generation of Grimm’s fairy tales, Schwan’s poems are often dark, lovely, and set to a cadence all their own. Featuring some of the best genre poetry available today Catacombs and Photographs is well worth the price and its visions are well worth the time readers will spend swept away.
