Vampire Stories
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Skyhorse Publishing, 2009

When you first see the title of this new Arthur Conan Doyle anthology from Skyhorse Publishing – ten tales under the heading Vampire Stories – your first impulse is to beg for mercy and feel betrayed; et tu, Arthur? you want to cry. In the current heyday of the undead, it seems like vampire stories have hijacked every genre of fiction going. Blood-sucking fiends infest the Romance section of every bookstore; they’ve long had a claw-hold in the Science Fiction section; and let’s not even talk about the Teen section, where Encyclopedia Brown was turned two years ago and Nancy Drew is a dark brood-mother by now. Surely, surely, if there’s one bastion that will hold out against this necrophilic onslaught, it’s the creator of that rational icon, Sherlock Holmes, who once reprimanded Watson with words that should be spelled out for Stephenie Meyer with holy water: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”
Those words, ironically, come from the 1924 tale “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” which is of course featured in this delightful, indispensable collection – and just as the vampire in that Holmes story turns out to be far more subtle and substantial than a pretty boy who glitters (glitters!) in the sunlight, so too this Skyhorse volume, edited by vampire-lore expert Robert Eighteen-Bisang and veteran anthologist Martin Greenberg, is far more satisfying than its title implies. For although Conan Doyle was friends with Bram Stoker, he almost entirely avoids the literal kind of undead so crowding bookstores these days. Instead, he gives us a much wider variety of creatures who prey, in various ways, on the vitality of those around them.
There’s Isadora Klein of “The Adventure of the Three Gables,” who flourishes while her lovers languish; there’s Baron Gruner of “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (another Holmes story), a truly vile blackmailer who ruins women as methodically as ever the evil Count did; there’s the diminutive Miss Penclosa of “The Parasite,” who exercises a powerful mental coercion over the men in her life, who resist her at their peril:

“You fiend!” I cried. “You have come to the end of your tricks now. I will have no more of them. Listen to what I say.” I strode across and shook her roughly by the shoulder. “As sure as there is a God in heaven, I swear that if you try another of your deviltries upon me I will have your life for it. Come what may, I will have your life. I have come to the end of what a man can endure.”
“Accounts are not quite settled between us,” said she, with a passion that equalled my own. “I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other. It will take a little more to break your spirit, I see, but broken it shall be…”

And there’s Octavius Gaster, the mysterious gaunt-faced figure at the heart of “The Winning Shot,” an eminently fascinating character who will have readers momentarily forgetting all about the consulting detective of 221b Baker Street. These nine stories (the tenth is a pastiche by Bill Crider that’s effective enough but can’t help but look a little, shall we say anemic, alongside works by a master like Conan Doyle) fully deserve the wider audience this book’s canny angle will certainly bring them. And Eighteen-Bisang’s brief, incredibly comprehensive bibliography (included as an appendix and listing every imaginary encounter between Holmes and Dracula, in books and comics) is an added treat. So there’s no betrayal here after all, just vintage Arthur Conan Doyle probing the dark edges of the human condition every bit as effectively as his friend Stoker did, and every bit as entertainingly. I highly recommend this book.

–Khalid Ponte

Not A Chimp: The Hunt
To Find The Genes That Make Us Human
By Jeremy Taylor
Oxford University Press, 2009

When Jeremy Taylor writes, in his terrific, rabble-rousing book Not a Chimp, that “we humans are an exceptional species,” he’s courting trouble from all comers, and you get the sense that he not only knows that but delights in it. Animal rights activists and many animal behaviorists will say he’s wrong: humans share, we’re so often told, 98% of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees, after all – surely the rest is window-dressing? Surely any attempt to reposition mankind at the unique and undisputed top of the evolutionary ladder is an attempt to sanction all the barbarities mankind has perpetrated on so-called “lesser” animals, most certainly including chimps, throughout history?

Taylor is having none of this. He makes the point – and follows it with a very detailed, very convincing layman’s tour of the neuroscience involved – that when it comes to evolution and life sciences, tiny percentage points can make gigantic differences. He urges his readers to move past a “chimp-ist” viewpoint in which taxonomical proximity to mankind lends chimps a brighter aura of sentience than, say, ravens or goats or elephants:

The important take-home point is that cognition is a tool to do an adaptive job, and when social and ecological problems are similar it can be expected to solve them in similar fashion, whatever the species. Claims for chimpanzee tool use, deception, manipulation of others, and insight can no longer reinforce claims for their evolutionary and genetic proximity to us, but only show that, like big-brained corvids, they have shared some of the same social and ecological problems as us. Any species that does so will evolve the necessary, and functionally analogous, cognitive structures to deal with them. The argument by analogy is undone.

Not a Chimp is a merry counter-blast to the animal rights and conservation activists who advocate, at least partly on the basis of genetics, extending human rights to mankind’s nearest cousins. The book’s flaw is tribal: Taylor stresses the cognitive differences between humans and chimps in order to pull back human-style civil rights, to stop the “lunacy” of extending those rights to chimpanzees. The fascinating science he’s synthesized and shared would work equally well if his ethics were more elastic – not fewer rights for chimps, but more rights for everybody, including, say, ravens, goats, and elephants.

–Tuc McFarland

The National Book Foundation held its annual award ceremony Wednesday night, and despite the presence of a rambling Gore Vidal, a schmoozing Dave Eggers, and an interloping James Franco, its hard not to feel let down by the whole gala. The reason for the disillusion is simple – the books that won seem dull and predictable, not the best books in their categories, but the ones most likely to receive committee approval.

In the awkwardly named “Young People’s Literature” category the award was given to Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin, about a courageous black teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. It may well be that this is a very good book, but, given its subject, the deep suspicion remains that it’s not the best book but the book adults think would be best for

“young people.” Keith Waldrop won the Poetry award for his collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, and maybe this book too is deserving, but maybe, you can’t help but wonder, Waldrop has just put in the most time in the close-knit world of poetry publishing and garnered slightly more name recognition than his competitors. T.J. Stiles takes the palm in Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the skepticism continues to adhere. Maybe it’s excellent, or maybe Americans love to anoint one big fat mainstream biography of an American figure per year, tailor-made for Father’s Day and Christmas.

Parked hd

For me, such skepticism is originally fostered by the Fiction panel’s decision to reward Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin. I have read this book (I reviewed it in our September issue), and I can easily report that it’s nowhere near as good as the other nominees. It is, in fact, a bad book, breathlessly overwritten, manipulative, and thick with cheap ethnic stereotypes. But what’s perhaps most disappointing is that Let the Great World Spin is almost identical in its subject to last year’s PEN/Faulkner award winner, Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland. The enervating implication that readers take away is that if you write an angst-ridden, sentimental novel that makes constant, thinly-cloaked references to September 11, you are ipso facto writing great fiction. That, and the ancillary implication that the best books are the ones that the most people will approve of on paper.

–Sam Sacks

I cruise a constellation of blogs written by authors who primarily (even, exclusively) write horror, science fiction, and/or fantasy. While I justify this use of my time as a practical interest in “the industry,” my motivation is primarily a morbid fascination with the squabbling, the self-righteous ranting, the bla bla bla-ing (T.V. shows Netflixed and sweated over, pro-wrestling fixations carried over from a humiliating adolescence, etc.), and the very bad ideas that make up the bulk of these posts.

Falling, maybe, into the “practical interest” category has been the latest promotion of The Shirley Jackson Award, a fledgling award for horror and fantasy fiction and an alternative to the Bram Stoker Award.

Last year, The Shirley Jackson Award committee, to raise awareness and presumably money, invited a couple dozen (plus) authors (only one or two a name anyone not deeply engaged with small press horror would recognize) to blog their own “Jack Haringa Must Die!” story (Jack Haringa is the editor of Dead Reckonings, a magazine of short, genre fiction reviews and occasional essays)—to imagine a humorous and/or gruesome death for Haringa in a few hundred words. These stories were collected, with an additional two non-blogged originals, in a slim volume called Jack Haringa Must Die!, to be sold online and at conventions for $10 a pop. Last month, a similar promotion was launched, this time, “Brian Keene is Dead.”

Curious, I read Keene’s blog entry on the stunt and scrolled through the comments to see what folks were saying, and I came across this comment, written by David Kearny:

I’m a little surprised they’re doing this again. Did the Jack Haringa book do well? I read it; most of the stories were built on private jokes that fell flat for me, who is outside the circle of friends who wrote them. I’m not attacking the concept, nor the cause, but if the goal is to make money for The Shirley Jackson Awards, shouldn’t a book be devised that people not on the committee or directly involved with it would want to own? …I hope this collection evolves into something more thoughtful than the last—considerate, that is, of the audience it seeks (rather than the audience it already has). I did like Laird Barron’s story in the last book… but the rest were uninteresting at best.

Brian Keene replied, thoughtfully, and corrected Kearny’s assumption that “Brian Keene is Dead” will be a book:

To clarify: This was devised by Paul, Nick, Nick, Lee, myself and a few others. Our goals were simply to once again raise awareness of the organization and hopefully earn some donations…

There are no plans at this time to collect the stories into a second volume. Not saying we wouldn’t do it if such an opportunity presented itself and the monies went to the org. But as of now, there are no plans and no offers. The goal was simply to increase awareness, if only for a day.

And to have a bit of fun doing it. ;>)

All well and good, and it does sound like fun, but Kearny got me wondering this: why promote an award named for Shirley Jackson and with the goal (presumably) of being taken seriously as an award worth winning with writings unrelated to Jackson and of such highly limited interest? Wouldn’t the committee serve the reputation of the award better—and create a more interesting artifact—by taking inspiration from the award’s namesake? Would it have been a better use of the undoubtedly limited resources used to publish Jack Haringa Must Die!

to instead compile an anthology of essays written (perhaps exclusively) by women about Jackson? With the money spent to print Jack Haringa Must Die!, a few women authors could have been paid to create original fiction inspired not by an advisory board member but by Jackson herself, which could have been posted on a website with a “donate here” button for readers to click. I suggest women authors in both cases for good reason: I suspect it’s no accident that the award is named for a woman author, that by doing so the committee consciously chose to underline that genre fiction is not exclusively the domain of boys, a common—and totally understandable—perception. Indeed, of the twenty-eight entries in Jack Haringa Must Die!, I count only six by women.

I think Kearny’s questions can be boiled down to two very obvious questions: Why is a literary award creating anthologies of tossed-off fiction with a localized appeal rather than linking itself to more thoughtful work and why is The Shirley Jackson Award committee ignoring Shirley Jackson?

– Adam Golaski

The Lost Origins of the Essay
John D’Agata, editor
Graywolf Press, 2009

Readers who remember John D’Agata’s first anthology, The Next American Essay, might cringe at the return of its Dave Eggers-style arrogance. “By ‘Next’ is meant those essays that will be inspired by these,” that collection declared. “By ‘American,’ of course, I mean not the nation. And by ‘Essay,’ I mean a verb.” And by “arrogant,” I mean a boy who sees fit to instruct his readers on the meanings of words in common usage, but The Next American Essay nevertheless was a superb anthology, leaping with life, full of lurid juxtapositions. So at the appearance of D’Agata’s follow-up volume, The Lost Origins of the Essay (again very handsomely produced by Graywolf Press), there’s dread mixed with anticipation.

The dread starts with the thing’s title. Who preens enough to use “lost origins” in an essay collection that features Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, and, God help us, Montaigne? Where’s the “lost” in that, considering the presence of such fixtures in every single essay anthology ever made? And the author isn’t helping things any, intoning about his title “Because I think having a broader sense of history can inspire a deeper sense of identity.” Yeesh. Granted, he’s not a boy anymore, but still – even old men don’t talk like that if they want to be taken seriously.

But once again, the ‘nevertheless’ follows right after – The Lost Origins of the Essay is a big, brilliant, absolutely invigorating anthology. Its net is cast much wider than in the first volume, for D’Agata’s conception here is that almost all narrative nonfiction that isn’t explicitly history comprises the “lost origins” (or, more properly, “long origins”) of the essay form we know today. So there are odd extracts from Sumer and Babylonia, as well as bits from Heraclitus, Theophrastus, Plutarch, and Seneca (the last three of which, we’re told, were translated by the editor). Africa is represented, as is China – and Japan, where the delightful Sei Shonagon (“she is gossipy, bitchy, snobby, fun,” D’Agata writes, “A complainer, a bragger, a tease, a sap”) gets her say. We come to Italy and approach the Renaissance and perhaps more well-trod ground; there’s Petrarch (also, we’re told, and perhaps we now blink in wonder, translated by the editor), a long rumination by Montaigne on Virgil, a refreshing inclusion of the great Thomas Browne, a travelogue by Basho, Swift’s oft-anthologized (but no less brilliant for it) “A Modest Proposal,” and 500 more pages of smartly chosen, wonderfully arranged stuff.

There’s plenty of experimentation here, a deep cosmopolitan breath of inclusion, and some winding-up remarks by John Berger, Lisa Robertson, and Samuel Beckett (whose “Afar a Bird,” we’re told – and by this point we’re either too skeptical or too tired to resist – is translated by the editor). The end result is much akin to The Next American Essay: sometimes infuriating, always thought-provoking, and ultimately very, very satisfying. Whatever John D’Agata’s other talents may be (raconteur, one fears, and polymath – and linguist! Let’s not forget that), he’s one hell of an editor.

–Liz Satterwaite

Francis Bacon, "Man with Dog"

From the backseat of my parents’ car, I listened and was afraid. Late autumn, deep dark—back then, in the mid-1980s, the roads weren’t so well lit. At the tail-end of a long family trip, warm and sleepy, it was easy for me—aged eleven or twelve—to slip into a very wild place, where the line between fun, boys’ adventure story and lost in the woods (something monstrous glimpsed up in the trees) was very thin indeed.

I listened to an episode of Nightfall, a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, originally aired in the early 80s (so, unlike Inner Sanctum or The Hall of Fantasy, both originally aired in the 40s, Nightfall was modern, with synthesized music and state-of-the-art studio production to prove it). The episode was “No Admittance/No Exit,” a story about an automated emergency clinic that determines treatment based on patients’ potential to contribute to society. Certainly, the story scared me (I’m easily scared), but it needn’t have for Nightfall to have kept me up that night, because the show’s opening had already done the trick.

That opening: A crash of notes high on a piano’s keyboard, like shattered glass, the sound of wind, and the host’s introduction: “In the dream you are falling, lost in the listening distance, as dark locks in…” a scream—a man falling—and then the host’s emphatic, “Nightfall.”

Maybe it sounds hokey to you youngsters, and maybe it is, but that intro was intoned by Henry Ramer, and he made it all sound so serious. Ramer was known to listeners of Nightfall as “your host.” He set up each episode, not in the cackling, punning style of The Crypt Keeper, who you know isn’t good for you, but like a gentleman—a gentleman with an upstairs torture chamber and a basement full of wicked science. “Good evening,” he said, not like Bela Lugosi (or someone impersonating Lugosi), but with a hint of vocal fry and an even sense of humor. Then, “tonight I would advice you to make certain that all of your escape routes are clear. The play is called, ‘No Admittance/No Exit’”—extra emphasis on “exit,” the emphasis one would place while pulling the mask off to reveal that he has no face!

Ramer provided the voice for numerous cartoon characters, including an invisible villain on a Canadian animated incarnation of Spider-Man, did voiceover work, commercials, and appeared in films, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

and Between Friends.

Yesterday, Neil Marsh wrote to tell me that Ramer died on November 12. (Marsh is the author of a website dedicated to the history of Nightfall, for which he contacted many of the cast and crew, including Ramer. Marsh and his research was invaluable when I wrote about the show for All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society.)

It’s as the host of Nightfall that I knew Ramer—his voice has long been a part of my peculiar internal landscape. I hear it often: when I re-listen to episodes of Nightfall, and when I hear certain words that Ramer said best.

–Adam Golaski

Samuel Johnson: A Life
David Nokes
Henry Holt, 2009

Samuel Johnson: A Biography
W. Jackson Bate
Reprinted by Counterpoint, 1998

In writing his fast-paced, engaging new biography of the great and terrible Doctor Johnson, David Nokes has three separate massive, uphill battles to fight. The first is with Johnson himself, who was vain enough to relish attention but cynical enough to savage biographers (and whose life absolutely refuses the neat arcs and resolutions the current book-buying public seems to demand). The second is with James Boswell’s mesmerizing, idiosyncratically epic Life. And the third is W. Jackson Bate’s monumental 1975 biography, rightly called the greatest modern life of Johnson.

Johnson is of course immortal, and thanks to Johnson Boswell is too, but a modern aspirant to the post of Johnson biographer might hope that time and advancing scholarship would remove Bate from contention. Fortunately, no: Counterpoint has kept his book in print in a very handy paperback, and so it pops up as persistently as old King Hamlet’s ghost, intoning ‘remember me’ to every new contestant.

And scholarship likes to think it’s more important than it really is; in simple truth, as a full-dress biography Bate’s book is unsurpassable. Johnson roars and rumbles through its pages as vividly now as he did when I first read the book forty years ago. Bate’s command of the innumerable pigeonholes of Jonnsoniana is absolute, and his prose scintillates (bless the folks at Counterpoint for keeping this feast before us). Nokes’ is quite the best book on Johnson to appear since Bate, and his book is leaner and quicker, often with sentences stitching together quotes from Johnson and others that run on for paragraphs at a time. Great care and discernment went into this production, but it can’t escape periodic duets with its looming predecessor.

Here’s Nokes about Johnson’s famous Dictionary:

Writing the Dictionary’s Preface he struck an elegiac note, remembering that both his wife Tetty and his former publisher and friend, Edward Cave, were now deceased. The work, he wrote, ‘was written’ (not compiled, but written) with little ‘assistance of the learned’ and with no ‘patronage of the great’, not in ‘the soft obscurities of retirement’ nor under ‘the shelter of academick bowers’ but amidst ‘inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. The tone he struck was truculent. It was with ‘frigid tranquility’ that he affected to dismiss the Dictionary from him; but though this intensely personal statement goes beyond good taste, it makes one thing unmistakable. The Dictionary that he produced would be recognised as his.

And Bate, on the same work’s genesis:

The thought of creating an English dictionary that could stand comparison with these works [the standard Italian and French dictionaries of the previous century] had long depressed the spirits of any individual qualified even to begin on such a project. For of course it would have to be an individual. There was not only no academy in Great Britain similar to the French Academy but also, given the pride in British individualism, not much prospect of one.

Readers will decide for themselves (and on more evidence, obviously) which author they more fully trust, but the signal differences are on display even in excerpts: Bate is calm and summarizing where Nokes is urgent and intertextual. Bate tends toward a magisterial remove; Nokes takes us into the London streets and drawing-rooms, quoting Johnson & co. the whole time. Both do a superb job, although we’ll have to wait and see where Nokes’ book is in forty years. For the present, readers should rejoice at having both books at their disposal. Johnson would have fussed, but he’d have been pleased just the same.

– A.C. Childers

The Tyranny of Email:
The Four-Thousand Year Journey To Your Inbox

• Ali Baba Goes to Town full movie

John Freeman
Scribner, 2009

John Freeman’s slim, heartfelt screed The Tyranny of Email opens with a quote from Gandhi, a preposterous understatement, and an unsubstantiated statistic. This isn’t the best way to begin an attack on a daily mainstay of your readers’ lives.

The preposterous understatement comes after Freeman – the impossibly young new editor of Granta – lists some of the benefits of email:

Today we can type a note on our computer in New York and it will be received in New Zealand in nanoseconds. We use e-mail to send documents, music, wills, photographs, spreadsheets, and floor plans, communicate with our banks, send invitations. We no longer have to fill out those irritating forms to receive a return receipt by post, proof that our important letter arrived. The computer does it for us.

And then he somewhat grudgingly says, “some of this is a good thing.”

Some of it? All of the things Freeman lists are undoubtedly good things, and all of the things he doesn’t list would fill an entire book the size of this one. We use email to stay in touch with our friends and relatives, ask quick questions (for which we’d like quick answers) of colleagues, employers, employees, service companies, etc., make or confirm important appointments, check whether or not we have the right destination in mind before we go all the way over there, make and receive job offers, and a hundred other things that were far more time-consuming, cumbersome, and inexact before email. Then there’s the literary publishing world of which Freeman himself is a part: conferring with fellow editors, dealing with freelance submissions, working up documents for final revisions – is Freeman too young to remember what a logistical nightmare such things were when done via mail and carbon copies, or is Granta Charlie Chan in Egypt hd stodgy enough not to care?

The unsubstantiated statistic follows right after this: “Information overload is a $650 billion drag on the U.S. economy every year.”

Oh please. If anything at all were a “$650 billion” drag on the economy every year, that thing would be firebombed by Special Ops team by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, and that would be the end of that. Not only is no source given for this scarifying number, but no source could be given – what on Earth does “information overload” even mean? More importantly, where will you find three people who agree on what it means?

Freeman throws these things out there in advance of his main argument, which is that the burgeoning of email, “the techno-rave of send and receive” (as he more than once breathlessly refers to it), is deteriorating our interpersonal skills, eroding our free time, destroying our ability to be still, ruining our powers of concentration, and conspiring to murder President Lincoln. His book takes us on a fairly standard tour of the history of interpersonal communication, from stone tablets to postal service to telegrams. It’s done with more wit and prose-writing ability than what you’d find if you typed “correspondence” into Wikipedia, but there are no more facts and no better documentation.

It’s all foundation for his main point, delivered in the book’s concluding chapters, “Manifesto For A Slow Communication Movement” and “Don’t Send.” In these chapters, Freeman outlines his plan to fix all the information overload floating around these days, and it’s a plan that would win Nancy Reagan’s approval: it all boils down to abstinence.

He argues that email is killing us, and he’s not above a little speechifying to get his point across:

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, e-mailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and communities. We can change this; we have to change it. This book has been an attempt to step back from the frenzy and the flurry of the now – the now we have created and the now we have to slowly remove ourselves from – to make this argument. Of course e-mail is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

The natural response to all this — “By all means, you remove yourself from the ‘frenzy’ right away! Take as much time at your calligraphy as you need, and rejoin us when you’re rested” — is easy but not entirely cheap. Much of The Tyranny of Email could be summarized in an email: “Sorry. Having a bad day.” The problem here isn’t common sense, it’s common narcissism: instead of concluding that he’s bad at handling email, Freeman decides email is bad. It isn’t. It’s a miracle. It can be abused just like anything else, but if it’s eroding your personal time and destroying your ability to read, it’s because you’ve let it do those things. Freeman’s book has its share of flaws (Star Trek: The Next Generation is not, for instance, an “ongoing television drama,” nor do wolves “haunt Central Park at night”), but by far the biggest one is that it never acknowledges – nor even seems to conceive – is that there are levels of self-control that fall short of throwing your computer out the window and joining an ashram.

Like it or not (and only a “crank,” as Freeman confesses himself to be, would not), the technology of interpersonal communication has advanced beyond hand-delivered cards and letters, and society has to adjust. Those who’d rather not adjust are free to opt out – but kindly don’t drag the rest of us back to the escritoire with you.

– Liz Satterwaite

Will
Christopher Rush
Overlook Press, 2009

The double entendre that is the title of Christopher Rush’s bracing, brilliant new novel Will is shorthand for the inspired idea at the heart of the book: a lawyer has come to Stratford to take down the last will and testament of Will Shakespeare, who’s feeling old and ailing and doesn’t, we know, have long to live. Just that: just that simple: Rush uses the famous will to prod the famous Will to retrace the winding paths of his life and times, with the lawyer as first questioner and then quickly awestruck audience. And the lawyer’s not the only one; by the time half a dozen pages have passed, the reader is also awestruck – and mighty damn pleased. This is a book to grapple to you with hoops of steel, an entirely grand, roistering, true book that you know right away you’ll wish to savor, to inhabit, and to endlessly recommend.

Rush in his parting comments tells us that this novel has been “growing underground” for his entire life, and certainly the finished product shows it. There’s not a scene, not a scrap of dialogue, not a single throwaway observation that doesn’t spring wholly to life in your mind, and virtually every page features some passage that begs to be copied out longhand. For instance, here’s Will’s imagining of his mother’s grief at the death of her firstborn baby girl:

So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

Rush’s Will is having his final say about everything, in one headlong monologue after another, and as with the real Bard, you want to quote almost all of it – like the page-long rumination on the infamous Tower of London, a part of which reads like this:

Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitor’s Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of the scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles.The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head down on the block simply to let Henry Tudor’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.

Or Will’s grudging-generous tribute to Philip Henslowe, seedy proprietor of the Rose theater:

One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs re-working for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors).

We would expect a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare to be on display in a novel about the Swan of Avon (although countless novels have bungled their way into disarming that expectation), but what really shines in excerpts like these and countless others in the book is something more, a love of Shakespeare that suffuses everything about the man, his times, and his plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean times come alive on these pages, but the real treat here is the sense of the man. Actual biographies of Shakespeare can be a losing game, as Samuel Schoenbaum so amply demonstrated in his massive Shakespeare’s Lives (and as talented writers can play nonetheless, as, for instance, Charles Nicholl showed in his recent study The Lodger Shakespeare), and here fiction can act with more freedom. At one point Rush’s Shakespeare satisfyingly describes himself, saying “The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanor, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip” … and reading along, we can’t help but agree.

Novels as strong as Will don’t come along as often as anybody would wish. Under no circumstances miss this book.

– Steve Donoghue

There’s no contesting it: we live in the heyday of the vampire.  From Anne Rice’s sexy, brooding Louis in Interview with the Vampire to Stephenie Meyer’s sexy, brooding Edward in Twilight, the reading public has been bombarded for the last thirty years with the un-dead in every incarnation and permutation imaginable. We’ve seen vampire villains, vampire heroes, vampire anti-heroes, vampire slayers, vampire world-conquerors, vampires in ancient China, fat Southern vampires, teen vampires, child vampires, vampire superheroes, and, in at least one instance, a vampire Pomeranian. Big screen Hollywood extravaganzas continue to hover into view in local multiplexes, and vampire-themed romance and science fiction novels roll off the presses every month in a seemingly unending supply.

So it seems only fitting to doff our caps today to the man who started it all (and no, we’re not talking about poor wretched Doctor Polidori, who can continue to rest in peace). Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker, the Irish-born (in 1847) journalist, critic, and theater manager who in 1897 gave the world Dracula. “Time is on my side” the fiendish Count says at one point in that novel (which is far more entertaining than you might recall and well worth a celebratory re-read), and it certainly has been: ‘Dracula’ as a literary icon has entered the pantheon of instantly-recognizable figures such as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A new hardcover edition of Dracula is in bookstores now (as well as its very first Stoker family-authorized sequel!), a vampire series is the hit of HBO, and a new Dracula movie is in the works – and we owe it all to Stoker, who had the stroke of genius to bring these creatures of musty old folklore into the light of the present day and set them loose on modern science.

By one of those hair-raising coincidences that so bedevil the literary world, this is also the birth-date of Vlad Tepes, the big-nosed and utterly ruthless Romanian warlord known to history as “the Impaler.” But at Open Letters we’re peaceful folk, so we’re going to let him rest in peace too.