Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Stephen King is my favorite author.

He has been since I was nine years old and first convinced my mother that I should be allowed to read him openly, not under beds and in back corners of the library. I have devoured everything I've ever been able to get my hands on, including the introductions he writes for his short stories (introductions that went a long way toward convincing me that short stories were an art form that should never be neglected). One of my favorite stories, "Home Delivery," was written for an anthology called Book of the Dead—an anthology of ZOMBIE STORIES. A whole book of nothing but ZOMBIE STORIES.

To my pre-teen mind, this was the ultimate of delicacies, the dessert to end all desserts. I already adored zombies in all their forms, and the idea of a whole book about nothing but zombies was just...well, it was staggering. But alas, for all that I had won the day on the topic of King himself, I had not yet convinced my family to buy me horror anthologies, and Book of the Dead passed outside my reach forever.

Or so I thought. I was rummaging through the books on the free book table at this most recent Boskone (and did I mention that my NESFA Press book, Letters to the Pumpkin King, is available now as both a hardcover and a gorgeous signed, slipcased edition?) when a copy of Book of the Dead literally fell into my hand. Oh happy day!

It's taken me a month to read my long-awaited treasure. Not because I was savoring it: because that was how long it took me to fight my way through. What a difference a quarter of a century makes.

The table of contents for Book of the Dead is made up entirely of male names. Some of them are unfamiliar to me; it's possible that there's a woman writing under a male pseudonym lurking somewhere in that list, camouflaged and content. But since they're all male names, and this was an invite-only anthology, I think it's reasonably safe to say that the first zombie anthology was very much a boys' club.

Most, if not all, of the stories in this book were written specifically for this book. When King talks about "Home Delivery" (I think in Nightmares and Dreamscapes), he indicates that there were questions about how much flexibility the modern zombie really had. Each of these authors really worked to find a unique take. And that unique take is so overwhelmingly straight, white, and male that it's actually jarring. Multiple stories—as in, more than one—focus on the plot of "try to rape a woman, zombies will eat you." Like, that is the core moral of the story. "Rape = zombies." It'd be sort of neat if it worked that way in the real world, but...

Of the stories in this book, two have female leads; one of the female leads is Chinese-American (she's also one of the only characters who shares POV with more than two other people). There are more rape stories than stories involving women with agency. (Interestingly, one of the two female leads, who is also one of the women with agency, was written by Stephen King.) There's one story about a little girl that made me uncomfortable in that "this book would have been taken away from me, and rightly, when I was twelve" sort of way, and I was reading Clive Barker at that age.

It may sound like I'm being overly harsh on this book, and in some ways, I am. It's a very simplistic, borderline sexist view of the zombie apocalypse, and for all the "unique takes" it contains, most of them didn't seem to work too hard to show us anything different that wasn't "oh boy oh boy I can get away with showing naked dead people." And at the same time...

This is where we started. These people weren't writing Yet Another Zombie _______ Story, they were writing, in many cases, the first story of its type. They were building a foundation. And I wonder how many people read this book, said "I could do so much better," and turned around to start constructing what would become the modern zombie obsession. I wouldn't call this a good collection now, because we've gotten so much better than most of these tales would have allowed us to be. But it's a foundational collection, and I'm glad I read it, even if I would recommend The Living Dead or The Living Dead 2 (and Zombiesque and about a dozen others) before I would recommend it.

We've shambled a long way, baby.

(I thought a lot about whether this needed a trigger warning, and decided that it was better to err on the side of caution. So...TW: very oblique and carefully worded mention of a suicide attempt.)

I don't think it's any secret that I am a voracious reader. I read constantly. My friend Michelle has commented on more than one occasion that she, as a lifelong reader, is still amazed by the way she'll turn her back for thirty seconds, look back, and find me with my nose in a book. Since I grew up very poor, I also grew up a voracious re-reader; my favorite books were likely to be read five, ten, twenty times before I moved on, and I still go back to them. There aren't many new books added to that shelf these days—I finally have more than I can read—but when I need a friend, those favorites are always there.

When I was fourteen, I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for the first through fifth times.

Tam Lin is based on the ballad (which I was already enamored of, and would become obsessed with somewhere between readings three and five), but only very loosely so; it shares a structure, and not the details. It's about a girl named Janet, who loves to read, and goes to college, where she can read as much as she wants. It's about growing up and growing older and how those aren't always the same things, and it's about the things she does while she's at school, about falling in and out of love, and Shakespeare, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and festive elephants, and pink curtains, and growing apart, and oh, right, the Queen of Faerie and the Tithe to Hell.

The main character, Janet, was everything I wanted to grow up to be. She was strong and smart and living in a world where the magic was subtle enough that I could see myself in her. She loved all the books I loved, and she wrote poetry constantly. It was because of this book that I wrote a sonnet a day every day for my entire high school career. Some of them were terrible, and some of them were just technically clean without being anything more than homework I had set for myself...but all of them taught me about word choice and meaning what you said, and they sparked a lifelong love of structured poetry.

Books were my salvation when I was a teenager (they still are, although I've gotten better about knowing how to save myself), but very few of them had real people doing things I could relate to and understand. Not like Janet. She was flawed and fallible and exactly what I needed, and better still, she gave my friends and I access to concepts like saying something when you needed help, and knowing that phrase would get you what you needed instantly, no questions asked. Because we thought we were being terribly clever, we used the phrase "pink curtains," which had been adopted for that purpose by Janet and her friends.

When I was sixteen, I decided I was done. I was out of cope. I was finished. I took myself and my favorite book (not Tam Lin, IT, by Stephen King) and went to a place and did a thing, and it was supposed to make me not have to exist anymore. And somewhere in the middle of the thing, I changed my mind. I literally started thinking about the characters in the books I loved, and how disappointed in me they would be, and how they wouldn't do this to themselves. They had more important things to do than die, and maybe so did I.

I went to a pay phone. I called a friend. I told her it was pink curtains, and she came and got me, and she did not judge, and she did not yell, and she helped me, because we had a framework for friends who would do that. That, like so much else that was good in our lives, we had learned from a book. From this book.

I still love T.S. Eliot and I still write sonnets and I went to college as a folklore major partially because I wanted to read, and study "Tam Lin," and be Janet Carter for a little while. Tam Lin influenced so much of who I grew up to be...and it helped me know that I could ask for help. So it's part of why I was able to grow up at all.

I love this book so much. I always will.

You should read it.

My "to be read" pile is notoriously huge, to the point that I will not allow myself to configure the Kindle that The Agent gave me for our anniversary until the stack of physical books waiting to be read weighs less than I do (this might happen faster if I stopped buying books). I have no system for going through it; I basically dig until I find something that looks interesting and fits what I want to read right now, and then go.

Yesterday morning, I decided to go for some YA fiction, and grabbed Giving Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe, a contemporary paranormal about bullying, loss, grief, true friendship, and a girl who can talk to dead people. I enjoyed it quite a bit; enough that I looked up the author to see if she had anything else I could buy (like maybe a sequel). What I discovered was that her second book, The Way We Fall, had just been released. I made a note to look for it...

...and then last night, when I found it displayed on the "New Releases" shelf at Barnes and Noble, I picked it up. I am weak. And I am glad to be weak, because this book is awesome.

Told in diary entry format, The Way We Fall is the story of Kaelyn, a sixteen year old girl living in an unidentified island community somewhere off the coast of Canada. She's writing a journal of letters to her best friend, Leo, first because she wants to reestablish their friendship, and then because she wants him to know what happened while he was gone. She wants him to know how they all died.

Because see, a strange disease hits the island. Airborne, with a long latency, and a period of increased sociability during what should be considered the most infectious stage. So when you're at your sickest, that's when you want to hug the neighbors and tell them how much you've always appreciated them. And then you die. It starts slow, and gets steadily worse, as diseases of this type usually do.

Kaelyn is not a doctor; not a scientist; not a virologist; she's a teenage girl, and her view on the outbreak is both moving and unique. She just wants to protect her family, herself, and her friends. She wants answers. She doesn't get them—not all of them, not enough of them. Crewe has done enough research to put together a plausible progression and set of symptoms, without actually needing to pin down her virus and walk herself into bad science territory. Instead, she has real people, in a bad place, and she lets them deal with their circumstances as best they can.

Kaelyn is a strong, smart, believable female protagonist in an tense YA novel that focuses on character and situation, rather than romance. Her losses are genuine, and painful. Better yet, there is an excellent level of diversity in the characters. Kaelyn and her older brother are mixed-race, with a black mother and a white father, both of whom appear quite a bit. Kaelyn's niece, who is central to the story, is black. Her best friend was born in Korea. And her brother is gay without being a stereotype or defined purely by his sexuality.

I really can't recommend this highly enough. I'm excited to know that there's a sequel coming, because not everything was answered at the end...but then again, not everything needed to be. It's a beautiful book.

You should check it out.

For all that I argue constantly that urban fantasy is one of the oldest genres, and that those of us who write it are the descendants of Lily Fair and should be afforded the same respect as the children of her better-known sisters, Snow White and Rose Red, the fact remains that urban fantasy as we know it right now, today, is a relatively recent beast. It developed slowly, lurching and slithering its way out of the jumble of general fantasy and into its current position.

A lot of the classics* of the urban fantasy genre were published during the 1980s, and many of them fell out of print during the same time period. They were like thieves in the night, only instead of sneaking into your house and stealing all your stuff, they snuck into your head and planted ideas like seeds. Maybe they didn't germinate overnight. Maybe they took years, or decades, to begin sprouting. But they did sprout, and the flowers they grew into spread more seeds, until the genre itself began to grow.

I was too young to really appreciate what was going on during those beginning days, but I already read voraciously, and several of those strange flowers have been a part of my mental landscape for as long as I can remember. Jack of Kinrowan. War for the Oaks. Gossamer Axe.

Bordertown.

Bordertown was a modern-day Neverland, a place where the lands of humanity and the fae collided, with magic and science at continual war with one another. It was a place for teenage runaways, filled with music and madness, and there were times when I, as a pre-teen nerd girl who never felt like she really belonged anywhere, practically ached with the longing to find that magic doorway that could get me there. In Bordertown, I would find friends, and adventures, and stories, and maybe I'd get hurt, but I'd do it in a place that hurt everyone, not just the ones who didn't quite fit in. In Bordertown, I could make the rules, and break the rules, and take the rules for whatever they were worth. All I had to do was find the door.

I knew even then that Bordertown was just a story, but it was a beautiful story, and stories have power. I read every Bordertown tale I could find with the same voracious need, and when they stopped coming, I started looking further afield. When I met Ellen Kushner last year in Australia, I told her that I wrote urban fantasy because I'd come too late to write Bordertown, and the genre as it exists now was as close as I could get.

Those original books are sadly out of print now. For thirteen years, the doors to Bordertown have been closed.

The doors to Bordertown are opening again on May 23rd. Welcome to Bordertown is a gorgeous, glorious anthology of all-new stories and poems set in that magical place, written by an incredible assortment of authors, and because the authors and editors are clever, you don't need to know anything but what I've told you here to appreciate it. Bordertown is where the magic is. Bordertown is where the music is. Bordertown lives.

In the meanwhile, you can read three of the original stories on the website; you can begin exploring this world; you can fall in love the way I did when I first heard the city's name, and the way I did again when I went to Boston and was handed an advance copy of the new map. Bordertown lives.

Now step into the story and find out why so many of us have loved this world so fiercely, so cleanly, and for so very, very long.

Bordertown lives.

I missed it so much.

(*Defining "classics" as "things without which the genre would not occupy the shape it occupies today," not based on popularity or staying power or even, in some cases, quality.)

I promised you shopping lists, and I intend to deliver! I'm taking a very generous definition of the word "friend," here, using it as a sort of shorthand for "friends and acquaintances and people who've emailed with me a few times and would probably buy me a drink at a convention if it was convenient and they had their wallets with them." Since that takes a long time to type, "friends" is our winner.

I have read every book I am recommending to you today, so consider this my Endorsement of Awesome. I've tried to be upfront about things like age ranges and such, but let's face it, I was reading Stephen King at the age of nine. My ideas on what you should and shouldn't give to your seven-year-old are messed. Up. So please try before you buy, and don't come crying to me if your kid starts claiming the clown in the closet is coming for his soul (hint: the clown probably means business).

First up, the inimitable Jim Hines! I mean that. He's hard to imitate. One of the things that makes him so amazing is the way he crosses age and gender barriers like they weren't even there. You think I'm funning with you? Hand Goblin Quest [Amazon] to any teenager who likes things that are awesome, and watch the divide between "boy books" and "girl books" melt away. Now try it again with the adults of your choice. It's fun, well-written comedic fantasy that has something for everyone. It's also the first of a trilogy. Hard to go wrong with that!

Once you've spent some time with the goblins, you could do a lot worse than sticking with Hines and taking a peek at The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon], the first of his modern action-adventure fantasy answers to the Disney Princess craze. It's a very pink book, but it, like the goblin books, works for male and female readers alike, with its engaging plot, awesome characters, and wicked-good dialog. I even helped to copyedit the third and fourth books in the series, which tells you something about my love for this world.

Moving on from Jim—thanks, Jim!—means it's time to take a look at the fantastic Jeri Smith-Ready, whose fantastic Wicked Game [Amazon] will introduce you to some of the most unique, most fascinating vampires currently stalking the shadows. They're the DJs of WVMP, and with the help of a con-artist protagonist and an author who knows how to go for the jugular, they can keep you rocking all night long. I love these books. Check 'em out.

But hey, maybe vampires aren't your thing. You could be more X-Files than Angel. And if that's the case, may I direct your attention to the delightful Gini Koch, and her steaming-hot, sexy, silly, utterly enchanting Touched By An Alien [Amazon]. (Okay, I admit it, I love Gini in part because there is now a DAW heroine whose name is sillier than Toby's. Thank you Katherine "Kitty" Katt, for making my protagonist less likely to kill me.) The sequel comes out next week, and wow, do you not want to miss the opportunity to beam up.

Cat Valente is exploring a different kind of alien landscape in her beautifully-written Habitation of the Blessed [Amazon], a landscape populated with creatures out of myth, legend, and allegory. She conjures up historical myths almost forgotten in the modern world, and weaves them together into something just probable enough to hurt your heart. It's a beautiful book.

Finally (for now), a book I loved so much that I actually blurbed it: Carousel Tides [Amazon], by Sharon Lee. It's an urban fantasy old-school enough that it wouldn't look out-of-place next to War for the Oaks and Tam Lin, and at the same time, it's totally part of the modern urban fantasy explosion. It's gorgeous and rich and deep and unique, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

That's books by my friends for today!

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly decided to rank "the new classics," and made lists of the "100 Most Influential" bits of various media in the last few decades. They had a list of movies, a list of books, a list of TV series, and so on. This, naturally, made me grumpy and contemplative, because their list looked absolutely nothing like mine. I then took umbrage, as I am wont to do, and made my own list of books that influenced and informed my reality. I proceeded to update it in 2009, because things can change considerably in a year.

I bet you know what comes next.

Books on this list aren't necessarily high literature; they're not necessarily classics; they're not even necessarily particularly good, although I think the bulk of them are. They're just the books that combined to construct a me. They are, in short, not the books I was supposed to fall in love with; just the ones that I did.

Your list will probably be drastically different. You may still want to take a look at mine. You might just find a few things that will surprise you.

( Click here for Seanan's updated list of 100 books that have influenced and rocked her world, and which may have influenced and rocked yours. Complete, in some cases, with commentary. Because she can, that's why. )

So last year, Entertainment Weekly decided to rank "the new classics," and made lists of the "100 Most Influential" bits of various media in the last few decades. They had a list of movies, a list of books, a list of TV series, and so on. This, naturally, made me think, because their list looked absolutely nothing like mine would. I promptly took umbrage, as I am wont to do, and made my own list of books that influenced and informed my reality. That was a year ago. Things can change considerably, in a year.

You know what comes next.

Books on this list aren't necessarily high literature; they're not necessarily classics; they're not even necessarily particularly good, although I think the bulk of them are. They're just the books that combined to construct a me. They are, in short, not the books I was supposed to fall in love with; just the ones that I did.

Your list will probably be drastically different. You may still want to take a look at mine. You might just find a few things that will surprise you.

( Click here for Seanan's updated list of 100 books that have influenced and rocked her world, and which may have influenced and rocked yours. Complete, in some cases, with commentary. Because she can, that's why. )

Straight On 'Til Morning [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] by Christopher Golden.
Roc Trade, paperback
352 pages, whatever happened to Saturday nights, and the girls you loved back then?
Currently in print

( Do you remember the 1980s, or are they just some by-gone era where the hair was funny and the delinquents were juvenile? Do you remember young love? Do you remember Peter Pan...and did you ever wonder just how dark it could get? Second star to the right, and click here 'til morning... )

Evernight [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] by Claudia Gray.
HarperTeen, trade paperback
352 pages, you don't know Evernight Academy like you think you know Evernight Academy gothic fun
Currently in print

( What secrets lurk in Evernight Academy, a school with a uniform most Hot Topic lovers would kill for? Can Bianca survive her time at school? What's up with the dreams? All this and more will be answered, but not everything will be revealed by clicking here... )

Divalicious! volume one and Divalicious! volume two, by Amy Mebberson and T. Campbell.
TokyoPop, paperback
232 pages, bubblegum bimbo pop princess American manga musical madness
Currently in print

( What's it like to be Tina Young, arguably the most famous pop-star princess in the known universe? And can a comic book about a pop princess really be awesome enough to be worth reading? Absolutely, and you'd be surprised. Click here for details. )