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I am planning to get back and review a bunch of the stuff people asked about from last year but I am trying to start This Year off on the Right Foot and as a result I have absolutely got to talk about the first book I read this year, The Stray Lamb by Thorne Smith.
When I found this in the used-bookstore basement of the Traveler Restaurant, I initially assumed that this was a Fantasy Novel of a Certain Era (the 1970s/80s) but in fact rapidly learned once I had brought it home that it was instead a Fantasy Novel of a DIFFERENT Certain Era (the 1920s!) that Del Rey books had realized they had a golden opportunity to disguise as a completely different kind of book. There's a whole pop culture studies essay to be written just about the covers that this book has had throughout its lifetime:
the first edition, from 1929
a couple editions from the 40s
>
this one's from the 60s
and this is the one I grabbed off the shelf last week, from 1980
which is the first time it was put out by specifically an SFF publisher, and boy, does it ever show!
For the record, there is never a centaur appearing anywhere in this book. FALSITY in advertising.
Anyway, the premise of this book is that mild-mannered middle-aged Mr. Lamb is miserable in his boring day job and unhappy marriage to the Worst Woman in the World (the book hates poor Mrs. Lamb SO MUCH for the crime of being an Artistic and Pretentious Social Climber), until he has the one-two punch of encountering, first, a dreamy underwear model, and, second, some sort of ancient magical man who recognizes in him a kindred (and possibly reincarnated?) spirit. This results in Mr. Lamb receiving the liberatory gift of a series of animal transformations that allow him to escape from the mundane horrors of his daily existence into chaotically uninhibited and frequently drunken adventures, like a sort of Bacchanalian Sword and the Stone:
"Well," said Long, "no natural-born horse could have consumed cocktails the way that one did. Never saw anything like it. And the sandwiches -- it must have had human blood in its veins."
Mr. Lamb has absolutely no control over his animal transformations and he does not at all care; whether he wakes up as a seagull, a kangaroo, or a shaggy dog, he crashes recklessly through the world tormenting his enemies and annoying his friends and broadly speaking having the time of his life. He even enjoys being a goldfish, although his wife's attempt to murder him puts a very slight damper on the proceedings. Not for him the megrims of a Gregor Samsa! One gets the sense that if Mr. Lamb had happened to wake up as a cockroach, he would immediately have cheerfully decided that this form, too, had much to teach him and gone in search of the nearest drink.
Mr. Lamb spends most of the book in cahoots with his daughter Hebe, a 1920s Cool Girl who immediately flags that the drunken horse causing chaos around the neighborhood is her father on a bender. Hebe, for the record, is all in favor of her father having an affair with her friend Sandra the underwear model. In fact she introduces them! and cheerfully proceeds to keep providing opportunities for Sandra to aggressively hit on her father all through the rest of the book, while Mr. Lamb is like 'hmm I'm not so sure about this!' It's fine; she, too, knows that her mother is the Worst Woman in the World.
Hebe is also attempting to sort out her own romantic problems: she and her 1920s boyfriend want to get married but have no means of support.
"There is only one of two things to be done," the young lady began briskly. "Either you'll have to ruin me or else start bootlegging."
This, of course, leads to a climactic sequence in which the whole gang is on the run from gangsters and the cops due to a bootlegging foray gone wildly wrong, with Hebe, Sandra, and Hebe's boyfriend lugging along a Mr. Lamb who is currently transformed into a lion and badly disguised as a dog. Everyone has a rollicking good time! (except, of course, for Mr. Lamb's soon-to-be-ex-wife, the Worst Woman in the World.)
When I found this in the used-bookstore basement of the Traveler Restaurant, I initially assumed that this was a Fantasy Novel of a Certain Era (the 1970s/80s) but in fact rapidly learned once I had brought it home that it was instead a Fantasy Novel of a DIFFERENT Certain Era (the 1920s!) that Del Rey books had realized they had a golden opportunity to disguise as a completely different kind of book. There's a whole pop culture studies essay to be written just about the covers that this book has had throughout its lifetime:
the first edition, from 1929
a couple editions from the 40s
>this one's from the 60s
and this is the one I grabbed off the shelf last week, from 1980
which is the first time it was put out by specifically an SFF publisher, and boy, does it ever show!
For the record, there is never a centaur appearing anywhere in this book. FALSITY in advertising.
Anyway, the premise of this book is that mild-mannered middle-aged Mr. Lamb is miserable in his boring day job and unhappy marriage to the Worst Woman in the World (the book hates poor Mrs. Lamb SO MUCH for the crime of being an Artistic and Pretentious Social Climber), until he has the one-two punch of encountering, first, a dreamy underwear model, and, second, some sort of ancient magical man who recognizes in him a kindred (and possibly reincarnated?) spirit. This results in Mr. Lamb receiving the liberatory gift of a series of animal transformations that allow him to escape from the mundane horrors of his daily existence into chaotically uninhibited and frequently drunken adventures, like a sort of Bacchanalian Sword and the Stone:
"Well," said Long, "no natural-born horse could have consumed cocktails the way that one did. Never saw anything like it. And the sandwiches -- it must have had human blood in its veins."
Mr. Lamb has absolutely no control over his animal transformations and he does not at all care; whether he wakes up as a seagull, a kangaroo, or a shaggy dog, he crashes recklessly through the world tormenting his enemies and annoying his friends and broadly speaking having the time of his life. He even enjoys being a goldfish, although his wife's attempt to murder him puts a very slight damper on the proceedings. Not for him the megrims of a Gregor Samsa! One gets the sense that if Mr. Lamb had happened to wake up as a cockroach, he would immediately have cheerfully decided that this form, too, had much to teach him and gone in search of the nearest drink.
Mr. Lamb spends most of the book in cahoots with his daughter Hebe, a 1920s Cool Girl who immediately flags that the drunken horse causing chaos around the neighborhood is her father on a bender. Hebe, for the record, is all in favor of her father having an affair with her friend Sandra the underwear model. In fact she introduces them! and cheerfully proceeds to keep providing opportunities for Sandra to aggressively hit on her father all through the rest of the book, while Mr. Lamb is like 'hmm I'm not so sure about this!' It's fine; she, too, knows that her mother is the Worst Woman in the World.
Hebe is also attempting to sort out her own romantic problems: she and her 1920s boyfriend want to get married but have no means of support.
"There is only one of two things to be done," the young lady began briskly. "Either you'll have to ruin me or else start bootlegging."
This, of course, leads to a climactic sequence in which the whole gang is on the run from gangsters and the cops due to a bootlegging foray gone wildly wrong, with Hebe, Sandra, and Hebe's boyfriend lugging along a Mr. Lamb who is currently transformed into a lion and badly disguised as a dog. Everyone has a rollicking good time! (except, of course, for Mr. Lamb's soon-to-be-ex-wife, the Worst Woman in the World.)
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