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Jun. 25th, 2025 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI was traveling again for much of last week which meant, again, it was time to work through an emergency paperback to see if it was discardable. And, indeed, it was! And you would think that reading and discarding one bad book on my travels, dayenu, would have been enough -- but then my friend brought me to books4free, where I could not resist the temptation to pick up another emergency gothic. And, lo and behold, this book turned out to be even worse, and was discarded before the trip was out!
The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. In the book's climax, the corrupt, debauched, spendthrift, incestuous, psychologically twisted twin brother tracks the plastic surgeon down to the Greek island and then stabs him with a sword-cane hidden in his crutches as revenge for the murder of his sister. Justified! Stab him again!! (The corrupt, debauched, spendthrift, incestuous, psychologically twisted twin brother does not survive this incident, as an island full of angry Greek peasants immediately mobs him off a cliff, but I am glad to report that at least it's ambiguous whether Our Hero survives it either.)
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. In the book's climax, the corrupt, debauched, spendthrift, incestuous, psychologically twisted twin brother tracks the plastic surgeon down to the Greek island and then stabs him with a sword-cane hidden in his crutches as revenge for the murder of his sister. Justified! Stab him again!! (The corrupt, debauched, spendthrift, incestuous, psychologically twisted twin brother does not survive this incident, as an island full of angry Greek peasants immediately mobs him off a cliff, but I am glad to report that at least it's ambiguous whether Our Hero survives it either.)
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
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Date: 2025-06-26 01:23 am (UTC)So I feel good about guessing that the title was a reference to the caduceus and deeply resentful that nothing interesting was done with it.
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-09 02:44 am (UTC)Tanith Lee could have knocked it out of the park.
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Date: 2025-06-26 01:40 am (UTC)I'm afraid I'm going to need more detail here, much as I sort of don't want to ask.
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-09 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 03:31 am (UTC)....Oh that's uncomfortable and not in an intentionally-done-to-spark-important-and-insightful-discussions-on-racism sort of way, considering you say the book doesn't see a point in even addressing it or acknowledges it.
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-09 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 04:11 am (UTC)I opened Dreamwidth sleepily late at night and began to read this post sleepily, and over the course of the paragraph beginning with this sentence I came to a brief state of full awakeness in order to go, “Hang on, what? Okay then!”
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 06:26 am (UTC)It's been decades since I read Esbae, but I recall liking it better than you did - although I will readily grant that (a) there are absolutely elements of the setup that were uncomfortable even then and haven't aged well since, and (b) I was coming at the book from a completely different and (at the time) much more sheltered demographic perspective. I suspect that I'd be more critical of the book today.
That said, it's also arguably the weakest of Linda Haldeman's three novels; the other two are Star of the Sea and The Lastborn of Elvinwood, both of which Goodreads dates to 1978. Star of the Sea is something of a period piece, set specifically in small-town Mississippi in 1950, and might now be considered a kind of magic realism tale; the plot involves an orphaned girl being raised in a convent setting who has an uncanny air and may have the ear of the Virgin Mary by way of a statue in the convent garden. It's unique and thoughtfully done, but probably an acquired taste.
By contrast, for my money The Lastborn of Elvinwood is an unacknowledged classic that was arguably a good decade ahead of its time. Set in and near a classic Quaint English Village™, its reluctant hero is local actor Ian James, who accidentally discovers that Elvinwood's vicar and its leading estate agent are secretly helping the local faerie population stave off extinction by disbelief...including, as our story opens, helping to arrange for the infant child of visiting American tourists to be exchanged for one of the fair folk. Ian finds himself dragooned into helping with the changeling-switch, and thrust willy-nilly into a faceoff with none other than Merlin himself. Haldeman is juggling at least half a dozen literary influences here with - again, for my money - astonishing deftness and dry wit, and my personal take is that had she lived (there was evidently a severe cancer diagnosis), she'd have evolved into one of the leading lights of modern urban fantasy.
(Haldeman also wrote my all-time favorite riff on Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a short story entitled "The Marley Case", originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. (Her solution to Jacob Marley's murder involves an ancestor of one John Wellington Wells, and has the Ghost of Christmas Past telling our viewpoint character, "You can get away with anything in fiction as long as you're consistent." Fortunately, the story has been anthologized at least a couple of times over the years, and so is not entirely impossible to track down even today.")
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 10:42 am (UTC)I remember being sad neither of the Linda Haldeman books I found lived up to their very stylish, very 80s covers.
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-09 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-26 10:19 pm (UTC)... but honestly too it makes me think of what I've read about people in countries where servants are a very common part of life abusing said servants. Like apparently even arriving at "maybe don't beat them up, even if you're very angry" is something that people don't arrive at? Hmmm.
Love your list of characteristics for the brother in the second book. He's soooo baaaaaad.
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Date: 2025-07-09 02:56 am (UTC)