skygiants

Despite the title, I had high hopes for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. The point of the anthology is to feature women who wrote suspense about women, with a focus on authors who were well-known between the 1940s and 1970s, but have currently faded from the public imagination. This is a good goal and I laud it, so well done, Sarah Weinman!

Unfortunately, I was not as excited by Sarah Weinman's introductions -- they're all either really unnecessarily spoilery, really unnecessarily dramatic, or just flat-out misguided -- while not shedding enough of a light on the authors behind them to make me feel like it was worth getting spoiled for. So that was frustrating! The stories themselves are also kind of a mixed bag. On the other hand, there are definitely a few gems, and some authors I will certainly be bookmarking for further investigation.

OK, so by story, we have:

1. "The Heroine," Patricia Highsmith

Sarah Weinman makes a big deal about how writing about women instead of gentlemanly sociopaths is THE ROAD NOT TAKEN for Patricia Highsmith, which is probably true, but this predictable entry into the 'whoops, the governess might kill us all!' genre is not an example of much of a loss.

2. "A Nice Place to Stay," Nedra Tyre

A woman who's never had a home finds jail isn't so bad? This is one of those where the twist felt much more SHOCKING!!! than believable.

3. "Louisa, Please Come Home," Shirley Jackson

I mean, Shirley Jackson can hella write. So this story from the POV of a clever runaway teenager is probably not the best Shirley Jackson ever, but that doesn't make it not a fun story.

4. "Lavender Lady," Barbara Callahan

I found this one maybe funnier than I was supposed to because it is basically just songfic?? I am sorry, I am incapable of taking any story that has mediocre lyrics sprinkled at regular intervals through the text to ILLUMINATE THE CHARACTER'S TRAGEDY very ... seriously ....

5. "Sugar and Spice," Vera Caspary

Although the premise of this was frustrating in the way stories about women motivated by jealous of each other often frustrating -- plain-but-rich cousin and poor-but-beautiful cousin hate each other and are constantly competing, usually over men, until one of them MURDERS a guy!!! BUT WHICH? -- it was actually one of my favorites in the collection anyway, because Nancy the plain-but-rich cousin is incredibly charismatic and interesting (she has no artistic talent, but she's brilliant at critique! she's a patron of the arts! she cheerfully calls herself a vipress!) The format is also kind of great, in that it's a double frame story; the narrator is Mike Jordan, who is not really involved in the murder at all but has been sort of alternately hanging out with different cousins for most of his life and therefore observed all the drama, but he's telling the story to the actual narrator, who is a completely random woman who is totally uninvolved and just has a phone that Mike wants to borrow! And then at the end, once he's finished telling her this whole long dramatic story, she's like, "OK, yes, murder whatever, what I'm taking away here is that NANCY IS GREAT, MARRY HER IMMEDIATELY." I am with you, random narrator woman. You and I, we understand each other. Anyway, I will definitely be looking for more of Vera Caspary's work.

6. "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," Helen Nielsen

Any story that starts out with a woman asking her husband not to put her on a pedestal because it's NOT A GOOD PLACE TO BE is probably a story that I'm going to like, and this is not an exception. Basically a critique of the virgin/whore dichotomy disguised as a murder story. Another author I will be looking up!

7. "Everybody Needs a Mink," Dorothy B. Hughes

I'm not sure ... how this is a suspense story ...? Like, a lower-middle-class housewife goes to a store and a nice old man mysteriously buys her a mink, and her family are all "that's weird!" and then that's it, the story is basically over. OK! That's nice!

8. "The Purple Shroud," Joyce Harrington

This one is set among ARTSY HIPPIES and feels ... very seventies. A douchebag husband gets murdered and it's fine.

9. "The Stranger in the Car," Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding came through for me again; I thought this was one of the best stories in the collection. A nice middle-class man attempts to cope with his teenage daughter's potential date-rape-and-blackmail situation, which soon escalates into a potential murder situation, and fails utterly. In the end his wife comes home and is like "oh, honey, you should have just told me straightaway and let me take care of it instead of worrying your sweet little head about it!"

10. "The Splintered Monday," Charlotte Armstrong

This one was fun! A cranky old lady feels like she's being tiptoed around by her hypochondriac sister's family after said sister's death, and, in the process of insisting that she is a GROWN ADULT and does NOT NEED TO BE CODDLED, good lord, people, accidentally reveals that one of them is a murderer, OOPS.

11. "Lost Generation," Dorothy Salisbury Davis

This story was very good -- it's about racism and vigilante justice gone wrong in a small town -- but there were almost zero women in it so I'm not a hundred percent sure why it's in this collection of stories by women and about women, specifically.

12. "The People Across the Canyon," Margaret Millar

And this one was actually sci-fi, I think? I'M CONFUSED. A little girl gets obsessed with the new neighbors and her parents get annoyed and then maybe someone gets sucked into a mirror dimension, I don't know.

13. "Mortmain," Miriam Allen Deford

We've already hit 'secretly murderous governess' on the domestic suspense bingo board, so now it's time for 'secretly murderous nurse!' Deford pulls it off pretty well, though, and the ending did genuinely give me the creeps.

14. "A Case of Maximum Need," Celia Fremlin

THIS STORY MAYBE STRETCHES THE BOUNDS OF PLAUSIBILITY A LITTLE. I've been trying not to spoil the suspense stories too much, but ... ( I'm just going to go ahead and spoil this one, because WTF? )

Diverse Energies is a sci-fi short story collection featuring protagonists of diverse backgrounds -- well, okay, fair warning, what it actually is is a dystopia short story collection featuring lots of crushingly depressing ways the world can and will go wrong, because that's what all the cool kids are writing these days.

But it also features a short story by my friend Rahul Kanakia, so I was willing to risk crushing depression! And also for the goal of supporting the anthology and what it's trying do. (With the exception of "Freshee's Frogurt," none of the stories feature white protagonists; several of the stories are not set in the US and two have gay protagonists, all of which is pretty cool.)

. . . and then I read the anthology and, plot twist, I was crushingly depressed. But this is par for the course and it was generally worth it!

So, going story-by-story:

"The Last Day," Ellen Oh: This one is set in Japan and basically seems to be an AU of World War II where everything is basically the same, except less complicated and worse? And "Hiroshima, but worse" is not something I personally felt like I needed. Depression scale: 10/10

"Freshee's Frogurt," Daniel H. Wilson: ROBOT GOES BERSERK. That's . . . basically it. I think this one is a novel excerpt, which may explain why it feels so slight; either way, not really my thing. Depression scale: 5/10

"Uncertainty Principle," K. Tempest Bradford: As she grows up, the heroine becomes aware that the timeline is shifting around her, and for the worse. After enough things she cares about have disappeared, she decides it's time to take action. I really, really liked the concept and protagonist of this one, and I wish it had been novella or even novel-length; towards the end there was a lot of plot in too little space. Depression scale: 4/10 (the story actually ends with proactive change! \o/)

"Pattern Recognition," Ken Liu: Kids are raised in a creepy environment, attempt to break their conditioning. The setup is fairly standard, but well-executed; I especially liked the depiction of teenagers extrapolating a real/past world from a dictionary. Depression scale: 4/10

"Gods of Dimming Light," Greg van Eekhout: I was not expecting NORSE GODS RECRUITING PEOPLE FOR RAGNORAK in the middle of this collection, but . . . I think I really liked it? Like, there is a sad quiet apocalypse of inevitable doom going on, and in the middle of the sad quiet apocalypse, VALKYRIES POSING AS SCIENTISTS. I'm down! Depression scale: 7/10

"Next Door," Rahul Kanakia: So Rahul is a friend, but aside from that, he is also a great writer with unique and bizarre ideas. In a world that is INFESTED WITH MUTANT BEDBUGS, and also where everyone who is rich is so plugged into VR all the time that they don't care that squatters are living right around them, the protagonist and his boyfriend try to find an uninfested place to live happily ever after. And then there is a HEIST. Depression scale: 7/10 (For the curious, here is Rahul's blog post about writing the story and participating in the anthology! And how all the cool kids are writing dystopias these days.)

"Good Girl," Malinda Lo: Mixed-race marriage is illegal, so everybody whose bloodlines are not pure (it doesn't matter in what direction, just that they're not mixed) lives underground. The protagonist, who is secretly mixed-race but passing, hires an outsider girl to look for her missing brother, and then they make out. I liked this a lot too; it's as complicated as it should be. Depression scale: 4/10 (hope exists!)

"A Pocket Full of Dharma," Paolo Bagicalupi: A sad, starving street urchin gets caught up in a conspiracy surrounding the Dalai Llama, which does not noticeably improve anything in his life. I was not super into this one. Depression scale: 7/10

"Blue Skies," Cindy Pon: The world is divided into two classes of people, those who are rich enough to wear special suits and have clean air and those who are poor and breathe gross air and die young. One of the latter kidnaps one of the former in an effort to make enough money to class jump; romance does not ensue. I appreciated the not! And also the narrative voice. Depression scale: 6/10 (everything is doomed generally, but maybe the protagonist isn't?)

"What Arms to Hold," Rajan Khanna: Kids work long, hard hours piloting robots that are plugged into their brains and are told that it will eventually lead them to a better life. Spoiler: it won't. On the other hand, at least the protagonist ends up getting to be sort of proactive about it. Depression scale: 8/10

"Solitude," Ursula K. LeGuin: This was my favorite in the collection. Coincidentally, it is also the least depressing! An anthropologist takes her kids to a planet to study the culture there; the kids assimilate way better than the anthropologist anticipated or wanted, especially her daughter, who is the narrator. Lots of super interesting culture-building and cultural clash all around. Depression scale: 3/10

I am fairly sure that some of you on my flist will see the title of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and know immediately that this is an anthology you will wish to read. To those people, I say only: awesome! I really loved some of the stories, liked most of them, and think the book's worth your time. It comes out on January 25th, and you can pre-order it here.*

Some people may want a little more detail. To those people I say: Steam-Powered is very definitely a book of lesbian steampunk stories. (Sometimes this makes it feel like a romance anthology, but there are enough stories that break the girl-meets-girl pattern that I generally didn't get bored.) It's also a book full of steampunk stories that are attempting, in a number of ways, to write steampunk that questions a lot of the assumptions of a genre that tends too often to fall back on nostalgic glorification of the grand old colonial days of the Great British Empire. So not only are these stories all female-centric and non-heteronormative, as the title implies, but they're punching back in other ways - most of these stories also incorporate race and class and religion and nationality in ways that steampunk tends, as a rule, not to do. And the vast majority are not set anywhere near England! (California steampunk! African steampunk! Mughal Empire steampunk! And in ways that are not exoticized, but absolutely integral to the stories.) So some of you will see this, and again know that you are interested in these stories, and those people can probably stop reading this review here if you want.

And if you want a little more, like, for example, a lengthy story-by-story breakdown of My Thoughts, then you can ( click the cut! )

*I should probably disclaim that I got an advance review copy of the book from the editor, for the purposes of book-blogging. I have no idea if this will be a thing that will happen ever again, and I hope this should not need stating anyway, but for the record: I make no claims to critical authority, but I obviously only say nice things about books if I think they are true.