Desperate Youth

by Jean Roberta

For the past two weeks, I've mostly been reading student assignments. However, the two recent books sent to me by Lethe Press are much more interesting.

“Almost five years ago, right before I turned fifteen, people stopped asking what I wanted to be when I grew up because it was obvious I wasn’t going to. That’s when I got my diagnosis. Acute blah-blah-blah leukemia. That’s what I heard, anyway. The words that doctors use in these situations have way too many syllables making them almost impossible to remember.”

This is how Jake Margate, the narrator of Never Rest by Marshall Thornton, introduces himself. According to the blurb on the back of the book, this YA novel is a version of Frankenstein. The comparison seems apt, but this modern version is both more and less horrifying than the original.

Jake has gone through years of nauseating, exhausting, ultimately useless treatments, and he is ready to give up. So are his conventional doctors, who try to prepare his mother to accept her only child’s impending death.

Jake’s mother is a key character, and she is determined not to accept the loss of the son for whom she has sacrificed so much. She is divorced from Jake’s dad, who morphed from a struggling musician (before the divorce) to a software-inventer with a second family and a more upscale lifestyle. As Jake explains: “He had spares. She didn’t.”

The narrative sounds completely convincing because it is told in Jake’s pitch-perfect adolescent voice. He can’t hate either of his parents, although he suspects that his mom would like him to blame his dad for “selling out” and remarrying. Jake’s father has made an effort to stay in his life, but his mother has been almost fanatically determined to save him at any cost.

Although Jake tries to assert himself as a legal adult, his mother has had to make painful decisions for him for so long that she is not willing to give up. She moves him into a shady, isolated “clinic” run by Dr. Harry, who admits that his treatments are experimental and that he can’t predict how his patients will respond.

In this last-ditch facility, whose costs are not covered by any American medical insurance, Jake meets other dying young people, including a friendly boy called “Goth,” whose parents actually named him Goliath. Despite his name, Goth is abnormally small, and he has had cystic fibrosis from birth. He and Jake realize that they want to be more than friends.

After being given a substance called “Property Five,” Jake is assured that his cancer has disappeared, but Dr. Harry keeps anxiously testing his “vital signs.” At one point, the doctor pushes a protesting “nurse” out of the room so that he can restart Jake’s heart. No one gives Jake enough information about his condition, but he gathers enough clues to form a very disturbing hypothesis.

Despite the macabre plot premise, this novel is full of the black humour of a young man who has always been the victim of fate and adult power. The reader comes to care about Jake and Goth, and to hope a miracle will enable them to have a life together.

Nothing has really been resolved by the end of the novel, but Jake seems to have caught his mother’s determination, and he is not willing to let Goth die.

After Jake has given Property Five to his lover, he watches Goth open his eyes.

“’What happens next?’ he asked me again.

This time I answered: ‘I don’t know.’ I caressed his cheek with one hand. He was already cooling. That made me happier than I’d been in a very long time.

We’d figure it out. We were ready.”

The other book is an anthology of speculative fiction, Survivor. Edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke, this collection is about mostly young, resourceful survivors of extreme conditions. Some of these stories are post-apocalyptic, and some are about survivors of social or personal injustice.

In the space opera “Scream Angel” by Douglas Smith, “scream” is a highly addictive, hallucinogenic substance extracted from the oppressed inhabitants of a colonized planet. Trelayne, the central character, has a change of heart when he fully understands that his employer, the Merged Corporate Entity, is keeping him under control by keeping him addicted so that he will co-operate in committing genocide.

“On Abydos, Dreaming” by John Linwood Grant is another space opera that sensitively explores religious differences and the ethics of creating artificial intelligence.

“The Good Liar” by Steven Grassie is set in a kind of medieval alternative universe, somewhat reminiscent of Star Wars, in which a brilliant woman manipulates the men in power to avert an unnecessary war.

“Mold” by Eric Gern is a witty contemporary story about a mother escaping with her two children from a violent husband and a house with mold in the attic. Told by the son, the story shows why he would rather lock himself in a car filled with the unusual, ever-growing green stuff than let himself be taken prisoner by his belt-wielding father. In the end, the mold functions like karma.

“A Stitch in Time” by Canadian writer Tonya Liburd is a heartbreaking story of another abused young man who can’t accept the sudden death of his girlfriend, who seemed like the only person who could really love him. He buys a magic spell that enables him to go back in time to a concert where he can make love to her, over and over. Yet the present contains possibilities, and he has to make a choice.

Limited time and space don’t allow me to summarize all sixteen stories in this anthology, but they are all well worth reading. When conditions are extreme, fictional characters show more strength and creativity than they knew they had.

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Hot Off the Press, Part 3

by Jean Roberta

Perennial: A Garden Romance by Mary Anne Mohanraj includes a sweet romance between a lonely divorced man (half-Scottish and half-South Asian) who runs a flower shop, and a lonely woman (apparently White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) who is diagnosed with breast cancer in a leafy town where she moved from New York City because her late uncle left her an older house which she decided not to sell.

The chapters of the romance are interspersed with simple, almost childish drawings, and free-verse poems. Here is one:

“Friends rush in for overdue mammograms, even the ones who were resisting going at all, afraid of what they’d find.
Husbands are kinder to their wives, hold them tight at night, seeing a future without them.
It can make you cranky; this should be about you, but now it’s also about them.
You let it go.
May something good come of this— more check-ups and kisses. We should all be kinder to each other, to ourselves.”

This little book seems to have been inspired by the author’s own bout with breast cancer in 2016 as well as her interest in gardening. (Both the progress of her cancer treatment and the development of her garden have been extensively posted about on Facebook.) This book would make an appropriate gift for a convalescent who needs reading-matter with a happy ending.

Read by Strangers, a story collection by Philip Dean Walker, is much more unsettling, and I wouldn’t recommend giving it to anyone who has already received bad news.

Confession: I haven’t finished reading the whole book, so my generalizations should be taken with caution. So far, I haven’t found any supernatural elements in the stories, but real life in middle-and working-class American families is shown to be sufficiently uncanny.

In the first story, “Unicorn,” a group of kids explore an abandoned farmhouse their parents have warned them to stay away from. One bedroom is still incongruously decorated with images of unicorns. The barn (now burned to the ground) was the site of a tragedy: the teenage daughter tried to ride a horse which she had been forbidden to ride, and since the horse didn’t know her, it kicked her in the head, killing her and leaving the imprint of a hoof on her forehead. There is evidence in the house that she had been trying to escape from something unspeakable.

In “Revolution,” Anna is in a long-term marriage with Hank when she suddenly discovers a sister she never knew about before: her mother’s first, unplanned child, who was raised by an adoptive family. The intrusion of the sister, Billie, changes the dynamics in Anna’s own family.

In the wittily-titled “Hester Prynne Got an A,” the mother of a teenage daughter seduces the male English teacher on whom the daughter has a crush, discovers that her son (the daughter’s twin brother) is gay, and shows that the welfare of her youngest child (a daughter who seems eerily calm and cheerful and therefore abnormal) is more important to her than trying to recapture her reckless youth.

Another wittily-titled story, “Brad’s Head Revisited, ’94,” shows the long-term effects of homophobic bullying in high school on one of the bullies (or a sidekick of the ringleader) rather than on the victim. Here the narrator seems disarmingly direct:

“I fuck for money and I like it. The studio tells me how good I am, how much money I bring in, how I look even hotter on film, like a god. Just like a fucking Adonis.”

Do you detect a note of defensiveness? This story is discomforting, especially considering the allusion to Brideshead Revisited, a novel of privileged English life in the 1920s, in which an envious outsider shows the lifestyle of a titled family from which the gay son is exiled.

The narrative voice in Walker’s stories is clear and unadorned, and much of the explication takes the form of dialogue. Most of the characters seem to be trapped in unsatisfying situations, and they can’t find a way out. Even in the first-person stories, an omniscient, well-read narrator seems to be hovering above the characters, unable or unwilling to give them enough perspective on their lives to provide them with any relief.

The stories are well-crafted, but if read in bed, they lead to depressing dreams.
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