The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on April 7, 2020

Stories like Kathryn Scanlan's seem to be in vogue in literary circles. They are praised for being astutely observed; whether the observations are worthwhile seems to be less important than the writer’s ability to capture a moment or sensation, or to illuminate or at least illustrate a shared human experience. Plot and characterization are secondary, indeed unimportant, to stories like these.

This is hardly a new trend. In a couple of recent books, Sam Reese quotes an observation that A.L. Balder made in 1945, when he described the (then) “modern short story” as “plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous — frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.” That’s pretty much how I would describe the stories in The Dominant Animal.

I have picked up and put down several story collections in recent years, unable to make it to the end both because the stories seem pointless and because nothing about the way they were written grabbed me. I made it to the end of The Dominant Animal because, although it is packed with stories, each can each be consumed in a minute or two. Many of the stories have an ambiguous meaning. A surgeon who cares about animal rights traps mice that are destroying his expensive cars by using glue boards, inadvertently kills one while trying to free it, and then closes the eyelids of the woman to whom he is relating the story. What’s that all about?

The picnickers in another story eat their hands while waiting for a pig to roast. In her mind, a woman compares baby squirrels to human babies. A man who awakens his neighborhood with a chainsaw every morning is arrested and quickly released, both for reasons unknown. In the title story, a woman disowns a dog that kills her other dog, then goes walking with a man who makes a strange sound. Dying pets and disagreeable men are recurring themes.

Maybe these stories will make more sense to other readers than they did to me. To be fair, I did appreciate a few of the stories. The story I most enjoyed is “Mother’s Teeth,” perhaps because it is slightly longer than the rest. While waiting for her mother’s chemo session to end, a woman eats ice cream and has sex with an elderly man in the locker room of a recreational facility. Later she endures her mother’s criticism, but the ending is happy (in the narrator’s view) because her mother dies.

A story about a woman who brazenly misappropriates another woman’s dog is interesting. So is an ambiguous story about two children who seem to be fending for themselves. A story about a disastrous casino and golfing vacation has something to say about the importance of changing patterns, just like clouds that are “tired of the same old thing.” A story about Scandinavian dieting is amusing. A story about untraining a trained dog would have been amusing but for the darkness that surrounds it.

So that’s about a half dozen of the forty stories in this collection that did anything for me at all. The ratio is just too low to recommend the volume as a whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Jane Goes North by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2020

In these troubled times, we take joy where we can find it. I always find it when I read Joe Lansdale. When he isn’t scaring the crap out of me in a horror novel, he’s making me laugh out loud, a reaction that few authors can consistently provoke. Jane Goes North is a perfect respite from gloomy reality.

Jane is in her thirties, living alone in Texas. She was recently fired from her job in a laundry. She was nearly arrested after a night of drinking, when a backseat dalliance with a preacher in a church parking lot sent her sprinting naked into the woods to avoid inquisitive police officers. That’s how her life goes.

Jane has been invited to the wedding of her snooty sister near Boston. She’s not sure she wants to go, but spite motivates her to make the trip. Her car, on the other hand, is certain it doesn’t want to move another mile. A ride sharing notice on a bulletin board brings her to Henrietta, a tough old lady who calls herself Henry. She has one working eye and a car that runs. Henry is going to Boston for a medical appointment, but since she has a tendency to collide with things she can’t see, Jane insists on driving. The two women instantly dislike each other but bond over the course of the novel.

The road trip turns into an adventure that includes an improbable kidnapping. The women are pretty much unfazed by their ordeal because random crap happens in life and they’ve gotten used to it. The trip becomes more pleasant after they meet a washed-up country singer who uses her two hit singles as fuel for a career playing music at dives filled with drunken audiences.

The three women are loaded with personality — they’re sort of like Thelma and Louise with an extra friend — but collateral characters add to the humor with conversations that spin off in amusing tangents. My favorite is a desk clerk’s discussion of roaches that get stuck in toasters (“I call them Roach Toasties”).

Jane Goes North offers at least one laugh per page, often two or three. Here’s Jane talking to her sisters: “You wouldn’t be interesting, none of you, if you had propellers up your asses and could fly around the room with them.” An East Texas summer is “so damn hot during the day a lizard needed a straw hat.”

Jane is changed in a positive way by her road trip. Henry faces a change in Boston that the reader won’t expect. The ending is warm and heartening, reminding us that friendships, however unlikely they might be, are just what we need in difficult times. So, for that matter, is Joe Lansdale.

RECOMMENDED

Providence by Max Barry

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 31, 2020

Mashing together themes are that are common in science fiction, Max Barry crafts a fun and interesting story in Providence. The themes include the danger of allowing Artificial Intelligence to supplant humans in making important decisions, the risk of corporate officers becoming indistinguishable from military officers, and the likelihood that the military industrial complex will manipulate public opinion so it can fight a profitable war.

The war is being waged with aliens who look like (and are therefore referred to as) salamanders. Salamanders have the ability to expel a force from their mouths that blows a hole through just about anything. The first human explorers to encounter salamanders tried to communicate with them, but ended up with holes in their bodies and ship. Hence the war.

Humans decided to take it to the salamanders, devoting more than 20% of their GDP to the production of weapons and ships. After humans were defeated in battle, the company that manufactures the AI that runs the ships’ systems blamed the humans for not recognizing the threat quickly enough. The blame could just as easily have been placed on the AI, but that wouldn’t have been profitable.

The new Providence class of ships is controlled entirely by AI. Humans are along for the ride, primarily to make propaganda videos showing their success at destroying salamanders. Propaganda is also designed to convince the public that salamanders hate humans, when in fact humans have no clue about what motivates a salamander. Nor are humans likely to learn, since their goal is to eradicate salamanders as a species.

Four characters are on a ship that is the novel’s focus. Jolene Jackson was the lone survivor of the defeat that sparked the decision to put AIs in charge of the war. She reluctantly agreed to become the ship’s captain, although the job gives her little to do beyond trying to make the crew appear to have discipline. Isiah Gilligan (“Gilley”) is a civilian who works for the company that made the ship and its AI. Gilly is in charge of maintaining the ship’s systems, but since the ship maintains itself, he spends his time trying to solve puzzles, including the nature of the enemy. Gilly is driven by curiosity.

Paul Anders is a claustrophobic loner who doesn’t respond well to authority. He is in charge of weapons, but since the ship decides for itself which weapons it will fire, Anders spends most of his time throwing ninja stars at Gilley. Talia Beanfield is essentially a psychologist who is charged with promoting the crew’s mental welfare, but her primary function is to assure that the crew produces upbeat propaganda films that viewers will appreciate.

In the tradition of science fiction novels, characters confront their fears, make sacrifices, puzzle out solutions, and persevere. Unlike traditional science fiction, however, Providence avoids a predictable ending, the kind where a few brave humans outsmart and outfight vast numbers of aliens. Instead, Providence reminds us that any aliens we eventually encounter are likely to be truly alien, so different from us that we won’t be able to understand them. Well, except for the curious among us, who might eventually work out the truth by making intuitive leaps that would escape an AI. In this case, the truth is a perfect blend of awesome and awful.

Max Barry tells much of the story in a light tone, finding humor in human foibles. As the humans come to grips with their true role on the ship — giving Earth something to cheer about so they won’t gripe so much about the cost of a seemingly futile war — they begin to bond with each other. Like all good fiction, the story is more about relationships than destroying aliens. Some of the novel come across as filler, but for the most part, Barry creates action and suspense that keep the plot in motion, while generating genuine excitement near the novel’s end.

RECOMMENDED

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

Published by Harper on March 31, 2020

Valentine is a close study of female characters in or near Odessa, Texas, during the oil boom of the 1970s. With one or two exceptions, men play a limited role; they work and get drunk and behave badly with women. Men in Odessa die from accidents and drugs; women die because they are killed by men. “You raise a family in Midland, but you raise hell in Odessa.”

Suzanne Ledbetter scolds her daughter for crying when she hurls her baton into the air and it falls on her eye. Never let them see you cry, she says. Suzanne peddles Avon and Tupperware because she refuses to be judged in the way the city judges its poor residents. When she dies, she wants people to say that she was “a clever businesswoman, that she toed the line.” Suzanne copes by taking what she can get while avoiding public confrontation of the forces that keep her in her place. Her pride is all that matters.

Karla Sibley is 17 and bone tired because her baby still won’t sleep through the night. She works at a restaurant where male customers complain that she never smiles. When Dale Strickland makes a drunken effort to punch her, the female owner tells her not to overreact because “we don’t want anybody reaching for his gun.” Maybe the other customers will kick Strickland around in the parking lot to teach him a lesson (or just for fun), but he’ll be back. The other waitresses think how nice it must be for Strickland and his kind “to move through the world knowing everything will work out for them in the end.”

Mary Rose Whitehead’s jaundiced view of men is confirmed when a 14-year-old girl named Glory Ramirez flees Strickland after he rapes her. Glory takes shelter in Mary Rose’s home while Mary Rose faces down Strickland with a rifle she’s not sure is loaded. Mary Rose becomes the victim of the racist locals who threaten and malign her for testifying against Strickland. She despises the members of the Ladies Guild who stand behind Strickland and regard Glory as a slut because she's poor and Mexican. When Mary Rose testifies, the male judge is condescending and the defense attorney argues to all-male jury that the rape was just a misunderstanding. Mary Rose’s experiences with men are so disturbing that she ultimately can’t distinguish men who are evil from those who are harmless. She is surprised to learn “how easy it is to become the thing you most hate, or fear.” How her experience will affect her judgment is a question that underlies the novel’s best and most suspenseful scene.

In a moment of crisis, Corrine Shepard thinks “that she is an old woman completely unprepared to stop the world from coming apart at the seams.” As Corrine listens to men at the country club bemoan the loss of “their war against chaos and degeneracy” that followed Nixon’s resignation, she thinks men are the same everywhere. “She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker.” The exception in Corrine’s experience was her husband Potter, but he died. Every night after his death she drinks too much, then sits in Potter’s truck, garage door closed, wishing she had the nerve to start the engine and end her life. The one time she did start the engine, Debra Ann, a pesky neighborhood child, opened the garage door to ask one of her unending questions.

Debra Ann's mother, Ginny Pierce, intended to come back for Debra Ann after she left Odessa, but never stopped for long in any one place. Debra Ann fills her life with imaginary friends until she discovers a real one, a gentle man who lives in a drainpipe. She provides a necessary balance to the novel, both in her innocent refusal to view all men as evil and by reminding women that they are the compassionate gender, the ones who help and forgive. But maybe that’s not true of all the women in Odessa. The novel suggests that some women react to violence by saying enough is enough.

Valentine is in part a story about the value of empathy for those who suffer, and of responding to wrath with mercy. But it is primarily a story of the emotional and physical pain that women endure at the hands of men, particularly in places where women are not valued as equals, where men make all the rules.

Elizabeth Wetmore captures a setting that is dry and dusty, a place that would have nothing if it didn’t have oil. Men come for work, live in “man camps,” and only stay until the boom ends, when they move on and leave the women behind. Wetmore repeats some of the local jokes about Odessa near the novel's end. The jokes are ugly, like the landscape, reflecting the bleak, unjust, and humorless life that the female characters endure.

Valentine is tense and depressing, but Wetmore’s surehanded prose tells a moving story that never becomes sentimental. It derives power from its avoidance of melodrama. Life is hard and for some of the characters, it is unlikely to ever be better. The female characters differ in age and ancestry, but they share an understanding, if not an acceptance, of their vulnerability in a harsh male world. Still, at least one character offers a message of hope, an unwillingness to be satisfied with survival, a determination to shape her own fate. The opportunity to understand and care about the diverse lives of these complex women makes Valentine a novel that will bear rereading.

RECOMMENDED

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on June 5, 2012

Redshirts begins as a Star Trek spoof, premised on the notion that if a character who has never been seen before is wearing a red shirt, the character is fated to die. The story follows the Intrepid and its crew. The starship has a regular need to replenish its crew when redshirts die, which they do with some frequency to set up nonsensical plots. As John Scalzi takes pains to point out, the science in some televised science fiction (including, although not by name, the original Star Trek) is less than rigorous, something that puzzles the more scientifically inclined members of the Intrepid’s crew.

Andrew Dahl and some other characters are newly assigned to the Intrepid. The gag is that the characters, not realizing they are in a television show, are perplexed by all the things that don’t make sense, including instant acquisition of knowledge that they never had until the knowledge becomes necessary to the plot.

The concept leads to some amusing moments. Veteran crew members hide in the storage closet whenever they sense that an away mission might be imminent. They understand that if a bridge crew member goes on an away mission with a redshirt, the redshirt will die and the bridge crew member will live, but only after a dramatic scene in which the captain shakes another crew member and demands a solution to a problem before a rapidly approaching deadline. Bridge crew members survive away missions, although one of them inevitably suffers a serious injury before his health is miraculously restored.

Andrew eventually puzzles out the fact that he is in a television show and that the Narrative is created in some other universe. Benefitting from the non-science that governs his existence, Andrew travels to the universe in which the show is made to do something about his fate. The story is a one-note gag but Scalzi milks it for some funny scenes.

The novel makes up for its silliness in the three codas that follow the main story. The first, focusing on the screenwriter who kills crewmembers on the Intrepid, lambasts screenwriters for their laziness. Really, if you’re going to write science fiction, you should make at least a half-assed effort to get the science right. You might also want to avoid predictable plots, like having a redshirt killed by a space monster every week. After all, plenty of good television shows (including some science fiction shows) manage to churn out a quality episode every week, one that’s based on human drama rather than predictable confrontations with aliens. The press of time and working in an unfairly maligned genre shouldn’t excuse writing like a hack.

The second coda follows up on the life of a character in the universe where the television show is written. Although a motorcycle left him incapacitated before Andrew arrived in his universe, he has been given a new life. In the novel’s most serious moment, he questions whether he had more value as an organ donor in his former existence than he has as a functioning human. A message from his other-universe self makes him realize that he shouldn’t blow his chance to become the master of his own fate.

The third coda addresses death and loss. It’s almost as good as the first two, if a bit sappy at the end. The codas are the kind of solid, contemplative writing that Scalzi can do when he’s not trying to be funny.

I’m not sure why Redshirts won a Hugo, although the only other nominee from that year I’ve read (2312) wasn’t great. Maybe it was a slow year. Still, Redshirts has earned a good bit of praise over the years, and given the way the codas balance the humor, a measure of praise is merited.

RECOMMENDED