Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey

by Karen S. Wiesner

  

Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey was published in 2018. This collection of 14 very weird stories is unlike almost anything I've ever read before. By the way, Guignol is a French hand puppet. In fiction, the word has come to be associated with a sensational, gruesome tale. 

It would be difficult to describe this anthology of stories individually because they're so short and strange, so, although I liked more than a few of them (very odd for me when it comes to a short story collection!), I can't really go in-depth about any one of them without giving away too much. 

In the general sense, these tales are all what I would consider very small vignettes. What you'll get is a slice of a life: Nothing came before that isn't told rather than shown, and, in some cases, there's little by way of follow-up or indication where it might go from there. It is nothing more, nothing less than what you see in the here and now--that's all you get. For that reason, there is very little depth to them. You'll never get to know the characters, settings, or situations any more than what's included in these few words. It's like you get a glimpse of something and then you're thrust out; you walk away because there's nothing else you can do. Whether a memory of what you've witnessed lingers on after that point is moot. I suspect the author would enjoy at least part of that description of his work very much. Honestly, none of this is an insult. It's more of a heads up of what to expect and an invitation, no RSVP necessary. You really do have to experience this set of stories yourself to get the full impact.

Contained within Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales were more than a few stories that harkened back to H. P. Lovecraft (complete with the tell-you-the-outcome-before-the-event format). I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure offering "A Circle That Ever Returnth In". "Haruspicate or Scry" was another standout. In that particular account, there's a hilarious reference to college students picking apart a story by a professor, praising his imagery and drawing parallels, to which the teacher responds (like he's impatiently embarrassed by the attention), "I was just writing about a damn pear." I've said similar things myself dozens of times while debating allegory in fiction with those who seem to enjoy reading into everything--just never with Orrin's simple but evocative hilarity.

If you like horror, fantasy, and the strange in your stories, this anthology is definitely one to gobble up in a single sitting. The author has several other fiction collections to choose from as well, so you don't have to stop at just one. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series. 

Visit Karen here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Spooky Tutti Frutti

I'm delighted to announce the release of my lighthearted ghost story, "Spooky Tutti Frutti," from the Wild Rose Press.

Spooky Tutti Frutti

It's part of their summer reading e-book series, "One Scoop or Two." With ice cream as the unifying element, these stories range from 7500 words to novella length and had to include the following features: ice cream central to the plot; a setting in a waterfront tourist area during the summer; an ice cream flavor in the title. It can be fun to write a story in response to a highly specific call for submissions. At the bottom of my e-book's product page, you can see a row of other releases to date in the "One Scoop or Two" series and appreciate the clever titles other authors have come up with. My story takes place mostly in a 1950s-themed ice cream parlor, and I think the bright, perky cover captures the ambiance quite well.

I knew I wanted to contribute a ghost story, since all of my fiction is supernatural or paranormal in some way. Waterfront resort area? Annapolis, where I live, is one of the sailboat capitals of the East Coast. I got the editor's assurance that this location fits the criteria, even though it's on a river rather than an ocean beach. The idea of using a sailboat race as the basis for the heroine's problem came naturally, since boat races are a common summer event in this kind of locale. Preparing to set up a stall at the dockside celebration on race day, the heroine wants to create an original flavor. A friendly but slightly odd girl she hires as a temp comes up with the perfect flavor, but why is the new employee, although brilliant on the subject of ice cream, clueless about many details of everyday life?

I wanted my piece to be light and mildly humorous, so I gave the heroine a problem that's serious for her but not dire or life-threatening. Between the title and the strange girl's behavior, I assume the reader will guess soon enough that she's a ghost. I hope readers will have fun waiting for the heroine to figure out the truth and decide what to do about it.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Holiday Stories of Connie Willis

If you feel in the mood for winter-holiday-themed stories, pick up A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS (2017), by Connie Willis. This volume is an expansion of her earlier collection MIRACLE AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES (1999). The twelve selections include five new pieces. Since three of them are longish, in my opinion they're worth buying the newer book for even if you've read the earlier one. Humor abounds, and in the manner of most good humor, the incidents are serious to the characters even though funny to the reader. In the majority of the stories, you can count on satisfying but not sappy endings.

My favorite pieces are two novellas that weren't in the old edition: Thousands of radio re-playings of multiple covers of "White Christmas," augmented by the stubborn insistence of a prototypical Bridezilla that she MUST have snow for her Christmas Eve wedding, spawn a worldwide blizzard in "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know." Snow even falls in locations that have never seen it before in recorded history. My other favorite novella in the book, "All Seated on the Ground," features the narrator's experience on a committee tasked with a first contact project. Aliens have landed. The extraterrestrial visitors don't behave hostilely, but they don't speak or otherwise give any indication of their purpose in coming to Earth. Until they're taken to a mall, where they hear Christmas carols—and respond to the line "All seated on the ground" by suiting their actions to the lyrics. Only the narrator, with the help of a high-school choir director, notices this reaction and manages to decipher its meaning. Hilarious, but as in all Willis's work, the humor arises from characters and situations portrayed with her usual dry, incisive wit, not mere one-liners.

Some other highlights: In "All About Emily," a cynical veteran Broadway actress reluctantly befriends a prototype android who has developed a burning ambition to become a Rockette. The protagonist of the bittersweet "Epiphany," a minister weighed down by depression in the bleak post-holiday atmosphere of January, responds to an enigmatic sense of a call by abandoning his routine duties and taking to the snow-covered highways in search of—what? The Second Coming? The narrator of "Newsletter" becomes convinced that aliens have invaded because everybody is acting too nice in the midst of the pre-Christmas rush. During the bustle of a church Nativity play rehearsal, the protagonist of "Inn" tries to cope with a lost, obviously poor young man and his pregnant wife, who don't speak either English or Spanish. You know where this one is going. The contrasts between the idealized portraits in the Bible illustrations and the bedraggled, bewildered couple and between the spirit of good will toward all and the minister's concern about homeless people stealing the Communion silver lend this moving story the sharp edge we'd expect from Willis.

A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS includes an introduction by the author about the challenges of writing Christmas stories, plus appendices listing her personal recommendations for Christmas-centered fiction and poetry, movies, and TV episodes.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theodora Goss's Fairy Tales

Fantasy author Theodora Goss has just released a new collection of stories and poems that retell and reflect on fairy tales, SNOW WHITE LEARNS WITCHCRAFT (with an introduction by Jane Yolen).

On her blog, Goss discusses the importance of fairy tales:

Writing Fairy Tales

Fairy tales, she says, "tell us fundamental truths about the world," which we "don't get from other places." Their darkness and irrationality reflect children's experience of a large, mysterious world. The traditional stories also reflect the adolescent experience of exploring the mysteries of the opposite sex. "All marriages are to animal brides and bridegrooms. . . . You are as strange and unknowable to your spouse as a swan bride, a bear groom."

The first piece in SNOW WHITE LEARNS WITCHCRAFT, the poem for which the book is titled, speaks in the voice of an aged, widowed Snow White musing on what she should do with her life now that she's liberated from the strictures of being "the fairest" and consort of the king. When women grow "old and useless," she decides, they should "Become witches. It's the only role you get to write yourself."

Similarly, all these poems and stories question "What if. . .?" or "What comes next. . .?" They make the familiar tales new and strange by switching viewpoints from "hero" to "villain" or changing time and/or place to a different milieu. To mention only a few: For instance, the poem "The Ogress Queen" offers the perspective of the prince's cannibalistic mother from the second part of "Sleeping Beauty," the follow-up that never seems to get into children's books and movies. "The Rose in Twelve Petals" explores "Sleeping Beauty" from a variety of viewpoints, including that of the witch who casts the "curse"; beginning in what appears to be a nineteenth-century setting, it concludes a century later, when the "prince" breaks through the thorn hedge on a bulldozer instead of a horse. The poem "The Clever Serving Maid" reflects on the exchange of identities between the princess / goose girl and her maid from the viewpoint of the maid, who doesn't want to marry a prince anyway. In "The Other Thea," the heroine has to visit the castle of Mother Night in the Other Country to reunite with her lost shadow. The poem "Goldilocks and the Bear" portrays Goldilocks and the young bear as childhood friends who grow up to get married, while "Sleeping with Bears," a comedy-of-manners story, features a wedding between a human girl and the scion of a wealthy bear family. In the poem "The Gold-Spinner," the miller's daughter, who actually spun straw into gold on her own, makes up the tale of a strange little man to get out of marrying the king. In the story "Red as Blood and White as Bone," set in an imaginary central European country in the first half of the twentieth century, the narrator, an orphaned kitchen-maid in a nobleman's castle, befriends a strange woman she believes—under the influence of fairy tales—to be a princess in disguise. The "princess" turns out to be something quite different but equally mysterious, on a mission that doesn't involve marrying the prince. A witch tells the heroine of "Seven Shoes" that she will get what she wants after wearing through seven pairs of shoes; the poem follows her through successive stages of her life to the point where, having worn out many types of shoes, she attains her dream of becoming a writer. (That one moved me to tears.)

In this blog post, Goss explores the value of fantasy and why she was drawn to reading and writing it:

The Horns of Elfland

She says she "read books about imaginary countries to belong somewhere," a yearning most fantasy devotees can probably identify with. As for stories "about magic happening in our world," they offer the promise "that our real world had the possibility of magic in it." I love her observation that writers, like witches, "cast spells"—"both witchcraft and writing are about using language to alter reality."

What is your favorite fairy tale? Mine is just about any version of "Beauty and the Beast." All its variants nourish my appetite for Intimate Adventure relationships between human and Other.

Speaking of romance, happy Valentine's Day!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt