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Eye-Catcher: Feed by Mira Grant

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Cover: Feed by Mira GrantCovers have a certain appeal for me. Judging books by them makes it very, very easy to determine what I will read when faced with a tide of new books and stories. With covers doing a good bit of the legwork for me, I don’t have to read nearly as many back covers or first pages to find what I want to read. (I know, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But it’s darn helpful to have such an easy first gate of judgment.)

This year’s Hugo nominees boasted several good covers that appealed to me. The one I found most intriguing, from a creator’s standpoint, was Feed by Mira Grant.

Feed’s cover is not necessarily an intricate piece of artwork that I could spend hours staring at (A Hundred Thousand Kingdom’s cover is much better suited to that). But as a cover, I don’t know what more you could ask for. It’s so amazingly clever. Part of the cleverness stems from Grant’s genius in titling the book: if you don’t already know, Feed is a novel about a group of bloggers in a post–zombie apocalypse world. So it’s got zombies, who are always trying to feed, and bloggers, who want everyone to subscribe to their feed.

The cover captures this by focusing on only two elements: the title and the RSS feed icon painted in blood. The grungy gray wall in the background communicates the setting—semi–post-apocalyptic and definitely not pretty—and makes the word and icon etched in bright blood a high contrast. They pop, bringing the pun to the forefront. The blood and the grunge, when added to the word feed, evoke zombies in the minds of those in tune with the current cultural obsession with zombies. Adding the RSS icon gives a dash of the unexpected, and the pun becomes relatively sophisticated by virtue of being visual instead of vocal.

Because the cover taps into and combines two current cultural phenomena (zombies and blogs), it catches an audience’s eye and forces them to, at bare minimum, read the back cover to figure out what’s up. It achieves what a cover is meant to achieve: it gets people to want to know about the book. It makes readers stop for a moment before moving on to the next of their plethora of options. Feed stands out on the smorgasbord, and that’s the first thing a book needs when it is released into the market.

As far as the book goes, I greatly enjoyed Feed. It was a blast, and Mira Grant’s zombie-ridden world is detailed and exquisitely thought out. I loved that the zombies were not the story: they were a plot point but they were not the plot itself. Beautiful worldbuilding. My one gripe is that I could never quite believe that the main character had a reputation as a hard-fact news reporter. For a while I thought maybe the character could keep her strong opinions out of her writing, but the blog snippets that were at the end of each section never showed me that. So on that point, my disbelief never really got suspended, but it was a wonderful read in spite of that. It also has what is now one of my favorite sibling relationships in fiction. The main character and her brother are perfect.

Leaflet Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

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The Prestige Cover
This is a lamentably crappy scan of the paperback cover.

Over the past few weeks I finally read The Prestige by Christopher Priest. (I have, of course, seen the movie, but that’s kind of irrelevant.) For those of you who haven’t seen the movie (and thus can’t puzzle out what The Prestige is about), I provide the back-cover copy from my paperback edition:

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose each other.

Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other’s ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magician’s craft can command—the highest misdirection and the darkest science.

Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations … to descendants who must, for their sanity’s sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

The book is told through a series of first-person accounts that are scattered throughout time: some are in the present (from the descendants whose sanity is at stake) and some are from the past (the dueling stage magicians, i.e. the portion the movie covers). The accounts are mostly written in personal journals, most notably from Alfred Borden (the first past-based viewpoint character) and Rupert Angier (the last past-based viewpoint character).

Narrators with Secrets

The narrators are obviously unreliable. In Borden’s journal he confesses this up front: “The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.” Because Borden so obviously hangs a lantern on the fact that he can’t be trusted, it becomes apparent that trusting Angier is risky business as well.

Having seen the movie, I already knew some of the secrets and illusions Borden and Angier would put out there (though Angier’s secret is notably different from what it was in the movie). In many ways, I wished I hadn’t already seen the movie—I wish, for example, that I could regain the initial effect of reading Borden’s contradictory prose without knowing the reason behind it. However, I relished the more intimate look into the minds of characters I already knew (in their essentials). The film does a wonderful job of focusing on the outward relationships the two magicians have and the effects of their secrets on those relationships, but the book brings you closer to the individuals.

Characterization & Fragmented Effects

The prose was interesting, and the characters’ voices and mannerisms were quite distinct. Angier is a penny counter; Borden is an idealist and theorist. Andy Westley/Nicholas Borden (he was adopted, and the Westley name is his adopted name and how he thinks of himself) shows a realistically confused young man; Kate Angier (great-granddaughter of Rupert) delicately captures her childhood experiences from an adult perspective.

Having so many narrators fragments the storyline—which is only more fragmented by the fact that many times you can’t trust what you’re being told. However, except for Andy’s account, each individual gets to go through his or her story, beginning to end, without interruption. I loved this. Each character was engaging enough alone to draw me into the story, and there were secrets and details enough to discover that repeated plot points weren’t redundant. Andy’s account bookends and separates the others’ accounts: because he comes into the Borden–Angier feud as an outsider, it’s almost as though the reader is discovering the family secrets as he does, so his bookending is appropriate.

I immensely enjoyed the book. The characters change, develop, and evolve over the many years of their lives documented within its pages. The story essentially comes down to one of obsessions, whims, and deep-seated aspirations. (It reminds me of English-language Romanticism, Gothic elements and all.) The Prestige, in the end, is a ghost story: the ghosts of whims, the ghost of obsession, the ghost of aspirations of immortality, whether through fame and glory or other means. The ghostly prestiges—the lingering effects of the novel—are the ghosts of human frailty and desire. As such, the book is chilling and fascinating, and it echoes painfully with reality—as nearly all good fantasy does.

Small Gripe

My only complaint would be that there were occasions when I didn’t believe that the words Angier were using were native to his time period and experience. Not to say that they couldn’t have been, but they didn’t ring true in my ear and jerked me out of the illusion of reading for a while.

Book–Film Comparison

As a side note, I couldn’t help comparing the novel and the film, if only to decide if I still liked the film adaptation after reading the book (I’ve watched the movie many, many times because I like it so much). I can’t say that I disagree with any of the choices the adaptation made. Focusing only on two characters made it easier to fit in the time, and focusing on the external effects of their decisions translates better to film and analyzes another side of obsession (as well as answering questions that Angier himself raises in his account). I even agree with how they changed Angier’s secret because it made it easier to get the strong impact without the luxury of time that a novel affords. I’d say I appreciate the film even more now that I’ve read the book (though, as I said before, I wish I could have had an untainted reading of the book—alas, it is not to be).

Christopher Priest’s The Prestige won the World Fantasy Award in 1996.

A Lifetime in a Book

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The Last Unicorn 40th Anniversary CoverThis year the folks at World Fantasy awarded Peter S. Beagle a Lifetime Achievement Award, and I can hardly applaud their choice enough. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is one of the only books I can consistently say is in my all-time top five favorite books (my opinions toward other books fluctuate so often that I can hardly pin them down with mere numbers).

Like many in my age range, my first introduction to The Last Unicorn was through the 1982 film (I can’t tell you how many times I coerced my mother into renting it from Blockbuster, and she bought the DVD for me a couple years ago for old time’s sake). I adored it when I was younger. Looking back on it now, after having read the book, I’m amazed at how true Beagle kept the screenplay to the book’s storyline while targeting a different audience and using a different tone than he does in the novel. It’s almost the exact same story (with a few cuts here and there for time, of course), but it had a very different effect on me than the novel.

I first read the book in junior high, and I’ve read it almost every year since. Beagle’s prose is masterful (reading the one-line descriptions in his prose is, for me, like finding rubies along the cobblestone path of the narrative). The feeling I get when I read the book, especially toward the end, is the same feeling I get when I look into a star-dusted sky in the wilderness or gaze over the waves rushing toward the rock-ridden coast of Cornwall or Oregon. It’s a beautiful, belittling, empowering feeling I’ve never been able to fully describe. It’s like keenly feeling that you’re just a thread, but also seeing your connection to an entire tapestry. When reading gives me that feeling, I can never forget the book, even if I “outgrow” the age group it’s written for (I read The Dark Is Rising every year too).

The Last Unicorn was the only novel on my AP English teacher’s approved reading list that wasn’t a canonized classic. That teacher, the fabulous Mr. Downs, required “explication” projects twice a term, and the shortest mine ever ran was 12 pages single spaced. They were big projects, and doing them on big books was much harder, so I was able to convince dozens of my classmates to read the 212-page The Last Unicorn. I never received poor reviews back from my referrals.

Since reading The Last Unicorn, I’ve also read A Fine and Private Place, which is a very different type of book but still very eloquent and enjoyable. Beagle was probably the first author who was able to make what could be considered sad or bittersweet endings beautifully satisfying for me. (Other things, mostly short stories, showed me the power of unhappy endings—can anyone say “The Lottery”?—but Beagle made me love them.)

When I started pursuing my English degree, I used The Last Unicorn for as many papers as I could get away with. Not that I ever used the same paper twice, but I just couldn’t help coming back to it with new eyes and new angles.  I projected a new film adaptation, analyzed the onomastics, broke apart some characterizations, got giddy when I recognized another of the butterfly’s allusions, read it as a Christian allegory, and considered the correlation between the Red Bull and fear. I still haven’t run out of things to think about that book; I don’t believe I ever will. Beagle created a book that functions like the magical forest in Grimm fairy tales: you’re always going into the same forest—Hansel & Gretel, Little Red Cap, etc. all go into the same German forest—but the experience is never exactly the same.

In short, there is a lifetime in that one book, in The Last Unicorn alone. Beagle’s other books are fabulous as well, but if only for The Last Unicorn and the lifetime of reading it will give me, I believe him to be fully deserving of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.