Books in 2008, #13

#13. The Situation by Jeff VanderMeer

This is, in short, weirdly fascinating. It's also not really a book, but rather a novelette packaged like one so for the sake of my sanity I'm just going to count it here among the others. The Situation is the story of an office's innards and its quirky employees, an account of a place both strikingly different than what we might know and yet all-too-familiar to those that have spent time in a gray-walled cube slaving over market reports and the like. It is the journey of an unnamed protagonist who has just been put in charge of a new project--to create a ginormous fish, from scratch, big enough that it can swallow a child whole. But of course.

Can I admit something here? Yes? Okay, I will then. All of this reminded me somewhat fondly of that scene in Beetlejuice where Adam and Barbara end up finding out that the afterlife is merely a convoluted office setting, brimming with paperwork and monotony. Of course, the characters there were monstrous, sure, but also comical. Here, where our leading worker's fellow employees are shapeshifters, things are less laughable. In fact, they are very much subverted, making them both unclear and interesting. My favorite would have to the Mord, once simply known as Mord, a bird lover who quickly mutates into something more quietly menacing, and all within an office's walls.

Which is really why I think I liked this the most. It's the mix of normalcy and surrealism, the juxtaposition of paperwork and info-seeking beetles, the horror of a manager made completely of ignitable paper, the way isolation creeps in just as hauntingly as it would in any situation. There's a sense of loss, a sense of confusion, an understanding that everyone hates you, and finally for our working friend a chance to break away. It's not exactly how he'd have liked to go (it involves a slug, and for those paying attention earlier on they know exactly what this means--serious business), but it is an end fit for a nobody worker bee.

The Situation is available as a free download from Wired. Click here to check it out.

More stuff pertaining to the mail

Yes, another grand post about...mail! Settle down, settle down!

• Received my contributor copy and check (mmm money) for the beach-themed anthology Strange Stories of Sand and Sea, which contains my short story "Birds, Gods, and the Naming of Things"...and boy is it a big book. Over 300 pages. Lots of stories in here and I'm looking forward to sitting down with it and checking the others out. I don't re-read my work. But if I was to I'd probably describe the piece as an in-and-out hallucination trip under the boards of Atlantic City where an angry boy learns a mighty lesson from a talking seagull. Yup.
  
• Received my review copy of the latest issue of the urban horror magazine City Slab, #12, which I'll be handling for The Fix Online sometime in the near future.
• I mailed out my latest entry into the Writers of the Future contest this weekend. Go, little story, go! Shine on you crazy diamond! Er, I'll keep my fingers crossed that it makes it to California safely.

And that's that for now. I suspect I'll be getting a few more interesting items this week, but most of them will be bills. Ah, the bane of my existence! Bills! And CVS ads!

Busy mailbox

Let's see, let's see. My mailbox has been pretty bloated lately, stuffing itself with a bunch of different meals. First, it's been snacking on four different rejections over the weekend (mmm, needs some salt!). These were mostly forms and have no effect on me whatsoever. The stories will be going back out some time this week.

Next up, a hearty meal consisting of a free copy of The Princes of the Golden Cage by Nathalie Mallet and my contest prize, The Best American Comics: 2006. Yay, books!

And finally we come to dessert. My mailbox has no will power, and has decided upon an official certificate that marks me as a kickass member of the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society. Yummers!

And even with all that, I'm thinking I should be getting a few more things in the mail this week. Still anxiously awaiting my contrib. copies for Murky Depths...

Free shtuff

So, I got some things in the mail this week. No candy, but I'm not going to turn away free books...



Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell. I really enjoyed his debut novel, Crystal Rain, last year and am definitely looking forward to diving into this one. Just by the cover alone, I know it's going to be a fast-moving and fun.



Prime Codex edited by Lawrence M. Schoen and Michael Livingston. A reprint anthology, focusing on more upcoming writers than name brands. The TOC looks good, and there's even a story from one of the issues of Shimmer that I also appeared in. Hey, what, no love for the P-man?



Chrono Mechanics by Art Thibert. I got this for free from Dave Carter's FreeComicBookMonth contest that he ran all during May. Looks pretty interesting, and it's definitely off-the-wall which, not surprisingly, is perfect for my tastes.