Customer Reviews

Sea, Swallow Me And Other Stories

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I was lucky enough to catch a public reading by the author a few nights ago, and the book promises to live up to its name. The story he read was full of vivid imagery, beneath which seemed to lurk both the cold starkness of reality and a twist of sly humor. I imagine that I will feel swallowed up in these stories ... as soon as my copy arrives!

Anyone who caught Kara Walker's retrospective at the Whitney was immediately challenged to think about race and art. Her surreal silhouettes carved meaning out of every room. Regardless if the viewer came away with a positive or negative impression, it was obvious that existing concepts had been broken, challenged, expanded and, as someone who was blown away by the show, I would add rightfully so. I discovered the same powerful intonations within Craig Gidney's collection, Sea, Swallow Me and other stories.
In the opening tale, The Safety of Thorns, the trappings of the plantation meld into the realm of myth and discovery with strong poetic imagery, yet the characters rise from up off the page with a stark realism. A slave boy is given a powerful elixir by a devil, but still has to find the strength he needs to grapple with reality from within. Equally impressive stories follow. It would be easy for the casual reader/reviewer to exclaim delight at discovering a gay black writer introducing gay black characters into the otherwise lamely heterosexual elf-white worlds of fantasy, but I found the author's pallet much more assured than that; like Walker, his art is not only arresting, subversive and naturally erotic, it stretches boundaries and genuinely puts the speculative back in speculative fiction. Importantly, the stories are as engaging as challenging; no one will close the book thinking they've been slipped a thesis a' la latter-day Delaney.
The three best stories, the aforementioned The Safety of Thorns, the titular Sea, Swallow Me, and A Bird of Ice, respectively open, support the middle, and (nearly) close the book. Sea, Swallow Me allows the reader to swim within some spectacular writing and nearly drown in a feeling of otherness. A Bird of Ice takes place within the snowy confines of an ancient Japanese monastery. A young monk is courted by a member of the fairy folk and ends up confronting much more than the homoerotic awakenings of adolescence. Not that the remaining stories are by any means filler. The few pieces I suspected of being early work still possessed all of the strengths exhibited in the best work. All offered a diversity of setting and theme, making the book one of constant exploration. In fact, when not paying close enough attention while reading the story Strange Alphabets, I thought I'd caught the author making that obnoxious freshman blunder of naming a character after a beloved writer: Rimbaud. I was genuinely thrilled to realize my mistake as the story concerns the train-bound sexual (and quite sticky at that) adventures of the actual poet, a nice historical twist, which, like the exceptionally short Magpie Sisters, keeps the book off-balance. Meaning it surprises. This is not your comfortable Renaissance Fair of modern fantasy and that's a good thing. Hell, it's startlingly refreshing.
Fantasy is seriously lacking in gay fiction written by gay men. Funny, that in writing this review I was initially hesitant to bring up race, for fear that by implication I would give potential readers the impression that in some way the polemic (as if that's somehow inherent to discussions of equality) shapes or invades these stories. Not so. The artist Kara Walker deftly works in black and white with obvious, evocative success. Craig Gidney wields a vivid rainbow of promise.

Craig Laurence Gidney's anthology of short stories is a jewel box of literary treats. Evocative, sensual, passionate and beautifully written, Gidney communicates a powerful sense of place and conveys with compassion and insight what it feels like to be outside the mainstream. The collection provides many delicious confections for the lover of the arcane, the decadent and the gothic, such as the carnival (Catch Him by the Toe) and the penniless Parisian artist Rimbaud (Strange Poets). The tone is leavened by a dark humour (the mother in Her Spirit Hovering is a scream) and the stories contain many brilliant scenes. It is hard to pick a favourite but I think I'll go for Circus-Boy without a Safety Net because of the emotional impact created for me in the scene when CB's parents find his doll and strip his bedroom - the sense of the boy's precious dream and the shame his parents inflict on him are shattering. It's a marvellous collection, in both senses of the word.

This is really a strange anthology and not a romance at all; some of the characters are gay men, both modern or myth or figures from the past, but it's not them being gay that linked all the story, it's more the unexpected and the legend, the faith and the myth mixed together.

The Safety of Thorns: Israel is a slave boy who lives in a plantation; he is very young (don't know exactly the age but he is still working little jobs around, so I believe he is nothing more than a child). One day, near the briar patch he sees a strange man. Israel believes him to be the Devil, even if the man reassures him that it's not true. But from that moment on, Israel's life is no more the same and terrible things happen around him. Maybe the man was not the devil, but probably he opens Israel's eyes to who he is and where he stays, and that was worst than a damnation.

Etiolate: Oliver is an African American artist; as an artist, with an artist's eyes, he likes the pretty thing, above all the pretty boys. But Oliver is not an handsome man and he is not even wealthy and famous, and so the pretty boys don't like him. One more night he sees the reject in the eyes of one of that boys, and probably his desire is so strong that he unveal something terrible, a curse or similar... or maybe he only frees his true self, one who sees the beauty also in the horror of death.

Her Spirit Hovering: Howard was a young man with big dreams of becoming a famous and adored artist. He had the skills, he was good, but he had also a overbearing mother who always crushed his dreams. Not only that she also managed to ruin every important relationship Howard had, first with Kamela, a young Indian girl he met at school (and being of a different culture was not good for his mother) and then with Ned, a talented man he lived with (and obviously being a man was not good for his mother). Now his mother is passed away, and Ned is probably thinking that he know can start living, but grudge and regret are bigger than the wish to start, and the weight of his presence is almost as present as when she was alive. But it's true that it's all his mother's fault, or maybe it's Howard that doesn't have the courage to take his life in his hands?

Come Join Me: Aime is a young boy with a gift, he can see the spirits of his dead relatives. But only his grandmother thinks at that like a gift, all the others, his mother first, want to cure him. Will Aime learn to live with his spirit friends, or will he join them?

Sea, Swallow Me: Jed has always searched for something, someone bigger than life. And maybe he finally meets him in a seaside village, in the deep of the sea.

Circus Boy Without a Safety Net: C.B. is a boy with a wonderful voice and a love for the old stars, in particular Lena Horne. When he was young his parents supported his dream allowing him to dream day and night about his favorite star, but when he became a young man, a teen, and this passion still was wih him, they feared him being gay and try to repress his dreams. He was a good singer, but he couldn't be himself in the choir of the church. When C.B. finally will leave home and enter the unknown world of New York, so far and strange in comparison to his little town, will he be finally free?

Strange Alphabets: in this short story the author romances a moment in the life of Arthur Rimbaud, when he first left his family home and his mother to find his true self in the big and alluring Paris. Arthur will learn that being free it is not always so good, and great pain will wait him, but the lure of poetry and the extasy of flesh is too strong to resist.

Magpie Sisters: a little scene on a little thief girl who is drawn by shiny little thing.

A Bird of Ice: Ryuichi is a Japanese monk; he lives in a peaceful monastery along a lake and one day he "saves" a swan which is drowning. Despite the warning of his brother, he takes care of the animal, and he is strangely attracted but it. And when the animal leaves, it marks Ryuichi with a kiss / bite. From that moment on Ryuichi is no more the same and he will have to see deeply inside himself to understand what he wants and who he is.

Catch Him by the Toe: Sambo is an African tamer and Simba is his beautiful Asian tiger; Sambo and Simba, Africa and Asia, man and animal, they are both strange and beautiful. Maybe too strange and beautiful for the little American town of Azalea, which can't see beyond its own fear of what is unknown and extraordinaire.

As I said, the anthology is not simple, but it's mesmerizing. It's full of color and flavor, an intoxicating mix that catches you while reading and lingers afterward. All the tales are mostly sad, but not without hope; the romance is not the target of the characters and so it's not even the final point of the stories; they are almost all self discovery journey, and the ending point of the journey not always is a light and beautiful paradise.

Gidney has written one of the richest pieces of prose I have read in years. The language is lush, and each story is a gem. I had to stop after each story to let the images wash over me. The sexual orientation theme is very secondary to the real worth of this beautiful book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Like veils of a Sufi dance or the manifold visions of Blake, Gidney's tales unfold in deepening mystery, with vanishing cafes like the magic theatre of Steppenwolf and the caravans of Knauf's Carnivàle. Carnies are a presence, from the magazine "Carnival of Men" in "Circus-Boy Without a Safety Net", to the harrowing finale "Catch Him by the Toe". Glimmering on the surface, a rich vocabulary ignites our senses with imagery. This is woven skillfully with the needle of syntax: dramatically punctuated sentences vary in length, whether languidly floating or tensely staccato; dialogue is offset by descriptive passages or suspenseful action; sequencing flows seamlessly from one paragraph to the next; segments are vignettes of storytelling.

Beneath this intricate scaffolding runs a stratum of mythological, historical, literary, cinematic, architectural, anatomical and botanical knowledge. Visual art references (Dali, Frida Kahlo) are interwoven with juxtapositions of European and African folkore (Ondine, The Tar Baby) and Freudian angst, although the portrait of a dead mother also hearkens to Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray".

Exploring sensual tricks of a yosei, ambitions of an impoverished poet, or abuse of a slave girl, Gidney portrays our mortal coil with laconic irony and compassion. He swings like a trapeze artist from the ErlKing to Eva Peron, from Snagglepuss to Saint Sebastian, Satan or the Samurai; from Beatrix Potter to Baudrillard, Boy Wonder, Bette Davis or Betty Boop; from Icarus to Iemanja or Izambard. These are complemented by musical references: jazz, darkwave, surreal pop, gothic dreamrock, a nondescript haze of dance, rave, jive, techno, acid, ambient / space genres, nostalgic musicals and cult celluloid (eg. "Twin Peaks"). Olokun strikes me as a majestic, chthonic prototype of the Fluke in "The X Files", while the concept of the island as a sentient being that hates or loves its flawed interloper, reminds me of "Lost".

When Oscar Wilde quipped "all bad poetry is sincere", he was expressing a paradox: that authors need to be at once immersed and detached; morality is self-indulgent. Poetic is harder to attain than Polemic. Gidney dances around this trap. It's exhilarating to read story after story by someone who not only refuses to preach, but who has no need to. One senses that storytelling is his natural element. Like Dante and Virgil in Hell, the protagonist of the second tale leads us through underworld clubs and bedrooms; each scene could be a canto of Inferno, where occupants writhe in desire, repeating their cycle of seduction. I'm reminded of a paradox observed by Zizek: that love (or desire) is at once an expression of our greatest freedom and our greatest prison, with phrases like "I cannot do otherwise", echoing down the ages like the fatal compulsion of Romeo and Juliet. This tale calls upon Cervantes' formula of obsessive hero Don Quixote (Oliver) and his comical, reassuring side-kick Sancho Panza (Pompeii).

Gidney's voice seems shamanic. With a few deft strokes he guides the reader into different states of consciousness, bending objects, landscapes and creatures into phantasmagoria, playing tricks like a shape-shifter, reminding me of Ben Okri's novel "The Famished Road", in which a spirit child of the Abiku slips in and out of dreamscapes and perceives spirits among the living. Stylistically, Gidney is closer to Italian magic-realist, Italo Calvino, or Britain's precocious A.S.Byatt. As Bloom suggests, great artists influence not only what follows but what precedes them. Their power stretches backwards in time, as well as forwards. My perception of magic realists or goths, including Poe, Borges and Dunsany, is altered by this new talent.
- Louisa John-Krol (wife of the Tin Teardrop)

I loved this book! It is the first short story collection from Craig Laurance Gidney and reading it, and then re-reading it, made me wish it was a longer collection or a part of a series. Gidney's voice is very assured and he expertly switches back and forth between first and third person narratives and different times and locals with ease.

Gidney's use of language is hauntingly beautiful and at once put me in mind of Tanith Lee or Storm Constantine. I also loved the way that he would play with myth and folklore, putting his own unique signature on them; from an African seagod to Desire personified, I found them all hard to shake as I proceeded to the next story.

It's hard to pick a favorite out of all these perfect gems but both "Etiolate" and "Strange Alphabets" spring immeadiately to mind. I loved the spin on the life of Arthur Rimbaud who is
"cursed by poetry." And the story of Oliver, who must comes to terms with what he desires and his own need to be wanted was darkly erotic. "Catch Him by the Toe" is straight up horror where a small town becomes a hunting ground for a creature bent on revenge, while "Circus-Boy Without a Safety Net" is a coming out story of a boy who follows his patron saint Lena Horne to New York.

Each and every tale in this collection is a joy to read and I was very happy I sought this book out. I hope you do the same! And thanks to Mr. Gidney; I can't wait for what's coming next!