The first thing you need to understand is that I am incredibly bad at watching TV. For example, the Gormenghast miniseries only has four episodes. I watched three in quick succession, and then forgot about it until several months later, and watched the fourth one without realizing it was the last episode. The other thing you have to understand is that my taste is terrible by normal metrics. I am having the best time with a TV show or movie when something is kind of off or slightly broken in a way that gives the entire experience texture. I also prefer it if the costumes look like they were made on purpose by someone who took every opportunity to add more lace, velvet, leather, or spikes (as the situation may or may not call for it), or, alternatively, like they had no money and raided the closet of a long-neglected community theater group.
For these reasons I pretty much only watch shows found on Tubi. Also for these reasons, I absolutely loved Gormenghast.
The Countess, possibly the only sensible person in this story. And that’s on a big bell curve.
The Gormenghast miniseries came out in 2000, and is based on the series of novels written by Mervyn Peake, published in the late 1940s-50s. I read the first one and a half books several years ago1 but was utterly unaware that the miniseries existed until I came across a screencap of Jonathan Ryhs Meyers as Steerpike on Pinterest.2 I am not sure if this is due to my general obliviousness RE television, or because it wasn’t easily available in the US.
Slight delay in this month’s edition due to finishing up a short story submission that was doing it’s best to kill me. I survived. The story has been submitted. Now I can stop suffering, and go back to my novel WIP (different flavor of suffering). I also, unrelated, got a new short story acceptance, which I will post more about later.
I love this cover. Art by Alex Eckman-Lawn
Today I’m reviewing Molly Tanzer’s new novella, And Side by Side They Wander, in which a group of humans set out on a heist to reclaim several works of art that were taken by aliens in exchange for fixing climate change and various other human-inflicted problems on Earth. Though they agreed to return the art when humanity proved responsible enough to care for it, the aliens have reneged on their promise, and humans lack the technological power to fight them over it.
I went into this novella thinking it was going to be about art repatriation, but it’s really more about copies: the differences between the real, the fake, and duplicates that lie somewhere in between (or beyond). The novella incorporates not just artistic copies but clones, robot duplicates of real people, and strange mushroom-derived mimicry. I was actually pretty relieved that the issues of art repatriation were more plot scaffolding than thematic core, because in all honesty the way people discuss this topic online drives me nuts. Sometimes the issue isn’t that complicated (The Parthenon Marbles. Just give them back). Sometimes different groups might have valid claims to an object. Sometimes you need to not hand objects over to scammers who are going to sell them on the black market. Etc.1
Once again the end of the month is upon us. My plan is to post monthly updates of some kind, but then I think “well I haven’t really done anything this month, have I?”
I have another review in progress, this time featuring art history and Molly Tanzer’s novella And Side By Side They Wander, so we’ve all got that to look forward to. In the meantime, here’s what else I’ve been up to, from least to most relevant:
Occasionally I find myself reading a series of unrelated books that fall into an unplanned pattern: similar topics, similar themes. At the beginning of the year I read multiple historical fiction novels set during the Tudor period, which mostly illuminated how little I know about the Tudors. More recently, I encountered two books that happened to fall into the unlikely category of Gay French Werewolf Retellings, and they got me thinking about retellings in general. The first is Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King, the second is Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan. Both books were enjoyable, but each takes a wildly different approach to the representation of history and legend, to different ends.
Etienne Delaune, Wolf Hunt. Not medieval, but fun to look at.
The Wolf and His King drew my attention back when it was announced because it’s a queer retelling of Marie de France’s lais “Bisclavret,” and broadly speaking, retellings of medieval French narrative poems are a little thin on the ground. So my first thought was: interesting! My second thought was: what are they going to do about the wife, though?
My misgivings on that second point were well-founded, unfortunately, but I’ll get back to that.
Welcome to Vespertine Dispatch, a newsletter about writing, reading, art, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
Who Are You?
E.M. Morrissey, writer of dark fantasy and science fiction. In a past life I completed a PhD in Japanese Art History. I have a few short stories out and am working on a novel, which is taking approximately forever.
