Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

My latest book is out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is available now from Luna Press Publishing.

I must be honest: this book was written because I am a world-champion grudge-holder. I was a big fan of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis when I was little. Then came The Last Battle, the final book in the series, and it got chucked across a room. The kids all died in a train crash, yay! Except for Susan, because doubt and lipstick made her unfit for heaven, the harlot. That’s what you get for liking nylons and having the temerity to go to parties instead of sitting round whining about how much better you had it running for your life from wolves and witches. Susan aside, I suppose the rest of the kids had to die. They were, all of them, getting too old for Narnia and who wants to survive their teenage years, really? Better death by British Rail. Susan will just have to bury her entire family on her own. It’ll be a good lesson for her. Character-building.

(If you hear a slam now, that’s the sound of the book hitting the wall, echoing through decades.)

So, yes. I hated the book as a kid and I hate it now. Happily, I’m not the only one who does! From the vast amounts of Susan-centric fanfic out there, it’s plain that there are a lot of Narnia fans who also can’t stand The Last Battle. Good. That book deserves to be hated, and there’s a great deal of pleasure in reading through fanfiction archives and realising that there are a whole bunch of people hating together. Hatred gets things done. So does disgust. So does disappointment.

Together, those things have combined to give Susan, in hundreds of different stories, a better end than she gets in canon. There are also a number of stories, to be fair, where the poor girl has it even worse. What can I say: fanfiction is a haven for drama. (Don’t look at me like that. You read it too.) But whether the stories give her a happy ending or a tragic one, they are all, implicitly, interrogating The Last Battle in particular, and the rest of the Narnian canon in general, and the ways in which that interrogation works – the shared themes, the multiple points of attack – are just plain interesting. They say things not only about how we see Susan, but how we see ourselves.

And that’s worth investigating.

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers

Sauna and the Cartography of Swamps

OJ

I have a new chapter out! “The Cartography of Swamps: Making and Breaking Boundaries in Sauna” can be found in Baltic Horror in Film, Gaming and Literature, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and published by the University of Wales Press.

I have to admit that, when I saw the call for papers for this, I didn’t send in an abstract because I knew a great deal about Baltic horror. I actually knew very little. What I did have was unbridled love for the 2008 Finnish film Sauna, directed by Antti-Jussi Annila. Now, a lot of my academic work is just me taking the chance to write about media that I really enjoy – this is my nerdy hobby, after all, and I’m not wasting time on work I don’t like! – so this was my opportunity to talk, at length, about Sauna. Why wouldn’t I take that up?

Sauna, if you haven’t seen it (and you really should) is a historical horror, set in the late sixteenth-century, which follows a map-making expedition along the border of Sweden and Russia. These two countries had just come out of a war, so setting up a mutually-agreed-upon border was a chance to try and limit future conflict. The expedition includes two brothers: one a cartographer, and one a former soldier deeply traumatised by the war. They discover an unmapped village in the centre of a swamp, and if you’ve any exposure at all to wetlands in narratives you’ll be familiar with how they shift and destabilise plot. How can anyone expect a reliable border in a place where land and water are constantly shifting? Answer: they can’t. Of course, given this is horror, geographical boundaries aren’t the only thing to be transgressed, and the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of moral boundaries which really should not be crossed. It’s cartography and ethical behaviour, essentially, and it’s fantastic.

Even if you don’t read my paper, the film is well worth watching. It’s slow, creeping horror and wetlands. What’s not to love?

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers, SFF

Lunar Gothic and Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series

OJ

I have a new chapter out!

To be honest, it’s not really new. It came out last year and I missed it. Oh well, better late than never. “Sterility Across Chasms: Dead Worlds and Technological Imaginations in Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series” is available to read in Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination from Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon.

When I saw the call for papers for this, which really was years ago at this point – academic publishing is notoriously slow – I knew at once that I wanted to submit something. Lunar Gothic? That was too exciting to pass up. There was really only one choice of text for me, too.

I was obsessed with the Darkangel series as a kid. I can’t tell you how many times I took it out of the school library. It was vampires! On the moon! And the central romance fell apart because it turns out it doesn’t matter if you (literally) offer up your heart to a prince, he doesn’t have to love you for it and it doesn’t make him a bad person, it just means you get to transfer your previously rather limited ambitions to (literal) worldbuilding instead. The drama! The imagery! The dead Earth, hanging in the sky while gargoyles roamed a creepy lunar castle and a whole series of brides got their blood drained and hung around afterwards, whining. (To be fair, in their place I’d whine too.) Death! Rebirth! Fantastical creatures and artificial life!

That trilogy was weird as hell and I loved every page of it. Because I mostly write academic papers on my own time – it’s the world’s nerdiest hobby – I end up writing a lot about my favourite things and pieces of media over the years. And why not, I say. Any excuse to reread this series is a good one. And Gothic really can go anywhere…

Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

I have a new book coming out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is due out on the 18th of August, and pre-orders are open now at Luna Press Publishing.

Like many fantasy fans, I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I remember reading. I got it as a Christmas present and was utterly enthralled. As the years went on I read the rest of the books in the series, and they were all fine… and then I got to The Last Battle, which remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room in disgust.

The problem was Susan: exiled from Narnia for her disbelief and her liking for nylons, lipstick, and invitations, she was the only one of her entire family to survive the horrendous train crash that sent them all to Aslan’s country. Heaven, supposedly, and they were all so happy to be there, to die in this horrendous way, and I looked at that book – I can’t have been much older than twelve, the age that Susan was went she first went to Narnia – and was deeply, irrevocably, revolted by it.

I have held a grudge about that stupid book for decades. Then I started reading fanfiction, and I came across Narnian fanfiction, and it didn’t take very long after filtering the characters for Susan to discover that there were a lot of other people as repulsed by that storyline as I was. I started bookmarking, and then I started writing about it: how fanfiction authors were re-imagining Susan to give her a better life away from Narnia… and away from Aslan.

Good for them. I like their stories better. And I hope, if you read this, that you do to.

Horror, Short stories

How to Live with Polar Bears

OJ

I have a new story out! “How to Live with Polar Bears” is in the latest issue of Asimov’s. According to the magazine, the story “brutally terrorizes” the reader, which is a lovely description and exactly the effect I was going for.

It’s a bit of an odd story, to be honest. If it has a theme, technically it would be constructing a narrative in which we can live with polar bears, but there are a number of these narratives within the story and they don’t always fit together. They’re not even always the same genre, which is fun – for me at least, mashing together fairy tales and science fiction and animal horror. There are genetically engineered bears and bears transported to Antarctica to feed on the scientists who work at Scott Base, and there are polar bears coming for a very different sort of dinner in a little house made of seals. There’s also a woman who’s part bear herself, or who sometimes wants to be and is making it happen in different and unethical ways.

She’s not very nice, that woman. In my past stories there’s a number of decent protagonists, good people doing their best, but there are times when I just want to write a rather brutal perspective, because such a character is often the vehicle for a very black humour and I find that amusing to write as well as to read. I happen to think this story’s hilarious, but I may be the only one.

The main character, I admit, has few redeeming features. (She does feed people to polar bears, so what can you reasonably expect?) Then again, she’s trying to bond with, or at least develop a method of cohabitation with, one of the few species on Earth that will actually hunt humans. I’m interested in the ways we interact with other predators and the choices we make in doing so. This story came out of that.

Also, I wanted to Frankenstein a polar bear. That seemed like it might be fun… and it was.