some recent reading
Jun. 26th, 2014 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've gotten no further in Bitter Eden than I had when I posted about it two days ago. As I said, not an easy read.
In other reading, I've tried a couple of books recommended by Ellen Datlow in one of her The Year's Best Horror anthologies.
The German, by Lee Thomas, is about a Texas town during the Second World War. A series of brutal murders of teenage boys sparks panic, and blame soon centers on the town's German immigrants, particularly on an unmarried loner. You can predict most of what happens next. The German a pretty standard novel about Why Prejudice Is Bad, except for one extremely weird authorial choice. It's strongly suggested, although never outright stated, that the titular German, Ernst Lang, is actually Ernst Rohm, having survived his 1934 murder through supernatural means he doesn't understand. And the text tries very very hard to rehabilitate Rohm from being, you know, a Nazi. Thomas, on the basis of no evidence I'm aware of, presents Rohm as not being an anti-semite or a racist, just someone who wanted to end economic and class injustices. Based on what little I know of Rohm, it's true that he took the "socialist" part of National Socialist more seriously than it was intended to be taken, but he was STILL A NAZI. Thomas at least doesn't entirely whitewash Rohm's taste for violence, but on the other hand, Thomas implicitly argues that he's become a nicer guy since he died, someone capable of tenderness and longing for emotional connection. I don't buy it, and it bothers me that Thomas's attempts to rehabilitate Rohm don't include him feeling any remorse for his role in the rise of Nazism (though he does manage to give a speech to a young neighbor boy on the topic of Why Prejudice Is Bad). It's just . . . weird, and while the character Ernst is unjustly blamed for murders he didn't commit, I'm still extremely uncomfortable with the way I'm supposed to sympathizer with Ernst's vicitmization while the book glosses over all the oppression he was responsible for. (Also, I felt Thomas ultimately endorsed the worldview he places in Rohm's mouth, that human nature is innately cruel and violent, that everyone will torture and murder if they think they can get away with it. I think that's a moral abdication that erases the responsibility of those people--very far from being everybody--who do torture and murder.)
Apparently this kind of attempt to rehabilitate Rohm just because he was gay, and because his gayness happened to be seized upon as an excuse to eliminate him as part of SS's power grab against Rohm's SA, is a thing these days? I can understand it as a backlash against the "Nazis were all gay and that was part of their evil" trope that was dominant for quite a long time (really, this appeared in journalism and in serious books about Nazism at least into the 1960s), but, honestly, I don't think it's setting back the cause of equality to say that someone can be queer and still be a rotten human being for unrelated reasons.
Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story tells of a 1937 British expedition to a Norwegian Arctic island that intended to overwinter and study the climate etc. A string of bad luck pares the original five-man team down to just our narrator, Jack, who only joined up because his scientific ambitions were ruined by the Depression. Jack now finds himself alone in constant darkness. Dark Matter is scary as hell in a very primal way, tapping into our fears of what might be out there in the darkness, but it's not gory or gratuitously violent. It's also well-written and an engaging read, and unlike Dan Simmons's The Terror, to which Datlow compares it, it's not homophobic either. I liked it a lot.
In other reading, I've tried a couple of books recommended by Ellen Datlow in one of her The Year's Best Horror anthologies.
The German, by Lee Thomas, is about a Texas town during the Second World War. A series of brutal murders of teenage boys sparks panic, and blame soon centers on the town's German immigrants, particularly on an unmarried loner. You can predict most of what happens next. The German a pretty standard novel about Why Prejudice Is Bad, except for one extremely weird authorial choice. It's strongly suggested, although never outright stated, that the titular German, Ernst Lang, is actually Ernst Rohm, having survived his 1934 murder through supernatural means he doesn't understand. And the text tries very very hard to rehabilitate Rohm from being, you know, a Nazi. Thomas, on the basis of no evidence I'm aware of, presents Rohm as not being an anti-semite or a racist, just someone who wanted to end economic and class injustices. Based on what little I know of Rohm, it's true that he took the "socialist" part of National Socialist more seriously than it was intended to be taken, but he was STILL A NAZI. Thomas at least doesn't entirely whitewash Rohm's taste for violence, but on the other hand, Thomas implicitly argues that he's become a nicer guy since he died, someone capable of tenderness and longing for emotional connection. I don't buy it, and it bothers me that Thomas's attempts to rehabilitate Rohm don't include him feeling any remorse for his role in the rise of Nazism (though he does manage to give a speech to a young neighbor boy on the topic of Why Prejudice Is Bad). It's just . . . weird, and while the character Ernst is unjustly blamed for murders he didn't commit, I'm still extremely uncomfortable with the way I'm supposed to sympathizer with Ernst's vicitmization while the book glosses over all the oppression he was responsible for. (Also, I felt Thomas ultimately endorsed the worldview he places in Rohm's mouth, that human nature is innately cruel and violent, that everyone will torture and murder if they think they can get away with it. I think that's a moral abdication that erases the responsibility of those people--very far from being everybody--who do torture and murder.)
Apparently this kind of attempt to rehabilitate Rohm just because he was gay, and because his gayness happened to be seized upon as an excuse to eliminate him as part of SS's power grab against Rohm's SA, is a thing these days? I can understand it as a backlash against the "Nazis were all gay and that was part of their evil" trope that was dominant for quite a long time (really, this appeared in journalism and in serious books about Nazism at least into the 1960s), but, honestly, I don't think it's setting back the cause of equality to say that someone can be queer and still be a rotten human being for unrelated reasons.
Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story tells of a 1937 British expedition to a Norwegian Arctic island that intended to overwinter and study the climate etc. A string of bad luck pares the original five-man team down to just our narrator, Jack, who only joined up because his scientific ambitions were ruined by the Depression. Jack now finds himself alone in constant darkness. Dark Matter is scary as hell in a very primal way, tapping into our fears of what might be out there in the darkness, but it's not gory or gratuitously violent. It's also well-written and an engaging read, and unlike Dan Simmons's The Terror, to which Datlow compares it, it's not homophobic either. I liked it a lot.
