I have finally finished Shadows on the Water Short Stories. This literal brick of a book has taken me from last Friday to today because it is so stuffed full of tales, some of which are too old fashioned for me to read quickly and easily. The cover also informs readers that this is “Gothic Fantasy”, although I think some of the stories are just plain Gothic with fantasy being only read between the lines.
If I ever revisit this book, I am going to skip so many of these older works. They are, almost all of them, dry. Often boring. Divorced from context, particularly the excerpts. Or poorly laid out, leading to confusion. There are so many reasons why I generally prefer the modern stories which are, first and foremost, stories. Not lectures or dissertations. But I should discuss what was read in this final section.
It starts with “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson, specifically chapter twenty-four. The protagonist (is his name Jim?) is adrift in a coracle, wanting to get back to land, or at least to the Hispania, where there’s water to drink. The only reason I can guess at what’s going on besides these details is because I’ve seen Muppet Treasure Island, obviously the best adaptation of the book. Actually, I have an abridged copy of the original novel on my shelf. My dad got it at the Scholastic Book Fair as a kid. After reading this, I think it’s going in the sell pile and I’m sticking to Muppets.
This is followed by Bram Stoker, yes of Dracula fame. But here are the first five chapters of “The Mystery of the Sea”, a different book that I’d never heard of before. Near as I can tell, a man is drawn to the sea at Cruden Bay and there he, with aid from a woman named Gormala, discovers that he has the second sight and a conduit to things others can’t even imagine. Actually, it was pretty decent, and I might be willing to read the rest of the book. Not online though, despite the book advertising that the rest is available on their website. I don’t need to stare at a screen that long.
Next is a collation of Polynesian myths concerning “Maui Seeking Immortality”. I’m not much impressed by W.D. Westervelt, who collected them. He lists a bunch of variations without actually telling the story all the way through. In fact, he often interrupts the story with his own observations. I’m not saying these things have no value, but I really wish he would have separated story from cultural, geographical, and observational data. It’s like…footnotes. Footnotes say “there’s an expansion on this information available, but you don’t have to interrupt the story if you don’t want to”.
Westervelt does it again with the (nominally) Hawaiian myth of “Hina and the Wailuku River”. This one is slightly better than its predecessor simply because there’s fewer variations on this myth than that of Maui. But it still suffers all the same problems.
“Kauhuhu, the Shark-God of Molokai” is from Hawaii as well and is the best of Westervelt’s collections. This is almost entirely story, with few if any notes about “real world” elements. It’s a fairly straightforward, if old-fashioned in execution, retelling of the myth. And wow, what a bloodthirsty myth. Then again, there’s a shark god to contend with.
The book concludes with Lucy Zhang’s story “Leftovers”. A young woman is dissatisfied with her life, doomed to be single forever. So she seeks after a strange creature that lives in the water. It’s an oyster that becomes a crocodile that becomes a dragon that becomes a woman. And it’s rumored that it can grant wishes to those it favors. The narrator isn’t so sure, but supports her friend.
And with that, it’s just the author bios and sad excuses for a copyright page. I mean, yes, as part of the author bio they say when the text was originally published and where, but it’s remarkably inefficient as a copyright page. I’m accustomed to a long list or a tight paragraph that functions more as a citation than a flourish. And true, all of the older works wouldn’t actually be listed because they’re past copyright. I just prefer my copyright page to be concise and easily located at the front or back of a book. Or both, as the case sometimes is. The actual copyright page here doesn’t even say that the author bios constitute an extension of the page, which it should.
Shadows on the Water has been a long and often frustrating read. Frustrating in that I really want to toss it into the sell pile…but I also really want to keep a lot of those modern stories. It comes back to the question of “how many is enough”. How many stories out of the fifty-five here need to be good enough to keep to justify the shelf space? How many of these stories are going to be a pain to find other copies of if I don’t keep it? If I find some other anthologies to go into the sell pile, can I then keep it?
If I’m counting accurately, there’s about a dozen stories I’m really invested in keeping. I could be generous and say that’s a quarter of the book, which still doesn’t sound like much. But…some of those are really good. I really think that I can make it work so long as I get rid of enough other anthologies to make the necessary space. I’m going to (finally) sell books tomorrow, so this is a prime time to evict more volumes. I don’t expect to bring home many, if any new books, but that’s fine. I still have more library books to finish.
Okay so, I did manage to clear enough space to keep the brick and as I was adding all the stories to my database – because I absolutely must keep track of my distinct short stories – I realized why the editor chose such a weird order. They’re alphabetical by contributor’s last name, except for the Foreword, which is of course at the front of the book. So all those bits of mythology that are just listed as “from Hawaii” or “Celtic Legend”? They’re in order based on the last name of the person who collected them. Which you don’t realize because those names are only at the end of the stories and in the author bios.
Honestly, alphabetical is just the laziest way to organize an anthology. And it shows that while someone wanted to find some really good stories as well as ones that span centuries of actual publication time, they didn’t care to put for the effort in order to maximize the reader’s experience. So, this is meat as a coffee table book, no more. Which is a shame because there really are good stories here.
And when I specified “modern” stories, I apparently meant “stories from the twenty-first century”. Because the only twentieth century stories are from the first decade or two, completely omitting everything from the 1920s through the 1990s. Considering that one of the later stories was originally published in Uncanny magazine, I think this shows a real blind spot on the part of the editor. We had to have multiple stories by Herman Melville and Jack London, but nothing from the 1950s? I’m pretty sure you could’ve found at least one great water story from that decade if you’d looked.
Ugh, I’m almost talking myself out of keeping this book after I just spent all that time updating my database. I should go poke at other things to read for a bit.
Other things like…comics. Next Saturday is Free Comic Book Day and I figured it might be nice to have a clean slate to start from. The big one this week is, of course, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #119. We get to see what happened when Zedd took Rita off into the depths of her own castle. Or at least, the end result. And Kiya is, thankfully, imprisoned again for the moment. But Billy has a bold new idea for how to reinforce barriers and protect the rangers when they morph. It just has a high cost. This is another quiet issue with things bubbling under. But I’m sure they’ll explode again soon.
Today I also had Robot + Girl #1, a free preview that was available. An adorable little robot is wandering a city, reflecting on how most humans are focused on their social media interactions more than anything else. It sees a girl holding up a sign saying “Free Hugs” and that’s exactly what she offers. The robot gets one for itself before heading off to its final resting place: a used robot parts warehouse.
Obviously the story doesn’t end there. This is just issue one after all. And it’s pretty cute. I don’t know that I have any interest in it, but it is probably decent in the long run.
mouse Reads Books 