It's Like Dr. Frankenstein Took A Knife, Edgy And With Electricity And I Think I'm Stretching The Comparison

I'm at the portion of Frankenstein where Victor returns to find William dead and his family broken from the death and the father says something to the effect of “rely on the justice of our laws, and the activity with which I shall prevent the slightest shadow of impartiality.” When I hear something like that, I think instead, man, you're looking the wrong way at it: You want the judges partial to you. You want them very partial to you.

Okay. I've read a lot, but having avoided Frankenstein, I feel like I've missed the original version of many things that I've read now that are playing off of it. In other words: I got to the scene where Frankenstein's monster is illuminated in the lightning and I wasn't terribly impressed when I first read it. I finished up the chapter and then realized: This is the one that started them all. This is the burst of lightning and I have seen it for the first time.

This is where they all come from. Ms. Shelley constructs it well, but man...I really want to be reading By Night In Chile, which I finally have in my possession. By Night In Chile is also about a realization in flashes of understanding, but that's really the extent of the commonalities of the two.

The other major "cover before the original" in my life is I'm On Fire, by Bruce Springsteen, or, should I say, I'm On Fire, by Hawks And Doves. Bruce's version, today, sounds tinny and stuck with an unfortunate synthesizer line, but it struck a chord in the 80's with its frank (dare I say earnest?) lust and its simplicity. Everyone, apparently, has covered it, from Kenny Chesney to Tori Amos to Johnny Cash and of the three (get ready for this), Ms. Amos' version ages the best.

But: The Chesney version and the Cash version both play up the earnestness angle of the song, leaving behind, almost entirely the undercurrent (and also main current) of naked lust. In other words, it does not have the vividness or terror of the original flash. It is a lesser reproduction of what came before.

Assuming that I understand the synthesizer line correctly in the original as something that is there and would be removed now, Hawks And Doves (former Planes Mistaken For Stars singer) gets it right. There are other instruments in the background, but mostly, its Gared with an acoustic and his gravely voice, which emphasizes the dirt, the sand, the grains, the fucking lust. (Finally, one of the few times I can use the word fucking and not have it be gratuitous and have it work, exactly, the way it is meant to. Vulgar, correctly.)

Now. The cover by Tori Amos is another story entirely. She uses the piano (like, obv.) to carry all of ideas and lets her own voice carry the lust for the song. And yes, her voice is lighter and is a little more fragile, but where it is supposed to, it carries that lust. Maybe it is the heavy breathing on the microphone that does it, but. It is pretty and also dirty, in a way that does justice to both.

Anyway. Point is. There is the original and then there are other things. In Frankenstein, I am getting an unadulterated dose of the original. It is terrifying, brilliant and fantastical.

Hawks. Doves. Fire. If you want to reverse engineer my love for Planes Mistaken For Stars, crank the amps as loud as they will go on this song and let the guy vocalize in a way that smiles, bawdily, through bloody gums and broken digits.

The Joker and the Luthor.

You just drew in your breath a little, didn't you? I did too.

Lex Luthor and the Joker interact. I completely forgot about this issue and it blew me out of the water. The way these “villains meeting” usually goes is they come up with an idea to kill one of their rivals and then one betrays the other so our hero can escape or win the day. It's mostly stuff for fans that really must know the answer who would win in a fight.

Enter Paul Cornell written and Pete Woods drawn Superman-free Action Comics run. Luthor is on a quest for more power and is being manipulated by everyone around him as he searches, vainly, for A Thing That Will Give Him More Power. (It's called a black sphere, which is a conduit to something that I'm not sure of, but it involves the refuse of last year's crossover. Literally.

The crossover threat spun out of the Green Lantern universe and ended up involving the Black Lanterns, who were evil. Or wanted to restore death. Or something. Look. What matters is that Luthor, for a two, three, four hour period was given incredible power to save the Universe from a extinction level threat. It was taken away from him when the Earth was no longer in danger of being killed.

He thinks, via these black spheres, discarded bits of malevolent energy from the black rings of the alien invaders, that he can harness an incredible amount of power. It should surprise no one to hear that Lex Luthor, man of Action, in this case, has cataloged their location and has made a list of all of them. There are a number of these strewn across Planet Earth, some in cities made entirely of traps, some in the Arctic Circle, some being guarded by Gorilla Grodd, but ignore all that for one sweet moment: The next one on the list is in the Joker's cell in Arkham Asylum.

Oh. Shit. Yes.

And before you begin, “but James, I don't know much about the Joker or Lex Luthor to pick up on many of the details that would make this thing sing” I tell you, “Trust me, you already know what you need to.”

Here's what you need to know: Lex Luthor is a man of science, devoted in two duties, one to advancing the human race and the other to kill Superman. (Bet you knew that already.) The Joker is a Nietzsche-inspired villain who believes life is a black comedy, kills lots of people and dresses up to do it. He's a deranged nihilist, in short. (Bet you know that already.)

And that's what makes the issue great, the multiple dichotomies, the multiple levels.

For all Luthor's Promethean posturing, he's a villain. He'd murder any number of people and commit crimes against humanity to kill Superman, a being that has made Earth its home and protected ordinary humans from extra-terrestrial invaders, falling rocks, guys with guns and anything dangerous or evil that the alien can put himself between humanity and it. The Joker makes no pretense to nobility. He's deranged, psychotic and willing to commit despicable acts because they have been done before and not punished.

Lex Luthor believes you are as you make yourself and the Joker believes that's a game for suckers.

You've got Lex Luthor, realist, man of science, there is a flow of time and it is a line kind of guy. You've got the Joker, the feral, violent nihilist, who believes history is multiple choice.

Lex Luthor is very serious about the future. The Joker lives in the moment. He kills in the moment, too, but that's another story.

Hell, both of them are serious about their superhero antagonists. Lex Luthor needs, must kill Superman, because the human race would evolve better with Superman out of the picture. The Joker, on the other hand, continues to use grisly means just to get Batman to see his point.

Or in other words: Chaos versus Reason, played in the key of villany.

But the most surprising part, is not that the Joker can see into the plot, not that Lex Luthor is being given the run around by a robot version of his arch-enemy's lover that knows it's a robot, but that the Joker is a romantic. The Joker was transformed by the loss of his innocence, to the point where he well, just look to your right.

That's...a really simple origin. He mistook meaninglessness for futility. Luthor came to the table ready to bargain, ready to interrogate and ready for any kind of hidden scheme. It is not lost on me that there really is something with a hidden scheme, in the room, something that can be bargained with and something that ought to be interrogated in that room, but unless Cornell pulls a “I knew it all along,” which I don't think he will, Luthor can't see it.

Hell, all Luthor had to do was ask, but of course, that was the one thing he couldn't do. The Joker might be bizarre, and irrational, but Luthor, the man who expected secrets within secrets and got the truth. Of course, from the person that Luthor expects the truth, there are secrets within secrets.

Back to the Joker, though. The Joker lives in a universe where people hold back extinction on a nearly annual basis, within the timeline and he's still hung up on the idea that life did not birth him with a meaning. Which might be why he's stuck in a box (even if he could escape it if he tried) and Luthor's out slobbering over power.

Anyway. Action 897. It's a really, really good issue and contains some cool philosophical stuff that's fun, even if you don't care about Superman or Batman villains.

Dillinger Escape Plan (who'se shirt I am wearing now) playing Nine Inch Nails' Wish, with, Nine Inch Nails. One of the lyrics works pretty well for the Joker. "I wish there was something real. I wish there was something true." Also, video is so goddamn sick. Press play already.

No Guilt, Only Pleasure

Of course the title's a lie. But you understand it's a lie, it's hopefully, hopefully, an oddity as a title around here and it'll get you to click.

Thus!

My guilty pleasure these days is Batman. No, not the psychedelic Batman trip done by Grant Morrison and a rotating artist pool that kills it on a regular basis, not the HOLYSHITMAN ground level stakeouts and near misses of Scott Snyder and Jock on Detective Comics (see right), not the can't slow down aesthetic of Batman and Robin, which Paul Cornell and Scott McDaniel showed up on the last minute and kicked out a jam on, but Batman, currently written and drawn by Tony Daniel.

It is as subtle as a car crash. There are other ways in which it is a crash, Catwoman's breasts are roughly as large as her head (see below), there's one young woman tied up and used as bait, the aforementioned Selina Kyle has a protege who calls herself Catgirl that even includes the ears. Anyway, it feels like Hush (written by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee) and I mean that in the worst way.

Daniel's style is a kind of Jim Lee impersonation that's a little bit scratchier and a with more emphasis on pencil lines than the other people working for the company, artistically. Also, there's a pretty good sense of movement in his splash pages. The writing, as I've alluded to is...pretty basic and trope-y, even while trying to introduce new villains. The Riddler has a daughter named Enigma, whom he takes out for father-daughter hero whoopings, I guess, Catgirl is the daughter of the perpetually overshadowed Gotham organized crime boss, Falcone and wears a lot of pink.

Yes, pink notwithstanding, this sounds a lot like the secret origin of Helena Bertinelli, aka Huntress. Get this: There's a Chinese PI named I-Ching, who is protecting a stolen girl called Peacock. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Hush, was, aesthetically, Batman's greatest hits. There's a fight with Superman, Clayface shows up as get this, a fake out, the Joker shoots somebody, Poison Ivy plays with men, Harley Quinn is dangerous and clumsy and would you believe that the Riddler has a brain-twister for Batman? Wow.

The phrase tour-de-force comes to mind. So does artistically bankrupt, now that I think about it. Anyway. Hush was drawn by Jim Lee and is now in a pencils only printing called Hush Unwrapped.

Tony Daniel's piece has basically the same problems, but updated. Look, there's Catwoman, helping out Batman, but now she's got a spunky female protege! (see right) Look, there's the Riddler surprising Batman, but this time it's with his daughter, who is energetic and naïve! Look! Here's an illustrator that looks like Jim Lee!

It's the same.

Whereas: Detective Comics introduces new villains, ones that act in ways the old ones didn't. Cornell's Batman and Robin throws a new villain for a twist: She's a presumed dead piece of Bruce's arm candy who returns and exploits Batman's blindspot. Morrison's Batman and Robin throws Darkseid at the heroes, in more forms than one, but that's only after they introduce the Circus of Strange, British themed villains and entirely recast the Joker.

Daniel's villains? Thiny disguised Fu Manchu or yellow peril analogues. See, uhhhh, below.

But Daniel's Batman is so big, so fucking dumb and so fucking hard to take seriously that I can't help but like it, in a way that's absolutely insulting. Batman looks jacked, punches dudes, gets punched occasionally and then jumps off a building. Toby will hate me for this, or at least chuckle, but Batman is the Jersey Shore of the Batman series of books. I know what's coming, it's almost guaranteed to be more ridiculous than plausible and in a medium where the "plausible", "ground level" Batman just found an Iron Man style suit of flying armor to take to the sky against the guy who just turned into an evil skin disease pterodactyl, that's a feat within itself.

Occasionally, Daniel has moments I like. One was that Catgirl *shudder* "couldn't read" the street signs from on the rooftop where she and Batman were perched, the implication being that Batman knew where they were without having to look at street signs.

Anyway. I don't need to read street signs to know where I am with Daniel.

With A Thousand Words To Say But One by Darkest Hour. Short version: Thrash metal with melody. Really. It doesn't suck. Promise.

Community. Buses.

I was on one of four buses on yesterday. Someone else's broke down on the highway about dinnertime. Lost a tire and in the dark, the drivers of my bus and the one with the lost tire scampered betwixt the traffic to find it.

Within a quarter of an hour, at least two people around me suggested the other three buses should leave. With the road service not arriving for 2+ hours, I tried not to think about what that would mean. It would mean abandoning an entire busload of people so three for every single one could make it back to the compound on time for dinner. It's not barbaric. It's not even cruel. It's...just without empathy or an understanding of what it means to be a community.

And that's not even strictly a utilitarian analysis. It avoids the question of how much it would cost the people left on their own on a bus in a place where they can't urinate or defecate for two hours while the lucky people get to carry on so they can get dinner. Let's not misplace my outrage. I'm sure, given enough of a timespan, I'd say to leave the bus. But it didn't even get to forty five minutes before people were talking about ditching their fellow travelers so they could be more comfortable while affixing more suffering to their fellow travelers. People they know! Maybe even like!

I know there's the joke about cannibalism that people resort to it too early, but seriously! Gimme 45 minutes. At least! That, apparently, is far too much to ask. It's disappointing. Are people really that selfish? I tried to convince myself, when I was on my hands and knees, cleaning up broken glass, at 7 a.m. yesterday morning, in the dark, that people really aren't that bad. It's harder to sustain that line of thinking when you're being insulted by the same guy whom you let in when he was interrupting your sleep 4 hours ago, cleaning up tiny pieces of glass, apparently too loudly.

Man, fuck that guy. And to be fair, there's a little bit of him in me, when I feel like being imperious and an asshole and who knows what the shit else. Of course, it's not for him that anyone is kind, right? They're kind and generous and patient because they want to be, feel like they're compelled to be, ought to be, or maybe, because they don't want to be like him or contribute to that.

I hope.



Songs For Teenagers seems appropriate here, if only for it's title. It's a great song in its own right, and if you look around on youtube for it, you'll find not only the original version by Florida's Fake Problems, but also a cover by The Gaslight Anthem. Enjoy.

A Storm Front In New Crobuzon

Perdido Street Station is unfamiliar. Storm Front not at all and I like both for those reasons.

Storm Front flaunts its influences on its first chapter, even in its first paragraph. The first paragraph is about how the mailman usually announces himself. See also: The Postman Always Rings Twice. Within the first chapter, we learn working wizard Harry Dresden is a) behind on rent and b) received an evasive female caller that wants to meet him about a missing persons case. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because it's basically the beginning of every noir story ever.

You get introduced to, next, a no bullshit police lieutenant, who needs Dresden to investigate a fresh crime scene. Surprisingly enough, she's a woman, Karrin Murphy. By the second page of the second chapter, Dresden's opened the door for the woman and called himself old school.

By the third chapter, he's been told by the Mafia to keep his nose out of the case, that the mob will “double” whatever the city is paying him to take a vacation for a couple weeks. He says no. (Of course.) There's a sour pub owner that Dresden is on a first name basis with and a voluptuous woman that wants something from him that lets Dresden peek down her shirt in attempt to get information out of him. (After a quick glance, and only that, he reiterates how old-fashioned he is.) He has to meet a vampire, cross basically all of the people who trust him in an attempt to solve the case.

Would you be surprised to find out that the police lieutenant is having her unseen bosses (Commander Fairweather, in case you were wondering) breathe down her neck or that one of the women is playing Dresden? No. No you wouldn't, because it's all shit you've been before.

It's not like the magic is much more astonishing. Maybe you'll surprised to hear that he brews a love potion and doing so blows up in his face? Mostly, magic accounts for the high octane fights and hijinx. Look, a talking skull and an absent-minded fairy to trap!

And yet, I blitzed through Butcher's paperback in two evenings and I'm stoked for the second, third and fourth books. (I suspect by book five or six he's going to be repeating ideas out the ass.) I mean, yes, I'm a total sucker for the genre and this one gets me right in the sweet spot. There's enough hijinks to keep things moving and there's enough twists (not that they're telegraphed, but it wants to be a noir so bad and I know what to look for) that it keeps me happy.

Compare:

Within the first chapter of Perdido Street Station, we see the city from outside in the first person, from a character that's not named or described, on the run from something, and headed toward a brief hope that it might be whole again. You arrive in the city from the first chapter, as you approach it, from the perspective of an outside on a boat coming into the city, hearing only rumors from the nebulous narrator. The first two sentences: Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. Right there, you get a clear sense of coming closer to a city center and that the narrators been traveling for a long time, whether hours, days or weeks, who knows.

In the next chapter, we meet an adorable couple, a female artist (Lin) and a youngish sorcerer (Issac), waking up with each other in their apartment. They wake up together and make breakfast. Issac, the dude, is predictably sleepy and wants to go back to bed. Familiar enough, right? That's when you see, slowly, that Lin has red skin, four pairs of insectoid legs and can't speak, so instead signs. That's before she opens up her head and reveals mandibles, not to mention, tiny delicate wings and that's before she and Issac start having sex, the anatomical possibilities of which Mieville leaves up to our imagination.

Lin, then leaves, because she has to go to work. Again, not really surprising, until you find out that she's going to meet a mysterious buyer that she's certain Issac won't approve of. It's a lucrative commission to do portrait of the lord of organized crime in the city. Yes. The woman gets in trouble and chooses it and, for the record, stays on top of it, until Issac fucks it up. (Not that Issac would know, which I suspect is another theme.) Other main characters are an underworld go-between, a Hutt-esque bartender that the regulars are familiar enough with that they cheerfully order from him.

Let me repeat the comparison: In Storm Front there's a femme fatale that appears in front of the wizened world-weary male narrator and there's hedging. It's probably on the level and it's probably nothing. (Of course it's not, but anyone who likes noir is not everyone who might read the story.) In Perdido, a young female decides she's going to take the chance of working with a crime lord because it will set her up for life and she'll be able to make whatever she wants post-faco and there's no hedging: This shit is dangerous. For Dresden it's enough to get by, for Lin, it's about getting free.

And...after reading Perdido, I wasn't psyched to read the next book in the series. When I finished Storm Front, I was, and this will not surprise you, psyched to read the next one, which, of course, I don't have. And it wasn't because Storm Front had a happy ending and Perdido ended with more movement and running, either. Perdido was exhausting, whereas Storm Front was invigorating. I knew, from the first paragraph of Storm Front, what I was getting into. Perdido, less so. I couldn't go on autopilot for the book or use my knowledge of the genre as a crutch to catch the little references. It surprised me and terrified me in equal measure, and pretty often to boot, so I know I'll be going back to Mieville eventually.

But Butcher? Like popcorn, I want more and I can handle it, right now.

Today's is the Out_Circuit's Across The Light. It has little or nothing to do with the thing, except that it's what I listen to when I need to chill out at night and I just want to be a little ambient. Crossed with Paul Duffield's Signal, I'm de-stressed and ready for sleep.

Perdido Street Station, Empty.

First things first: Amazing book. Like Bolano, I feel like there's a blast radius after the book finishes. It weighs on me and so I went to Butcher's Storm Front and was reinvigorated. The “new weird” designation makes sense for Mieville, as there's usually a new strange creature around the corner or at least, at every chapter.

A bit spoiler, but something that's fun. The city's leaders are talking to the Ambassador of Hell, in a private chamber, in which they require spell protection (which has a very limited time frame) to even enter. They are standing in front of the seated Ambassador, who is dressed in a natty black and red suit and speaks as a charming human negotiator would. If they blink involuntarily or stretch, however, for a brief instant, the illusion breaks, and the room is viewed as a festering, fiery pit of shrieking souls, in which there is a lot of screaming and the Ambassador is revealed as a hyena headed grotesque creature.

But: They can hear reverberations of the screaming, screeching words the Ambassador is saying. The Ambassador and the group can't come up to a deal, so the group leaves and as the group is going back upstairs to the normal part of the building, one of them realizes something: Guys, I don't think the screaming voice was the reverberations. I think the normal voice we heard was the reverberation.

Holy shit. Instead of mankind piercing the illusion of sweetness of devils, as so often happens in fiction and literature, the sweet voice is what the humans convinced themselves of to ignore the voice they believe to be true, the shrieking and screaming. Smile a moment: What other horror can you convince yourself isn't so bad?

It's that kind of reversal that endears me to Mieville. Mieville's characters and writing can be elegant, stubborn, grounded, ornery or dropping huge, poisonous hints to the reader, something that sticks out for a page, like a secret between Mieville and the person that pays attention. Also, he's smart and super liberal, so that doesn't hurt, either. This a committed Socialist, not a fly by night operator that fucked a co-ed with a poster of Che Guevara on their pasty, mauve dorm wall. A guy who, in the year 2001 received 1.2 percent of the vote as a Socialist candidate for the House of Commons.

I've been working on a review that says something to the effect of: Kraken was Mieville having fun, after what I imagine was a grueling writing process of The City & The City, since Kraken has so many of Mieville's favorite things (and completely ridiculous bullshit) in close proximity. He's got his two male leads running around with Star Trek props, which, thanks to the power of magic, have transmuted into working phasers, a cephalopod MacGuffin, gimp mask Nazi assassins and the crux of the book being decided by who has most powerful and sprightly imagination.

Perdido, then, comes a decade prior (Perdido, 2000, Kraken, 2010), and incidentally, is weird and no fun. It's a scary book. Sure, there's a circus of strange, but that's aqs much to show Issac's state of mind than actual levity. Case in point: Lin ends up brain damaged thanks to the beast that Issac unleashed, Issac pissed off everyone who has a powerful organization in the city, the person to whom he promised flight and there's another woman with Issac, who is not brain damaged.

And now, they're disguised and leaving the incorporated limits, weighed down by Lin, who is now significantly less competent, Issac's guilt and everyone's culpability in a plan that saved New Crobuzon at the cost of a basically innocent human life, the lives of their assorted friends and the ire of every power player in the city.

On the plus side, our heroes (???) met a for real God, the cryptic, nonsensically verbalizing Watcher, a spider of titanic proportions, who'se plenary existence is very much put into danger by the terror of the last half of the book, saved a city, even if they never can take credit for doing so.

I'm not sure what that arithmetic shakes out to, but I know it left me cold, in the best way. Luckily enough, I had Butcher's first Dresden Files book to start, and that's where I'll pick up in the next piece.

Since we discuss hell in this, a little heavy metal feels appropriate. And by a little, I mean five minutes worth of some of the finest vintage available. Here, have Dead Fathers Wading in the Bodygrounds, by Trap Them.

“We're the healers, we're the providers, we're the shelters and the badges and the sirens and the cadence and the martyrs. We are the old graves digging the new.” Good old fashioned doomy metal, nastier and with attention to detail. This is not supposed to make you happy. This is supposed to dump a half empty gascan on the rage inside you. Put your horns up, child, and bang your head.

Frankenstein To Rome By Way Of Perdido Street Station

This one's late. Here's why: I'm not doing these with a buffer. It's my fault and no one else's. In response to and because of the fact that I'm going to be away from the Internet for the weekend, this is the first of the three pieces that will be up tonight. Call it the China Mieville Triptych. I have another two books by Mieville with me, so I don't see his influence becoming less pronounced on me, but also, because the other book I read, Jim Butcher's Storm Front, (the first book of the Dresden Files series) also has magic and a cynical outlook and was sooooooooo much quicker to read. That doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Anyway. This one is a comparison to Frankenstein, which I have chosen for my next A Theory Of book. What will be Wednesday's will be whatever Mieville I remember, on its own. And what will be Friday's is Perdido Street Station compared to the first Dresden Files book.

The other reason why is because my flights to Rome ended up arriving...eight hours late, I just went to bed Monday night and didn't have internet access until today, Thursday.

Which means I need to stitch this thing together, using whatever I've been reading and whatever I remember from Frankenstein. As you might have guessed from the title, I've been working my way through China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, a book about a lot of things, but also about a far too curious scientist meddling with things he shouldn't. In Frankenstein, it's, well, the scientist named Frankenstein, shooting life into a waiting creature he curated and created, using miles of blood vessels, discarded brains, body parts and whatever else he could find. In Perdido, it's an absent minded sorceror called Issac, living in a cosmopolitain shithole called New Crobuzon feeding a curious recreational drug to a caterpillar that blossoms into a soot-black terrifying creature of the night, which exists in multiple dimensions, can cut through armor like a knife through a receipt, flies adroitly and drinks the dreams and knowledge matter of its prey (anything, including apparently, a very Hell, who'se ambassador refused overtures to help the city.). Issac didn't know that going in. He just kept the caterpillar around because it didn't eat normal food and he pitied it.

Perdido and Kraken have a number of similar plot elements (along with The City & The City.) There's a skunky/manipulative head of an academic department who seems haughty and ends up being evil and behind one of the growing threats. There's a failed strike against a overclass (not present in City, IIRC). Authorities are at best, well-intentioned and ineffective (well-intentioned in City and Kraken, evil in Perdido and ineffective against the growing threat in all three) at worst, careless, responsible for the threat and ineffective (the trifecta is in Perdido.) There's also a cobbled together resistance which is startlingly effective against the threat (Kraken, Perdido).

In all these though, the cobbled together bits work the best. Apparently, trained militia can't hit the snake moths any of the time, but our heroes, only a couple of which have any kind of history with pistols can, 2/10 times. Oh shit, there's also a member of the underclass, ignored and underestimated by their masters, who rise in ways that save our heroes' ass. (Kraken, Perdido, maybe City) Honestly, when I read the Scar next, I am putting money on the idea that there's going to be a rising underclass member, an evil academic, and negligent, myopic authorities.

That said, Dr. Frankenstein could be a villain in a Mieville book: He brings life to something he created and then treats it like a thing without autonomy. He's also evil, but in a way that doesn't see himself way, or at least bad. Frankenstein feels a lot, lot denser. The type is smaller and is spaced even more shorter than Perdido, but I think the expectation of Frankenstein weighs on me.

There's another bit about Frankenstein that Mieville doesn't have. (Mieville's also not one of the celebrated authors of all time. That's a thing.) Frankenstein, or at least the first forty-nine pages of it I've read is immensely quotable.

“I shunned my fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.” Gives you an idea of the guy's state of mind as well as the fact that he might in the back of his mind, thinking about what he's doing is wrong.

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.” This might be Mary Shelley in a self-deprecating moment. I can see her writing that with a sly smile.

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never allow a passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge ought to be an exception this rule.” That last one was on page 44, just before Chapter Five of Volume One and just before Frankenstein flips the switch on his now famous monster. That, kids, is how you do foreshadowing.

Song is called The Disarming Smile, by the World/Inferno Friendship Society. It's from their new record, which is a lot...jauntier than I would have expected. (Except for the track about a friend's suicide.) Think of what the band would be whistling as they're walking away from a crime sporting a shitfaced grin and that's about it. Not exactly new territory for the band, but less agitated. It's clear: the band knows something you don't.

Think more Hothouse Flowers and less Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater and you're about there.