Today, reader, I'm going to review an anthology.
I love short stories. I have never been able to write them myself - as I'm sure you can tell by the content of this blog, my strengths lie in nonfiction writing - but I have always consumed them avidly. I find great comfort in their self-containment. I have resisted reviewing anthologies until this point because they are so difficult to review; individual short stories should stand on their own merit, and I am loath to heap them together into a single review.
But Dangerous Women has riled me, reader. I am well and truly angry at this book, and the men who put it together - so a review it shall have.
Let's begin.
Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner R. Dozois...
...is incredibly frustrating.
The title implies strongly that the short stories within the anthology will be about dangerous women. I was excited about the concept - it's nice to be represented in fiction every so often. I love reading strong female characters, especially those who know the thirst for revenge.
My excitement was misplaced. This is not a book full of short stories featuring dangerous women. This is not even a book full of stories featuring strong women. Most of the stories are about sexy women, and how they make men crazy with their magical sex powers. Several of the stories feature women merely as afterthoughts, as ornamentation, augmenting tales of male misadventure.
Because this isn't a typical novel review, I'll dispense with my usual formatting and simply give you an emotional highlight reel of what it was like to read Dangerous Women. This will be an experiment, reader. You and I will have to see for ourselves how it works out.
Let's get to it.
Story: Some Desperado by Joe Abercrombie
Made me feel: Excited, optimistic
The first story in the anthology, and reader, it was beautiful. A promising start that increased my excitement with regards to the stories ahead. A strong female lead, cutthroat and ferocious, and undeniably dangerous.
Story: The Hands That are Not There by Melinda Snodgrass
Made me feel: Confused. Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?
The fourth story in the anthology. This story, narrated by a male protagonist, describes a stripper. Who may be a rebel. Or maybe she isn't! Reader, we never find out; but we do find out a lot about how sexy the 'dangerous' woman in the story is. It's not a bad story by any stretch of the imagination, but it sets a tone with which we'll unfortunately grow familiar over the course of the anthology: sexy lady uses dangerous feminine wiles to ruin a man.
Story: Bombshells by the delightfully named Jim Butcher
Made me feel: Deeply relieved
Magnificent! Perhaps the book can be redeemed after all? Maybe The Hands That are Not There was a fluke, included by accident, things happen, all can be forgiven. In Bombshells (story #5), the female protagonists are skilled, fearless, and capable. They are strategic and smart and yes, you should absolutely feel threatened by them. Within the first few paragraphs, the line "So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters' shower." - I laughed out loud. It's nice to see one's demographic represented in works of fiction.
Story: Wrestling Jesus by Joe R. Landsdale
Made me feel: I had to put the book down and go out to a face-to-face with someone who said he could get me a passport so that I might leave Berlin, and good thing, too, because I nearly threw it out a window. The book, not the passport. Abject disdain.
What in the name of Agent Hawthorne's pet corgi* did I just read? Again, a fine story - I can recognize good writing even if it's not my particular cup of Earl Grey Cream - but how on earth did this make it into an anthology about dangerous women? The woman, in the case of story 7, is a fickle vixen who will only sleep with the best wrestler in the ring. Old men continue to fight over her long past their prime. She does nothing in the story. If I recall correctly, she does not even speak. This story doesn't get an "F" on the literary Bechdel test - it gets a "What are you doing here? You don't even take this class. I'll check the roster... yeah, you're not even enrolled at this school, kid, get out of here."
*(Give Buttercup a pat on the head for me, Hawthorne. She's such a good dog!)
Story: I Know How to Pick 'Em by Lawrence Block
Made me feel: Outrage. I found myself idly lighting matches and throwing them into the wind after reading this one - my muscle memory wishing I could burn this story to the ground.
The ninth story opens with disdain for the female character. "Woman like her, she'd have to be the star in all of her productions." What is the writer saying with this line? Don't you empathize with the woman, reader, she's bossy.
I am going to spoil this story for you, reader. I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, because I'm angry just remembering it. The male protagonist/narrator picks up a woman in a bar. A hot woman - the narrator spends a full page describing just how hot she is. They make out in the parking lot. Here's another excerpt: "I thought of doing her right there, just throwing her down and doing her on the gravel [...] Throw her a fast hard one, pull out and stand up while she's still quivering, and be out of there before she can get her game up and running."
So that's about what we're working with.
They go to a motel and have sex that is very satisfying for her, but not for him (this will be important later). He fantasizes briefly about beating her. She tries to convince him to murder her husband. He reminisces about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother (perhaps she's supposed to be the 'dangerous woman' here?). Then, our protagonist literally says "my turn" before flipping his bedmate over, and 'riding her long and hard'. Poetry, no? He finally orgasms as he chokes her to death.
At this point, reader, I wondered - is this a joke? Maybe this anthology is intended to be a satirical take on how fiction treats women. I'm still not sure whether or not that's the case, to be quite honest with you.
Story: The Girl in the Mirror by Lev Grossman
Made me feel: Like I was rubbing aloe vera on a sunburn - the relief was there, but it didn't last long.
I love Lev Grossman's work, across the board. This story - the twelfth in the anthology, if you're keeping track of these things - is really an excerpt from the excellent third book of his Magicians trilogy (a series I devoured and will someday review on this blog as "divine"). Readers of the series will know, then, that [spoiler, you should expect these by now but this is fair warning] is the most dangerous of women: Alice, who was turned inhuman by magic she couldn't control. Plum, our female protagonist, is in her own right at least a little dangerous - in that I-know-just-enough-to-be-dangerous kind of way. I do wish that, for the sake of the anthology, it wasn't a male teacher saving the day - but then, heroes aren't the point of this anthology, are they? The dangerous women are. And Alice, for whom Grossman titled his excerpt, is well worthy of the descriptor "dangerous."
Story: City Lazarus by Diana Rowland
Made me feel: Deeply weary. It was all I could do to finish the anthology after this one.
Early in this, the fourteenth story, our protagonist is at his friend Peter's house. Peter's lady friend wants Peter to have sex with her. Peter doesn't feel like it, so invites the protagonist to satisfy her needs instead. Protagonist shoves Lady Friend into the bedroom, and emerges a few minutes later, flush with masculine swagger, saying "I wasn't trying to make her happy." We never hear anything about her again, reader, but it's a good snapshot of the relationship between the sexes in this story. This was apparently one of the very best stories out there, and the editors of this anthology picked it out of the crowd. They read it, said "oh, yes, this will be excellent for our collection of short stories about fierce, strong women!" They paid money for it, and published it. They did all of that on purpose, reader.
More about this story: It's strippers, again. One particular stripper. Apparently that is one of the primary occupations that Dangerous Women seek out, because how better to wield our Feminine Wiles against men? Well, the woman has wiles, and wield them she does. The end of the story is satisfying, but only because the rest of it is so painful to read - the outright repellent male protagonist gets his comeuppance, and our dangerous woman is finally revealed as dangerous in the penultimate paragraph of the story.
I will share a story of my own with you, reader - a true one, since (as I mentioned before) fiction is not my strong suit. I once went on a date - in the time before I was on the run, obviously. We watched a movie with an extremely gratuitous rape scene. I reacted with appropriate horror, and then my date turned to me and whispered "I know, but wait until you see how she gets back at him! It makes all this worthwhile."
The feeling I had as I drove home from that date is the same feeling that I had after reaching the end of City Lazarus. I found myself thinking, really? Does that really make all of the previous degradation 'worth it'?
--
I'm going to stop my review of the anthology here. There were many other stories - some good, some bad, some middling - but the ones I included in this review are a good representation of what you can expect if you make the mistake of picking up this book. To summarize: you can expect to feel a deep disappointment in the squandered potential of what should have been an anthology about dangerous women, but instead wound up being an anthology about how men view us.
My only comfort after subjecting myself to that anthology is this: I know what a truly dangerous woman is like. And she does not trifle with men like the ones in these stories.
Rating: Lamentable.
Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?
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