One of last year's most talked about fantasy authors (thanks to two nominations and a win in major genre awards) was Lena Mellony Tami, who latest novel--reputed to be darker and more unpleasant than most epic fantasy in the current crop--I was able to acquire in ARC.
The title, Revolting, is of course a play on words, since the plot pivots around a rebellion against society and its norms (and ultimately against the very empire and its gods) by a boy whose very existence disgusts and repels his countrymen, leaving him outcast, untouchable, intolerable. The crime against decency committed by this wretch? To have survived the death of his twin, an achievement normally supernaturally impossible due to spiritual bonds. The existence of our hero, then, is more distasteful to his fellows, we are told, than a man fucking his mother is in our world. The trouble is, aside from the credibility of this taboo, on which more later, the comparison by which Tami tells us this fact breaks the fourth wall (and not in a good way, Reader). The whole things feels anachronistic, or at least to spoil the author's otherwise game effort to create a world at once morally very different from our own, and more or less believable.
And here is my problem with this book, which is in large part with how the book was marketed. We are told that this is a book about taboo, disgust, about individuals too repugnant to accept in society, about discrimination of a degree unknown in our own world. PW called it “nauseating … unsettling”; SH said, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, almost unclean”; NYRB restrained themselves to “upsetting”, which is closest to the truth. This is an upsetting book; there is violence, abuse, bigotry, bloody and disproportionate revenge. But it is not a book that successfully conveys that sense of disgust, of taboo, of deep-seated, psychological, bowel-churning moral rejection and stigma. We constantly feel the injustice of the boy subject to societal ostracism, but we're never shown what it is to be a member of the cultural that rejects on the basis of (to us arbitrary) personal status. And if you lay claim to writing a book about disgust, revulsion and horror, you need to do better than that.
While we have a fairly solid addition to the epic fantasy genre, therefore, with lower-class (and arguably "untouchable" caste) protagonists, a deep and keenly felt sense of injustice, and a hand for physically and viscerally (sometimes sadistically) described horror that comes from intimate knowledge of human military and criminal history, Tami has failed at her ostensible goal. While we see quite plainly why the hero of this book revolts, at no point does the reader understand, truly feel, why he is revolting.
The title, Revolting, is of course a play on words, since the plot pivots around a rebellion against society and its norms (and ultimately against the very empire and its gods) by a boy whose very existence disgusts and repels his countrymen, leaving him outcast, untouchable, intolerable. The crime against decency committed by this wretch? To have survived the death of his twin, an achievement normally supernaturally impossible due to spiritual bonds. The existence of our hero, then, is more distasteful to his fellows, we are told, than a man fucking his mother is in our world. The trouble is, aside from the credibility of this taboo, on which more later, the comparison by which Tami tells us this fact breaks the fourth wall (and not in a good way, Reader). The whole things feels anachronistic, or at least to spoil the author's otherwise game effort to create a world at once morally very different from our own, and more or less believable.
And here is my problem with this book, which is in large part with how the book was marketed. We are told that this is a book about taboo, disgust, about individuals too repugnant to accept in society, about discrimination of a degree unknown in our own world. PW called it “nauseating … unsettling”; SH said, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, almost unclean”; NYRB restrained themselves to “upsetting”, which is closest to the truth. This is an upsetting book; there is violence, abuse, bigotry, bloody and disproportionate revenge. But it is not a book that successfully conveys that sense of disgust, of taboo, of deep-seated, psychological, bowel-churning moral rejection and stigma. We constantly feel the injustice of the boy subject to societal ostracism, but we're never shown what it is to be a member of the cultural that rejects on the basis of (to us arbitrary) personal status. And if you lay claim to writing a book about disgust, revulsion and horror, you need to do better than that.
While we have a fairly solid addition to the epic fantasy genre, therefore, with lower-class (and arguably "untouchable" caste) protagonists, a deep and keenly felt sense of injustice, and a hand for physically and viscerally (sometimes sadistically) described horror that comes from intimate knowledge of human military and criminal history, Tami has failed at her ostensible goal. While we see quite plainly why the hero of this book revolts, at no point does the reader understand, truly feel, why he is revolting.






Directed by the otherwise unknown to me Stuart Emersen Cade, this DVD came with a label that looked like it had been hand-printed. I think that's the budget rather than a pirate copy, but it is quite hard to tell. The movie bills itself as "hilarious", "homage" and "cult", but those aren't the words that came to my mind. (They might rhyme with them.) There are quite obvious references to the classic movies, and more importantly the cinematic styles and trademark cheapness of directors like Bava, Romero, Argento, and all the low-budget masters of '70s Italian horror. The trouble is, Cade imitates without improving, pastiches without critiquing, borrows from without any self-awareness, irony, humour, or--saddest of all--talent whatsoever. To take a single example, Dark of the Heart is as sexist, gratuitous, misogynistic and soft-pornographic as the most tasteless of the European classics, not as a critique of the now horribly dated tradition, but unimaginatively and gratuitously in its own right. Pretty much every scene is an excuse for half- or fully naked women to run screaming or expose their tits on a mortuary slab. Of course, this lack of self-awareness or self-respect describes most cheap horror films made in in the 1990s or even today.
