The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga

selected and translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

This is a collection of short stories from Horacio Quiroga. I am told that Mr. Quiroga was a foundational figure for short stories in Latin American literature. I suspect he has some better stories out there.

The Vonnegut quote leads because very few of the stories manage to end without death. The rest might end in madness or foolishness, often leading to death. "The Dead Man" dispenses with the foreplay and drops the protagonist on a machete in the first page, following his thoughts as he bleeds out. This sets up a certain expectation which can be played with, because the usual happy ending becomes rather surprising. Once you have set up the capacity for the story to go in either direction, either direction can be a surprise, and this is a good sort of tension to have. (I mis-remembered the Vonnegut quote as attributing the murder rate to short stories, because killing off the character is a dramatic ending; maybe that is somewhere else in Breakfast of Champions.)

Quiroga is not a cheerful author. There is bonus cruelty to go with the foolishness, madness, and death. The longest story, "Anaconda," has the interesting set-up of making poisonous vipers the point-of-view characters, so we have villainous protagonists with the goal of wiping out some humans. Whichever way you consider a "happy ending," one side is going to suffer and die. And this collection does not even have the story I was seeking from the High Octane Nightmare Fuel page.

The collection starts weakly. Maybe "The Feather Pillow" would have affected me more if I used a feather pillow, but the allegory in the story is obvious and the title reveals too much. "Sunstroke" is just pretty weak.

Then you get to the longer, inscrutable "The Pursued," and you see that the author has a special touch. It is not fully developed here, and I don't think the story quite works with its mix of an unreliable narrator talking about someone else's madness in a way that never really arrives, but it is evocative. "The Decapitated Chicken" shows the author coming into his full capacity, and the rest of the collection bears it out, with some stories being better than others.

There are a dozen stories in the collection, and most of them really are short, 10 to 20 pages of easy reading. Quiroga seems to be at his best when killing someone quickly but lingeringly and painfully, perhaps an odd combination but developed well in the length of a short story.

One that especially lingers is "Juan Darién," which spends a lot of time on the torture of a boy when the villagers are somehow convinced that he is a tiger in human form. Of course, given the collection, the irrationality of it does not necessarily make it wrong, and even if they are right, that will not remove the juxtaposition of "ferocious beast" with "innocent victim suffering needlessly."

So it is that kind of collection. These will not brighten your day, unless you find suffering cathartic, but they are well-told.

The English (language) author most like Quiroga is Poe. You have probably guessed why. I was also reminded of Stephen King, not so much because of the content but because of the recurring setting. Almost everything King writes is in a sleepy New England town, and Quiroga's stories keep returning to the banks of the Paraná. Some of them are perhaps less compelling to our audience because we do not have the same worries about jungles, vipers, and tigers. Anaconda is notable for its distinction between vipers (poisonous snakes) and snakes (hunters that crush), where I have never heard an English author care much about the distinction.

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The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

The Forever War really is as good as you have heard, a classic in both war stories and science fiction. I still rate it a 3 on our scale because I cannot see its impact working nearly as well a second time, once you know the whole story. Or maybe it should get a 4 for that reason, that it will have a different impact on later read-throughs; I retain the right to up-rate it later. This is the downside of the ratings scale here.

The war with the Taurans began in 1997, a galaxy-spanning war where the battles can be decades apart as ships travel at relativistic speeds. William Mandella is a conscript in the first ground engagement, starting us off on a war that will last more than a millennium.

If anyone is unfamiliar with what is meant by the idea that some books are in dialogue with each other, read this, Starship Troopers, and Old Man's War. You have some similar base stories that go in very different directions.

In this case, I was born too late to catch some bits as I went along. I was born after the Vietnam War. Once someone mentions it, however, everything falls into place. If anything, putting the story on this scale mutes the emotional trauma because it is just too big to assimilate, and because the scale is small relative to what one might expect over centuries.

A recurring theme, played surprisingly softly, is how the world changes while you are away. Hippies were not around when the Vietnam War started. When you fly away for a century, everything changes, and you arrive after entire social movements have passed. You leave for the war, and your little brother is a man by the time you get back, only here you are just a few years older due to traveling at relativistic speeds. The effort of getting your brain around the change across decades mutes the loss of the little things, at least at this remove. "I missed my brother's high school graduation, not to mention all of his high school years" is one thing; "my brother is now older than me, and he lives on the moon" is another.

I say this is played softly because the characters do not dwell on it much. The society you leave to defend will not exist by the time you get back. This is not just a change in national politics and the president; your birth country is unlikely to exist when you get back more than 100 years later. They mention surprisingly rarely that everyone they know will be dead. As above, you assimilate this (or not) and move on.

It is not as though they have a choice in the matter. They are conscripts. They are at war. Even if there were no enemy soldiers, the environment is enough to kill you. Dwelling on the unfortunate circumstances when you get back will not help with all the unfortunate circumstances you must survive first.

That leads to another recurring bit: live it up while you can. With survival rates being low, there is no point to worrying about the future. You can throw away all your money every shore leave, because it will probably be your last. You probably have no long-term future (don't dwell on that), so making plans for it is pointless, and there are no long-term consequences for anything.

The more I write here, the more surprised I am that veterans come back in as good of mental shape as they do.

If this is your first time seeing real events through a sci fi/fantasy prism, note that the distance helps you reflect on things without that knee-jerk reaction to cheer/condemn Team Red/Blue. This works better at an even further remove, when you cannot see through the allegory immediately.

If you have not picked it up already, this is not going to be an uplifting story. War sucks. The characters are subject to forces (natural, enemy, and allied) that kill almost entirely at random; very few times can you even approach the thought, "s/he deserved that." It is a mass of pointless, random bloodshed. Which seems a fair representation of what a soldier faces.

Since we are seeing the war from the level of the individual soldier, it is living with those random details, and the book does thrive on details. You get to know many of the casualties. When you don't, you still get to count them off one-by-one or see them fall in little packs. It is a tremendous success to be able to simultaneous make it numbing while still making you feel each pinprick.

It is somewhat less successful as a sci fi story because of failures in scaling across hundreds of years. Some large changes come exceedingly quickly, while other bits remain remarkably unchanged a millennium later. Technology advances, and there is an early discussion of being out-teched in the time it takes to travel from your base to the fight, but not as much as you might expect given existing growth rates. This is kept in the background, as it is inessential to the story and the context would become incomprehensible, but it is playing the premise of a millennium-plus war short to have it be even that comprehensible at the end. Even without a Singularity, one expects a bit more over time.

And then there are the common amusements with the science fiction of the era. Everyone smokes. Advances in computers were vastly under-estimated and in the wrong directions. We accept "intergalactic travel in the 1990s" as a basic premise, rather than wondering where our flying cars are. So basically this paragraph is just being a sneering jerk, laughing at the past's vision of the future, and we'll all get together and we are all scheduled to do this repeatedly as the dates of various films and stories arrive. Good times. Hey, look at the size of that computer in the Asimov story, tee hee.

In closing: great book, great story, great details. Read it. I have even left the interesting and/or traumatic details unspoiled for your reading pleasure. Go to, then.

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The Nymphos of Rocky Flats by Mario Acevedo

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

I promised that I would try another Mario Acevedo book, since HarperCollins was kind enough to offer them at a conference. This was milder than Jailbait Zombie, but not compelling enough to make me want to read the others in the series.

"Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire." Now he's a private detective, visiting Denver to investigate a nymphomania outbreak at a Department of Energy nuclear facility. Women are trying to bed him and men are trying to kill him. Government work is not as quiet as it is made out to be.

It is workmanlike. It is fine. If you like this kind of thing, it is a fair example. It will never be on anyone's must-read list, but it delivers on its premise with average quality. I have yet to read anything from James Patterson, but I am led to believe that this is comparable (probably slightly below, since Mr. Patterson is leading his bracket).

"This kind of thing" here means salacious hard-boiled vampire detective fiction. (I feel like I should have some commas in there, but it is more a concatenation of genres than a list of adjectives.) Middlingly salacious, very hard-boiled, constantly vampire, not terribly detective; the "hard-boiled" overwhelms the "detective."

Despite the title, this is less salacious than Jailbait Zombie. Women shuck clothes fairly frequently, but the violent scenes are more likely to be completed than the sex scenes. Men shuck clothing at least as frequently, particularly but not only Felix. There is a surprisingly high homoerotic quotient, with at least three men and five women offering Felix sex. Well, two of the men leap directly to kissing rather than making a verbal offer, and one of the women does not so much "offer" as "demand at gunpoint."

This book was nicely spoiled by Jailbait Zombie, so reading them in order could be helpful. On the other hand, the plot twists are (respectively) telegraphed, way out there, and mostly unexplained, you can get through almost the entire book before it becomes relevant. The plot is sufficiently coherent, at least as much as any action film, with the same technique of keeping things moving rather than pausing to think about it all. The climaxes are anti-climactic, going with late-game info dumps that take up more time than the associated fight scenes.

The book is not especially smart. (I hit similar points on Jailbait Zombie.) "Vampire" is used as an adjective to hand-wave any exposition of "vampire hypnosis," "vampire senses," "vampire enzymes," "vampire levitation powers," etc. (It is nice to see someone not trying to redefine what a vampire is (beyond letting makeup block sunlight), although there are enough vampire myths that giving someone "standard" vampire powers still makes some abilities seem random.) Plot points are inexplicable or over-explained. There is gratuitous Latin, with the same terms re-defined multiple times in case you forgot. The book seems to assume that the reader is not especially smart, repeatedly summarizing events in case you missed them, and since more or less the same thing happens three times in a row early in the book, you really had to miss them.

This repetition worries me about the continuing series. It is common for the later books in the series to summarize earlier events, for late arrivals or anyone who has forgotten in the years between publication. Jailbait Zombie mentions events from this book several times, not just in case you missed the book, but in case you missed the earlier repetition. This book refreshes your memory several times. I fear the series' becoming a recursive summarization by the time it gets to 8 or 10 volumes, unless it adds a lot of pages. And books that don't think you are smart do not want to threaten you with lots of pages.

That page count is higher than the word count might demand. Where long books try to look slimmer by cramming the pages with small fonts and narrow margins, Nymphos takes the children's book approach with a generous font with plenty of negative space. One way to make it a page-turner: put less on each page so you turn them more quickly.

I met Mario Acevedo. He explained to someone, "This is not great literature." It is meant to be a rollicking romp. If you like this kind of thing, and are not some kind of intellectual snob, you could very well enjoy it. But you probably have a long list of "must reads" before you get to it.

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Dungeon Delve by David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek, et al

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition supplement

Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns

Interesting, challenging encounters designed for plug-and-play in your Dungeons and Dragons campaign. These are designed around the "kick in the door" cinematic style of play that 4th Edition seems to assume, with some small amount of set-up and ideas for expansion. Every level gets a linked set of three fights.

The book has three recommendations for using it. One is the plug-and-play approach I mentioned: pre-made encounters for your campaign, a tool for the experienced dungeonmaster. Second is as DM training, providing modular bits for practice. I am not sanguine about this, because it would be training the DM in the combat-focused approach that reduces the game most of the way back to tabletop wargaming (nothing against wargaming, just that role-playing games have grown in a different direction). Third, as a competitive event where the DM is trying to kill characters with defined obstacles. Could be fun, probably not conducive to a campaign.

Each encounter assumes miniatures. Each recycles some map pieces from D&D modules. Depending on your view, that is a nice bonus or a craven way of trying to extract funds, but the dungeon tiles are reproduced in sufficient detail not to demand additional expenditure. The tiles are arranged so you can plausibly keep the encounters separate, rather than wondering why the orcs in the next room are just listening to you slaughter their friends. You could argue on some, but let's say that stone has great sound-absorbing properties, and it will not matter to you if you are playing kick-in-the-door. The fight is the point, so just set up at the start of it.

The format is standardized, good, and stays out of the way. Each delve is three encounters. Each encounter is two pages. This repeats what I said about the core books: great effort was taken to keep everything visible when you have the book open, rather than flipping between pages. Open the book, there is one fight-unit.

I always support Wayne Reynolds cover art. The female warrior's equipment is perhaps questionable, with the usual fantasy habit of showing off skin in places where heavy armor should not. As usual, the open-bodice breastpiece is defensively sub-optimal. She must be amazingly strong to wield a sword as broad as her thigh in one hand. And about those thighs: are those some kind of metal-banded garter belts holding up the stockings? I love his drawing style, but I question the fantasy depictions of ladies' equipment. The tiefling wizard is showing off his nipples, but his robe was never providing much protection anyway.

The fights are interesting, combining a theme with a bit of variety. Some of the variety is questionable, but you can plead cinematic style. Some of them look inappropriately difficult. I trust the designers on the encounter level math, but they are very fond of ending with party level+3 or +4 fights, and you can construct some very difficult encounters by combining the right creatures that synergize. Flipping through, we have a level 1 party facing 2 level 4 enemies, a level 1 elite, and 8 level 2 minions. That EL3 fight is bad enough to include a sidebar on running away. The level 30 delve ends with a level 30 solo supported by 2 level 27 elites and 3 level 24s, in a room with hazards that only affect the PCs, and the big guy can refill his hit points twice with another feature of the encounter. How about throwing a level 8 elite against a level 3 party, along with his 3 friends (levels 4, 4, and 5)? I was surprised when I found a "solo" enemy that was actually alone, as opposed to one fight that has two of them with support.

Enemies get complete stat blocks, so you will not need to flip through other books. You can run this just fine without owning a Monster Manual. The stat blocks can be a bit hefty, so hopefully the DM is sufficiently experienced by the time s/he gets to bosses that have half a page of abilities. Streamlining that was one of the points of 4th Edition.

The editing could use some work. Some are little things, like spelling or forgetting that they re-named a monster and having its stat block refer to its generic base type. Others look like victims of the editing process that keeps everything on two pages. There is a throne with three gems, each of them with a special function; only two gems are described. One fight refers to a protective aura from the previous room, but the previous room never mentioned it. One room has a trap that is confused about whether it works north-to-south or east-to-west. The environmental hazards of the rooms are most often the culprits; they presumably received less attention than the monsters. It starts to feel like each delve has a landmine for the unwary DM.

On the whole, it has some nice set pieces that I could use or adapt when running a game. It is more flexible than a pre-made adventure, which requires more work if you want context and not just combat, but some question the quality of the context provided in the pre-written modules. Because of editing issues and the need to be aware of a half-dozen things in each fight, such as environmental hazards or bosses with many abilities, these will still require some preparation even if one is just running them as context-free battles. After all, if you are playing these as "kill the character" competitions, you want to win.

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