In The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the near future, the religious right wing has taken over the US in a coup, using weapons that have rendered the majority of the population infertile. The story is told by Offred, or “of Fred,” one of the few fertile women left, who are sold into slavery as baby makers. This novel, yes, is a horror story and a cautionary tale, especially given the global realities of today’s world. It is also that wonderful rarity, science fiction that achieves the level of art. The characters are uncomfortably real, the commander and the commander’s wife in particular, and I’m still troubled by Offred. Why was she such a wimp, why did she so easily allow the commander to dress her up like a doll and parade her out to the illegal nightclub, why did she allow the commander’s wife to pimp her out to the chauffeur? The last chapter never fails to make me froth at the mouth, I think mostly because I don’t want Atwood to be right, and I’m terrified that she is.

Every story in the Atwood anthology of short fiction, Good Bones and Simple Murders, is good. I have to say that up front, because now I’m going to tell you that the third story, “Unpopular Gals,” is why this book will remain forever enshrined on my bookshelf. In five and a half pages, Atwood tells you why fairy tales live forever, and it ain’t because of that wimpy, weak-kneed, put-upon little girl whose rescue always takes center stage. Oh no, it’s the evil stepmother, it’s the ugly stepsister, it’s the wicked witch in the woods who move the story along. “I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.” You’ll never look at Snow White or Cinderella the same way again.

I also loved The Robber Bride, the story of Zenia the man-thief, as told through the eyes of three of her victims, Roz, Charis and Tony. Men are the loot in this book, Atwood told a hilariously intimidated Charlie Rose*, but some or all of the gold may be dross. So is Zenia a villain for stealing their men, or a heroine for rescuing the women from them? Don’t ask me, I’m still not sure Zenia is really dead. Zenia’s been dead before.

[*I looked for that interview online and couldn't find it. If it's up somewhere, please post the link in the comments section.]

I started with this recipe by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City. I experimented and I did a (very) little research, and this is the one I make today.

Twenty ounces all-purpose white flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
1/4 teaspoon yeast
2 cups cold water

Start your loaf on or before noon.

Measure dry ingredients into a bowl and whisk together.

Pour in water and stir into a wet dough with a spatula. Scrape down the sides, spray with olive oil, cover with Saran wrap, and let rise for 12 to 18 hours, about double in bulk. I like to let the first rise start on the counter and finish in the refrigerator.

Fold dough down gently using oiled spatula (As Mme. Loez would cry in my cooking class in Paris, “Avec respect pour la cuisine! With respect for the food!”). Spray again with olive oil, cover again with plastic wrap, and stick in the refrigerator overnight.

Pull out the bowl in the morning and let it sit on the counter until it warms up enough to double in bulk, anywhere from 6 to 8 hours. More won’t hurt. The dough will start bubbling in an almost stop-motion boil, big blisters, you’ll know it when you see it. (It’s really kind of disgusting, now that I come to think of it. Looks like a creature out of a science fiction movie–”It’s ali-iive!”)

Put dutch oven with cover into a cold oven and set oven for 450F.
When the dinger goes, bring out the dutch oven, set the lid to one side and use an oiled spatula to gently (”Avec respect pour la cuisine!”) scoop/scrape dough into the pan. Shake the dough in the pan, centering it and rounding the loaf. Spray lavishly with water, cover with lid, and put in the oven. Set timer for 45 minutes.

When the timer goes off, remove the lid from the dutch oven, reset the oven temperature for 425F, and reset the timer for 20 minutes.

When the timer goes off, remove the pan to the stove top and let sit for ten minutes. Remove the loaf from the pan and put it on a rack. Let it cool thoroughly before you slice into it. If you have the self-control. I almost never do.

Crusty and chewy and full of flavor, this is a real woman’s bread. I make artisinal bread, hear me roar!

Table salt is better than sea salt. Kosher salt works, too.

The best snack in the world is a slice of this bread dipped in olive oil spiced with a pressed clove of garlic, some Italian herbs, and a glug of balsamic vinegar.

Kate is only 5 feet tall but fears neither man nor beast: Early in this novel she takes down a knife-wielding roustabout and a charging grizzly bear. Her two live-in loves are Sgt. Jim Chopin, a hunky state trooper, and silver-gray Mutt, who’s half wolf and half husky and whose ever-changing moods make him somewhat more interesting than the trooper. Kate started her career as an undercover investigator for the DA’s office in Anchorage but later moved to the small, isolated town of Niniltna, where she works as a PI and also heads the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association, the primary governing body in that corner of Alaska.

The plot of “A Night Too Dark” centers on the Suulutaq Mine, where vast gold deposits have been discovered. The gold isn’t being mined yet because environmental questions must be answered, but the prospect of a billion-dollar bonanza has various hustlers and corporate vultures circling. (The Suulutaq Mine is fictional, but Stabenow has said it is based on the controversial real-life Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska.) Kate has deeply mixed feelings about the mine; the region needs the jobs but doesn’t need the environmental damage and the threat to its way of life. However, she and Sgt. Jim are drawn there after two of the mine’s employees mysteriously die and a third goes missing.

This plot unfolds nicely, but what makes the novel outstanding is Stabenow’s vivid portrait of the Alaskan culture. In the opening pages we meet an old-timer with a long white beard whose “Carhartt bibs were frayed and stained, the black-and-red plaid Pendleton shirt beneath it patched and faded, and the Xtra Tuffs on his feet looked like they’d been gnawed on by ferrets.” We meet the town’s four “aunties,” Native Alaskan women in their 80s who are the community’s social arbiters. We learn that it is unwise to ask an Alaskan “Where are you from?” because so many have pasts they are determined to escape.

We attend a board meeting of the Niniltna Native Association and discover that Native Alaskans are just as angry, stubborn, greedy and duplicitous as anyone else in politics. We learn that in today’s Alaska, outsiders sometimes marry indigenous Alaskans for their money — the Alaska Claims Settlement Act of 1971 having awarded huge amounts of land and nearly a billion dollars to them through regional corporations like the one Kate heads. As a result, at least some Native Alaskans have become prosperous. We see that Sgt. Jim doesn’t bother much with dope smokers, bigamists and poachers, if they otherwise behave. We also learn, after a quiet dinner at home, that he and Kate are partial to spontaneous displays of affection: “She laughed harder when he cleared the table with a sweep of one arm and threw her down on it.”

Stabenow is blessed with a rich prose style and a fine eye for detail. At one point she devotes two delightful pages to detailing the beauty of Kate’s garden (”The deep purple spire of monkshood, its cluster of closed blooms giving off an air of mystery, appeared and disappeared around every bend of trail”), and elsewhere we’re treated to a digression on the hunting and cooking of moose (”Old Sam liked his meat crisp on the outside and bloody close to the bone, and this took time and care.”).

Stabenow doesn’t say much about Alaskan politics, except to have Kate quip, “Anyone in Juneau [the state capital] in their right mind is an oxymoron.” However, in an interview with Publishers Weekly, Stabenow said that she’d met then-Gov. Sarah Palin twice, the second time in 2007, when Palin named her Alaska’s Artist of the Year. Stabenow added, “She didn’t mention the novels either time.” This is alarming. It’s always wise to greet a novelist with “Loved your book,” whether or not you’ve read the book in question. The writers are invariably grateful, and none has ever been known to demand proof. If Palin can’t figure that out, how can she ever hope to lead a great nation?

Did you know July was called “the hunger gap” back then, because July was right where the stores of last year’s harvest ran out, but before the new crop was ready to reap? Did you know that if you fondled a woman’s breast, uninvited, it would cost you a fine of five shillings? Did you know there were no surnames in the year 1000? They never left home, you were going to have the same name as your dad and your mom, so you didn’t need them. Did you know Benedictine monks, by oath silent most of their lives, worked out a sign language with over 127 signs? “One gets the impression,” write the authors, “that mealtimes in a Benedictine refectory were rather like a gathering of baseball coaches…”

The prose throughout this novel is able and vivid, and you can see the twinkle in the writers’ eyes, as in excerpts from a First Millennial medical book called Bard’s Leechbook, which conveniently lists maladies starting with the head and working down. Mid-body we find a cure for male impotence, or “…the Viagra of the year 1000 — the yellow-flowered herb agrimony. Boiled in milk, agrimony was guaranteed to excite the man who was “insufficiently virile” — and if boiled in Welsh ale, it was described as having exactly the contrary effect. Although later the authors do say, “Several of the Leechbook recipes would have done credit to the witches in Macbeth.”

The authors don’t idealize the Anglo-Saxons in the year 1000, but they respect them and their resilience and capability, and they have a knack for making the narrative sound like it’s all happening next door and all we have to do is stick our heads out the window to be eye witnesses. “Here is the earliest surviving example of an Englishman laying out life in a daily routine, juggling time, the schedule of the earth, and the life of the spirit,” the authors write. “These are people like us.”

About the easiest way into medieval studies I’ve ever stumbled across.

On February 16th, I updated my Facebook status with, “Happy Kate Shugak Day in Palmer, Alaska! Go ahead, blow off work and take your dog detecting.”
JoAnne said, “Oooh, fun! I’ll take my standard poodle. She mostly detects squirrels and rabbits that she can’t catch.”
Bobbie said, “I don’t have a dog. Can I still play?”
Jan said, “I’ll tell my boss and take the rest of the day off.”
And Becky said, “You do NOT want to know what my dogs find when detecting.”

That evening I got all duded up in basic black and pearls for the launch party at the Arizona Biltmore in Scottsdale, hosted by the Poisoned Pen Bookstore. Diana Gabaldon and Laurie King joined me, along with a crowd of Danamaniacs, who came from as far away as Boston, Detroit and California. Here’s a picture of them as they were assembling.

[iPhone photo plus bad photographer equals blurriness. Sorry about that.]

The next night crazy people drove all the way to San Diego from Los Angeles to see me at the Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. Photo by Patrick, who also gave me chocolate and recommended four new sf novels.

And then on to Powell’s in Portland. Events like this sink or swim on the responsiveness of the people who come. Everyone here was a hundred percent on, great questions, lots of laughs, and an actual frisson of excitement when they heard one of them was going to win a book with a brand new Kate Shugak story in it. No, not A Night Too Dark, another one, click on the link.

The next night was Barnes & Noble in Anchorage, where the Lathrop Dorm Contingent turned out in full. Alas, no photos, I wasn’t on the ball. But my cousin Hank, the commercial fisherman from Cordova, showed up, and bought a copy of the book to prop up a shaky table leg at home. I did get a photo of him.

Extreme shopping in Anchorage will do that to you.

And then Saturday to Fireside Books in Palmer.

That’s Mayor John Combs giving me the key to the city, after which he exerted mayoral privilege to elbow his way to the head of the line to buy the first copy. There was a line, too, Palmer really turned out.

I have to say I felt a little sheepish when Palmer named A Night Too Dark’s pub day Kate Shugak Day. I don’t live in Palmer. Neither does Kate. But then I remembered, my mom and dad eloped to Palmer to be married there by the territorial commissioner. Who knows, I might have been, er, started there.

And then last Wednedsay, I updated my status thusly:

My publisher Andy Martin sez: Kate hits the NYTimes bestseller list again, ANightTooDark #29! Thanks, guys!

Everybody liked that, a lot. Me, too. What I said.

A while back Laura Anne forwarded me an email from author Rosemary Edghill, who was putting together a murder-in-a-fantasy-setting anthology. The email came with a message from Laura Anne, which read, “You should do this.”

That’s Laura Anne, always big with the subtle.

I’d never written fantasy. I don’t even read that much of it, because after Middle Earth what is there? I like my speculative fiction hard, nuts-and-bolts, what happens next next door. I want to go back to the moon and on to the asteroid belt and Mars and the moons of Jupiter and from there to Beta Centauri. Sword and sorcery is a little too woo-woo for literal-minded me.

But I confess, I’m afraid of Laura Anne, so I doodled around a bit, so I could say “See? I tried!” and she wouldn’t hurt me.

And then these two characters showed up between the doodles. Both women. One wore a sword and the other carried a staff. They had magical powers, some of which appeared at puberty, some of which were acquired. More doodling and they rode into town, one of them even on a white horse. A young woman was strangled and by various magical means my duo discovered and brought the murderer to justice.

By the time I stopped doodling I had forty-two pages, and to add insult to injury it was a sword-and-sorcery tale. It was also twenty pages too long for the anthology. Rosemary asked me to cut it to fit. I refused. I guess I thought my prose was too deathless to be tampered with. Yeah, right.

So after all that, my story didn’t even make the anthology.

Fume.

So, I thought, I’ll put together my own magic-and-mayhem anthology. (Can we spell “hubris”?)

I decided to ask for murder in a fantasy or science fiction setting, to broaden the appeal to both writers and readers. I went downstairs and looked at who was on my bookshelves. Hmm. Here we have Sharon Shinn. Writes the sf Angels-on-Samaria series. Also wrote that most elegiac of fantasy novels, The Shape-changer’s Wife. Over here is Charlaine Harris, who writes the Sookie Stackhouse novels, the best vampire series in the bloodsucking genre. And here is Anne Perry, who wrote me a short story for The Mysterious North. Could I go to that well a second time? (hyoo’bris, n. excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.)

I asked them each to contribute a story, and displaying a touching belief in my ability to get this anthology off the ground, they all did. Sharon has written a lovely little magical boarding school murder, not at all a la Harry Potter, and which she said might evolve into something a bit longer one day. Say a novel? Charlaine has written a story set in that same Sookie universe, and if there was an award for first lines her name would be on the short list. Anne takes us into the courtroom for a trial by magic, where the verdict isn’t what one might expect and neither is anything else.

I remembered talking to Donna Andrews about writing speculative fiction, and she was also a contributor to The Mysterious North, so I asked her for a story, too. She sent me a delightful tale of a mage with a cold, an apprentice with a clue, and a villain with neither.

Then there are the writers who live in Alaska and whom I can personally browbeat into writing for me, Michael Armstrong, John Straley, and Mike Doogan. Michael has written a modern take on an old Aleut legend involving seagulls, and there must be some kind of bird thing going on among the menfolk because John wrote a detective story from the first-person viewpoint of a raven. Mike was the only one of my contributors to weigh in on the science fiction side of murder, although I’m not sure it is murder in the end. You decide. Enjoy his character names while you’re at it.

Laura Anne offered a story of her own, based on characters who inhabit a series she just sold to Harlequin Luna, and recommended I solicit stories from Anne Bishop, Simon R. Green and Jay Caselberg. Laura Anne’s story is a come-hither into a world next to but not quite of our own, seen through the eyes of a cat burglar with, yes, special powers. Anne’s story is set in the world of her Blood novels, where a vigilante wearing a jewel of power exacts deserved if harsh justice upon a serial revenge killer. Simon has written a creepy little horror-ish noir story in which Sam Spade would feel quite at home, if Sam Spade was dead. Jay brings back the ancient Egyptian gods to modern-day Cairo, with a last line that will have you all diving under your beds.

I heard Roger Ebert say once that the true test of a good film was how well it sucked you into its world. Same goes for good writing. In this anthology you can smell the coffee on the streets of Cairo, walk on the ceiling with starspawn, and negotiate with extreme care the social intricacies of the world of the Blood. You can run from the raucous call of an Alaskan seagull, and you’d better. You can belly up to Sookie’s bar and order your blood at an appealing 98.6F. You can meet a gargoyle in a Savile row suit, go mano a mano with piskies, and sneeze striped bats. You can sweat out the verdict at a trial by magic, conjure a reflecting spell at the Norwitch Academy of Magic and Sorcery, and, I hope, hear the song of the Sword in Daean.

Enjoy your visit to these different worlds, but watch your back.

It’s not safe in here.

Like Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, where on the first page the noun absurdity is defined thusly: “A statement of belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.” A few pages on we find Australia, “A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.”

And that’s just the A’s. Bierce wrote his dictionary an entry at a time for a weekly newspaper from 1881 to 1906, and even the curmudgeonliest reader will find something on every page to make them smile.

English is a voracious language, gobbling up any foreign word or phrase and putting it to use in law, medicine, cookery, fashion, slang, you name it. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Foreign Words in English tells us where those words and phrases come from, sometimes with surprising results. See circa, “around” from the Latin, as in circa 300 BC, but also, we discover somewhat to our incredulity, related to the English cerement, a waxed cloth for wrapping a corpse.

I also enjoy books about dictionaries, most recently Henry Hitchings’ Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. Did you know that as late as the year 2000, American jurists were consulting the Dictionary to try to figure out what the founders meant by the word declare, as in “declaration of war?” Divided into chapters headed with definitions from the Dictionary in alphabetical order, written with affection, respect and not a little glee, this book is going to make you want to go out and do like Robert Browning did, read the Dictionary from cover to cover in preparation for a life of writing poetry.

Under the Influence

“A woman,” Kate said. “The powder burns weren’t just on the shirt, they were under the flap of the pocket. Would Sturgus let a man get that close? And it was a twenty-two, small, easy to use. And I’d put money on the woman being Mrs. Baxter.”

“Not the wife?”

“She was home.”

“But Mrs. Baxter was coming back from the first show at the time he was shot.”

“Sure, according to her son and daughter-in-law.” She reached for the file. “McNutt said that he heard another shot–what, two hours before? It was never accounted for in the record. Baxter shot him before the show–it was the back of the building, it was February, it was dark by five, who would see?–and then went off with the kids to establish an alibi.”

“She must have been shook when McNutt told her Sturgus was still alive.”

“Yeah, that would have been a bad moment. But she played it out, went looking for the chief. And notice her son got himself on the coroner’s jury. Making sure the verdict stayed person or persons unknown.”

“What about motive?”

Kate grinned. “Got a Yellow Pages?” She found an entry, and pointed.

“Larson’s Fine Liquors,” he read out loud, “Convenient to Office and Hotel, Competitive Pricing, Bush Orders call 1 800…wait a minute. Larson?”

“It was 1921, prohibition, everybody knows they were running Canadian whiskey into Bootlegger’s Cove back then. I bet Sturgus caught Lyle at it and was going to put him away for it.”

Jim, annoyed that he hadn’t put it together himself, said, “Okay, who was this ‘Bobby’ Sturgus called for, then?”

Kate shrugged. “Maybe Mrs. Baxter’s name was Roberta. Bobbie for short. Why do you care, anyway?”

“I don’t know. He was a cop. He was shot in the line of duty. Bugs me that nobody ever found out who or why.”

Kate stood up. Mutt cast a languishing farewell look at Jim and padded to her side. “You’re scaring me, Chopin. You’re starting to sound like a crusader.”

I’ve already got a cause, he thought as he watched her walk out the door.

Wednesday, February 17th, 7pm, Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego

Thursday, February 18th, 7pm, Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills, Portland

Friday, February 19th, 7pm, Barnes & Noble, Anchorage

Saturday, February 20th, 12Noon, Fireside Books, Palmer

While you’re waiting to clutch the book in your hot little hands, go here to read four excerpts.
And after you read it, go here to print out the Reader’s Guide.

The first book is called Strapless by Deborah Davis. You’ve all seen the painting whether you know it or not, a voluptuous redhead in a black dress with a plunging neckline. It was Paris, where else, in the 1880s, the time known as La Belle Epoque, the beautiful era, a period of peace and prosperity in Western Europe, and a flourishing time for the arts. In Paris there dwelt two ex-patriate Americans, a young wife determined to use her beauty to become a leader of Parisian society, and a young painter determined to use her beauty to make his name in his profession.

She was Amelie Gautreau, he was John Singer Sargent, and the painting was “The Portrait of Madame X.” Displayed for the first time at the Paris Exhibition in 1884, it so scandalized Parisian society that it almost ruined him. It did ruin her.

Strapless is not only the story of a portrait, though, it is itself a portrait of a time and a place and the people who lived there. Opening the book is like stepping into a time machine. The portrait, which Singer had to buy back from the outraged husband, sat in Singer’s studio for thirty years, and now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After reading this book, I had to go see it again.

Chariots for Apollo by Charles Pelligrino and Joshua Stoff is the story of the making of the lunar module, that section of the Apollo spaceship that landed on the moon, and it’s one of the best books ever written about the Apollo program. It begins with a brief history of man’s journey into space which includes social commentary, as in this passage on students in New York being instructed in nuclear holocaust avoidance: “…duck and cover…duck and cover…Who is laughing over there? Be quiet?…We must always remember that: no laughing during a nuclear holocaust…There, on the floor, at age eight, many children were beginning the believe that grown-ups were a little bit nuts. In a few years they would begin to say as much.”

The pride of the engineers who built the ten lunar modules shines through on every page, and their pride is fully justified when the ill-fated mission of Apollo 13 cannibalizes the lunar module to get home. Written with insider knowledge and wry humor, Chariots for Apollo also offers up life lessons like, “Never, never tap a fully loaded rocket with a screwdriver.” In 1960, sixty rocket scientists died in Russia when someone did.

The Swamp by Michael Grunwald is a history of how first we dried out the Everglades and are now desperately trying to wet it down again to a reasonable facsimile of its former self. Grunwald has a gift for simile (“It had the panoramic sweep of a desert, except flooded, or a tundra, except melted, or a wheat field, except wild.”) and a good reporter’s nose for the political boondoggling, pork bellying and backroom dealing that form the Everglades’ prime crops, including what really happened in Florida in the 2000 election. Grunwald is an advocate for restoration, no doubt, but his eye is clear, his pen is sharp and he takes no prisoners. He’s not very nice to the Army Corps of Engineers, either, which, since I’m from Seldovia, makes me like him all the more.