The New Hero Volume 2 Read online

  The New Hero

  Volume 2

  New Heroes for a New Age

  Edited by Robin D. Laws

  Published by Stone Skin Press 2012.

  Stone Skin Press is an imprint of Pelgrane Press Ltd. Spectrum House, 9 Bromell’s Road, Clapham Common, London, SW4 0BN.

  Each author retains the individual copyright to their story.

  The collection and arrangement Copyright ©2012 Stone Skin Press.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN 978-1-908983-80-0

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at

  www.stoneskinpress.com

  Contents

  Preface Where the Hero is Now

  Alex Bledsoe Finger Stakes

  Jesse Bullington Saturday’s Children

  Emily Care Boss The King’s Condottiere

  Greg Stolze Dead Leather Office

  James Wallis Alms and the Beast

  Jennifer Brozak Iron Achilles Heel

  Will Hindmarch Blood for the King

  Matt Forbeck Friends Like These

  Robin D. Laws Among the Montags

  John Scott Tynes Footsteps in Limbo

  James L. Sutter Guns at the Hellroad

  Jean Rabe Stalking in Memphis

  Christina Stiles Killing Osuran

  Tobias Buckell The Rydr Express

  Biographies

  Where the Hero is Now

  As you have no doubt intuited from the numeral at the end of its title, The New Hero 2 continues Stone Skin Press’s exploration of the iconic hero story. As these pages will further confirm, the precise demands of this timeless structure paradoxically offer writers a near-limitless variability.

  Stories of iconic heroes pervade our culture. If anything, as genre storytelling undergoes an unprecedented resurgence, they’ve never been more omnipresent. The rise of the information economy tilted the mainstream to please a generation of tastemakers. Nerds and hipsters have converged. Your hairdresser digs vampire romance; your plumber rocks a killer videogame rig.

  Key to this shift is a preference for the mythological over the psychological, for the symbolic over the naturalistic. Either set of modes can provide mere diversion or communicate depths of human experience. They demand, however, to be read in different ways. Inevitably, critical frameworks lag behind changes in the way we appreciate narrative, which remains at heart an instinctive and emotional process. Ways of understanding developed to explicate works of psychological naturalism may lead us to downgrade the fundamentally mythic expression that is the iconic hero story. Yet viewed from a remove, it is a container no more or less robust than the dramatic formula we’ve conditioned ourselves to value above all others.

  Inner change defines the dramatic protagonist. He undergoes a transformative arc, moving from rise to fall or from degradation to redemption. His struggles chart out as a series of emotional encounters with those around him. That arc tells his entire story; when it ends, we need no more of him.

  The iconic hero, on the other hand, is built for outward conflict. Her battles take place in the external world, which confronts her with a disorder she must rectify. Armed with a signature array of working methods that reflect the character’s ethos, she tackles it. Crisis tests her, but she remains steadfast, or recovers her fundamental sense of self after momentarily losing sight of it. She resists transformation, instead cleaving to a consistency of character. This full-circle structure allows her to return for repeat adventures. From this repetition arises a satisfying sense of recurrence continuity.

  Is life a line, or a series of cycles?

  It is both, of course, meaning that we don’t have to choose. We can enrich ourselves on the tales of both the dramatic and the iconic hero. Each mode is at its most fully realized in the hands of authors who know its ground rules, and best appreciated by audiences attuned to its expectations.

  Here, working in various genres, voices, and tones, appear fourteen writers well steeped in this eternal rhythm, ready to divert and to disturb, to thrill and to please.

  This New Hero outing serves as a snapshot capturing the present state of a fast-moving genre scene. Supernatural elements continue their invasion of other conventions. Mash-ups rule the day, reviving established tropes by smashing them together and seeing what weird resonances emerge from the collisions. Replacing the realist extrapolation from a fantastic premise is a post-modern arrangement of tropes and images, pitched to a self-aware reader ready to accept the sets of conceits they offer up.

  The volume bookends itself with a pair of already-established recurring characters of recent vintage.

  In “Finger Stakes”, Alex Bledsoe brings us a deliciously mordant tale of hardboiled swords and sorcery featuring his genre-bending private eye, Eddie LaCrosse. Drawing equally from the wells of Fritz Leiber and Raymond Chandler, “Finger Stakes” partakes of the next iteration of heroic storytelling: the playful, knowing mythic mixmaster, borrowing elements as it desires them from disparate traditions.

  You don’t have to be fictional to be an iconic hero, as Jesse Bullington evocatively establishes by casting Weegee, the NYC news photographer who turned hard-hitting tabloid snaps into gritty art, as the protagonist of “Saturday’s Children.” The disorder he faces reveals itself as a supernatural one, leading him to partner with an old flame, seer Claire Simons. Reverberant with period atmosphere, this urban fantasy reads in high-contrast black and white and pops like a flashbulb.

  Emily Care Boss likewise presses a real figure into service as her iconic hero, in this case bringing to swashbuckling life painter and mercenary captain Onorata Rodiana. “The King’s Condottiere” plays its fifteenth century derring-do straight, bringing us a feminist role model we might not believe, were she not lifted from the history books.

  When magic meets modern crime, either the unearthly quality of the former or the low-life credibility of the latter may suffer. Greg Stolze’s “Dead Leather Office” not only nails both elements, but makes them seem like they always go together. Maybe that’s because his no-nonsense protagonist, the “cold woman” Cadillac Anne, has a boot planted firmly on both sides of this duality.

  James Wallis grounds his swords and sorcery excursion “Alms and the Beast” in a redolent sense of history, placing his unnamed pilgrim hero in England and burdening him with the emotional scars of the first crusade. By siting him in this specific place and time, James finds a refreshing new context for that most classic of iconic types, the enigmatic man of action.

  The emergence of popular serialized fiction coincided with the opening of the American west, forever linking the frontier gunslinger to the iconic hero tradition. Today’s weird west resurgence, as typified by Jennifer Brozek’s “Iron Achilles Heel,” puts a geek-culture torque on this longstanding connection. The relationship between a man and his weapon is never more acute than when the gun talks back.

  Within the exacting structure of the iconic hero story a deft writer finds room to portray the grace notes of daily existence. In Will Hindmarch’s “Blood for the King”, those telling details just happen to convey the rhythms of a spacefaring future where humanity is in decline. Thus he situates the medical hero, here personified as Dr. Ariam Keown, amid deftly drawn signposts of the new space opera.

  Students of genre mash-up will want to perform a compare and contrast between Alex Bledsoe’s story, referenced above, and Matt Fo
rbeck’s “Friends Like These.” Both combine fantasy with the hardboiled detective sub-genre, to notably different results. Matt populates his world of shotguns and sorcery with the outre denizens of post-gaming fantasy. A breakneck farrago of wisecracks, bar fights and elven corruption ensues.

  Having asked twenty-seven other writers, in both this and the original volume, to tackle the sometimes-unforgiving structure of the iconic hero tale, I figured I’d better put myself to a similar test. “Among the Montags” plays with viewpoint, voice and identification with the protagonist as it follows its mute hero, Longthought, on a canine rescue in an exurban Toronto devastated by semiotic apocalypse. Were this an exploitation movie, the tagline would read: One sword heals; the other one kills.

  In the Professor, a kindly but tormented psychopomp to other souls trapped in Limbo, John Scott Tynes presents an iconic hero unlike any other. In “Footsteps in Limbo”, the world to which he restores order is an eerily depicted half-realm between life and death. As he investigates a series of strange disappearances, we are drawn into a melancholy reality driven by a passive, refracted logic.

  James L. Sutter infuses the weird western with millennial anxiety in “Guns at the Hellroad.” His hero, taciturn freelance gunslinger Jacob Weintraub, brings order to a world broken by a past Rapture and/or Singularity. The relationship between hero and his sidekick of the moment, a blind seer, brings a flicker of human verity to a shattered landscape.

  Jean Rabe’s hero, the summoner Sabine Upchurch, calls history’s deceased greats to her side, to protect her beloved city from harm. “Stalking in Memphis” sees her confronting a mythic firebug with the aid of a deity more familiar with a different town of the same name. Jean’s lighthearted touch finds the fun in the modern occult genre.

  The originators of popular genres often find their prose styles denigrated even as the trappings and assumptions of their stories become touchstones for generations of imitators. Perhaps it’s their unruliness of their craft that lent their work the energy needed to exert this effect. Christina Stiles recognizes this, attacking her sword and sorcery story “Killing Osuran” with a straight-faced intensity Robert E. Howard might applaud. The homicidal thirst for justice displayed by her not-quite-human hero, Kaja Dawne, manifests itself through the story’s unnerving ferocity of viewpoint.

  The anthology heads back to space for its final rip-roaring tale of futuristic ultraviolence, courtesy of Tobias Buckell and his recurring bad-ass, Pepper. Buckell plays gut-crunching id off against speculative superego in “The Rydr Express.” Pepper’s previous exploits can be found in such novels as Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose. In the end though, the true hardnose is Tobias who can make you take second person and like it.

  The breadth of tone, voice and theme found in this collection testifies to the enduring strength and gaining momentum of the iconic hero form as we enter a transitional era in narrative. The way we consume stories is changing, as are our expectations for them. Whether we learn to understand them better, or simply keep on enjoying them without looking too deeply under the hood, one truth remains incontrovertible: the hero is always with us, and the new hero is here to stay.

  —Robin D. Laws

  Finger Stakes

  Alex Bledsoe

  There was a bit more gray in Jane Argo’s hair, but otherwise she hadn’t changed at all since the last time I saw her. She was still taller than me, curvy in all the right places and quite capable of dismembering pretty much anyone, male or female, who crossed her path. She still wore a sword that most men, including me, would have trouble raising past the horizontal. This made her high, little-girl voice even more incongruous, but I knew better than to laugh. Men who laughed at Jane Argo tended to end up with even higher voices.

  She sat across from me in my sparsely-furnished office above Angelina’s tavern in Neceda. She crossed her fur-fringed boots on the edge of my desk and tilted back her chair. She explained her request with the term, “Professional courtesy, Eddie. One sword jockey to another. We’re so much alike, you know.”

  I almost did laugh at that. We became sword jockeys for vastly different reasons. I’d been raised at court in far-off Arentia, and had the best education and martial training before I left home following a tragedy for which I felt responsible. I began a long stint as a mercenary, until I grew weary of killing on someone else’s say-so. I then discovered that my mix of skills and experience made me a perfect sword jockey, hiring out to solve problems too delicate or difficult for official channels.

  Jane grew up in the woods, a peasant girl who married young and, faced with the prospect of a life of nothing but bearing children and backbreaking labor, ran off to sea at the first opportunity. She’d been a privateer, then a pirate, then a pirate hunter. She was the one who caught Rody Hawke, the most vicious and successful pirate who ever sailed, and who was now sealed in a cell at the top of a tower until he revealed the location of his treasure. She became a sword jockey when she tired of the ocean and returned to her husband, finding she too had a set of abilities that had few other uses. I liked her and trusted her, but I could also tell she was yanking my chain.

  “We’re about as ‘alike’ as a monkey and a breakfast roll, Jane. And ‘professional courtesy’ doesn’t put ale in the mug. You know I get twenty-five gold pieces a day plus expenses, same as you.”

  “Don’t you have a special rate for friends?”

  “Sure, if they don’t want me to work very hard.”

  Metal and gems glittered as she waved her hand in defeat. I’d seen marks left by those rings on the faces of many a punk over the years, but not on the one face that needed it most. And that was the reason she said, “Okay, fine. Drive a poor working woman to poverty. You’re hired. Now go get him.”

  “Not so fast,” I said, and refilled both our tankards from my office bottle. Outside the sounds of Neceda, the small riverside town I used as my home base, came through the window. It was early summer, and the markets were suffering as they awaited the first harvest, which made everyone short tempered as their money ran low. It might be a good time to get out of town for a while. “If you know where your husband is, and the kind of trouble he’s in, why don’t you go get him?”

  She took a drink and looked down at the floor, at the wall, out the window, anywhere but directly at me. Finally she muttered something into her ale.

  “Beg pardon?” I prompted.

  With careful pronunciation she repeated, “Because after the last time I did that, I promised him I would never do it again.”

  And there it was. Jane Argo, the toughest female sword jockey around, who could slice a bumblebee in half in mid-buzz, was genuinely in love with her no-account husband Miles. Of all the mysterious things I’d witnessed over the years, the way love made people act remained the strangest of all.

  Miles Argo was the kind of man you couldn’t turn your back on even if he was up to his neck in dried mud. During the years Jane had been at sea he’d been too busy surviving to get into too much trouble, but once she came back he was proof that free time was a bad thing. When she began actually earning a living, he became essentially useless. Using her money he whored, gambled and drank; she saved his ass and took him back each time.

  Clearly Jane had serious blinders on when it came to Miles. But as a newly-committed partner myself, still marveling at the intensity of my feelings for red-headed courier Liz Dumont, I was in no position to mock. Who was I to say it wasn’t true love?

  Jane tossed a bag of coins on the desk. “That should get you through the week. If you need more, we’ll talk then.”

  I picked up the bag and put it away without counting the contents. I always felt a little nervous working for a friend, but money was money, and Jane definitely understood the nature of the job. “All right, I’ll go get him and bring him home. You’re right, it won’t be quite as embarrassing as his wife doing it, although I won’t go out of my way to shield his tender feelings. But you know he won’t stay. He’ll be
out hound-dogging around again as soon as your back’s turned.”

  “Oh, I know,” she agreed with no hesitation. For a moment I saw, beneath the extraordinary façade, the very ordinary woman with an everyday broken heart. Then it was gone, and she smiled ruefully. “Believe me, I’ve lived with the son of a bitch and heard every excuse you can imagine. I know.”

  ***

  I started at Long Billy’s tavern, Angelina’s competition across town. Angelina had banished Miles years ago after he made a drunken pass at her; since she was only slightly less intimidating than Jane, I suppose it meant Miles stayed true to his type. But I knew he sometimes spent his meager winnings at Long Billy’s, so I sought out Billy himself.

  “Miles slip his leash again?” Billy asked from behind the bar. As his name implied, he was very tall and thin, though he claimed the sobriquet “long” had an entirely different origin. His eyes never left the ample cleavage of a very young girl well on her way to drunkenness at one of the nearby tables.

  I said, “You’ve got boots older than her, Billy, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  She caught him looking and tugged her top down even more. He smiled. “Shame is momentary, Eddie. Memories of love are forever.”

  “You call that love?”

  “She will. When I’m done with her.”

  “So did Miles say where he’d won his money?”

  “Someplace called the Diamond Hole in Four Chops. Old mining down at the foothills of the mountains. He said the cards there were smoking hot for him. His exact words.” He paused, and tried to make the next comment sound casual. “And how’s Angelina these days?”

  “She’s right across town, Billy. Why don’t you go ask her?”

  “Ah, that’s okay,” he said. “Just curious.”

  There was some history between Angelina and Billy, but neither spoke about it in anything but vague terms. Unlike Miles and Jane, Angelina and Billy were equals, which might explain their estrangement. But I thought the same about Liz and me, so what did that portend? I shook my head, finished my complementary ale and left Billy to his conquest of the moment.