Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriquo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilicen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilicen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriquo and Lilicen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriquo like a boss and Lilicen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriquo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.

Invisible Things

 
 
Invisible Things

by Andy Pizza and Sophie Miller

Chronicle Books

2023 

 

 

Invisible Things is a children's picture book that illustrates things that can't be seen - experiences from our other senses and our emotions. 

 

The book is a kind of guided meditation for kids, first walking through things we might hear, smell, taste, or feel, and then asking the reader to close their eyes and take some time to identify the invisible sensations around themselves. And then this is repeated for emotions, with a bit of extra attention given to reassuring kids that sadness and fear are normal, but also not permanent. 

 

The illustrations use cute little personifications to depict each invible thing. The song stuck in your head is a guitar with feet and googly eyes; the heebie jeebies is a hollow tree stump with little eyes peeking out of it. I think the idea is that making each sensation or emotion into a tiny monster makes them easier to think about and imagine.

The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

 
 

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

written by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet

Strand Releasing

2013

 

 

Although it's only a decade old, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears looks more like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, with its unsettling blend of blood and sexuality, the uncanny repetitions and re-dos of Celine and Julie Go Boating, or Jan Svankmajer's Alice, with its creepy stop-motion skeletons, than like anything from the last 30 years.

 

The plot, such as it is, is relatively simple, but the story isn't told in a straightforward way, and by the end, I doubt that we're supposed to think that there's anything as solid as a 'real' story amidst the parade of images.

 

A man comes home to his absurdly Art Nouveau apartment to find his wife missing. He questions the neighbors, calls a private investigator, searches the building, and finds a series of secret passages. He also keeps encountering the same enigmatic woman in a number of different guises.

 

As the film continues, the already tenuous distinction between 'reality,' flashback, dream, fantasy, hallucination, and story told by another person recounting one of the above, dissolves completely. We see the same events several times, sometimes identically, sometimes with variations. People, especially the husband, are repeatedly cut with razor blades and knives, only to see their wounds vanish moments later. People die, and then are still alive. The sex is all sadistic. The mysterious woman, Laura, is powerful in a way that all the others are helpless within this surreal world.

 

The most notable thing about the look of this movie is the editing. I don't think there's a single shot that's held for more than a couple seconds. The editing deliberately creates dis-continuity rather than the usual illusion of seamless movement. Actions start and restart, repeat partway through. Scenes are interlaced with each other and with brief flashes of imagery. Parts of the movie are shown in low-frame-rate stop-motion, like we're flipping through a stack of photographs.

 

It's a unique visual experience. It don't think I'd describe how I felt about this one as 'liking it,' but I am glad I watched it. I'm always interested to see movies that experiment, that try something new, show me something I haven't seen before.

 

 

Originally watched January 2023.

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

A Storm of Wings

 
 
A Storm of Wings

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1980, reprinted 2005
 
 
A Storm of Wings is the second of John Harrison's science fantasy books centered on the far-future city of Viriconium. The first book, The Pastel City, is set on earth in the Evening, a kind of quasi-medieval period that follows after the fall of the ultra high-tech civilizations of the Afternoon. That first book reads almost like a sequel, because Harrison introduces us to a King-Arthur-like figure who ruled Viriconium and united the surrounding lands, but then the whole book is set after his death. The dead king's daughter, the young queen, calls her father's old allies out of retirement for help as Viriconium is invaded by her half-sister, leading an army of human raiders and scifi monsters left over from the Afternoon.
 
A Storm of Wings is set another 80 years later. The young queen is now a woman in middle age (human lifespans are longer in this era, it seems). Her father's equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table are all dead, except for Tomb the dwarf and the ancient, possibly immortal wizard-figure Cellur. Society is Viriconium has become less medieval and more futuristic thanks to the Reborn Men, an army of soldiers from the Afternoon who were specially trained to fight the scifi monsters, who Tomb woke up out of suspended animation for help in the war. It's not initially clear how, but the other important detail from the first book is that Tomb mentioned several times that his mentor was the first person in the Evening to travel to the moon, and that journey is the source of this book's problems. Unbeknownst to anyone, he's returned to the earth, and he's brought something with him...
  
So, A Storm of Wings leans more into the scifi half of science fantasy. It's also probably more literary, because while the first book had dense, almost poetic passages of description, and featured slightly unconventional heroes in a strange setting, its plot still followed the structure of an adventure story. 
 
This second book is more ambitious, though in my opinion not quite as good. The main protagonist of Pastel City was a reluctant hero because he was old and retired, weary and mournful, and he wanted to be a poet. In Storm, Harrison goes fully anti-heroic. We get someone who repeatedly rejects the attempts to recruit him, who was an apprentice airship pilot in the war (which destroyed all the airships), who's spent the last 80 years angry and embittered and working as an assassin. Tomb and Cellur are little more than elderly advisors at this point. Cellur's tower has collapsed and his flock of mechanical birds is all but gone. We get a witness to the alien trouble, a Reborn woman who has only a tenuous grasp to reality, and one of the queen's advisors, another Reborn Man who is in the middle of losing his grasp as well. And to guide them, the ghostly psychic projection of Tomb's mentor, a babbling, farting, levitating sphere of ectoplasm, who sometimes warns of danger or leads the way, but is otherwise incapable of coherent thought.
 
What especially makes Storm different though, is that while nominally the monsters this group has set off to find and defeat are alien insects, originally from deep space, more recently from the moon, the actual problem they have to solve is a kind of epistemic crisis, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality itself. 
 
I mentioned that both the Reborn protagonists experience something like delusions; Harrison tells us this problem is ubiquitous among the Reborn Men. Some part of their minds still wants to live in the Afternoon. This is presented like a kind of degenerative schizophrenia. They suffer hallucinations and fugue states and lose the ability to care for themselves or to live among anyone but their own kind.
 
The citizens of Viriconium increasingly join the Sign of the Locust, a cult that preaches that the world is an illusion, it isn't real. By the start of the book they've become violent. By the end they are all partially turning into insects, growing new limbs and other bodyparts as though they're cancerous tumors.
 
When our protagonists, a mix of reluctant and incapable, finally learn the truth, the problem isn't just that alien insects have landed on the earth. It's almost metaphysical. Harrison claims the earth looks the way it does not just because of its physical matter, because of how we, collectively, because of how our minds interpret that arrangement of matter. But the insects have alien minds, different needs, a new psychology, and the world responds by becoming what they need it to be. 
 
The insects are like the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion or the hronir from Tlon from Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Their presence is an incursion of a competing idea that strives to overwrite the world as we know it, a dream trying to become real. The changing landscape, the toxic yellow mist, the mutating cultists, the city of Viriconium overlaid with another version of itself made of spiderwebs and wasps' nests, the insects themselves growing human limbs and organs in a process that mirrors the cultists - the apocalypse is here, and it is the physical manifestation of a disagreement about meaning. You can't fault Harrison for trying something daring.
 
That said, I think I prefer The Pastel City. Harrison leans so hard into making his characters unlikable that I didn't especially enjoy reading them, even as they opposed an end of the world scenario that's more like a nightmare or horror film than like a disaster movie. I liked his prose better before too. In Storm he repeatedly describes scenes as though we are watching them on a screen, including people walking onto, then across, the out of our unmoving field of vision. It felt like reading a description of a comic or movie, it's not an effect I enjoy in literature. If other critics are to be believed, both these two are just warm-ups, and it's the next couple books where Harrison will really impress me. It's an open question though, whether what is mostly widely praised about his writing will be something I enjoy more than a clear story, told well.