Another view of Terry Bisson's story in Subterranean #7

Daniel Braum reviews the issue on his blog

Daniel Braum


Spoilers regarding Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Somali Coast"







A. Nakama's review of it:

Pirates of the Somali Coast," by Terry Bisson, starts off whimsical and ends up disturbing, but for all the wrong reasons. Told through a series of emails from a boy stuck on a cruise ship taken over by modern day pirates (a twist on Bisson's distinctive dialogue-only story writing), the story is meant to disturb the reader through the boy's gleeful description of partaking in the murder and terror happening around him, but it is riddled with sloppy holes. The more subtle ones include repeated time stamps and an internet lexicon not even remotely resembling one that kids are using these days, but the more deep holes show Bisson's complete lack of understanding of his subject matter and youth culture. I haven't heard anyone get excited about a "GameBoy" for about a decade now, for example.

What really glares, however, is the none-too-subtle implication that the boy's inability to discern between reality and fiction stems almost entirely from video games. Thus, the boy's psyche might be disturbing to hand-wringing housewives obsessed with Oprah's doom-saying, but anyone aware of the research done on precisely this subject would be unable to suspend their disbelief -- the story itself is just too divorced from reality. And so Bisson sacrifices plausibility to the altar of an easy scare. All too disappointing, considering that it's from the author of the fantastic, "They're Made Out of Meat."


Here's what Dan says about it:

" In a way this story is an alternative version of that crazy story of a cruise ship taking unorthodox evasive actions of making dangerous waves to fend off an attack by Somali pirates. In this story things don't go as well as they did in real life. The joy in this story, for me, as in many Bisson stories is the tight POV. This story is told from the perspective of a very young and very immature boy and via e mail ( one way.) I was willing to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride and enjoy the story being told from this point of view. I found this to be the muse and the point of the story. For me the story wasn't a deep commentary on human nature like his award winning Macs, but a fun story to take delight in the way it was told."



Obviously, I think the story works or I wouldn't have bought it. I found it utterly chilling as I realized what was going on.

Wolves in the Walls at the New Victory Theater

Just came back from the National Theatre of Scotland's musical production of Neil Gaiman's children's book Wolves in the Walls conceived of (partly) and designed by Julian Crouch, who created the amazing Shock-Headed Peter. Rick Bowes and I went and who should we meet outside? Alisa Kwitney, Claudia Gonson (they didn't know each other until I introduced them), and then Neil, his film agent, Merrilee Heifetz (his and my agent) and her family...The musical doesn't open officially till the 14th and runs for a week but these are my impressions.

The production looks gorgeous, the wolves are wonderfully wrought. The mother, an actress named Anita Vettesse was brilliant--great voice, charismatic and perfect in the role. The brother played by Paul James Corrigan was also terrific. They each had excellent showstoppers to perform. The father played by George Drennan was good, but he didn't have enough to do and no great showstopper. Unfortunately, the girl Lucy, played by Helen Mallon, was unintelligible. Her Scot accent was so strong that we could only understand about one of every ten words. And she tried too hard to play a kid. I'm afraid that I don't see how her performance can be improved in the short time remaining --but she was absolutely the wrong person to have play for an American audience. The sound all around was not great--very muddy-- and difficult to understand any of the lyrics when all four of the main characters sang together.

The kids in the audience were entranced, even though there were some very scary bits. Ysabeau Wilce's "pig" (or a "pig" impersonator) played a crucial role.

So recommended with the above caveats.