The Escher-eqse city of Ayona has a nominal nobility, in the form of a duke and his royal family, but the city is mostly governed by the frequently conflicting groups of Mechanics and Alchemist. While the Mechanics and Alchemists exist in an uneasy truce with each other, they both vie for the upper hand in power. The ancient city was “grown” out of stone by the ubiquitous but slowly dying race of gargoyles, who, when they were stronger, were worshipped and feared and kept both groups in check.


Mattie, a mechanical automaton, is at the center of this conflict for several reasons. First, she is the creation of a prominent Mechanic, Loharri. Second, she is a practicing alchemist. And finally, she has been contacted by the gargoyles and given the task to heal the sickness that turns them into stone. While Mattie is mostly a free agent, she bound to Loharri, because he has the key to her clockwork heart.


The novel has numerous subplots and operates on several levels. One is as a novel of political intrigue. The war between the Mechanics and Alchemists is kicked off when a terrorist group destroys the stone palace, and both groups point the finger at each other. Mattie shuttles back and forth between the two groups. As automaton, most of the mechanics believe that she is the mute and mindless servant of Loharri, so she can listen in on their plans without being considered a threat. Both groups use Mattie to find out who the culprit is, without realizing that she has her own motivations. The Alchemy of Stone is also a novel of weird magic. In addition to the major narrative featuring Mattie, part of the novel is narrated by the gargoyles themselves. Their mysterious story is told in a plural poetic voice, not unlike Kafka’s short story Josephine the Singer.

“We scale the rough bricks of the building’s façade. Their crumbling edges soften under our claw-like fingers; they jut out of the flat, adenoid face of the wall to provide easy footholds….We could’ve flown. But instead we hug the wall, press our cheeks against the warm bricks; the filigree of age and weather covering their surface imprints on our skin, steely-gray like the thunderous skies above us…”

Most of the scenes of Mattie performing alchemy have her doing arcane things. She can see salamanders dancing in fire, and other elementals. The fact that Mattie does not have a soul also allows her to befriend the Soul Smoker, a much feared lonely old man who devours ghost and like Mattie is used by various factions. It is also a novel of relationships, between creator and creation, between magic and science, and ultimately, between people. While there is a slight love story, most of the tension in the book is generated by the love-hate relationship between Mattie and Loharri. In a way, their disturbing relationship reminds me of the dynamics of male-female, master and slave relationship explored in the oeuvre of Octavia Butler.


Sedia’s novel has a steady pace and aims for the ‘slice of life’ feel of the fantasy books of Ursula LeGuin’s Tehanu or any of Patricia McKillip’s work. She avoids explaining some of the magic/mechanics—like what makes Mattie intelligent. Instead, the reader sees the world mostly through Mattie’s eyes, and feels her terrible loneliness. She’s a misfit toy in a strange world. If at times she is passive, it fits with her character. She is literally a breakable person. The novel’s main weakness is that is can’t make up its mind as to what kind of story it wants to be. Quest story? Love story? Political allegory? (In addition to the terrorism and the revolution stories, there is also a subplot involving racial profiling). The anomie that pervades the narrative seems to be the main theme of the book. From the Soul Smoker to the gargoyles to Mattie herself, this is a book about those unsung heroes and outsiders who sacrifice much for the common good. The resolution is both haunting and unresolved. While The Alchemy of Stone is not a perfect book, it is a worthwhile read and belongs on the same shelf as such postmodern fantasy authors like Mieville and Vandermeer.

A nameless modern woman steps outside of her home and finds a severed finger on doorstep. Naturally curious, she picks it up. A small grey spider climbs on her shoulder, bites her ear, and she finds herself taken to the Hedge, a timeless, enchanted dimension inhabited by fairytale creatures and talking animals: moths, grasshoppers, and birds along with more traditional fairies. She's to be the bride of the Winter King, who is the titular spider. He needs to marry and ultimately sacrifice a mortal woman to secure his reign. Paralyzed by the spider’s poison, she is the unwitting participant of this grisly ceremony, until she is kidnapped by the Prince of Spider's ne'er do well brother, The Hunter. But not before her hand is lopped off.

At the same time, Richard Dadd in 19th Century England alternates between his life as a mad painter and as the servant of the Hedge's wicked and lovely fairy doyenne known as the Beloved. In his guise as her consort, he wields an axe of iron and does her bidding. Dadd struggles between the two worlds, not certain which one is real. His story is a tragic one, and has genuine poignancy.

The various denizens of the Hedge align themselves with different factions—one seeking to extend the Prince of Spider's unnatural reign, another wishing change—as the missing Hunter and Bride wander through the Hedge and beyond.

If the plot sounds a wee bit madcap, its telling is completely moon-mad. Ms. Gallagher's fairyland is a tricky place, with its own logic. The Hedge is a place of savage whimsy, a portmanteau world that is part Beatrix Potter on opium part Lewis Carroll at his most absurd. Speaking ladybirds and butterflies exist alongside walking corpses and murderous dolls. The Bride witnesses everything through her fevered haze and tries to make sense as she realizes that she is pawn in incomprehensible war.

Ms. Gallagher writes with a poetic exuberance. She throws the reader in the middle of her kaleidoscopic landscape and doesn't pause to explain. This dizzying approach contributes to the sheer alien quality of the Hedge. Many of her point of view characters aren’t human—her evocation of the cold motivations of fairy creatures is highly reminiscent of Sylvia Townsend Warner's brilliant short story collection Kingdoms of Elfin. The two human characters—Richard and the Bride—are mad and fevered. Ms. Gallagher changes tones and scenes with a real facility. For instance, the repartee between the Bride and the Hunter is rip-roaringly funny, and there are moments of slapstick in the book. These mesh well with scenes of unsparing horror—Ms. Gallagher doesn't skimp on the blood letting.

The Spider's Bride is an accomplished first novel. It is quite unlike anything out there—a poetic, comedic, and horrific tale with a magic all its own. Ms. Gallagher turns the idyllic British fairyland of Andrew Lang and Charles Perrault on its head. I look forward to what she’ll do next.

Punktown, on the planet Oasis. In this sprawling metropolis, a Lovecraftian evil is stirring - spreading its shadowy tentacles through the city. When his girlfriend discovers a copy of the Necronomicon - an ancient text reputed to summon the Great Old Ones - Christopher Ruby is thrust into a nightmare as his girlfriend falls prey to the dark forces unleashed. Fleeing into Punktown's underground, he searches frantically for clues to what his girlfriend has brought into the universe...

I have to admit I had trouble rating Monstrocity. On the one hand, the setting of Punktown itself is intriguing. However, the mythos underpinning the story doesn't fare as well. I liked the ideas Thomas came up with, but in the end, it doesn't stray far from its inspiration and the story feels a bit rushed. Additionally, the writing is serviceable if rough at times.

It's unfortunate, because Thomas does have some great material to work with and an evidently fertile imagination. In the end, I'd like to rate it higher but I feel like there's potential here that was a bit wasted on a retread of Lovecraft's work. Perhaps if the book had been longer, allowing more time to build up tension and focus more on the "evil city" feeling, that could have helped.

In the end, it's a nice effort and I'm interested to read Thomas's other Punktown work to see how it compares.

"The Rose in Twelve Petals" begins Theodora Goss's newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author's work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then re-frames our expectations. The initial recognition of the familiar story pulls us into the the fairy tale mindset: of stories that map the small journeys and decisions that can unexpectedly lead to major life changes; of characters and encounters that we understand to be meant not quite literally, yet not as simple allegory either. As the story progresses, the postmodern telling of the tale, the way that every character and every side are given voice (reminiscient of Pamuk's My Name is Red), the way that the subtext of classic fairy tales -- gender, class, politics in the largest sense of the word -- are literalized, all serve to pull fairy tales into modernity, into history (often but not always our own). This mixture of old and new modes of storytelling recurs in the collection's other fifteen stories: there are times, settings, characters and themes that appear again and again, similar but different, the original fairy tales of a multitude of parallel worlds. Throughout, Goss's storytelling palette is made up of the strange day-to-day patterns of individual wants and desires, the certainties and uncertainties that make up our daily lives.

So it is with "Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold," where the titular professor is given the chance to choose between the certainty of his humdrum, largely failed academic and personal life, and the uncertainty of passing beyond an ambiguous threshold into a new level of existence. And so it is with the World Fantasy Award-nominated "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm," about a man building a glider to reach an airborne city where his art will be appreciated (art and the appropriate audience for art are other recurring themes in the collection). For both Meister Wilhelm and Professor Berkowitz it is uncertainty, a lack of faith, that is the enemy of the artist.

The flip side (Goss again showing multiple sides to many stories) is seen in a pair of tales set in the author's native Hungary. In "Letters from Budapest," an art student rebels against the dull, utilitarian view of painting enforced by the Party's Art Committee. Lured by the thrill of artistic certainty offered by a decadent painter in hiding, he horrifically discovers that there are choices even more creatively sapping than following the Party line. It's a good story, and a brave one. "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" is very much a parallel tale, of a similar place at a perhaps somewhat later time. A sparsely poetic, coldly beautiful epistolatory story, "Sorrow" is concerned with the certainty of revolutionary movements -- aesthetic, and thus inescapably political -- and the uncertainty that comes from rejecting conformity with them. I was reminded of Spook City's fall to the Nothing in Ende's The Neverending Story, as the silent revolution of entropy advanced across the artist's community of Szent Endre. The sun now shines with only a "vague luminescence," writes the nameless letter-writer who has refused to join the movement, and "I sit...not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow."

Death is life's great certainty; no surprise that the big D enters into many of these tales. Cancer is one of modern life's foremost uncertainties, and it, too, figures prominently here. It figures most prominently in the collection's title story, "In The Forest of Forgetting," where a woman diagnosed with "lumps" casts aside the certainty of past roles -- Patient, Daughter, Wife, Mother (which largely represent the cast of Goss's new fairy tales, replacing Kings and Queens, Knights and Princesses) -- in a mythologized journey toward a new, uncertain role and place. It is as heroic as it is tragic. "Lily, with Clouds" shows a similar journey from an outside observer's viewpoint, as the so-certain worldview of a small town Southern matriarch is fractured when her prodigal sister returns home to die. If there is an unambiguous statement in Goss's collection, it is expressed here:

Mind you, Goss's stories aren't all grim. "Sleeping with Bears" is the delight of the collection, as the sister of a new bride goes from uncertainty ("I don't understand why [my sister] decided to marry a bear") to certainty ("I finally understand why my sister is marrying a bear") in a story that pokes at notions of gentry and family history in the American South, while literalizing some of the earthy sexuality of classic fairy tales. "The Belt" also touches on issues of class, gender and sex, continuing the familiar fairy tale of the male noble who marries a beautiful common woman past the usual ending of and they lived happily ever after. In fact, what "The Belt" does is replace the certainty of that typical fairy tale ending with an equal certainty, grounded in modern notions of psychology and class, that no such unilaterally happy ending could now be possible when both sides are considered. The story is presented with such a feeling of earnest good advice, however, of empowerment for both women and men, that to me it felt optimistic rather than pessimistic -- some new, truer form of happy ending, the story suggests, may now be possible. Your mileage may vary.

The stories mentioned thus far involve characters coming to terms with external certainties and uncertainties. There is another type of story in Goss's collection: the wishing stories, stories where characters drive the outcome through their desires. Emblematic of these wishing stories is the recurring character of Emily Gray, an ephemeral fay spirit of enigmatic motivations. Miss Emily Gray's first, eponymous story is a fairly straightforward tale of being careful of what you wish for, and the danger of childish certainty; her second appearance, in "Conrad," is a straightforward tale of a beneficial wish granted to an uncertain child; her final appearance, in "Lessons with Miss Emily Gray," is a not-at-all straightforward tale of beneficial wishes granted and of being careful what you wish for. Yes, there is a progression here, an inner order to the collection's stories.

It is in the collection's penultimate story, the Nebula Award-nominated "Pip and the Fairies," that all the strands of Goss's storytelling come together most superbly. Philippa Lawson is abandoning her acting career and returning to the home of her childhood, where her mother wrote children's books, fairy tales. Philippa no longer knows whether those stories of Pip and the fairies were based on her own true adventures, told to her mother, or if her mother's stories have colonized her memories of childhood. "How did it begin?" Philippa wonders; the question is as important as how it ends, perhaps more so. The story is Goss at her best, speaking to both the child's love of fairy tale, and the adult's sense of survival and need to ascertain. It combines many of the themes and devices of the collection's previous stories -- the wishes, the threshold, the mother taken by cancer -- while stacking layer upon layer of certainty and uncertainty. It's good; it's very, very good, a heady mix of Pan's Labyrinth, Carroll's The Land of Laughs, and Goss's own unique magic. I'd very much like to tell you that the ending -- devastating, heartbreaking, and yet transcendent -- is uncertain, as I have with so many of these other stories...but I don't think that I can.

The way themes of certainty and uncertainty pervade In the Forest of Forgetting, it is no surprise that on the rare occasion a story does disappoint, it is usually because of issues with these same themes. In some stories the authorial certainty Goss exerts feels at odds with the uncertainty she seeks to evoke. The authorial certainty in dividing up "The Rose in Twelve Petals" into its twelve sections, for example, feels in conflict with the narrative uncertainty Goss uses to end the tale; the end feels a little too obviously a Statement. Similarly, for the section in which Professor Berkowitz must decide whether to pass through the threshold to be titled "Faith, like a Seagull Hanging in Mid-air" presages the nature of the professor's testing, signals too clearly that the author is in control and knows in advance what will happen. These are stories that reveal too soon that only one thing can happen, where Goss has left no room for the story to surprise herself. Or in some cases her readers: several other stories seemed to go on too long, to explain too much, too neatly. "I assumed it was perfectly clear," says Miss Emily Gray in her eponymous story: "I was sent to make come true your heart's desire." Miss Gray is saying this to a child, however; to most adult readers it will be perfectly clear.

The explaining permeates even the book's introduction. Goss here shares not only some of her personal history -- she and her divorced mother traveling from Hungary to Italy, Belgium and then up and down the Northeastern United States -- but also how she feels these experiences have impacted her writing in its concern with place and displacement, with borders and irrevocable crossings. It's useful and interesting information, but often the relentlessly biographical analysis does no favors. For some readers it may deuniversalize the stories, rendering the tales purely commentary on the author's personal experiences. It can also lead to lazy analysis. We can note that in nearly all of Goss's stories, you cannot, or should not, go home again -- but how do we explain the brilliant ambiguity of "Pip and the Fairies" in that regard? Or it is tempting to say that Goss's prose has the elegant, mannered precision of someone to whom English is not a first language, who learned not just (as most schooled from birth in the USA learn) how words are used, but also what and how they mean. This sort of simple reductionism, though, is unfair to the author. How many other non-native writers of English (to say nothing of natives) have Goss's lyricism? How many born abroad have her perceptiveness in identifying the mythologies of the United States: the Northeastern USA's fascination with the post-Civil War South, for example; or the way many of her older foreign characters regard service in Viet Nam as a badge of belonging. How many writers have her Peter Beagle-like ability to instantiate complex modern concepts via the language of story, making a place for the fantastic and fabulous in modern literature? And indeed, how many people have her drive to create and share stories?

For that is also, I think, one of the core themes of In the Forest of Forgetting. The transmission of story, and in particular of fairy stories, occurs throughout the collection: in some cases stories are shared by oral storytelling; in some cases by books, or letters; in some cases they are written on scavenged pieces of driftwood and cast out to sea. In all cases fairy tales serve to create, and to symbolize, a sense of personal history and place. Their value is not that they grant understanding, but that they encourage us to seek understanding, to see and act on the complex truths of the world. Paradoxically, the words of fairy tales tell us not to ignore that which cannot be directly put into words; they acknowledge our sense that there are certainties, even if we cannot always be certain what they are. If the modern world has become a poor place for classic fairy tales, as several of the stories herein suggest, the answer Theodora Goss proposes is not that we forget fairy tales altogether, but rather that we create new fairy tales for our new age. She has certainly created several excellent ones in this collection.

-- Matt Denault

I find that very rarely are we lucky to garner a book recommendation that equals in quality with the zest that it was given in. When I was recommended a collection my misgivings were amplified, not that I have any qualms reading collections - quite the opposite - as I had in relative recent time read a number of fantastic collections related to the genre that include but are not exclusive to works like Jeffrey Ford’s Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, Matthew Rossi’s Things that Never Were, Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Life, Jeffrey Thomas’s Punktown, Rhys Hughes’ A New Universal History of Infamy , Nowhere Near Milkwood, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, and Di Filippo’s Lost Pages. I was aware that this collection was the debut work of an author by the name of Holly Phillips, and since I was handed this collection with the promise of reviewing it I was a bit apprehensive having such a fresh recollection of works, of which I thought were just superlative examples of the craft in my mind to subconsciously (and consciously) compare it to. What I found in my visit to Phillip’s In the Palace of Repose is that my worries were unwarranted, and after making room on my shelf where I keep top tier collections, I realized the only thing I had to concern myself was in the event of having to review another collection again in the near future, I now had a new name to remember and include to list amongst those I listed above to make me feel apprehensive about. It shouldn’t be too difficult, as if In the Palace of Repose is any indication I think Phillips will soon make it impossible for her name to remain in any form of ambiguity.

In her debut collection, Phillips offer nine stories. If you have not read the work and the name perhaps sounds familiar, two of the nine stories, including the title story, had been previously published elsewhere, and the remaining seven original to this collection. The collection itself, along with these individual nine stories (lives), is comprised by a rare and satisfying blend of the fantastic, subdued horror, and a touch of science fiction; however they are all written with a literary quality that would seem misplaced and atypical to mainstream readers.

The title story opens the collection, after a quaint and personable introduction by author (not to mention a rather talented one himself) Sean Stewart. In the Palace of Repose serves as a perfect introduction to both the reading experience and author. We are shown the elements that will remain in the rest of works, binding this collection, not by genre but thematically and by tone. The story about a captive King and the bureaucracy that imprisons him for so long they forget why, a story about magic and wonder contrasted with the starkness of the reality of the cold world, some of the scenes nothing less than breathtakingly rendered by Phillips:

The second story ‘The Other Grace’, less fantastic but a more chilling account of a girl who one day lost her memories and her readjustment to life living with her parents and brother. An example of how false the statement “just being there is enough” can be, not from her standpoint but from the perspective of others, and delivers a statement that even though you may not be capable of remembering anything, even you yourself cannot run away from your self.

'The New Ecology’ is a tale about a young woman realizing she cannot run away from the world around her. Aptly named Millennium, she drifts from place to place in fear of changing ecology manifested to her in strange living constructs. Regardless of what you are doing in it; you must take into account the world itself as it is evolving around whether we do or not.

A tale of metamorphosis, ‘A Woman’s Bones’ takes us to an archeological dig at an ancient burial ground that is interrupted by the appearance of Alyakshin, a tribal nomadic group, who warn of the bad omen to dig up the grounds of a legendary female conqueror. The story is about a woman who is a part of the expedition, who has similar roots as the Alyakshin, who serves as the translator between the two groups which causes her to reflect on her heritage both present and past, and the necessity of it, for her to truly rise again in the world.

‘Pen and Ink’ along with ‘ Summer Ice’ are perhaps my favorites in the collection. A young artist is looking for her father, a famous artist himself who disappeared. She does so by unconventional means by locating and looking at her father’s various works, looking for him in the paintings. The ending of this piece reminded me of the painting of the dream house/landscape in the Robin Williams movie ‘What Dreams May Come’ that his wife had painted. To locate these paintings, which were sold by her mother to various buyers, she enlists (or is it the other way around) the help of a disturbing figure, a museum curator who feeds off the art itself. I found a passage in this story depicting the character Cezzanne’s thoughts, on sketching and art that really seemed equally appropriate regarding the effect of Phillip’s prose:

Phillips displays her talent for the surreal in ‘One of the Hungry Ones,’ a story of a street urchin who is invited to join her “friends” in a masquerading ritual, a social gathering that turns into a surreal game of hunt - not a game of chance but a game she cannot play and win, nevertheless a game she find herself yearning for.

‘By the Light of Tomorrow Sun’, a story about the completion of a circle, albeit by less desirable means, at aptly a place called End Harbor, a setting described as a “meeting place of worlds”, as a young boy Daniel returns for his dying grandfather.

Along with ‘Pen and Ink’, the next piece ‘Summer Ice‘, are my favorite of the collection. All the stories in ‘In the Palace of Repose’ are bound by the presence of a varying degrees of a gloomy ambience, and ‘The Summer Ice’ does not deviate from this, but in the end offers a hope bred from what seems to be born of sentimental origins. It’s also a subtle story where Phillip’s describes a setting peripherally, offering much more then what readers who require being directly told something to glean the truth of its presence. Of all the stories I felt this one really displayed the deftness Ms. Phillip’s has in the craft aside from her immaculate and beautiful prose, which is obvious at the collection's onset. Let me pause for a moment for my “head in the gutter moment” part of my review. When I finished reading this story, the choice of name Manon (which I am sure is common), and the fact that Ms. Phillips is Canadian from my understanding as well, and the prominent role of “Ice” in the story, stuck out to me. Besides being a fan of speculative fiction, I am a bigger sports fan, and a proud member of the ESPN Sportscenter generation, and all these unrelated elements for some reason made me think of Manon Rheaume, a female hockey player who made some splash a few years back being signed and playing in a preseason NHL game - Okay, my heads out of the gutter now.

The concluding piece is ‘Variations on a Theme’ two interwoven stories of two musicians linked in a mysterious way, and offers a satisfying conclusion to the collection. The choice of stories to bookend this collection were flawless.

Needless to say I really enjoyed my reading experience with Phillips' In the Palace of Repose. The stories spanning multiple sub-genres not only demonstrated Ms. Phillip’s versatility and bear witness that her prose is as effective in one as it is in the other, but also made the work seem not repetitive as it could have been, due to the aforementioned theme and tone shared among the stories: a melancholic perspective that loomed albeit in different degrees…well like a shared fog:

Going back to the prose, it’s both accessible and provides depth reminiscent in is aesthetic value to a Patricia Mckillip. Sean Stewart in his introduction touches on it:

Like in all collections some parts do not equal up to others; however even the stories that didn’t grab me as much as some others were still a marvel and exercise of an author who has an obvious love for words and the prose to indulge that love. There are legitimate gems here with works like 'Summer Ice', 'Pen and Ink' and 'The Other Grace', and that said my final grade for Holly Phillip’s debut collection, In the Palace of Repose is an 8.5, and a big thanks to Mr. Wallace for recommending me such a compelling read, and more importantly introducing me to what is hopefully many future works from Holly Phillips.

Another excellent product from Prime, fastly becoming my favorite publisher.

Jay
The Bodhisattva

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It's official, I’ve read my first China Mieville knock off. In her first novel, The Etched City, Australian newcomer K.J. Bishop blatantly emulates the horrifically fantastic, vaguely steam punk style of Mieville…and she fails miserably (unless the point of the novel is, rather than entertain, to engage the reader in a war of attrition).

The novel starts off well enough, the first sixty pages are filled with promise; set in the dustbowl of Copper Country, the reader is introduced to army doctor Raule and the vagabond Gwynn, rebels fleeing the harsh justice of the Army of Heroes. They make their way to the city of Ashamoil, a wholly uninteresting conjuring of New Crobuzon, and then the novel gets boring.

Gwynn becomes a hired gun for the Horn Fan Cartel where he helps run their lucrative slave deal while Raule works as a doctor to Ashamoil’s poorest residents. Normally, I would give my faithful readers a better overview of the plot, but this is all I can say; at this point, the plot grinds to a sudden halt for the next 300 pages until Ms. Bishop remembers that novels contain elements like “plot” and “climax.”

The bulk of Bishop’s novel is an exercise in imagination, a horrific carnival. The reader waits as otherworldly, vaguely philosophical, often times downright ugly and always unnecessary devices are described in seemingly endless succession until the reader is drowned into complacency. For example, Raule (an interesting character who Bishop all but abandoned once the story moved to Ashamoil) keeps a collection of horribly mutated stillborn children. Does this serve any purpose besides allowing Bishop to showcase her imagination? No.

There is no doubt that this style of writing can be effectively done, as evidenced by Mievilles’ brilliant Bas-Lag novels. Those novels all have an absorbing plot; The Etched City doesn’t. It is also evident that Ms. Bishop is a competent writer, as proved by the vivid imagery constituting a majority of the novel.

Unfortunately, that is not enough. There is no plot at all to carry the reader’s interest and one is overwhelmed by the endless parade of vividly detailed (yet ultimately pointless) horrors until the reader stops caring, which is a decidedly bad sign.

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