First: Asexuality prompt fest!

I will be hanging around there as soon as I get my head together enough. Losing most of a week to brain-destroying heat has left me feeling completely off-kilter in terms of writing and otherwise accomplishing stuff (I'm about twenty pages behind on the kinkmemes I'm already keeping up with...) On the other hnad, I've been reading real books! (Easier to handle in hammock than laptops are, see.) Apropos of that:

Dear Mr. Leonard R. N. Ashley, who wrote "The Complete Book Of Werewolves" that I picked up from the con.txt swap table:

You invited people to talk about your book on the Internet, so I think I'll take you up on it.

While I generally agree with you about the terrible state of the American educational system today, I have some objections to your statement that American schoolchildren ought to "tackle Henry James' The Turn of the Screw instead of reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple and other politically correct assignments."

Speaking as a young(ish) American who tackled both of those books in school (though neither as an assignment), Turn of the Screw is not actually a particularly good novel. It is, in fact, a fairly standard Gothic novel that has had all of the actually interesting elements of Gothic novels taken out, so that it can pass as proper men's literature. If you would like to read some good, serious gothic novels that are stylistically excellent, fun to read, and have serious things to say about both the genre and the state of humanity, I recommend Austen's Northanger Abbey or Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oh, wait, those were both written by women, so I suppose that would be too "politically correct".

As for The Color Purple, I will grant you that, particularly in terms of pacing and structure, it has a certain lack of polish. On the other hand, it's an absorbing book that takes risks, tries things that had almost never been done before, says things that nobody else was trying to say, speaks to people nobody else was speaking to, and does it all very, very well, if not perfectly. I am sorry if there was not enough girl-on-girl, racism and gore in it for your tastes (per your previous recommendation of Moon Dance*, with its lesbian cowgirls and savage Sioux tribesmen.)

Also I am not entirely sure why you felt the need to make that comparison in the middle of what was ostensibly a survey of werewolf literature, but I am sure you had your reasons.

Kisses,
Melannen

P.S.: I am actually working on a lesbian werewolf novel myself (scattershot and very slowly, but I am), since con.txt - two years ago? Four years ago? I forget - when one of the mods in a panel about original writing said that she was still looking for the first Great American Werewolf Novel, as she'd never seen one. I suspect it won't have enough girl-on-girl or racism for you, either.

I am used to books about the paranormal and anomalistics, especially ones about "savage monsters", having at minimum a fairly high level of passive background racism (along with fairly high levels of ablism and often misogyny and classism), but this one was toddling along being reasonably okay, if extremely and smugly idiosyncratic, when suddenly, *pow*, right in the face. Repeatedly. (The 'politically correct literature' rant was only the start :/ )

I would like to state for the record that the books I left on the con.txt swap table were books I actually liked that I happened to have extra copies of, or not enough storage space for, or to have left the fandoms of. Unlike apparently nearly everybody else who left books, who appeared to be clearing their libraries of authors who had proven to be homophobic/racist/misogynistic/pedophilic and/or copyright hypocrites. (All that Card and Bradley and Gabaldon and Heinlein and Bear and etc, it was like a nostalgia trip through the last two years' worth of fail.)


...Oh, and while I am at it,

( Dear Mr. R. D. Schneck, author of 'The President's Vampire', )
*I have not actually read Moon Dance by Somtow, or any of his other work; it's possible it's a very good book, but Ashley's description somehow did not give me confidence.