As with LOTR, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's Bones is the sum of its aesthetic choices, times the auteur's vision. Jackson brings a vibrant surrealism and suspense to the adaptation, and it says a lot that he chose Brian Eno to do the music for it. Spoilers below.

The Lovely Bones is the story of young Susie Salmon, who's murdered by a serial killer, and who then observes the aftermath as a ghost. A girl in her early teens, Susie is compellingly played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan. She observes the grief of her family, and their floundering responses as the police consider every possible suspect but the right one; she experiences an afterlife that seems a strangely logical mix of its own rules and her internal world. (In places it's a little like a subtler version of What Dreams May Come, without the philosophy-and without a Cuba Gooding, Jr). She resists complete absorption into the next world, drawn back to psychically finger the residue of her own uncompleted life.

The novel's story is told by the murdered girl. In the book, Susie says: "My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my dad talked to him once about fertilizer." This voice, as voice-over, usually simple, sometimes penetrating, neatly interlaces and tightens the film's narration. The use of voiceover is famously a cinematic bugaboo, a chain holding many films back - it mars Kubrick's otherwise brilliant film noir, The Killing - but occasionally it can work, and here's the occasion. Saoirse Ronan's voiceover brings the first-person voice of the novel into the film, so that we feel haunted by her as we watch events unfold. Jackson uses the voiceover just enough, and in just the right places.

We know early on - as in the novel - that Susie Salmon will be murdered, because she tells us so. But somehow Jackson makes us afraid for her anyway, though her doom is a kind of fait accompli from the first. Jackson stretches out the suspense about who does it for awhile, but by the end of the first act you know it's "Mr. Harvey." The psychopathic Mr Harvey, a predator who can be just charming enough to be well camouflaged, is played with creepy brilliance by Stanley Tucci - you absolutely know that this character is a guy from your neighborhood who's very fussy about his flowers, very punctual, lives alone. You accept that he builds dollhouses - perhaps miniature houses is a better description - as a hobby. And somehow his little quirks quite logically dovetail with the fact that he likes to rape, murder, and dismember young girls. We infer we shouldn't trust people who are too neat, wound too tight, and too charming. Good advice. The scenes where Mr. Harvey stalks Susie, and entraps her in the little pre-adolescent play-chamber he builds, like a dollhouse, under the cornfield - a resonantly symbolic setting - are quite frightening. One knows what will happen, and it doesn't help. Jackson's skills at suspense and the elucidation of fear – the bringing of background fear cracklingly into the foreground, at precisely the right moment - are powerfully in evidence.

The afterlife of The Lovely Bones has its various facets, like the Bible's "many mansions"; there is a kind of dark afterlife bardo feel to part of it, but there's also the freedom of living one's dreams, in a light-hearted way, as a fourteen year old girl. Never forget, when Jackson shows you her afterlife, that it's her afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl in her early teens. In one segment that might strike some as a bit airyfairy, there is a Little Prince style planet; there are butterflies and teen-fantasy outfits. She even sees herself fleetingly on the cover of a teen magazine. But this isn't your afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl who had teen heartthrob photos on her bedroom wall. That sequence is not overlong, and it makes sense. And it's just a portion of her life-after-death - other parts are almost Mordor-like; are certainly fraught with symbol and infused with a living presence, so that we're never surprised when it responds to psychological impulses from Susie or the mortal world. The scenes in the Next World are often spectacular - and yet they meld potently with the drama of the mortal world.

Susie's relationship with her father, likably played by Mark Wahlberg, is more powerful than her relationship with her mother - Rachel Weisz—whom we know largely from her grief. Her father is obsessed with finding her killer, and is thoroughly unsuited for it - eventually, spiritually guided by Susie in an understated way, he intuits the killer's identity. When he tries to do something about it, his fury bears bitter fruit, in keeping with the film's theme of acceptance over hatred.

It may be that the second act, at times, doesn't quite cohere, doesn't always lead immaculately into the third. Occasionally it seems episodic. But the film's imagery and characters exert a pull that draws us relentlessly along, and the third act plays out compellingly.

Susie's sister is the one who finds the evidence the blind, flailing adults overlook while Susan Sarandon, as the alcoholic, bohemian grandmother — holds the family together. Chainsmoking, endearingly incompetent , the character is wonderful, completely convincing, and sometimes quite funny. Sarandon may get a best-supporting-actress nomination for this - she simply becomes this woman.

Susie's murder has been with us from the first, in a way, but chronologically it comes right after she meets a stunningly Byronic young immigrant from Britain (reminiscent of the young man the girls love from the Twilight pictures), who might have been her soul-mate... had she not been murdered; had her life, with all its drama and joy, its highs and troughs not been brutally, maddeningly, senselessly and oh-so-pointlessly interrupted. This is one of the film's most poignant throughlines, and provides some of its emotional resolution, in time. Just in time - to rescue an ending that some might find a little unsatisfying.

The film strays in some places from Sebold's narrative, but the end belongs to the novel, a resolution as much emotional as plot-driven. It's a denouement written by an artist, not by a Hollywood screenwriter. There must have been some Suits feeling angst over that ending, when the studio distributors saw it. (I notice they aren't spending a lot of money promoting The Lovely Bones.) Not that it's a bad ending - it's just deep. And they don't like deep. Will they recognize the cunning symbolism of the faces in the dollhouse windows? The little ships suddenly taking shape in the bottles?

I found the ending to be just frustrating enough — about as frustrating as our world is. And it is another example of choices defining an adaptation. Some fans of the book may carp about certain freedoms Jackson took, but most will hopefully see that in this very creative, authoritative film Peter Jackson preserves the characters, the theme, the dread, the delight found in the novel - and has added just enough of his own.

John Shirley's newest novels are Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel, and Bleak History

In the early years of the Cheney administration, my neighbor's house burned to the ground; and in her grieving give-aways, I inherited an unscathed copy of John Shirley's Really Really Really Really Weird Stories. I hadn't known my neighbor well, and I had obviously never been a huge reader of whatever exactly it was that Shirley was writing. So, it wasn't for another six months that I cracked the first page of the book, a story collection so creatively explosive, trembling with unashamed poetic license, that it become almost a talisman to me, a Yes from the Cosmos, a direction to an aspiring story-teller.

The most remarkable thing about that collection, perhaps, was that each of its four sections, did, as promised, get progressively weirder. And the first story, in which a street-walker in San Francisco answers a marriage ad from a Mexican B-actor who bills himself as the world's smallest man, was already weird enough. Charlie Manson only wishes he had the mental powers of the trailer park psychotics that lash out at Shirley's cold doctors and stuffy bureaucrats. The Virgin Mary only wishes that she could be revivified from the homely rubber of an ordinary beach ball.

Though his stories are grittier, more carnal, and far more menacing, Shirley's collection brought to mind a master from a different time. Shirley works with his post-punk urban decay, the aftermath of Reaganomics, in much the same way that Alfred Bester had worked with his epochally charged up-scale Madison Avenue of the 1950s, namely, picking it up like a snow globe with a city inside, shaking it up a few times, and letting it settle into his brilliant space-stories. Like Alfred Bester, Shirley struck me as a literary southpaw, a natural born story-teller, whose strong imagination defied the myriad rules of thumb that burden other authors. Faithful only to the caged beast that wants to burst out of each story, their work unfolds exactly the way you'd want it to unfold, passionate, unpredictable, uncannily true, and often funny enough that you stupidly try to retell the story at parties.

Much of what I've always loved about John Shirley pours out of his new novel, Bleak History.

In hero Gabriel Bleak, Shirley draws a fine portrait of a scruffy outsider who earns his living on the margins of society, as a bounty hunter, and of a young man whose psychic wounds go much deeper than his gory bad memories as a reluctant soldier in Afghanistan.

The hunter himself, we soon learn, is being hunted by a splinter group of American intelligence. In mercenary fashion, the CCA would like to "contain" Bleak's talents, and use them in a secret war against the nebulous Enemy. They've been watching him since birth, and in some ways, know more than Bleak about the source of his psychic gifts, which include the knowledge of when he is being observed, an ability to speak with ghosts, and the power to condense the energy of "the Hidden" into fireballs and ladders.

Shirley is ever the master of twining plots, each with their own energy, that come at each other with the inevitability of runaway trains.

In Bleak History, we are treated to a parapolitical story of the CCA, whose methods of keeping America safe go as far as kidnapping "talented" children, including Bleak's own brother, and keeping them in an adolescent (and emotionally larval) state. Halfway through the book, this plot line rams right into the compelling story of Troy Gulcher, a scuzzy crook who calls upon an old dark entity called Moloch. These two stories then intersect with a fictional piece of historical metaphysics, in which Sir Isaac Newton and a group of luminaries attempt to spare the world from another grueling Dark Age with the help of an extremely ancient bit of technology left deep inside the ice at the Magnetic North Pole. Into this mix, Shirley threads the story of the mystically perfect love which has, so far, skirted Gabriel Bleak, and a plot line in which Moloch, through the use of his human puppets, prepares to take over the world.

As these various plots thicken, each of the Faustian puppet masters find themselves the unwitting puppets. One by one, Gulcher and the others experience reversals of fate, until even the power mad general Forsythe, who is using the CCA, and these magical entities, lies in the dirt, babbling, impotently bemoaning what he's done.

What is so enjoyable about Bleak History, however, more than its head-strong plotting, more than all the spectacular and baroque metaphysics, is the way the author depicts the levels of human cruelty. I suppose the same could be said of Dante Alighieri. In any case, both authors show a loving touch in their canny portraits of morally repulsive men and women of their times. And both lay out a very pleasant variety of the faces one finds within every rotting institution, with its colorful monsters and gentleman failures.

While I consider this novel, in many ways, a work of genius, I did get a sense, at times, that the author himself was not exactly aware of where his unique strength lies. In many places, Bleak History moves on the page a bit like an action movie, where one can see every kick and grimace and plume of dust. Don't get me wrong. I heartily enjoy the exquisite shadenfreude that only Shirley evokes. But for me, the visceral effect was diluted by what came across as a readying of the story for another medium. Bleak History was strongest in those places, mostly in the little details, where the author gives himself to the madness of the story, and perhaps, to madness itself, and manages to bypass the kind of pre-thinking that can be harmful to the unscrupulous lifeblood of art.

What I love so much about Shirley's characters, at their best, is how they come off as such hilariously chipped tea cup specimens of humanity, so American, so horrible, so believable, and so very John Shirley. But in this book, I didn't detect that strong heartbeat. One can see what the characters in Bleak History are pointing towards. But I didn't feel them fully materialize, each as a world unto herself. Instead, the more authentically geisty dregs of humanity take a backseat, in this book, to a more accessible kind of oddball, who only really represents an oddball to that vast majority of normals. I feel as though it was well within John Shirley's reach, when he painted his gang of misfits (the so-called ShadowComm, who reluctantly accompany Gabriel Bleak) to add those few brushstrokes which would render them as something worthy of A Confederacy of Dunces, or A Feast of Snakes. It almost seems that some dark entity was exerting a force on the brilliant wordsmith, all along, so that his creations would instead come out as a better drawn bunch of X-Men.

On the other hand, perhaps the organic vitality of the characters suffers precisely because the book does so much. Bleak History takes the reader on a heady tour of demonology, love, crime, war, an intricate and homespun system of mysticism, the psychic surveillance state, unique variations on the Stockholm syndrome, the sorrows of every eternal misfit, and an apt critique of institutional thinking. There are plenty of thought-provoking tropes in the book, including self-enclosed realities the author calls pocket worlds, an autistic oracle, various ways a person might reach into another mind, and scientific explanations for Magic and the Occult. And like so much of Shirley's work, beneath the twisted story, the reader is treated to a Matryoshka series of dolls within lying, paranoid dolls.

Many of our favorite fantasy books of the past year or so feature a self-consciously noir tinge. Perhaps the most buzzed-about of these is The Steel Remains by Altered Carbon author Richard K. Morgan — it's gotten an amazing reputation since it came out last January, but if anything the hype understated this book's greatness. Profane, riotous and utterly captivating, The Steel Remains follows three thick-skinned veterans of a terrible war against lizard people, as they investigate the rise of a new supernatural power that threatens to obliterate everything they fought for.

Other recent books in the "noir fantasy" niche include Richard Kadrey's Hollywood revenge saga Sandman Slim (which we reviewed here), China Miéville's weird detective story The City And The City (reviewed here), Elizabeth Bear's supernatural alternate history detective stories collected as New Amsterdam, John Shirley's psychic bounty hunter saga Bleak History, Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, and io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer's hardboiled detective novel Finch, plus several others.

Fantasy detective stories are nothing new, of course, and neither are morally grey protagonists or dark storylines. The "vampire detective" and "urban ghost-hunter" genres are decades old at this point. But this new crop of books seems uniquely "noir" by virtue of its extreme nastiness. They're coarse and often overtly sexual, they often feature extreme graphic violence, and they seldom offer you a clear-cut right and wrong. Their protagonists are has-beens, losers, or not-quite-epic champions, with tarnished armor.

And just as classic hardboiled detective fiction often features assholes who are untouchable because they're rich, these novels often feature people, or things, who are too powerful to mess with — except that, instead of just having lots of money, these fiends tend to have mystical power or ultra-powerful friends.

These novels take place in cities and towns already crushed under the weight of history before the story even begins — Finch, for example, is VanderMeer's third book about Ambergris, his fictional city, and it takes place 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword, when the mushroom-like Grey Caps have retaken the city and are systematically oppressing the humans. And in Shirley's taut Bleak History, we come in in the middle of a struggle by a shadowy government organization to control psychics like Gabriel Bleak, who can see ghosts and communicate with The Hidden, a supernatural realm beyond our own. Bleak works as a bounty hunter, using his supernatural gifts to track down bail-jumpers. The government stooges remind each other that under the new rules, they don't need evidence to run them in.

Bleak History also features some appropriately lurid descriptions of New York as a hot, humid cesspit full of crooks, ghosts and thugs. Including this lovely Spillane-esque passage:

A few hours later, the sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.

You know you're reading a noir-ish book when a simple description of an urban sunset turns garish, menacing and disturbing. As I mentioned in my review, the descriptions of the menacing decay of Los Angeles in Kadrey's Sandman Slim also stay with you. Like this bit:

Sometime while I was gone, Hollywood Boulevard had a nervous breakdwon. Vacant storefronts. Trash dissolving in the street. Nothing but ghosts here — shadows of runaways and dealers huddled in padlocked doorways. I remember the Boulevard full of wild kids, drag queens, manic Dylan wannabes, and tourists looking for more than their next fix. Now the place looks like a whipped dog.

Another thing that sometimes sets apart the protagonists of this new noir writing is their outlawed sexuality — two of the three protagonists in Morgan's The Steel Remains are queer, and we're never allowed to forget how much people despise them for it. The warrior Ringil Angeleyes is the gay swordsman you didn't know you've been waiting for, who'll sleep with anyone, including the mythical fairy-like creatures that are hell-bent on crushing the human race. (And then Ringgil will turn around and dismiss his sleeping-with-the-enemy stunt as a meaningless fuck.) At every turn, Ringgil is called a faggot by people who want to drum him out of decent society — but they can't, because he's a war hero and still the only hope they have of surviving. Another protagonist, Archeth, is a lesbian and the last representative of the mythic race of the Kiriath, aka the Black Folk, and both aspects of her identity are deeply offensive to the new wave of religious zealots who are taking over the Empire. Meanwhile, Bear's story collection New Amsterdam features a gay vampire detective, Sebastian.

Most of all, these books tend to feature tarnished heroes, who are facing people (and creatures) who are much more powerful than they are, and who think that they can rule over the festering sewer that is the city, and trample anyone who gets in their way. Whether it's ancient demons, rich assholes with magic, evil fairies, or government spooks, there's always somebody wanting to rule over the dungheap — and usually the only person standing in the way is an outsider who's past his or her prime. You also often sense that the world is heading the wrong way — in The Steel Remains, slavery has become legal and is fast becoming the Empire's main industry, while religious bigots are working to crush every last shred of culture or sophistication.

And the heroes of noir fantasy aren't just damaged — they're traumatized. In The Steel Remains, all three of the protagonists are carrying around the weight of the mass slaughter in the war against the Scaled Folk and the pointless wars among humans that followed, plus Ringgil is scarred mentally by having watched his lover tortured to death by the Inquisition. In Sandman Slim, we're constantly getting flashbacks to Stark's years of fighting for his life in Hell's arenas.

So why are we seeing an upswing in noir fantasy now? I asked some of these authors, and they pretty much all saw their work as a continuation of noir themes that have always been present in the genre.

John Shirley says:

Think of Mordor — and how Mordor, and also the earthworks of Saruman, were always very industrial. And noir happens in the shadow of industry. So in The Lord of the Rings it was about the intrusion of the darkest side of the urban on the green heart of Middle Earth. Urban fantasy though is a mutt, half fantasy, half urban noir. Our era does seem morally challenged—we're stunned by the immorality of Wall Street. Trying to make sense of it we project it onto supernatural villains. Going back, my novels Cellars and City Come A-Walkin' were early fusions of sf, magical realism, dark pop sensibility and noir fantasy. Bleak History just continues that thread in my writing.

And Kadrey sounds a similar note:

Am I part of a movement? I don't know. Movements are like pandemics. There's always another one coming along to make you bleed out.

Cities have replaced the black woods of medieval Europe as the home of the Black Beast, ghouls and bloodsuckers. You can't hide in the woods anymore. We've clearcut them to make foldaway entertainment centers for Ikea. The only place left to be invisible is in the city. There are the empty industrial zones where no one ever goes and the crowded downtowns where no one ever looks at you. Plus, porn and cable.

I don't think that there's anything special about this era's stupidity and corruption. Every era is the worst one ever. Every century is the end of the world. The fantasy I write isn't dark it's logical. There's a French saying, "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," which means, "We are born between piss and shit." In a world of shit, my heroes are the people who choose to be just a little less shitty.

Sir Galahad is dead. Good. Fuck him.

Writes Bear:

I'm not an expert on early fantasy, but I'm pretty sure Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser weren't the first noir protagonists in fantasy, and they are considerably older than I am (first appearing in 1939, quoth Wikipedia). So I don't think morally ambiguous protagonists are a modern phenomenon—but I do think that morally complex people are more interesting to write (and more engaging to the reader) than four-color heroes with whom the world conspires, so that there is always a morally unambiguous choice.

So, if it's a movement, it's one that's been going on for a long time. It's definitely a *conversation,* however!

(But then, I'm suspicious of literary movements and subgenres and marketing categories, so my own objective bias must be exposed.)

Adds VanderMeer:

Finch is a lot of things besides noir — a spy story, a surreal fantasy, a commentary on failed or occupied countries, a political statement about the last eight years of American empire, so I don't feel like part of a noir fantasy movement — I thought of Finch back in 1998, just didn't start work on it until 2005. But the appeal, I think is the built-in suspense and structure. You even see it in the Potter books, especially the early ones, which are all mysteries wedded to fantasy. Noir is a dangerous thing to use, though. In the wrong hands it becomes a series of cliches or it lends itself to the status quo. As for the anti-hero idea, while it's somewhat prevalent in noir, Finch isn't really a good example. John Finch is an honest, decent man in a bad spot. The real anti-hero is, in a way, the occupied city in which he lives. And the point of wedding noir to fantasy in Finch isn't to maintain the status quo but to explode it. Why are there several noir fantasies out recently? I don't really know. As an avid mystery reader, they all seem as different from each other as anvils, oranges, and bacon.

That lost cyberpunk novel would be Black Glass, coming out in August from ESP Books. Says Shirley:

Black Glass, which will be published in its first, hardcover edition, this summer, by Elder Signs Press, was conceived under a different name and as a different kind of project, in the early days of cyberpunk, by myself and William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Spook Country and all his books in between. We had collaborated on a couple of projects before this one. I don't remember who came up with the main idea or the general story of Black Glass. I know I wrote up an elaborate tale based on our discussion; I'm the one who fleshed it out and Bill approved it. But then the project got derailed, we both got diverted, and Bill was swept off to collect awards, count his royalties, chill with rock stars, and work on other projects. Subsequently, long subsequently, I remembered the book and inquired; Bill is a busy guy and turned the whole thing over to me.

So some years later I have written the novel, which I think of as the Lost Cyberpunk Novel; I have written it in its entirety. No one else should be held to blame.

Image from cover of Dark Wisdom #8, featuring Shirley's writing.