Crispin’s Model by Max Gladstone
My rating: 4/5 cats
It wasn’t a bowl and rose. It wasn’t not a bowl and rose, either. Take the bowl, and take the rose, and shatter them, cubist-like, through time as well as space, so in one facet the rose blooms and in another it’s rotten, the bowl here tarnished and there radioactive gleaming. But that doesn’t capture the twisted, callous distance of the effect. There was more time than time in that painting, and more space than space.
no new story last week had me slipping back into the archives to find one i hadn’t read, and i’ve been a review-slacker for a little bit, but i wanted to plop this one out before starting my 2021 december short story advent calendar project (which starts TODAY!)
i’d passed this one by numerous times in the endless scroll thru the archives, losing interest once the old LOVECRAFT vibe registered, but i decided to give it a go this time because GROWTH.
and it’s not at all bad, despite my misgivings.
it’s about an artist’s model named deliah dane who takes a gig from a particularly eccentric painter; a man who cannot bear to keep a piece once someone has viewed it. that quote above is deliah’s description of his version of a still life, which she insisted on seeing before agreeing to sit for him. that painting was promptly and unceremoniously thrown out the window after her viewing it tarnished it for crispin. artists, amiright?
but if his paintings of flora and crockery get turned into…that, what is going to happen to the human form via his brushstrokes?
funny you should ask, because THAT’S WHAT THE STORY IS ABOUT AND YOU CAN JUST READ IT AND FIND OUT!
it does get very lovecraftian, but mostly in the vagueness of its imagery and not in the blockchunk of its prose. my brain couldn’t understand all of it, but that’s l-craft’s whole deal, so it just means the story was a successful homage.
okay, that’s a wrap on 2021 tor shorts that AREN’T part of the december advent calendar. see you on the other side of this!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2017/10/04/crispi…
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