Category: Short Fiction

Michael Marshall Smith, ‘Unbelief’ (2010)

22nd June 2010 / / 1 Comment

There’s a kind of story which I’d characterise as the fantasy equivalent of a shaggy dog story, one where the fantasy is used as a ‘punchline’, and the rest builds up to that reveal. It’s a risky strategy to use, because it puts a disproportionate amount of weight on the ending, on making sure the ‘punchline’ has all the impact it needs.

‘Unbelief’ is a story of this type. Mostly, it is a conversation between two men in a New York park, one of whom has been hired to assassinate the other. The ‘punchline’ here is the identity of the victim; sad to say, it’s not particularly surprising or interesting. The story takes off a little towards the end, when we see there have been serious consequences to the protagonist’s actions; but this piece is still some way short of Smith’s excellent best.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Michael Marshall Smith’s website

Neil Gaiman, ‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains’ (2010)

18th June 2010 / / 1 Comment

In a mythical-historical Scotland, a child-sized man arrives at a house in a valley, searching for one Calum MacInnes, who is said to know the way to a cave on the Misty Isle, a cave in which there is gold. Thus, the two embark on a journey that will have tragic consequences for at least one of them…

The great strength of this story lies in its manner of telling. Gaiman’s prose creates an atmosphere of a bleak, half-legendary world, less through particular descriptions than through careful use of archaic structures. I rarely find myself associating stories with colours, but I imagined this one strongly in shades of white, grey, and wintry green.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Neil Gaiman’s website

Joanne Harris, ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ (2010)

17th June 2010 / / 1 Comment

‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ is, as far as I can gather, related to Joanne Harris’s 2007 YA novel Runemarks (exactly how, I can’t say, as I’ve not read that book). Long after Ragnarök, the Norse gods remain with us, and Aspects of several currently reside in New York. Our narrator is one such, Lukas ‘Lucky’ Wilde, now a semi-retired rock musician. In this story, Lucky and Aspects of other gods are being hunted by agents of the Shadow, who seek  to destroy them.

The idea of gods from historical pantheons living in the present day is not an unfamiliar one, which means this story has to do that bit much more work for it to shine, and I’m not sure that it succeeds. It’s a jolly adventure, but the plot is not inventive enough, nor the sense of magic deep enough, to make ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’ anything more than that. Harris’s breezy first-person narration ensures a fun read, but that’s as far as this tale goes.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Joanne Harris’s website

Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Fossil-Figures’ (2010)

16th June 2010 / / 4 Comments

The tale of twin brothers Edward and Edgar Waldman; the former small and sickly, the latter healthy and successful, having literally been a parasite on his brother in the womb. As their lives progress, the ‘demon brother’ Edgar becomes a Congressman, and Edward remains in the family home, the reclusive painter of a series of grotesque pieces – and an elegant reversal gets underway.

Oates’s prose is dense, with long paragraphs and repeated phrases, which has the effect of putting distance between the reader and events – there’s no forgetting that this a story being told. It heightens the sense of strangeness, and is particularly effective towards the beginning, when one gets caught up in the swirl of words describing the twins in the womb and as young children. Oates doesn’t maintain quite the same level of intensity throughout the story, but ‘Fossil-Figures’ is still a worthwhile read.

Rating: ***½

Roddy Doyle, ‘Blood’ (2010)

15th June 2010 / / 8 Comments

Straight away, here’s an author I would not instinctively associate with fantasy (though I’ve never previously read a word of Doyle, so that’s based purely on an assumption of mine) — and if the anthology continues to be as good as this, I will be very pleased.

Doyle’s protagonist is a forty-one-year-old man, married with two children, who has hobbies like going down the pub and playing football… There is nothing exceptional about him; he is normal, or so he wishes to tell himself. Yes, he’s an average bloke — with an urge to drink blood.

This leads to a number of farcical situations, as our man tries to hide his desire for blood from those around him; but what makes ‘Blood’ a particularly good story is the way Doyle uses this implied vampirism as a metaphor for general insecurities about one’s place in life and the world. The protagonist fixates on his wife’s offhand comment, ‘You’re such a messer,’ and starts to wonder what must be wrong with him that he’s feeling this way. Yet, surely, nothing’s wrong, because he’s normal, isn’t he?

Doyle writes in an easy, flowing style that suits his tale well — light-hearted to an extent, but with a relentless forward march that mirrors how the protagonist is overtaken by life. I’ll be reading more of Roddy Doyle’s work in the future, no doubt.

Rating: ****

Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio (eds.), Stories (2010)

15th June 2010 / / 3 Comments

Anthology titles don’t come much simpler than that. And the aim of the anthology (according to Neil Gaiman’s introduction) is similarly direct — to present good stories:

…[Al Sarrantonio and I] wanted good writing (why be satisfied with less?). But we wanted more than that. We wanted to read stories that used a lightning flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it before. Truly we wanted it all.

What the editors got was… this:

Roddy Doyle, ‘Blood’
Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Fossil-Figures’
Joanne Harris, ‘Wildfire in Manhattan’
Neil Gaiman, ‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains’
Michael Marshall Smith, ‘Unbelief’
Joe R. Lansdale, ‘The Stars Are Falling’
Walter Mosley, ‘Juvenal Nyx’
Richard Adams, ‘The Knife’
Jodi Picoult, ‘Weights and Measures’
Michael Swanwick, ‘Goblin Lake’
Peter Straub, ‘Mallon the Guru’
Lawrence Block, ‘Catch and Release’
Jeffrey Ford, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’
Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Loser’
Diana Wynne Jones, ‘Samantha’s Diary’
Stewart O’Nan, ‘Land of the Lost’
Gene Wolfe, ‘Leif in the Wind’
Carolyn Parkhurst, ‘Unwell’
Kat Howard, ‘A Life in Fictions’
Jonathan Carroll, ‘Let the Past Begin’
Jeffery Deaver, ‘The Therapist’
Tim Powers, ‘Parallel Lines’
Al Sarrantonio, ‘The Cult of the Nose’
Kurt Andersen, ‘Human Intelligence’
Michael Moorcock, ‘Stories’
Elizabeth Hand, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon‘
Joe Hill, ‘The Devil on the Staircase’

I’m intrigued by that contents list, because it includes both names I’d readily associate with the field of fantastic literature, and others which I generally wouldn’t. I’m curious to see how that selection plays out, which is why I plan to review this anthology one story at a time (here, I must tip my hat to the excellent Martin Lewis, whose similar short story projects have partly inspired me to do this).

I should say that I’m declaring my intention to review Stories in this way without having actually read any of the tales, so it remains to be seen how I’ll feel about that decision 400-plus pages later. There’s only one way to find out; it’s time to open the book…

UPDATE, 4th Aug: I’ve now completed the anthology, and posted some concluding thoughts here.

Elsewhere
Neil Gaiman’s website
BBC News interview with Gaiman

Chris Beckett’s ‘The Turing Test’: a guest post on NextRead

1st June 2010 / / 0 Comments

Gav Pugh of the NextRead blog devoted last month to posts about short stories. He published a number of guest reviews during the month, and was kind enough to accept one of mine. I decided to go back to Chris Beckett’s collection The Turing Test (which I reviewed here last year), and look at the title story in more detail.

My review of ‘The Turing Test’ is here, and you can read the story itself here. While you’re at NextRead, be sure to check out the other Short Story Month posts; there’s quite a variety of stuff covered in them. My thanks to Gav for posting my review, and for highlighting short fiction in this way.

M.G. Preston, ‘Extreme Latitude’ (2010)

23rd May 2010 / / 1 Comment

A short tale, told in diary form, of a scientist working at a polar weather station, who is slowly driven mad by a constant humming noise. The story works well enough in showing how the protagonist loses his grip on reality, as his diary entries become ever more frantic; but I think it falls down towards the end, because the supernatural interpretation that’s offered doesn’t quite convince, making it hard to accept the ambiguity for which Preston seems to be aiming. Almost there, but not quite.

This story appears in Black Static 16. Read all my posts about that issue here.

Tim Casson, ‘The Overseer’ (2010)

18th May 2010 / / 1 Comment

Depression-era London: our narrator, Darius, was born into a wealthy family, but is now having to deal with the hard economic times and has taken a job in a factory. He discovers a dark secret at its heart, in the form of the mill’s mysterious masked overseer. Casson evokes the atmosphere of the factory particularly well, and the ending takes the story takes the story off in a fascinating new direction. But the metaphorical underpinning doesn’t seem fully coherent, leaving me with the sense of a story containing two or three ideas that sit quite uncomfortably alongside one another, good though Casson’s writing is.

This story appears in Black Static 16. Read all my posts about that issue here.

Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Glare and the Glow’ (2010)

14th May 2010 / / 2 Comments

A man with a penchant for quotations  (though he can’t always remember who said them) buys some unusual light bulbs that illuminate rather more than he had bargained for. Rasnic Tem pitches the voice of his narrator just right (borderline insufferable, that is), and the tale is short — but it works.

Link
Melanie Tem’s and Steve Rasnic Tem’s website

This story appears in issue 227 of Interzone. Read all my blog posts about that issue here.

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