Adventures in reading
Pflug’s narrator travels back and forth across the Atlantic, in search of someone seen (and loved) in dreams. That person remains elusive, but the protagonist does encounter someone else from those dreams — a woman named Tullis, who has in turn dreamt of the narrator. This whole story has a suitably dream-like quality, and a final line that leaves proceedings nicely open to interpretation.
Rating: ***½
Elsewhere
Ursula Pflug’s website
A senior employee of a philanthropic organisation finds himself with the phone in one hand and the name ‘Violette Doranges’ in his thoughts, as though he’s just had a conversation with someone of that name, though he remembers no such thing, and knows no such person. In the subsequent days and weeks, the name of Violette Doranges crops up again and again; it turns out that she is a glamorous young socialite who moves in similar circles to the protagonist, though they’ve never knowingly encountered each other. Our man resolves to find a way to meet this mysterious woman, but doing so proves harder than he expected.
Early on, I thought I knew where Griffin’s story was going – his protagonist was not going to meet Violette; she’d always be nothing more real than a whispered name to him – and settled down for a dance towards and away from the revelation of Violette’s identity. But it was not to be so: towards its end, the story takes a turn that opens up the possibilities of interpretation, and leaves the tale alive in the mind for quite some time afterwards.
Rating: ***½
Julia Trafton discovers that her late husband, the wealthy but cruel Lucien Kane, has been unexpectedly generous in his will: he has bequeathed Julia’s family home (which she gave over to Lucien when they married) to her. There’s a condition, however, Julia must remain in the house for one night, without moving any of fifty-two marked objects. This may seem straightforward enough, but the objects turn out to be the fruits of Lucien’s interest in taxidermy – including his own stuffed corpse, proudly on display in the bedroom.
The idea behind ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ is creepy enough, but what makes Fitzpatrick’s story work even better is a wonderful ambiguity over the exact nature of the events taking place. Nicely done.
Rating: ***½
Elsewhere
David M. Fitzpatrick’s website
A girl who disappeared to who-knows-where, for who-knows-what reason, returns home as mysteriously as she vanished. She is different – withdrawn and unresponsive; nothing her parents try is able to bring their old daughter back. And then they discover that she has changed in ways far stranger than they could ever have imagined. I can’t quite piece together in my mind a conception of everything that goes on in the story; but Tullis’s writing is wonderfully unsettling.
Rating: ***½
One of the contributors to Null Immortalis has suggested I might find that William Meikle’s story gains greater resonance once I’ve read the book, because of the connections brought about by its context in the wider anthology. I suspect that will indeed happen – and here’s a story whose affect is certainly amplified by its context.
In Watt’s tale, S.D. Tullis is an enormously prolific and celebrated writer, whose secret is that his work is assembled from the solicited contributions of who-knows-how-many others. Our narrator is one such writer, who received a letter from ‘Tullis’ and responded with a short paragraph – and now obsessively checks Tullis’s output for signs of his contribution. ‘Apotheosis’ works enough well on its own as a character study and a story that hints at a hidden view of the world; but it works even better in Null Immortalis, whose structure echoes that of the work in the story.
Rating: ***½
I love this kind of fantasy story, where the fantastic elements slide from metaphor to concrete reality and back again, and can be read just as fruitfully either way. Pearlman’s narrator looks back on his relationship with his father, which began with him viewing his dad as a giant of a man, and grew worse as the protagonist his father’s shortcomings. At every stage, the father’s stature diminishes – figuratively and literally – in his son’s eyes, and the intertwining of reality and fantasy results in a very fine tale.
Rating: ****
It’s the end of the line: after ten years and as many volumes, Nemonymous has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the stories in each volume were published without bylines, with the authors’ names being revealed at a later date. Null Immortalis is a little different: as it’s the final Nemonymous anthology, bylines are already assigned to the stories — which gives us the following contents list:
Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’
David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’
David V. Griffin , ‘Violette Doranges’
Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’
Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’
Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’
Mike Chinn, ‘A Matter of Degree’
Richard Gavin, ‘Only Enuma Elish’
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ‘Icarus Above…’
Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’
Cameron Pierce, ‘Broom People’
Stephen Bacon, ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’
Mark Valentine, ‘The Man Who Made the Yellow God’
Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Green Dog’
Bob Lock, ‘Haven’t You Ever Wondered?’
I’ll be blogging these stories one at a time, with links appearing in the list above as I go.
(One last note before we start: last year, Nemonymous editor/publisher D.F. Lewis ran a competition to see who could match the greatest number of authors to their stories in the previous anthology, with the prize being the chance to appear as a character in every story in Null Immortalis. The winner was Scott Tullis, who is also a contributor to the book; I’m particularly intrigued to see what he’s written…)
Elsewhere
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