Tag: short fiction

Stewart O’Nan, ‘Land of the Lost’ (2010)

A woman living alone becomes fixated on the case of a girl’s murder, which turns into a resolution to find the body, which the killer claims to have buried. I think O’Nan is aiming to present his protagonist’s search for the body as a search for purpose in life; her obsession is conveyed effectively, but I don’t find the central parallel to be drawn as strongly.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Stewart O’Nan’s website

Diana Wynne Jones, ‘Samantha’s Diary’ (2010)

It’s a skilled writer who can indicate the broad arc of her story within a couple of pages, and not leave the reader feeling short-changed for having that knowledge. Diana Wynne Jones is, of course, a highly skilled writer, and achieves the feat with flair in ‘Samantha’s Diary’.

Our story begins on December 25th, 2233, as well-to-do  Samantha returns home to find an unexpected  present waiting for her – a Christmas tree, complete with its own bird. Samantha has to look the bird up on the Net, discovering that it is a partridge – and we know, long before she does, what will arrive at Samantha’s door in the coming days. But we don’t know exactly how it will play out, which is what maintains our interest. I won’t say more, except that it’s very funny indeed.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Diana Wynne Jones official website

Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Loser’ (2010)

My first experience of reading Palahniuk – and what an experience.  ‘Loser’ is a portrait of a student who, according to fraternity tradition, has gone along to a recording of The Price Is Right, taken some acid – and is invited to come on down. Palahniuk’s telling is intense, conveying the disorientation of his protagonist, who can’t remember the name of the show but knows it’s not that one,  and is surprised to see bread in its raw state, before made into sandwiches. It may take a moment to return to reality after reading ‘Loser’ – and the story has left me intrigued to read more of Palahniuk’s work.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Chuck Palahniuk’s website

Jeffrey Ford, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ (2010)

I find Jeffrey Ford to be a reliable writer of interesting (by which I mean good) fantasy. This story is a fine example of his talent, as what appears at first to be an evening out for a couple in love proves instead to be more of a nightmare – and the price of escape is high. Ford leaves his readers to piece together exactly what is happening in ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, and I think that’s the key to the tale’s affect, as the real tragedy of the situation emerges gradually from the happiness.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Jeffrey Ford’s website

A.C. Tillyer, An A-Z of Possible Worlds (2009)

Now here’s a book which has clearly been made with great care and attention by its publishers (Roast Books of London): An A-Z of Possible Worlds is presented as a box of twenty-six individually-stapled booklets, one for each letter of the alphabet, each containing its own story. Happily, the tales themselves more than live up to the presentation.

Anne Tillyer has written a set of stories which each concern a place that doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, they stand alone: there are several scattered cross-references and commonalities, but the unity of the collection emerges not from them, but from Tillyer’s style, which I’d broadly characterise, rather unhelpfully, as a ‘storytelling’ style – that is, she captures something of the timeless quality, the flowing rhythms, of folktales. This can lend itself to imagery, such as the following evocation of place:

The central boglands are both the beginning and the end of the world; the place where everything comes to nothing and nothing ever changes. Nature lies in a coma, time has given up trying to pass and the only things that move are the flies and the fog and the driving rain. Here, the natural cycles of birth and decay have unravelled and run in a straight line. Even the rain that falls on the bog is never released into rivers or the roots of trees but seeps from puddle to mud and stagnates there forever. It is the stasis that all life must overcome and to which all life will return. Evolution never made it past first post… (‘The Bog’, p. 1)

This is a long beginning that repeats its point, but I think that very technique works well here: an accretion of detail, like layers of sediment,  that brings home the stifling atmosphere of the bog. (The description continues as Tillyer moves into the story proper, with similarly atmospheric results.)

It’s not all about the imagery, though. There are stories here with fascinating ideas, such as ‘The Labyrinth’, with its people whose ancestors made home on an island generations ago, and who now have no sense of time; reading about their actions is unsettling, but also fires the imagination. There are also tales of the absurd, like ‘The Job Centre’, in which a country’s leader declares that there is full employment in his nation – which is news to the people queuing in the job centre at that moment. A plan must be devised to create work for these people, and the results raise a wry laugh.

As much as the stories in An A-Z of Possible Worlds stand alone, they gain considerably from being part of the whole. Not all of them completely satisfy as stories in their own right – there are some, for example, where a turn of phrase really stands out in my mind rather than the plot – but these are bolstered by other tales, which have complementary strengths. It’s the whole edifice of what Tillyer has created which impresses most, rather than individual pieces of it.

Which is not to say that there aren’t some excellent individual stories here. To pick out two: ‘The Youth Hostel’ concerns a remote hostel which is one day visited by a journalist from an interiors0 magazine, who writes a feature on the place as an example of ‘rustic charm’. The popularity of the youth hostel grows exponentially as a result, but visitors don’t necessarily get what they were expecting. This story is both neatly plotted and makes pointed commentary on attitudes to ‘tradition’.

Another story I liked in particular was ‘The Casino’, which is about a country colonised by the wealthy and turned into their own private playground, where they can enjoy the finest luxuries and the best healthcare. But this lifestyle is threatened by too many people living too long, and the proposed solution is not a pleasant one… Again, this is a nicely constructed tale (there is a certain inevitability about the plotting of both ‘The Casino’ and ‘The Youth Hostel’, but Tillyer’s craft is such that one does not feel short-changed by this), with an added vein of satire, this time on the subject of authority.

The way that Tillyer writes about places in these stories – often in the abstract, without names or many other specifics – they really do become ‘possible worlds’. They’re places that one knows don’t exist, but could, perhaps, if the world had more interstices. Imaginary as they are, though, it is fascinating to explore these worlds in this remarkable collection.

Elsewhere
Further reviews of An A-Z of Possible Worlds: The Fiction Desk, The Literateur, and Vulpes Libris
Interview at The Literateur with A.C. Tillyer, and Faye Dayan of Roast Books

Lawrence Block, ‘Catch and Release’ (2010)

Block’s protagonist calls himself as a catch-and-release fisherman, but what he goes after most often is not fish, but women — he used to kill the women he caught, but now he lets them go (without their necessarily even knowing that they were ‘caught’), and instead imagines what he would have done to them. But perhaps it’s time for a change…

Naturally, this character’s mind is a deeply unpleasant place to be, making ‘Catch and Release’ disturbing to read. But the story achieves its effect well, as Block maintains the suffocating (for the reader) focus of his protagonist’s viewpoint, and ramps up the tension as the tale moves towards what may be  (though one hopes not) the inevitable.

Rating: ***½

Peter Straub, ‘Mallon the Guru’ (2010)

A relatively short piece about a young guru named Spencer Mallon, who is travelling in India with his spiritual leader Urdang, when he discovers that his genuine powers of healing may not be the unalloyed blessing he thinks they are. I wasn’t sure what to make of this story when I read it — it was well-enough told, but it didn’t seem to have much in the way of consequence.

Since then I’ve discovered that the character of Mallon features in A Dark Matter, Straub’s latest novel, which may help to explain things somewhat — I wonder if the story would work better for me if I’d read the novel and knew more about Spencer Mallon’s life. But, really, I’d prefer stories that are presented as stand-alone to actually stand alone, and ‘Mallon the Guru’ doesn’t do that very well.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Peter Straub’s website

Michael Swanwick, ‘Goblin Lake’ (2010)

Reading Michael Swanwick tends to remind me that I should read him more often, and that’s what happened with this story.

‘Goblin Lake’ has the atmosphere and style of a folktale, but with a metafictional twist. During the Thirty Years’ War, a soldier named (of course) Jack is, for a prank, thrown into a lake whose waters are said to change anything they touch. Beneath the surface, Jack finds a whole other world where time passes rather differently, falls in love with the king of the lake’s daughter, and so on.

Except it’s not ‘and so on’, because the world is not as Jack thinks, and he has a decision to make. This is a beautifully told tale, which engenders a frisson of that true fantasy feeling towards the end as one allows oneself to consider, just briefly, what it might mean if the story were true. Yes, I must read more Swanwick…

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Michael Swanwick’s blog

Jodi Picoult, ‘Weights and Measures’ (2010)

Along with Roddy Doyle, Picoult is an author I wouldn’t instinctively associate with the fantastic (though I’ve not read her previously); I find it interesting that those two authors’ stories are my favourites in the anthology so far. ‘Weights and Measures’ is the story of Sarah and Abe, a couple who lose their baby daughter, and then find their bodies subtly (then not so subtly) changing.

I found Picoult’s story to be a delicately observed portrait of loss and grief, with an added metaphorical undercurrent, as the contrasting physical changes in Abe and Sarah represent the drifting apart of their relationship. Neatly done.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Jodi Picoult’s website

Richard Adams, ‘The Knife’ (2010)

My first experience of reading Adams (Watership Down being one of the considerable number of books I wish I’d read as a child) is this very short (three pages) piece set in a boarding school in 1938. The protagonist, Philip, is being bullied by Stafford, the head prefect of his house; he harbours fantasies of revenge, but has never acted on them – until, that is, he finds a knife. I appreciate the way Adams portrays the knife as the focus of Philip’s desires; but I feel that the ending doesn’t quite work, and the rest of the telling is not quite intense enough to compensate, so ultimately this story falls short for me.

Rating: ***

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