Tag: Stories

Richard Adams, ‘The Knife’ (2010)

29th June 2010 / / 3 Comments

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: ***

Walter Mosley, ‘Juvenal Nyx’ (2010)

28th June 2010 / / 3 Comments

Another vampire story, but unfortunately one that’s not as successful as Roddy Doyle’s. Mosley’s protagonist is a student radical in the 1970s, when he is seduced by a woman who turns him into something like a vampire and dubs him ‘Juvenal Nyx’ – ‘child of the night’. Thirty years later, Nyx falls in love, sets himself up as a professional ‘problem solver’, and takes on a rather mysterious client.

‘Juvenal Nyx’ is constructed from several different elements, which may be fine in and of themselves – for example, Mosley is particularly good at evoking the uncomfortable desire caused by the vampirism – but they sit awkwardly together. For instance, into the midst of a tale which portrays its subject matter in an otherwise ‘realistic’ fashion, walks Nyx’s client, who is every bit the stereotype of a supernatural femme fatale; she just doesn’t seem to fit, and there isn’t room in the story to indicate her place in the wider scheme of Mosley’s fictional world. In the end, ‘Juvenal Nyx’ is too fragmentary to truly satisfy as a complete piece.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Walter Mosley’s website

Joe R. Lansdale, ‘The Stars Are Falling’ (2010)

24th June 2010 / / 2 Comments

Lansdale tells the story of Deel Arrowsmith, a soldier who returns home to East Texas from the Great War, to find a wife who thought he must have died, a son who’s never really known him, and a life from which he is now impossibly distanced. Haunted by memories of his wartime experiences, Deel struggles to fit back into his old world.

The portrait of Deel in Texas is carefully observed, and I appreciate the parallels that Lansdale establishes between his protagonist’s two sets of experiences. But what makes the story ultimately come unstuck for me is that the narrative voice so suited to describing events in East Texas doesn’t draw me in to the wartime sequences, and that unbalances a tale whose success depends on its equilibrium.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Joe R. Lansdale’s website

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

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