Beyond the Shrinking World, now at Podcastle

Last week, Podcastle posted a recording of my short story Beyond the Shrinking World (which originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies almost a year ago) read by the fantastic Dominick Rabrun. It's totally free to download or listen to, and you should check it out. This is, without a doubt, one of the coolest things that I have ever got to experience in publishing. Dominick does a great job reading the story, and hearing someone else's interpretation of every sentence I wrote and every character's voice in the thing... can anything possibly be cooler than that?

The answer's no, but the fun doesn't stop there, because the story begins with an editorial/introduction from Dave Thompson. The broader topic is grimdark, and, while I don't think I would ultimately place my work in that category, it's interesting to view it in that light. Ultimately, Dave agrees that I probably don't fit there, but he says that my work is extremely dark and almost Lovecraftian at times -- both of those, needless to say, are characterizations that had me grinning ear to ear to hear. Oh, and the bit about how he really liked the story and will be first in line to read anything else I write in the world didn't hurt.

There's also an Escape Artists forum where people can discuss the story, and you should clearly head over there and write paragraph after paragraph of drooling praise (or, uh, whatever you'd like to write). As to what people have said already, it's fascinating to read. The reaction's mixed, and while I won't lie that I (like every writer out there, I'd imagine) would be quite happy with everyone loving my work, I expected that. I know I have turned into a bit of an oddball when it comes to taste, and I think I might be a bit too self-consciously pretentious and nihilistic for universal appeal (I say this, I must stress, as a condemnation of my own, admitted personal obsessions rather than as a bitter stab at readers at large). Hearing that my prose, world-building, and general darkness worked is great, and the more negative comments about packing too much in to too little space had a far point that I hope I can address a bit in future works in the world and in general -- though those readers really should have seen the first draft, which had just as much content in far less space and was a total mess.

The only comment that made me really kick myself is about the German being flawed, because that one is totally My Bad. Looking back, thinking that an introductory class worth of experience was enough to pull another language off in print was ridiculous, and I'll certainly be returning to those sections before/if the piece ever has a third outing.

Anyway, enough rambling on my part. If you decide to give the piece a read or a listen, I hope that you enjoy it.

"A Game of Distance" in Plasma Frequency Magazine

Plasma Frequency Magazine just released its third issue, and my Fantasy short "A Game of Distance" is the first story in it.

Were I to sum up "A Game of Distance" in three words, I think I'd go with espionage, magic, and friendship. Unless, of course, I could just write awesome in triplicate. Years back, the story was inspired by  a scene in Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn trilogy, in which a spy grows to know their quarry, and was the first flash piece I wrote. It's been touched up a bit since, and I doubt it has any actual similarities to Hamilton's Science Fiction epic, but I do quite like the little piece. Hopefully you do too.

The issue does, though, have a bevy of other fiction and other content as well. The print edition is ten bucks, but you can also read for free. Check it out!

Kameron Hurley - God's War

Nyx went on (p. 286).

Kameron Hurley's debut novel, God's War, got widespread coverage and acclaim across the blogosphere last year. Having now read the novel, I can say that the attention is certainly deserved.

The far future world of Umayma has been shaped by the never ending war between Nasheen and Chenja. In many ways, this conflict is reminiscent of our world's recent past, not only with the term and tactic of the "suicide soldier" (p. 167) and the lone man armed with some horrific contagion but with sentences like: Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear (p. 197). But, on Umayma, the war has gone farther than ours, has become overwhelming and omnipresent. It has led to strange technologies and powers like the magicians' ability to control bugs or the shifter's morphing. It has led to new societal patterns, new permutations of faiths, and new structuring of gender.

The war has set the course of Nyx's life as much as anyone else's, if not more. She has served her time at the front, has served Nasheen as a bel dame by keeping the populace in line, and has fallen more than once for Nasheen. But she refuses to surrender her autonomy to the war. Those around her know the events and the people that have made them. Some even go so far as to believe they have made Nyx, can take responsibility for her actions. She rejects that:  How many men had made her? […] They were just men. They were just people. […]It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you. (p. 240) In the face of the world and war around her, Nyx still demands responsibility for herself, insists upon her own course. She refuses the idea of submitting to anyone – not Fatima, not the magicians, not the queen, not God (p. 171).

Nyx's ferocious individualism is contrasted with Rhys, a religious man who fled Chenja to take refuge in Nasheen and has now found himself a member of Nyx's team. Rhys submits himself to God utterly and often. Yet, no matter how far he is from Nyx, the novel never removes the heart of weight of his position. Hurley's treatment of religion is one of the fairest I have encountered. Both Nyx and Rhys are complete characters with reasons for their faith or lack thereof, and, though each has potentially overwhelming problems as a result of their outlook, those problems do not easily rob their souls of validity. Furthermore, Nyx and Rhys' interaction is a mixture of conflict and care that feels real.

Nyx and her team are recruited to hunt down a woman from the stars and the game changing technology she possesses. This could have been the easy foundation for a simple, Thriller style plot. Instead, this quest doesn't come until nearly a hundred pages into the novel. The hunt will prove brutal for its undertakers. It will take them to and perhaps beyond their limits. But it is not the whole story of God's War, for Nyx's life began before it and will continue after it. The hunt is just one more part of it, something to further explore Nyx and the war rather than to constitute the whole of them.

The hunt at God's War's center, if viewed as a Thriller style chase, is not particularly successful. Much is made of Nyx's abilities, and she is indeed dangerous and possessed of a ferocious will. But she is ambushed and captured. Endlessly, again and again. Hurley can write a gripping action scene, but the grand arc of her plot basically consists in the reader sitting back without ever seeing much of the investigation itself and waiting for Nyx to get kidnapped the next time. Luckily, though she doesn't display the tightest plotting skills, Hurley does excel at character and at world building, and her characters' interactions and needs drive the reader and the story on as its futility becomes clearer.

As one might expect, the scale widens as the novel progresses. Or, at least, it seems to. Often, in God's War, what seems a new vista is simply a vast new continuation of the old. It's not long into the book that we get a sense of Umayma's place in the larger universe. There are many ships and factions out there, many so alien in their level of technology they couldn't have put in at the old port if they wanted to (p. 11). For all that space, though, the simple truths of strife are not escaped. After all, "They fight another of God's wars out there in the dark, can you believe it?" (p. 9)

So it is with the game changing technologies that Nyx chases. They could, perhaps, end the war. But they would not end it with peace but with incredible suffering and destruction. By the novel's end, Nyx is doing her best to destroy that technology, to ensure that neither side can wreak such havoc. But hers, even should she succeed, will not be a victory like that of the secret agent who keeps the nuclear bomb from the terrorist. Nasheen and Chenja are already quite capable at the whole death and destruction thing. At best, Nyx is sparing her world the fire by holding it down in the frying pan.

As Nyx's life swallows her hunt, the war comes to swallow not only the hunt but Nyx and everything in the novel. As we close, the war has not been changed, and even our protagonists have not been saved from its darkness. The novel ends with two sentiments. The first comes from the Queen when she says: "Know that what I do, I do for the good of Nasheen." (p. 283) The reader has no reason to doubt her, and the argument that she presents seems logical. But after so much destruction and pain, the words seem beyond hollow. Finally, the queen says:

"There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa."

"I know," Nyx said. "Life keeps going." (p. 285)

Life keeps going and so does the war. In its cracks, Nyx and those like her exist, tied inextricably to the war and yet determined to make their own path through it. Following them is not a cheery experience, but it is a powerful one.

"Legwork" in Fantastic Frontiers Magazine

In all the excitement of late, I haven't had a chance to mention (or peruse myself) one other piece of absolutely fantastic news. The debut issue of Fantastic Frontiers Magazine is now available in the Apple marketplace, and, among numerous other worthy tales, is my short story "Legwork." To give you an idea of the story's contents and style, I wrote it fresh off the high of discovering not only VanderMeer's short stories but the writings of Haruki Murakami. I can't claim to have truly captured either of those titans' skill, but I think I did get something worthwhile out of the attempt.

Alma Alexander - 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens

Five friends meet at the Spanish Gardens after decades out of touch. There, they drink Irish Coffees and talk about the past. One by one, they leave the table to go to the bathroom, to take a call, or to snap a photo of their Jaguar tattoo for their friends without disrobing in public. But their trip to the restaurant's backrooms ends up accomplishing rather more than that. Each of them is approached by Ariel, and he, the messenger, shows them a different version of their lives, a different path they might have taken. And they must choose.

The idea of getting to tweak your life is not an uncommon one in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Generally, its pleasure comes from examining key choices and contrasting the new reality with the old. 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens does not succeed in that regard. The main reason why is that we simply don't know enough for such a comparison. The only scenes we see outside of the novel's five alternate realities are the friends' conversations in the restaurant. Those conversations are for more enjoyable to read than dense biographies of each character would have been, and they do reveal a fair bit about each's past, but they do not cover nearly enough to allow us to spot the differences, let alone the moment of divergence, in the alternative stories. Therefore, save the ones that are so dramatically different as to be impossible not to notice (of which there are a fair few), the reader does not really know what specifically is new and what is not and has still less of an idea of how the two realities compare.

Furthermore, while the idea of a choice between realities is central to the novel, it's rather interesting that the realities themselves seem to have little of choice in them. Admittedly, I did wonder going in how a person, brought back to their pivotal decision but not told that this was not the first time, would not simply make the same choice they had previously. The answer is that Ariel does not give them a chance to repeat their choices – or, really, to make new ones. The first alternative reality is accomplished by a woman surviving a car crash she would otherwise not have; another is made by a parent's revelation or the lack thereof. These are not so much choices as they are events, drastic changes that are not so much wrought by the protagonists as wrought upon them.

Then there's how the novel's central choice, that between the old reality or the new, is fatally undercut because these characters do not live in a vacuum. If they take the new reality, the old will be forever shifted, and the people they love shifted with it. Again and again Ariel makes statement like: "Not your responsibility. […] You are only responsible for your own [choices]." (p. 89) But that is obviously ridiculous, especially in the case of parents, to one of whom Ariel admits that, if she changes her reality, her children "Will never have been born." (p. 177) In those circumstances, choosing anything but the established world would be incredibly selfish, and that's one of the reasons why it's not so surprising that four of the novel's five choose to remain.

As the novel progresses, Ariel and his role do come through more strongly. In each of the last two stories, Ariel steps beyond his proscribed role as impartial messenger and interacts with the characters. In both of them, something more of Ariel is seen and an otherworldly feel is definitely conveyed. The first, Ellen's tale, manages this without sacrificing anything of what makes the others work (more on that in a moment) and somehow manages to make the convoluted structure of scenes within a frame story within a frame story not only workable but engaging. The last piece and the Coda didn't work quite as well for me in terms of character (in part because, by the time we get to them, Olivia has been defined and redefined again and again in different incarnations so many times that it's hard to get any sense of the "real" Olivia) but made up for that with more of that ethereal feel and an excellent ending.

Despite the problems in its central conceit, 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens is a powerful read. This is chiefly because Alexander is an excellent character writer. The five alternate realities that we witness may not be gripping because they are alternate realities, but they are gripping because they are stories about people that we quickly come to care about. Alexander throws us into each new life in a few words, convincingly builds relationships between characters, and keeps a strong sense of pace and purpose in what are, essentially, life stories without any strong guiding plot to shape them. The fact that there are five of these life stories, and that they are all talking at once when we begin the book, makes for a slightly difficult opening, but that is made up for by how the table grows in the reader's mind, how the reader gradually comes to know each of the speakers until they, too, are at a gathering of old friends.

All of this is certainly not hindered by Alexander's prose. Though never flashy, it is always comprehensible and good at conveying the emotion of the moment, such as the off-beat way in which a character's first reaction to a disaster is conveyed: The information made no sense, as though he had asked what time of day it was and got a response that it was Wednesday (p. 44).

Alexander also possesses quite a bit of skill at encompassing characters and situations in metaphors, such as one of Simon's girlfriends saying he goes through life watching it through the windows of a train […] You never step off the train. Now and again you allow somebody else to step on, share a compartment for a little while, and then they get put off at the next station and you go on – sitting by the window, looking out at the scenery, knowing always and precisely where you are and what lies around you but never staying long enough to get to know any of it, or to truly love it (p. 70). Reading that for the first time, I was positively reminded of Murakami describing a character's lovers as having come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere (p. 360) in 1Q84, and a comparison to Murakami, needless to say, is not something that I do lightly.

Essentially, 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens is five life stories wrapped around a conversation. Its Fantasy element and choices did not wholly work for me, but the characters within its pages most certainly did. The experience of reading it is rather like heading over to the Spanish Gardens, getting an Irish Coffee of your own, and meeting some new best friends.

K.J. Parker - Sharps

My review of K.J. Parker's newest novel, Sharps, is now up on Strange Horizons. For anyone just getting here from over there, you may be interested in my other Parker reviews:

Scavenger
Engineer
The Folding Knife
The Hammer

[A scheduling/administrative note to regular readers: the review of Sandy Mitchell's Hero of the Imperium that, to be honest, may or may not have ever made it through the motel I was at's awful internet and onto the blog, will be back (and properly posted!) next week.]

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

There are things that cannot and should not be explained. (p. 85)

As a longtime reader or two might know, this is not the first time that I've read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was, actually, the first of the Murakami novels I read and, at the time, I knew that I liked it but didn't know what to make of it besides that. Since, and as a result of that first exposure, I've read, reviewed, and loved several of Murakami's novels, and yet, as time went on, it was this one that outlasted them all in my thoughts. About a year after that first read, and several months after the book's in-absentia rise to the position of one of my favorite novels, I reread the book and found it lived up to every one of my expectations. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Murakami at his best, at his most playful and his most insightful. [A note before we begin: there are SPOILERS aplenty in the following.]

Information is key and king in Hard-Boiled Wonderland's Tokyo, and, from the beginning, the conflict over it is what dominates and threatens the world. Devoted to the preservation of knowledge and its exclusivity we have the system, and the system is the state. (p. 160) Arrayed against them are the factory, dedicated to the breaking of the system's codes and the revealing of its revelations. Our dear protagonist, a member of the system, is drawn into the conflict by a neutral, eccentric and brilliant scientist whose breakthrough discoveries, we're told, could spell the end of the world. (p. 128)

All of this is, as the narrator observes, your classic cops-and-robbers routine, (p. 33) and it's from there that the book's noir comes from for this is as much a crime novel as it is a Science Fiction one, a surreal fantasy, or a work of pure Literature (much as I hate the term applied as a genre) – which is to say, of course, that's it's somehow both not at all and the very exemplar of the form. Of course, Murakami's usual vivid colors are in full force here, as is his floating and flowing surrealism, all of which is obviously antithetical to the orthodox noir of a Hammett or a Goodis. 

That dismissal, though, misses the narrator's endlessly witty and even insightful observations, often, in the very purest tradition of noir, showing the bizarre nature of it all and the narrator's insignificance and even powerlessness before it, albeit always with a special Murakami twist:  I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler. (p. 21) The writing here is a constant toying with intentional absurdity (Walls a toasted off-white, like the muffins I eat for breakfast. (p. 7)) and profundity, blurring and even obliterating the lines between them: There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death (p. 8) or: Even cast aside, clothes know a permanence that eludes their wearers. (p. 374)

But while the System/Factory conflict drives the first part of the novel, and while it's never really silent, the reader comes to realize that it's the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. Progress is pure, devoid of good or evil intent, but the pursuit of it and the actualization of its fruits are deathly dangerous: It's this pure focus, exclusive of all view to loss or gain, that's seen science achieve such uninterrupted advances. […] [But] the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. (p. 253) Ultimately, the question of its possession by good or evil is irrelevant, for progress and knowledge hold all the potential for our misery and harm: Civilization […] faces serious crises because science is used for evil – or good. (p. 29) 

The promised end of the world does come, or at least the end of a world: Actually speaking, it isn't this world. It's the world in your mind that's going to end. (p. 270) The looming apocalypse does come, but it does so in personal form, the scientifically-caused dissolution of the narrator's mind and soul, leaving him in an inner world of his own consciousness, cut off forever from what we view as reality. 

That brings us to the second of the book's two threads, that entitled The End of the World and taking place entirely within that unreal world created by the scientist's machinations and growing in prominence as the novel progresses. This is a world made up of a single, isolated town, surrounded by a perfect wall, overlooked by a clock tower that has long forfeited its role as a timepiece. (p. 38) It's a world that's the opposite of the outside, one that remains forever unchanged (p. 14) and where absolute peace can be found in mindlessness, motionless existence, for it's our intellect that leads to all the so-beyond-natural ills of the world. As one character in this inner setting says, lay down your mind and a peace come. A peace deeper than anything you have known. (p. 318) 

Murakami does not just allude to this deeper realm and leave us to draw our own conclusions. No, he shows it to us in chapters that alternate with the jagged coolness of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and could not be more different. As the narrator is more and more submersed into this peace the tale circles absolute stillness and absolute zero, each chapter resplendent with the fading remnants of true awareness and bursting with a languor so brilliantly evoked that the reader's thoughts, too, drift in ever smaller currents, relaxing and weakening as the heartbeat slows and wonder grows. Here, in this world, there is everything and here there is nothing, (p. 385) and it's a perfect nothing. (p. 86)

Murakami doesn't just raise questions. No, as crushing waves of melancholy and an almost agonizing beauty imbue every word of the novel's ending chapters, Murakami's brief but deep epic of thought reaches two successive peaks. The first is the justification of progress and striving, no matter its cost. For the utopia of absence that the End of the World shows us is not only devoid of loss but also of gain, not only misery but also joy: The absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope. (p. 334) For, as we come to see, Love is a state of mind (p. 334) and cannot exist for those who have no mind. But then comes the so-understandable, so heartbreaking finale to it all. For the narrator, though now fully conscious of the costs, cannot leave behind the peace that he's found. He stays, immersed in the harmony and perfect nothing of that dreamed and conflict-free world.

The level of cool and grandeur, in their corresponding sections, does come at the expense of plot. As the narrator quips at one point, this isn't the kind of thing they show on TV. This drama was a lot more complex and with no discernible plot. (pp. 112-3) While "no discernible plot" really is going a bit too far, it's not far off in terms of effect. Though a lot happens here, none of it is gripping in a roller coaster, plot boiler, gotta find out what happens next kind of way. This is, rather, the kind of book where the narrator can observations and wit power on unhindered through a scene where he may be, say, stabbed in the gut with a knife. While such a distance could certainly leave many a book powerless, though, Murakami effortlessly keeps you engaged with his characters, prose, absurdity, and with the reality of his setting. What's most surprising about the last of those is how real the day to day world of the characters is, no matter how impossible the events within it become. Murakami accomplishes this through a deft weaving of the mundane into the fantastic, having his characters prepare food and live their lives all around the plot and, of course, by utilizing his characteristic barrage of references, which here include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2011: A Space Odyssey, Turgenev, and Borges, to name just a few.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was written early in Haruki Murakami's career but exemplifies, nonetheless, so many of his strengths. It's true that this is the most out and out genre of the Murakami novels and stories that I've read, but my affinity for it goes deeper than that. The world here is filled with fantastically daring ideas glimpsed from the shadows and approached head on. The writing is filled with, in one section, always dancing wit and, in the other, surreal majesty. The book, throughout, is a entertaining to read, fun from first word to last, and also a work of stunning power and sorrow, a novel that's joyous, poignant, and profound.

Publication v6

Over the last year and a bit, I've had a fair few publications to announce around these parts. In case you couldn't tell from the posts, I was grinning from ear to ear for each of them and, just maybe, doing a bit of jumping up and down. Well, I've another of them, and this one's a big deal. Maybe the biggest since the breakthrough of the very first. Though I haven't yet gotten to review one of their issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of my absolute favorite places to find fantasy stories. Just a few days ago, they accepted my story "Beyond the Shrinking World." To make an awesome thing even more awesome, this is not only my first fantasy sale, not only the sale of my longest story yet (by far), and not only a sale to an awesome market, but my first pro sale. So yeah, I'm pretty excited. I'll keep you guys updated as I know more.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.

"A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.

I also typed. (p. 1)

There are, indeed, ghosts in the pages that follow those fantastic opening lines. As well as a mermaid and a wolf, and the sharp dividing line between the two that can also blur. There're also the narrator's first person digressions and conversations, her wrestling with herself and her inner demons in dialogue and in open view. Before any of that, though, before even the first page of the novel proper with the promise of a mermaid and a wolf, Kiernan warns us that: This is the book it is, which means it may not be the book you expect it to be. Oddly enough, the warning's not so unexpected. After 2009's acclaimed and award nominated The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan's become the kind of writer with the reputation of doing the unexpected, the unexplainable, and the darkly, beautifully brilliant. The Drowning Girl shares some of that prior novel's techniques – its intertextuality and its particular style of first person narration, to give just two examples – but its results are quite different, abandoning the strong sense and confines of place that dominated The Red Tree, taking on a farther reaching and harder to pin down mantle, a story about need and change and our reality and our escaping it.

When delving into something so multifaceted and amorphous, it's probably not a good idea to begin by admitting I don't understand the book I'm reviewing. But, as I seem to have done just that, I should explain what I mean. In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, Kiernan said: Over and over, I get the “But what happened?” people, and I think it causes me actual physical pain that they’ve so missed the point. Most of the time – and this is the truth – I don’t know what happened! I don’t want to know what happened! As I’ve said again and again, one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions. I don't think that The Drowning Girl is meant to be understood. It's meant to be experienced, of course, to be delved into and wrestled with, to creep into our psyche and twist and smash what it finds there, to make us think and feel – but not for something so simple and pat as understanding.

Imp, as the main character's friends like to call her, is schizophrenic. This is not, though, solely a story about schizophrenia, containing insights only applicable to those afflicted. No, as Imp says: There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. (p. 101) Still, Imp's schizophrenia is vital to the tale, allowing and forcing her to face the mermaid, the werewolf, and the reality that binds us. Early on, she draws a sharp distinction between what is true and what is factual (p. 6), and so discerning what actually happened and what's impossible, what's real and what's fantastic, is wholly beside the point. The Drowning Girl is a narrative of thoughts and emotions, desires and implications, and not at all one of concrete occurrences.

Separating true and factual, though, is a difficult thing, and Kiernan often mines the gap between them, spinning out inconsistencies that we and Imp can become mired in if we don't keep our thoughts on what really matters. Imp, too, can play the game. This is her story, as she types it out on her grandmother's typewriter, and the doubts and hesitations of Imp the Storyteller are right there alongside those of Imp the Character. The distinction between true and factual is a double edged sword, and, in the scenes that cut too deep, Imp often retreats into a barrage of dates and trivia and facts that obscures all possible truth.

I won't be blowing your mind if I tell you that The Drowning Girl is a story here, but it doesn't stop there. This is a narrative of stories within stories, art within art, and layers folded tight and wrapping round their kin. Innumerable artists and writers, bits of legend and of history, are described, quoted, and alluded to within these pages. There's Phillip George Saltonstall and his haunting painting The Drowning Girl, Albert Perrault and his explorations ofviolence and the mythology of Little Red Riding Hood, Seichō Matsumoto and his suicide-invoking novel Kuroi Jukai, the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short that was later called The Black Dahlia Murder but first the Werewolf Murder, and even Imp's own stories and paintings.

These mentions of and creations of real and unreal art are not hollow pretension. The clues are scattered in each of these sources, and the truth at The Drowning Girl's heart lies somewhere where all of this art meets and blends. Art, here, is a source of spreading ideas. And of spreading ghosts. Hauntings are memes, Kiernan writes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, ad grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. Or a painting hanging on the wall. (p. 12) And, of course, it doesn't end there. The Drowning Girl itself contains a haunting, and it seeks to spread itself beyond the 336 pages of its binding. It is an infected document, just waiting to spread its load of plague. (p. 88)

As all of this has no doubt made clear, Imp's story is not a straightforward one, and neither is its telling. Midway through the novel, Imp says: I didn't set out to appease the Tyranny of Plot. Lives do not unfold in tidy plots. (p. 171) Imp is full of digressions, often advancing through the past by sliding from one isolated event to another in a path that will only make sense afterwards if it ever will. That our narrator is a character, a human and very much at the center of all the misery she must unfold, is never lost, and she skirts around the most difficult parts before darting back to confront them head on. At times, when the connections are particularly obscure and when the climax of the chapter or incident is held away for one approach too many, this approach can grow irritating. At others, the easy shattering of chronology unmoors the events of the story from their specifics, leaving them feeling timeless and all around us.

The Drowning Girl is very much a work of Weird Fiction, that strange subgenre of horror and fantasy and more crystallized by H.P. Lovecraft (who Imp is "distantly related" to (p. 169)) that shows how the world is so much larger than what we see. It is not at all, though, a typical work of that genre. The world is vaster than we can grasp here, yes, greater than can be glimpsed through our "counterfeit sanity," (p. 285) and all the impossibility beyond may be damaging and deadly and potentially destructive, but characterizing it as simply malevolent is a hopeless oversimplification. Roles are reversed here, what's beyond the pall often being savaged by us and our world. It's not Elizabeth Short's murderers but the victim herself who is, in five stages, turned into a werewolf here, and its's not the siren but Imp who is the "author of abrasions" (p. 282) on that siren's perfectly soft skin.

Imp remembers Eva Canning coming to her twice, once in July and once in November, once as a mermaid and once as a wolf. Only one of these recollections is true, but, not knowing which is, she has no choice but to tell both tales. These two appearances, of the siren and of the predator, of seduction and of violence, are often sharply differentiated in the novel, with memories of one eventually coming clear as a manufactured self defense mechanism against memories of the other. But, like most such dividing lines in the novel, the mermaid and the wolf, the women walking into the water and the women slain by claws, come together.

All these come down to changelings, don't they? (p. 158) Imp writes, and so much of it does. The Drowning Girl is a novel about change, or at least the desire for it, a novel about mutability and collapsing boundaries, about being held prisoner by flesh and wanting to be free so badly that death finally becomes an option. (p. 151) These transformations play into every part of the novel, from transsexuality to the wolf in a girl's skin, but it's the border of reality that's most frequently railed against, cowered behind, and penetrated. Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against, (p. 65) Imp tells us, and insanity becomes a siren (p. 101), but things aren't that easy.

Insanity and the supernatural is here countered with Imp's humanity, both in its greatest aspects and also in its least glamorous. I pissed, she writes, and so I knew I must be alive, because I don't think dead women piss, do they? (p. 292) It's not, of course, limited to piss. Abalyn is Imp's girlfriend and lover, and the relationship between the two of them is one of the novel's strongest aspects. Their history together is meshed in with Imp's uncertainties about Eva and the world, but the two's interaction is rich with personality, hesitation, and, eventually, love. Besides which, showing Imp's vulnerabilities outside of the context of the purely impossible – showing how, after just meeting Abalyn, she wanted her to say yes so badly I probably had my fingers crossed. (p. 19) – goes a long way towards humanizing Imp.

Kiernan achieves all this with excellent prose that lives up to her reputation as a peerless wordsmith, but that's not to say that it, like the story, is exactly what you'd expect from her. The majority of the writing here is somewhat similar to that found in The Red Tree, at least insofar as it is as conversational as it is erudite, a mixture of insightful and vulnerable, traumatized and cutting. In marked contrast to the all out assault on every sense that defined so much of Kiernan's earlier prose, many of The Drowning Girl's descriptions and scenes read with the easy fluidity of dialogue, the unnatural rendered ethereal with suggestions and self examinations. All of that only adds to the impact of the barrage of images and emotions when it does come at the peaks of Imp's madness and the impossible's hold. The seventh chapter is the height of this, made up of pages of long paragraphs that snake and twist every which way and filled to the bursting and beyond with meaning and absolutely stunning writing, like: Dead wolves are sin-eaters. She was nailed with iron spikes to a smokehouse wall and gawkers came from all around to bear witness to laid low Christ Wolf in her mock Calvary tribulations. (pp. 210-1)

As I said in the beginning, I can't claim to fully understand The Drowning Girl. Then again, I'm not sure if such questions about sanity can ever be properly understood. I was, though, totally enthralled by this book. This is a novel about a haunting and about hauntings and about telling the stories of hauntings, and its characters and images, its words and power leave its page and haunt you as you read. But, though it hits you hard, The Drowning Girl is not a book of one note doom. It is a book about drowning, but it's also a book about learning to swim.

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

"And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem." (p. 9)

1Q84 is the Japanese novelist Haruku Murakami's third novel since 2000, though the word "novel" might be a tad misleading, as it's a trilogy in Japan. Fittingly enough for its three-in-one background, it's a brick of a book. Nonetheless, it's an easy and pleasurable read, Murakami's smooth and sonorous prose floating you through a narrative that, right up until you turn the last page, seems to make perfect sense. When you look back on it, however, all the easy associations you picked up as you read turn out to be rather hollow, the book's meaning something that has to be cobbled together from bits and pieces throughout its massive, lifelike sprawl.

An easy looking thematic starting point seems to be the reference in the title, the contrasts and, of course, similarities between Orwell's so-famous 1984 and this year of 1Q84, this world-with-a-question-mark, as Auomame puts it. But that association's too easy, and Murakami's true intent at once rises above that one-to-one correlation/interpretation and also sidesteps the comparison entirely. As one character says:  Now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we'd point to him and say, 'Watch out! He's Big Brother!' There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think? (p. 236) Those Little People are nothing near as concrete as Big Brother and his police force. No, the Little People are something nigh entirely ephemeral, a force of magic and thought that only touches the world, if it does at all, through implication and faith and the most subtle of maneuverings.

In the end, the comparison does, of course, seem valid to some extent, but the despotism shown here is not one of force or even of nation, but rather a despotism of thought and will, of past and intent and even of love. The Sakigake Cult is the clearest example of this. It takes the circuits out of [its member's] brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. […] It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about different things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. (pp. 120-1) but while it might be the most obvious example of the intellectual and individual atrophy at the novel's core, it’s the least focused on. Sakigake is mostly a specter in the shadows, an example of how dominating the Little People's manipulations can become so that we may better see and fear them in the rest of the text.

[People] have to move with a purpose, (p. 29) we hear towards the novel's beginning, and it could be said that attempts to find that purpose and carry it through, no matter the circumstances or obstacles, dominate. And the greatest of all barriers seems to be one's birth. Both Auomame and Tengo had parents locked in narrow roles, and each had to escape those roles to try and become who they needed to be. More important than just escape, though, is reconciliation, or at least understanding, of the past. Much of Tengo's storyline is in fact his desire and need to understand his origins and father, to comprehend how half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man. (p. 176) But while Murakami's adept at Tengo's personal conflict, the ramifications of it do not, of course, end there. No, in 1Q84 the world seems made wholly of an endless battle of contrasting memories, (p. 293) and it seems that the effects and maybe even purpose of life might be the rewriting of those memories and the past.

Love is another thing central to 1Q84, but that's not to say that it's pure. No, the characters need love, but it's often what destroys them, a cruel jailor and torturer that feeds on their flaws and often leaves them destroyed. It's through love, here, or at least love's approximation, that true loneliness is reached, and Murakami proves devastatingly able to hammer those moments home: Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. […]Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically – on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone. (pp. 368-9) That's where Auomame comes into her role as assassin. She, with few friends and fewer emotional attachments, has become an avenger of sorts, a slayer of those who abuse and destroy the object of their desires.

The one exception to the novel's two categories of emotionless and damaging is the idealized and intangible relationship between Tengo and Auomame, forged from just one moment of true contact many years ago and distinct by virtue of its improbability. Neither character will pollute it with their actions, will actively go out and find the other. If they are too meet again it must be by chance one day, like passing on the street, or getting on the same bus, (p. 190) for only flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken. (p. 374)

1Q84 is anything but a realist novel. Its flow is a surreal drift. Strict analysis flounders here, the orderly march of cause and effect left behind for a tale as humanly logical as it is absurd. Like After Dard, 1Q84 is not constructed from the oft-contemplated yet depthless impossible but instead from the subtly unthinkable. Murakami's otherworldly agents – his Little People – do not replace our reality but rather alter it. Murakami's is a Tokyo-born Middle Earth made of nothing but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp, emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a war notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. (p. 548)

One of the text's key fantastical components is that of dohta and maza (p. 685) and the relationship between them, object and shadow, reality and afterimage, character and alter ego. It's a relationship that characterizes much of the text, for 1Q84 is a story of layers and careful shading, numerous perspectives and recurrences, images and events appearing again and again in slightly altered forms and viewed through drastically different eyes. Even the language comes to play the game, with Murakami often using one word, such as aroused (p. 43/4), twice in the same scene, but in vastly different connotations, with the first nonetheless impacting how we view the second.

Murakami's prose is brilliant and engaging without ever being flashy or openly attention seeking. It's the little things that make it what it is and often the descriptions of the smallest things that stick in your mind the longest. Murakami is an absolute master of similes and metaphors, twisting mundane images into wonderful new configurations, like when a character must fasten [their] feelings to the earth – firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. (p. 185) or like when we're told how Tengo's past lovers had come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. (p. 360) Furthermore, Murakami's a supremely playful author, often mercilessly poking fun of his own creations with a wray wit: The large crown of his head formed and abnormally flat bald area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a military heliport that had been made by cutting away the peak of a small, strategically important hill. (p. 330) Not even revelation and life changing events are above such jibes:  At least once in his life [Tengo] had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone With the Wind. Once you have achieved something so magnificent, you have to be content with it. (p. 727)

Despite all that, 1Q84 is a flawed novel, and a reviewer ever so slightly more concerned with snappy phrasing than accuracy might even say that those problems are half from excess and half from restraint. The first of those can, for the most part, be pinned down to the novel's aforementioned repetition. It's a technique that is, for the most part, effective, but, when used to the extent it is here, serves to further slow down and clog up the works. The repetition does give added insight, but it also serves to stifle any forward momentum the novel might otherwise have accumulated. This, and the novel's length, would both not be an issue if not for the fact that, put plainly, the book simply doesn't have enough significant events, at least not when one compares the number of those to the weight of its minutia and the sum of its page count. Though 1Q84 is more than twice the length of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it doesn't feel like it has any more content or depth, just like it's playing its melodies at half speed.

That's not to say, admittedly, that 1Q84 is never a tightly paced, gripping work, just that it almost never is. One of the novel's key set pieces is a long, long time building, but, when it comes in the midst of the second book, is composed of chapter after chapter of almost unbreakable tension, each word exquisitely backed by the weight of our expectations and by the omnipresent feel of imminent revelation. Alas, the novel never again reaches the magic of those chapters, and some of the later significant events actually serve to simply underscore the weightlessness of much of the narrative. The third book introduces a new viewpoint character, a private detective in the employ of Sakigake. His chapters are generally enjoyable, but the moment when he pieces together the connections between Tengo and Auomame is one of the novel's weakest. In the main thrust of the narrative, enraptured by Murakami's prose, the link between the two is delightful and even magical because of its slightness. When uncovered and explained in terms of the detective's supposed logic, however, the connection ends up viewed by the reader's regular, discerning gaze and the link is, when considered in that light, of course ridiculous.

The other contender for the much-coveted prize for the novel's weakest section comes when the reader is finally allowed to glimpse some of the text of Air Chrysalis, the book-within-a-book that first exposes the Little People and that, when rewritten by Tengo, goes on to win prizes and top bestseller lists. Everything from cap-i-tal-izum to peese and for-tress (p. 532) is rendered in the grating, garish, and juvenile manner of an adult doing his ham-handed best to cram a child's perspective down our throats. The main effect, besides conveying boundless immaturity, was making me wonder about the sanity of the judges and reading populace of this alternate reality Tokyo.

I would say that most of my criticisms of logic and pacing, though, wouldn't come as any surprise at all to Murakami. After the publication of Air Chrysalis, Tengo reads several of its reviews, one of which says that: As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness.' (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

That, really, seems to sum up much of Murakami's philosophy in reading this work and the mindset that must be used to read it. Speaking of life, a character at one point thinks: The warmth and the pain came as a pair, and unless he accepted the pain, he wouldn't feel the warmth. It was a kind of trade-off. (p. 803) 1Q84 is a magical and sprawling work, one resplendent with depth, and also one loaded down with a number of flaws. It's a tapestry of dreams that might just be too delicate to be perfect without being ruined.

K.J. Parker - The Hammer

You can have justice, or you can keep the peace. Can't have both. (p. 379)

Though I can hardly call myself an expert in Parker's work, I have read The Folding Knife and the Engineer Trilogy, and the similarities between The Hammer and the latter of those two are unmistakable. Some of those are superficial, like how we've here, as we had there, a scene involving the urgent construction of some strange tool to save a man's life. But that pales compared to the rather larger similarity of a world, one filled with conflict but set in its ways, disrupted forever by a single freethinking man that fled the established order, outthought everyone else, started a factory, revolutionized the economy and technology of all those around him, had an ulterior motive, and changed everything.

Now, a similarity that gargantuan's a bit hard to overlook, but alright, fine. It was a great concept the first time, and I trust Parker as an author. Surely, she could make it work again, and surely she wouldn't shoot for the exact same payoff. Well, she didn't. But that's where the book's more serious problem lies. The Engineer Trilogy showed its hero of sorts undertaking a huge task, but that was just the beginning. Momentous as the factory was, it was the path to something much greater. Using a comparatively simple mechanism, the main character shifted the entire world and did something that, though tragic, was unmistakably incredible, grand, and all sorts of words like that. The Hammer, alas, plays out in rather the opposite fashion. Our factory builder, Gignomai met'Oc, does have an ulterior motive, but rather than being earth shaking, that motive's far, far smaller than what he seems poised to do. The novel's earthshaking rhetoric and epic build were all just smoke and mirrors. Amusingly enough, all that large scale stuff does end up happening, after our personal payoff, and it does so off screen and without any real fuss.

It's something like if you went to a great stage magician's show, and she took to the stage with a school bus behind her, and she gave a long speech about how she's going to lift the bus into the air with the power of her mind, then reshape it into a statue, or what have you. Then she takes a spoon out of her pocket, bends that, and wanders off. The spoon bending was all well and good, and might have been quite impressive in other circumstances, but it's rather hard to not feel more than a tad disappointed after all the buildup it got. Then, as you're walking to your car, the magician stops by and, in a section entitled Five Years Later, tells you that she actually did all that was promised, only she did it after the lights were out and everybody'd left. She briefly alludes to how interesting it might've been to see if only she'd let you, though, so there's that.

Why is this such a problem? After all, in her aforementioned stand alone, The Folding Knife, Parker plays out the drama of one man's life on a grand stage. What makes that not work here, though, is that, unlike in The Folding Knife, the characters are not only unsympathetic but also unreletable. Some are cold and distant, others are only presented to us in that way, but we can grow close to none of them. That's not necessarily a problem in an epic, but it certainly is in a personal story about one man's obsessions. Like Vaatzes, Gignomai interacts with people as if they're objects, as if he's a "scientist" and the world's but a culture for him to fool around with and bend to his will, life just an "experiment" for him to manipulate to his satisfaction (p. 217). That could work for a man unfeelingly shaping nations, but when his goal is a familial one, I, at least, felt little more than the vague disappointment that comes when a great power is used for some minor end.

Of course, Gignomai's not the novel's only character. He is, though, the only one with any mystery to him. Through the entire novel, I can only think of one genuinely and emotionally human moment, and it takes place very near the end, though I won't say exactly what it is to avoid spoiling the text for those who've yet to read it. That one moment struck me, added untold depths to the character who expressed it, and made me, for a few brief moments, really feel the human consequences of Gignomai's actions. If the rest of the book had been like that, it would've been heartbreaking and immeasurably more powerful. But the rest of the characters, besides Gignomai and that one other flash, are concepts given flesh and blood, walking playthings for Gignomai to shape as he chooses. Amusingly enough, many of them are even aware of this. The town's shopkeep and mayor even begins to think of himself as a "properly greedy man" (p. 300) before all that long. The explanation for this could, I suppose, be that Parker's only capable of writing obvious characters unless, as she does with Gignomai, she simply hides everything about them, but I don't think that's true. After all, though it focused on much of the same themes as The Hammer, the Engineer Trilogy had several complex and fascinating personalities, and The Folding Knife had its riveting star, Basso. Leaving that out, though, I really can't say why most of the characters here fall so flat.

The distance is reinforced by the prose, though there is still a huge amount of Parker's always stunning irreverence towards traditions, loyalty, and life itself: [He] had no idea how to kill a man with his bare hands. It turned out to be one of those things you can pick up as you go along. (p. 342)

But when you laugh – and laugh, I think, you will – you're not laughing with the characters, even if they made a joke. You're laughing at how much more than them you know, even if it's not much, and at how terrible things are and will grow, and at how deserving they are or are not for the fate that you know that's coming.

Even when Parker relates her character's thoughts directly, the prose is still distant. We come to see these people, and we come to understand them, but we never really come to sympathize with them. Midway through the text, we see that Gignomai looked up so fast he banged the top of his head on a cross-beam. He felt a strong pulse in his scalp, and something wet dribbled down over his forehead. (p. 279) We see the physical and emotional effects of the story in every detail, we know why Gignomai hit his head and what happened afterwards and that blood dribbled down, but we see all this through a lense, and the detail that's never mentioned is whether this hurt, and we're certainly never made to wince alongside him.

This is, I realize, a really negative review. I should, likely, qualify it a bit. I didn't hate The Hammer. I even enjoyed reading just about every minute of it, loved the writing, was intrigued for most of it, and finished it in two days. But the book's ending was more a whimper than a bang, and the fact that, for all its interesting aspects, it was building up to nothing, rather trashed my fond memories of most of the experience. This isn't the kind of book where you cheer for the hero, and, because there's never a tenth of the way credible opponent, it's also not the kind where you wonder for even a moment if that hero's going to win. In the end, the The Hammer's the kind of book that's experienced through a lense or a microscope, with the reader not at all a part of the action and along just to see how things turn out, and, well, they don't really turn out at all, at least not on stage in any of the ways we might've been tempted to see.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Ammonite Violin & Others

In the dream, I'm standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I'm cold, and I wonder why I didn't at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I'm holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something's moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I want to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that's when I see the girl, standing up for out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains. (p. 33)

The Ammonite Violin & Others is a collection of crystallized longing. Caitlin R. Kiernan’s characters are people filled with desires and loneliness and lust, and their dreams are as decadent as they are magnificent. These are stories so emotional that they are often agonizing to read, tales made of as much desperate hope as tortured despair.

Kiernan’s writing is not easily digestible. Hers are tales woven of tightly knotted imagery and internal monologues, dense tales either utterly unaware that they are being told or obsessed with the obfuscation of their own creation. Easy dialogue is almost nonexistent, here. When conversation does play a major role, it’s often through shifting viewpoints and timelines, through second person tales told to both a lover and a demon while tenses shift.

The title story – my favorite of the collection – exemplifies every one of Kiernan’s elements, even if no part of it is directly supernatural. A collector of ammonites and strangled women melds his two passions – the beautiful and the horrific – into a single perfect instrument and invites a struggling virtuoso to come to his secluded seaside home and play it for him. The music created is spellbinding – a typhoon gale flaying rocky shores to gravel and sand, and the violinist lets it spin and rage… (p. 101) – and the tale’s mixture of the beautiful and the grotesque is nothing short of devastating.

It’s the two Metamorphosis tales – A and B – that are probably the collection’s heart laid bare. Metamorphosis A shows us two distant lovers. One watches, unable to take the next step, while the other reaches out and transforms into something either far greater or far lesser than what they were. The transformation is revolting, and yet it is voluntary. It’s something lusted after, something desired, something needed. It fills a primal and erotic need, and it’s the only thing that can bring the two lovers together.

Metamorphosis B, on the other hand, happens after a character has been changed, after a mermaid has been taken from the sea by a sailor’s lust. In many ways, Metamorphosis B shows the long after consequences of Metamorphosis A, even if the transformations and characters of the two tales are, on the surface, unrelated. B brings forth the darkness inherent in such relationships, the resentment and hatred built up by the imposed change of interaction, the after effects of a love so dark and twisted, so – perhaps – necessary.

The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer brings us to the edge of society. A woman lives at the edge of the river, forgotten and abandoned by the world. Her only companion is the rats, the rats that waited huddled together in the void, the endless nowhere place where there were not yet stars or planets or gods or angels, but only the nothingness before creation and only the rats. (p. 103) Alone with herself and the rats, she becomes their greatest ally, and yet she can do nothing as men destroy them. For One Who Has Lost Herself follows a similar path despite its different circumstances and tone. The narrator is a seal who has lost her skin. Her skin, the core of her being, waits for her at a shop across the street, but she can do nothing but watch it from the other side while, day after day, people jostle by oblivious. When she finally does cross, when she finally does enter the store to reclaim her soul, she learns that the center of her world is irrelevant to those around her. Her most precious position is detritus at the core of a donated chest, unimportant. Amidst such civilized surroundings, her quest for herself seems bizarre and, perhaps, even dangerous.

Many of Kiernan’s stories bring to mind another writer I’ve mentioned often enough on here, Thomas Ligotti. The dense imagery of the two writers is similar at times, and the despair rampant in many of Kiernan’s conclusions is certainly another similarity. That being said, Kiernan reaches those depressive depths (when she chooses to) through very different means.

Ligotti shows us a world where connecting to one’s fellow beings is impossible. Kiernan, on the other hand, is all about those connections and their costs, all about humanity distorted due to its need for companionship. The similarities are perhaps most prevalent in The Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection, a tale of someone journeying beyond and the costs and ramifications of doing so. The Voyeur in the House of Glass, too, is an interesting counterpoint to Ligotti’s work. In the story, a man desperate to plumb the depths of interaction leaps from vision after vision of humanity without truly connecting with any of them. The man’s quest is a carnival exhibit, and his dreams are exploited by showmen even as we experience them. It’s a testament to Kiernan’s skill that a story with almost no plot or character change can be so engrossing, and it does so through some of the most potent imagery and vivid scenes in a collection resplendent with potent imagery and vivid scenes:

The girl lies at the edge of the sea. She is not a mermaid, not yet, but this very morning she has come upon the oily carcass of a tiger shark, nine feet snout to tail, stranded in the seaweed and sand and shell litter. All she has ever wanted, this girl, a strong heterocercal tail, pectoral and anal and pelvic fins to carry her down into abyssal gloom that she might finally take her place in Neptune's lightless halls. She's hacked away the head and jaws a few inches above the gill slits and buries it in the dunes. Then she returns to the shark and slips herself inside, wriggling unwanted legs deep into the slimy, decaying gullet of the monster fish, burying herself to the hips. And with an upholstery needle and fine silk thread she begins to stitch herself to the dead shark, sewing her own pale, insufficient flesh to its sturdy predator's trunk. (p. 143)

You’ve no doubt noticed many similarities in my summaries of these stories. That’s not (or at least, not wholly) from my own stunted ability to summarize. Images and motifs reappear in tale after tale, reinforcing the collection’s dreamlike feel. Many of these stories seem like prior tales glimpsed from a different angle, and yet those often feel wildly disparate while seemingly unrelated tales course through the same emotional channels. Characters across the collection have needle-filed teeth or perfect ivory triangles of feldspathic porcelain, saw-toothed carinae (p. 159) bestowed by dental students and others, and circles and enveloping seas crop up again and again, recurring to permeate our imaginations with their power.

Unfortunately, the same repetition that strengthens the collection’s most remarkable stories can make the weaker tales blend together. There’s no story here that can be considered a failure, or anything even approaching a sane definition of a failure, but some don’t succeed in leaving nearly as much of a mark upon the reader as others. This is, perhaps, a result of the format. Everything in the collection was written to appear, two stories at a time, in Kiernan’s monthly fiction journal, the Sirenia Digest. When compiled, the similarities can, at times, impair an individual tale’s chance to stand on its own.

The Ammonite Violin & Others is a collection to be savored and examined, not quickly devoured. These stories are almost never easy to digest, but they are almost always worthwhile. Caitlin R. Kiernan has the ability to take her readers into the darkest of places, and, when the last page is turned, the reader gets to discover that leaving those places is far more sorrowful than entering them.