H.P. Lovecraft - "The Nameless City"

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die (p. 30).

For the Lovecraft enthusiast, the most obvious lures of “The Nameless City” are bibliographic, the way that it introduces Abdul Alhazred and his couplet (quoted above) and prefigures At the Mountains of Madness with the idea of artwork giving a window into a lost civilization’s history. But it is also a powerful tale in its own right. As the narrator descends beneath the sands of Araby, Lovecraft displays his gifts at toying with history and building atmosphere, but he also works with wonder in a way which I had not often considered in my prior readings of his work.

[Be warned before continuing that I am assuming some familiarity with Lovecraft as a whole and so will not be going into great detail on the more obvious topics, such as the specifics of his dark revelations (in a word, scale; in a few, the realization that the universe is infinitely vaster than we are and that we do not matter) or how many adjectives he can cram into a single sentence. There will, also, be some spoilers for the story discussed. Finally, note that all page numbers come from the Penguin Classics edition of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, edited by S.T. Joshi.]

In popular culture and brief references, Lovecraft is often reduced to one emotion: fear. Occasionally, at moments of great specificity, that might be clarified to fear of the unknown. I don’t mean this in a purely derogatory way. Fear of the unknown is a huge part of Lovecraft’s work, and he evokes it masterfully. But “The Nameless City” exhibits the other driving force behind much of Lovecraft’s work: wonder, and our need for it.

The narrator here is not forced into his predicament. He came to the Nameless City of his own volition, well aware of its reputation. He endured many hardships to see it, even excepting those he encountered after his arrival that he could never have expected. Early on, he talks of “curiosity stronger than fear” (p. 32). Shortly afterwards, he writes of “that instinct for the strange and unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places” (p. 34). Curiosity, the drive to seek the wondrous, then, is a matter integral to the narrator’s character. And it is admirable. We are not dealing with a dallier, here, but rather with a man that has managed to trace forgotten legends to their source, one whose search for knowledge has left him fluent in Lord Dunsany’s short stories, Thomas Moore’s poetry, and Greek mythology.

This need for wonder is not a fleeting thing. It might be the driving force for the erudition just discussed, but it goes farther than that. Just before descending into the Nameless City, the narrator says that he was “more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder” (p. 33). Fear, then, goes beyond what can be put into words, past what is rational. But so does wonder, for the narrator’s wonder trumps his fear. Remember, after all, that he has not yet entered the city when he feels that way. He could have simply turned around and seen no more. Right up until the final revelation, the narrator insists that “wonder drove out fear” (p. 39).

Let us step back for a moment and remember that this is the Lovecraft that, in a 1930 letter to August Derleth, wrote that: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat – especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. An escape from strict, material reality like the kind that Lovecraft there described certainly sounds like a matter for wonder to me.

In fact, it leaves me wondering if wonder might not be the other pole of the cosmic dread that makes up so much of Lovecraft’s worldview, if his protagonists, aware of the unsatisfactory nature of the mundane, find that their only chance at joy is to strive for something greater than what is commonly perceived. That question is starting to go beyond “The Nameless City,” admittedly. While the narrator certainly does show a drive for wonder, we do not get to see any of his ordinary life, nor his state before the expedition. But the distinction between wonder and terror is one I certainly do plan to keep in mind when I next return to Lovecraft’s work.

What “The Nameless City” does provide in ample detail is how a search for wonder, for something greater than the limited perception that we all have ends if it ever really succeeds. Needless to say, it ends poorly. By the time he has escaped the Nameless City, the narrator can bleakly boast that “no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows” (p. 30). The knowledge he has gained burns away any shred of joyous wonder.

In his imparting of that overawing knowledge, Lovecraft operates by taking successive steps away from the narrator’s comfort zone, enlarging the frame each time but doing so by subtle enough degrees that we follow him until the final shocks. From Araby* to the uncharted desert to the ruins to the strange temple and on, each step seems tied to the last. Many of the piece’s more evocative details serve to bridge and strengthen the gaps between conceptual shifts. The seemingly source-less wind that leads the narrator to the passageway down, for instance, is an admirably physical hook that keeps things from feeling too easy or too bodilessly concerned with alien art.

(* In any other author, the fact that “Araby” seems utterly unpopulated save for the narrator and a few briefly mentioned sheiks would seem like whitewashing. In Lovecraft’s work, it just left me glad that we were spared any execrable descriptions of cultic natives dancing about a fire.)

The most interesting thing about the different stages might be how easy it is to cross from one to the next. It does not, of course, look that way at first. “There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive” (p. 30) Lovecraft tells us of the Nameless City before, after a semicolon, continuing with: “but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandmas in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why” (ibid).

Of course, if there are no legends about it and no one has ever heard of it, it is difficult to see how so many people are whispering about it. One could be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that Lovecraft let his grandiosity get away with him. But I think the seeming contradiction shows something deeper. There are barriers to seeing the cosmic truths behind the mundane, but those barriers are perspectival and not material. It is not that all knowledge of this past is truly gone. Rather, we fervently wish that all knowledge of it was, and so we loudly declare that even as we whisper the truth to those closest to us.

Then there is the crucial fact that Lovecraft does not reach the end of these stages. He never says that he is done, that all truth has been revealed, and that the reader can rest contented. Rather, at the end, he gives us a glimpse of more vistas yet to come, even if we could never manage to tread upon them. The artwork grants the narrator great knowledge, but it is incomplete. It does not take him to the present day. Instead, he is left knowing that: “Of what could have happened in the deological aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say” (p. 39). The final revelation, then, is that, even with the veil torn back, there is still an incomprehensible vastness beyond it, still infinitely more to be known that can never be known, other and innumerable gaps of cosmic time that even this monolithic revelation cannot come close to filling.

I would like to end, though, on a slightly smaller scale: with an allusion to mythology. As the narrator journeys to the Nameless City, he sees the sun, and we hear that he “fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile” (p. 31). To those that either know the myth or alternatively turned to S.T. Joshi’s handy footnote (I will admit that I fell into the later category), the description of the natural world seems poetic, tinged with greater stories and imaginings. Lovecraft brings the allusion back at the tale’s end, and those same words are then utterly overshadowed by the vaster horrors below. Similarly, wonder functions in the story throughout, growing putrid and awful as it is attained but no less present for it.

Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

Deciding exactly what Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge is in a top-down, definitional fashion does not work particularly well. The collection is subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales,” and that is certainly accurate. But dark is not the most precise of terms, even if it may end up being all that we are left with. Of course, any reader that has held the volume in their hands (but not yet turned its pages) is likely unsure what I am so confused about. True, the blurbs come from varied sources. Hilary Mantel and Junot Diaz, figures of Literature both, serve to somewhat complicate the picture. But the cover quote from Joe Hill and the large-font of Peter Straub’s endorsement seem, at least insofar as marketing is concerned, to seal the deal: this is horror.

Indeed, Revenge does achieve many of the same effects as Horror – but its meaning of achieving them are so different from those used in the Horror genre that, while Horror may be its destination, that leaves the journey unilluminated, and this is very much a work about the journey and the process. To be fair, there are some moments of genuine Horror-style horror. There are murders here and grisly disfigurements. Lurid descriptions of torture, too. For the most part, those moments did not work particularly well for me. They felt like some of the collection’s weakest. The heart of the collection was not those few violent motions but the general picture that it built, the quiet collection of observations and experiences. This is not a book about a grand event that is seen but rather about the process of observing.

 The eleven stories in Revenge are each told by a different first person narrator. Though this is not a mosaic novel – there is no single story that is being crafted throughout – the narrators do encounter one another, and those passing glimpses of another’s pain or catharsis give the reader a powerful reminder of how different those experiences look from outside that character’s head. The effect does not end there. Within the stories themselves, Ogawa is always playing with differences, with what we see of each other. Often, the answer is not much. Near the beginning of the collection’s opening piece, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” Ogawa writes that You could gaze at this perfect picture all day – an afternoon bathed in light and comfort – and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing (pp. 1-2). From there, the collection becomes a subtle teasing out of what is out of place – and how horrifically off it is – and a reminder of how all pain is hidden in plain sight.

Crowded together in this modern world that we inhabit, it’s easy to think that nothing is hidden anymore. The narrator of “Old Mrs. J.” certainly thinks that. Living in close proximity to innumerable neighbors, he believes that: Just as I could see everything that went on in her apartment, she missed nothing that happened in mine (p. 30). But such surface transparency really serves to hide so much. This can be seen when Mrs. J. is in his apartment. Such encounters are uncomfortable. But, more than that, they show how much we miss. Mrs. J. reads the titles off of the narrator’s bookcase and, even standing right there, “got them all wrong” (p. 28). No matter how clearly we see, the world is not exactly as we perceive it. And that lesson is rammed home at the story’s close, as no one in any of these seemingly transparent, seemingly visible apartment notices the murder in their midst.

Direct, onscreen action is a rarity in Ogawa’s stories. It would remove all the layers of ambiguity and perception that underlie so much of what she is doing here. Rather, the tragedies in these stories are glimpsed out of the corners of our eyes, are talked about or remembered or even just imagined. “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” my favorite tale in the collection, is composed of the last of those and also serves to tie together and comment upon the collection as a whole. The narrator, questioned by the police about a murder that occurred in one of the other stories, finds the whole procedure exciting. Her boyfriend finds that disgusting. “Do you find it amusing that someone died?” (p. 84) he asks. That’s not an unfair question, really, to ask of readers of Ogawa in particular and of Horror in general, but Ogawa does not simply ask it and wander off.

Pained by her boyfriend’s leaving her for her answer, the narrator enters the nearby Museum of Torture to take her mind off of things. What happens next is not what you think. She is not tied down and brutally tortured. No, she is simply shown through the museum, and the kindly, attentive curator describes the exhibits to her. The interactions between the curator and her are some of the easiest, most connected conversation to be found in the whole collection, and the narrator knows it: “He certainly was interested in what I had to say, unlike my boyfriend” (p. 93). This moment of genuine human interaction occurs amidst pain. None of the torture devices are used onscreen, but each is described, and the narrator and reader imagine their implementation. It is horrific. To give just one example, in the curator’s words: “Next we have this leather strap and those pliers. The victim’s wrist was attached to a table with the strap, and the pliers were used to extract the fingernails. Note the unusually delicate tips of the pliers” (p. 90). Yeesh!

But why wander the halls of the museum of torture? Well, the aforementioned connection is part of it, but it’s not the only part. To start with, it must be admitted that, yes, there is something (horribly) amusing about death. As the curator says, “The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules” (p. 90). But even that is not the whole picture, for to say that we encounter death because we are interested in it is to wholly flip the equation. After all, as the narrator knows, “torture was everywhere” (p. 91). This is confirmed by how, throughout her tour of the museum, the narrator hears of devices that the reader has seen in previous stories, albeit in less extreme contexts. Those encounters, too, were torturous. And if pain is all around us, then our choice is not whether to seek it out because it is amusing or to healthily prevent it. Our choice is whether to acknowledge reality or to pretend.

Ogawa, needless to say, does not pretend. She approaches pain in all its guises, approaches loneliness and vulnerability and murder. Very occasionally, Ogawa does break the slowly woven web with a moment of abrupt violence, or at least the sudden revelation of one. This occurs in “Lab Coats,” where a conversation takes a sudden and drastic shift at its end with the disclosure that one of the participants killed her boyfriend. Though twists like that do shock the reader, they were my least favorite parts of Revenge, because the sudden upset left me less rather than more engaged with the narrator’s perceptions. Thankfully, such sharp turns are rare. Generally, the hurt at the center of each story is only slowly brought out as the narrator tries to go about their life. It comes on stage calmly, gently, until it is, by the end, all that the reader can see or think about.

Though not a speculative fiction author exactly, Ogawa does toy with impossibilities and fantastic metaphors. This can be best seen in “Sewing the Heart,” in which the narrator meets a women with a bizarre defect: her heart is outside of her chest. Just before seeing it for himself, the narrator realizes that he has “never seen a human heart before, and the thought filled me with fear and disgust” (p. 65). The moment of true and very literalized insight into another, though, does not actually leave him disgusted. Rather, he finds it impossibly alluring. He wants to caress her heart. By the end of the story, he wants to possess it. The story, before long, becomes one of the collection’s most troubling. We are too far from one another to ever truly see them, it seems to say, save in the most extraordinary circumstances. But, if we actually could, that might not help matters. It might be only our distance that prevents us from doing even more harm to one another.

No matter how far from each other we may ultimately be, though, writers as skilled as Yoko Ogawa can give us a glimpse behind the curtain of other minds. In the way that it builds and progresses, Revenge is a soft collection filled with pathos. It is also a cutting knife.

Painting Nothing

The Gloaming has now released its final issue. The magazine's closing is a sad event for dark fiction. The issue's release, however, brings with it some great stuff.

Amidst a myriad of downright snazzy tales, it also has one of mine, a piece of Horror flash entitled "Painting Nothing." I wrote it a long while back, drafting it the night I finished Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco. So yeah, it's basically a few hundred words of worship. But I think it's not bad worship, as these things go. The coolest part of the publication, though, may be that there is an illustration next to it. Seeing how any part of your work is interpreted by an artist is just, well, totally and incredibly awesome.

Check it out, and don't forget to read the rest of the issue while you're at it.

Mr. Regali's Coffin

This is a (very) short Horror-ish vignette I wrote some time ago when in the mood to try my hand at something like what Thomas Ligotti's accomplished in Noctuary's "Notebook of the Night." It's a bit too simple to really evolve into a full fledged tale, but I do enjoy its mood and figured I would post it on here in case any of you do as well. Enjoy...

The shop is the center of town. The windows give glimpses of nothing, and the swaying wooden sign bears only a name: MR. REGALI. The townspeople come every year to tell their stories. Each has their own sheet of paper, and, while they speak, Mr. Regali draws with calculated abandon, pencil veering wildly up and down to create bizarre, shifting lines that encompass every word they've said. When the paper is filled, every glimpse of lively white smothered in sterile graphite, he announces their time of death, and they only come one more time to his shop.

The people who tell their life stories are a destitute lot like any other. The aggregate of their stories is a helpless picture, an image of man locked in a cage and dreaming of being free. The various protagonists Mr. Regali meets are helpless and hopeless, and he wishes he could save them. But he can only help in one way.

Mr. Regali is not some factory provider of garden-variety caskets for garden-variety corpses. He does not believe in one size fits all death, and each coffin is custom ordered, tailored to its occupant like a fine suit. Merchant of the paraphernalia of death he might be, but his work is no less essential than any of life's other major purchases - tuition, house, car, ring - and is arguably the most long lasting of all those ephemeral boons.

Every one of the coffins is the same. They are eighty-four inches from toe to head, twenty-eight from left to right, and twenty-three from ground to top. None have decorative fittings. The coffins are all identical, but they are made unique. Mr. Regali keeps no standardizing blueprints, consults no limiting specifications. He reaches the same conclusions in a different way for each individual, crafting the disparate pieces to match the heights and depths of the future occupant's oh-so-generic soul.

Mr. Regali has a masterpiece. No one's ever seen it, but I think I know what it is. I think that it's a coffin like and unlike all the others, being built piece by piece over the decades that his shop has been the climax of town life. I think that, somewhere in the backrooms of the establishment, there is a piece of paper for Mr. Regali and erratic pencil lines to mark his life. I think that, someday, Mr. Regali will shut the lid over himself as he's shut it over so many others - leaving us alone, adrift at the edge of death with no guide to lead us beyond.

"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!

"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.

Martin, Nightflyers, and The Speculative Scotsman

If you exit the Hat Rack, take a right, and cross the Atlantic Ocean, you might find yourself at the Speculative Scotsman's. But while we may be a tad geographically distant, we're a fair bit closer in terms of content. And so, when Niall asked if I'd be interested in doing a guest post on the SS while he tours these here states, I responded with a multi-paragraph version of "Hell yes!" The piece's up now, a review of George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers novella that hopefully does both the story and the blog it's hosted on justice. And above and below it is praise for this here Rack that just can't be good for my ego...

Catherynne M. Valente - Ventriloquism

The first story in Catherynne M. Valente's Ventriloquism, Reading Borges in Buenos Aires, bends reality, the light of a dozen worlds reflecting on the story's lone immutable details: someone, in Buenos Aires, is reading Borges, and the reading and the person and the city are all shaping one another. In one paragraph the reader is old, in the next young. Facts, pasts, and the characters around the reader dissolve and are rebuilt, changing from page to page. In the final story, 13 Ways of Looking at Space/Time, scientifically analyzed creation myths are balanced with the affecting story of a certain unnamed science fiction writer, and possibilities are given birth and then die as timelines coalesce: I am writing the word and the word is already published and the word is already out of print. Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering. (p. 328) In between those two stories, six years of Valente's fiction bring thirty of those permutations to life, thirty different tales united by that unnamed science fiction author's vision and sprawling across genres and years and narratives.

Valente's prose unifies the disparate tales found here. Her writing is baroque and dense, sentences composed of tightly packed imagery that rolls over the reader, such as a childhood described in La Serenissima: Never since I was a girl did my feet grace a stair but that the embroidery of my shoes was soaked through, red thread to black, green to black, blue to black: rain-sodden, rimmed with street-mold (p. 67) or the opening of A Dirge for Prester John: We carried him down to the river. It churned: basalt, granite, marble, quartz – sandstone, limestone, soapstone. Alabaster against obsidian, flint against agate. Eddies of jasper slipped by, swirls of schist, carbuncle and chrysolite, slate, beryl, and a sound like shoulders breaking. (p. 23)

It's true that the storm of images is imposing, occasionally even overwhelming, but that's not to say that Valente isn't a versatile writer. She's capable of bringing the same richness to almost any emotion and the same vividness to almost any place. She shows us bitter self loathing in Milk and Apples: I had been wicked, yes, because I had borne a dead daughter, I had squeezed a little pale corpse from my body as though I were nothing but a fat coffin, and buried it in the snow-hardened fields. (p. 147) She shows us sinful opulence with Gobulash's decadent wine: This is a wine that swallows light. Its color is deep and opaque, mysterious, almost black, the shadows of closed space. Revel in the dance of plum, almond skin, currant, pomegranate. The musty spike of nutmeg, the rich, buttery brightness of equine blood and the warm, obscene swell of leather. The last of the pre-war wines – your execution in a glass. (p. 278) And she shows us, too, levity, dry wit, and grandiose plans in How to Become a Mars Overlord: No matter what system bore you lifted you up, made you strong and righteous, there is a Mars for you to rule, and it is right that you should wish to rule her. (p. 300)

Valente's love of language is evident in more than just her prose's richness. In Ventriloquism, writing has the power to change the world, and Valente's protagonists spread awareness through slyly delivered pamphlets (The Anachronist's Cookbook) and through writing on pregnant stomachs (The Harpooner at the Bottom of the World) while Valente delivers the same messages through her tales. Many stories here are almost as concerned with how the story is being told – with its writing – as they are with what the story itself is. The Days of Flaming Motorcycles is shaped and titled by the cover of the notebook the narrator is writing in. In The Secret History of Mirrors, the narrator becomes the center of attention due to her tale, and her contempt for those around her who don't speak for themselves is plain: Ah, but they pound so upon the door of my cell, and demand their sides be told! Have you ever heard of such disagreeable folk? As if this was the first manuscript written from within our hexagonal chambers! As if vellum and gall were so rare as to the hunted across the fields like harts and hares. (p. 218) It's true that not all of the first person stories have such central frames, but even those that do not are filled with identifying flourishes, the narrators eschewing banal "My name is…" introductions for proud declarations such as, from The Dirge for Prester John: And after all of these, feet bare on the sand, skirts banded thick and blue about her waist, eyes cast downward, walked Hagia of the Blemmyae, who tells this tale. (p. 24)

In his introduction, Lev Grossman says: You will encounter those stories in a new way here. You won't recognize them at first, when you meet them. they will have taken off their glasses, and let down their hair. And you'll lay, like the old boss says to his secretary in the soap opera, in surprise and wonderment: Good heavens! You're beautiful! They will smile. And then they will rip your heart out. (p. XII) It's hard to think of a better way to describe Valente's fiction, her self-proclaimed mythpunk. These stories start out enchanting. Opulent, yes, but seemingly innocuous. They show you fantastic things and let you revel in glorious new places, and then, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly, they grow dark and twisted. There are no spell-breaking shifts here, no contrived tonal changes. There are, instead, revelations, the reader realizing that they've allowed bright lights and sweet aromas to blind us to misery all around us.

This is shown no where better than in the second of the novel's two Hansel and Gretel tales. A Delicate Architecture begins with a fairy tale world, a girl living with her father, the greatest confectioner to ever live, and living a life where everything is made of sweets. As the tale progresses, however, the price of such sweets becomes all too clear, the proof of the father's words: He told me very seriously that I must always remember that sugar was once alive. It grew tall and green and hard as my own knuckles in a far-away place, under a red sun that burned on the face of the sea. I must always remember that children just like me cut it down and crushed it up with tan and strong hands, and that their sweat, which gave me my sugar, tasted also of salt. (p. 83-4) The narrator is harvested for the sweetness that she can bring, and, while the tale's initial flights of fancy are still present, it's plain that such paradises are not for everyone.

Hidden costs lie underneath almost every story here. Valente manages to both show us the fabulous power of such dreams and, devastatingly, their painful realities. Amid the wonder of airships, The Anachronist Cookbook's protagonist writes: What you do not see are the Children who wind the Gearworks, stoke the Fires, load the Aerial Bombardments, pack Powder and scrape Bird Offal from the Engines. (p. 58) Such sentiments abound in fairy tales told by side characters and villains, in flights of fancy only held down by their cost, and in tales of heroic struggle cheapened by those it carelessly destroys.

Admittedly, not all of the collection's tales are equally powerful. Valente's prose is a dominating thing, and it can, at times, overwhelm the reader. Some stories, such as The Anachronist's Cookbook, are interesting ideas that lose their power through digressions. In that story, the messianic protagonist fights a battle against a cruel world through her stealthily disseminated pamphlets, but the drama of the story is waylaid by an excess of those pamphlets, and the conclusion is unsurprising. Other stories also occasionally lose the grand picture for the power of the details – and yet, if you're going to pick a reason for a tale to fail, I think excellence of prose and description is a pretty damn good one. No, I would not say that every story in here is a masterpiece. But I will say that there is no story in here that you can ride with half an eye, no story that won't drag you into its every depiction, and no story that is a safe tale that one has read before and has no interest in reading again.

Catherynne M. Valente is a distinctive author, a unique voice. Every tale in this collection asserts her style within the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence, and any limiting genre indicators never manage to assert themselves until long after the reader is swept away and shore is no longer in sight. Valente's fiction is like the delicate wines of Golubash or the handcrafted sugars of A Delicate Architecture, and I think I'm going to be savoring choice tales and discovering new layers for a long time. 

Fantasy & Science Fiction: March/April 2011

This is the third issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine that I've read. Of all of them, it's probably got the strongest standouts, though it's also got a few weaker tales.

Albert E. Cowdrey's Scatter My Ashes starts us off, one of the many horror tales in this issue. Cowdrey has been present in each of the three F&SF issues that I've read and seems equally adept at whatever he turns his hand to. The characters and situation are rapidly set up (a mysterious family tragedy, an aging and rich woman, the dark and mysterious sorcerer, and the writer to investigate it all), and Cowdrey is able to flavor his story with brief spurts of Russian dialogue and character quirks without drowning in them. Perhaps best of all, Cowdrey is quite capable at wryly mocking his own set up, leading to several humorous lines such as: [The servant] had the highly suspicious feature of not understanding a word of English, when when spoken by a Hearst reporter in a firm, clear voice. (p. 14) The story's final line is predictable but loses little of its charm for that. And yet, for all the skill of its construction, I wouldn't say that Scatter My Ashes is an excellent tale. The concluding line really sums the story up: familiar, well executed, and enjoyable, but not exceptional in any way.

If Scatter My Ashes is the refreshing and enjoyable cup of coffee that leads you into your day, Paul di Filippo's A Pocketful of Faces is a delicious and disquieting brew had in the alleyways of a city you've never been to before and never will return to. This is a Science Fiction story that manages the rare trick of combining intensity and atmospheric, intriguing setting without letting up on either element. The narrator is a policeman tasked with hunting down criminals that illegally outfit their robot "twists" with stolen faces, replicas of people in their lives. The story is filled with amusing references (The Man of a Thousand Faces, The Face that Must Die, and so on), and is host to enough powerful images and scenes that the rushed-feeling climax fails to detract from its power.

Sophie M. White's Metaversal is a poem that rapidly branches out and, in four verses, manages to launch us through quite a multitude of realities. The poem's amusing, and fits well between A Pocketful of Faces and the story to follow.

Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie is an affecting modern fantasy tale. The story's opening draws the reader in with sweet and seemingly innocuous imagery:

A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.

I reached out to mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers. (p. 64-5)

Before long, however, the characters begin to draw apart, and the idyllic opening scenes give way to a melancholy middle. The situation is likely familiar to most readers – and the fantasy content is rather slight – but Liu manages to create character sympathetic enough that they make us feel for them up to and beyond the story's close, and the tale never loses its charm.

Sheila Finch's The Evening and the Morning is the issue's centerpiece and by far the longest tale here. Unfortunately, it's also the issue's weakest piece. This is the concluding tale of Finch's Xenolinguist series of shorts, which I haven't read, but, as it's here published without the benefit of the prior dozen-or-more tales, I think it's fair to judge it on its own merits. The opening scene is a meeting between Crow (the main character) and the alien Tu've. The two are old friends, which does come across, and the setting is interesting, but the scene is smothered with details and information, preventing the newcomer from getting through the door. Compounding the problem, Finch has a habit of drifting off in the middle of her own sentences, seemingly losing her train of thought halfway through and then regaining it, ending up with awkward constructions like: One week later, the Venatixi craft, nameless as all Venatixi ships were – how the Venatixi overcame the resulting confusion was something Crow couldn't image – stepped out of deep space just inside the orbit of Earth's satellite and commenced normal cruising speed. (p. 83)

Once the tale gets moving, things don't much improve. Crow, several humans, and Tu've's daughter travel to the long-lost Earth and are eager to explore. Instead of finding a paradise still functioning (but in isolation), they see nothing whatsoever made by human hands. Now, the backstory seems odd to me, but, fair enough, I haven't the prior knowledge to make sense of it. More damning is the fact that the desolate earth is never felt by the reader, and that the characters – though they're quick to lament the tragedy of earth's fall – never come off as particularly upset, save for a few rather maudlin scenes. In fact, the characters besides Crow are uniformly shallow; Tu've's daughter is the worst of the lot, her every action incomprehensible and illogical. The tale's resolution bears with it a few interesting elements but doesn't manage to justify the story's length or even answer the questions that the story itself raises.

Things get more interesting again with The Night Gauntlet, a round robin Lovecraft mythos tale. The only author I'm familiar with is Pugmire (and even there not first hand), but all the participants must be commended; there are no jarring transitions to be found here, and the atmosphere is carried along throughout. The meat of the story isn't groundbreaking, but the tale is enjoyably seasoned with a commendable knowledge of horror Lovecraftian and otherwise (including a reference to that Ligotti fellow I'm always harping on about), and there are several images here that are quite successful. This isn't an essential story, but it is a capable horror tale rendered all the more impressive by the number of its creators.

Happy Ending 2.0 by James Patrick Kelly loops around the turning point of a happy couple's relationship. Returning to the spot where everything started to go downhill, the two end up out of step with one another with one foot in each time stream. The story's not surprising in the least, but it's concise and emotional enough to pass muster.

The Second Kalandar's Tale, written by Francis Soty, is a bit of an enigma, to say the least. The events, characters, and prose style are larger than life and flashy enough to keep the reader's attention, but it's tough to say, upon turning the last page, what significance – if any – the whole thing has.

Karl Bunker's Bodyguard tries for pathos on a grand scale and doesn't quite manage it. The story's protagonist, a human amidst an alien culture, seems like an interesting figure, but the reader never grasps enough of the culture or the wider world to ever understand his situation. There are well done moments, here, but the story as a whole feels distinctly more like watching someone have an emotional breakdown than it does having one yourself.

Kali Wallace's Botanical Experiments for Curious Girls is a slow building tale, one filled with eerie, small details such as: Miss night used to put Rosalie to bed every evening while snow fell outside the window, but one day her fingers had curled up like brittle twigs and she couldn't unfasten the buttons anymore. (p. 223) The oppressive tone only gets stronger as the tale goes on, and the protagonist soon manages to arouse our sympathies, all culminating in an excellent ending.

After the humorous but brief Ping (two sentences long), we reach the issue's closing tale: James Stoddard's The Ifs of Time. From the first paragraph, Stoddard is quick to invoke the bizarre and the epic: Evenmere is a house of infinite proportions. Within its gabled halls, beneath its countless roofs, are countries and kingdoms, dominions and principalities, walled fields and farmed courtyards. The manor is the mechanism that regulates the universe, and its many servants light the lamps, wind the clocks, repair the walls, polish the doorknobs – a thousand tasks – so light and time and space, the stars and the worlds, continue. (p. 239) Stoddard is able to keep the same vibe throughout the story without having to sacrifice characterization or immediacy for it. The meat of the tale is the four stories-within-a-story told by a strange group of friends. Each is an interesting piece in its own right, and the frame story's climax is powerful and interesting.

The March/April issue of F&SF is a very strong one overall and one I'd recommend to any fan of genre short stories. The highlights here are well worth remembering – in particular I'll be searching out Filippo's prior work and keeping an eye out Wallace's future fiction – and a good majority of the rest is comprised of stories that, if not excellent, were certainly not poor.

Standouts: A Pocketful of Faces, The Paper Menagerie, Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls, and The Ifs of Time