— The Editors

Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative language and fierce, enigmatic drawings, Monster Portraits examines with sympathy those who transcend boundaries and find themselves outsiders. “Like all monsters, we don’t belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival.”

This examination takes the form of a journey through the land of monsters, “that lasted an indeterminate length of time, which, outwardly, took the shape of five years.” We meet many monsters on this journey: bitter, beautiful, powerful, fierce, fantastic, exploited, misunderstood. We are allowed to see them as they see themselves. We learn what “monstrous” actually means—because there is none more monstrous than someone who would wield the epithet “monster” to banish another.

Monster Portraits comforts the monster, confronts the monstrous. Many of us see ourselves reflected in both. Exiles from the places we used to belong, born into the wrong body or skin or shape, here too soon or perhaps too late, unable to live as we truly are. But we are also monstrous in our ways; we laugh while somewhere else, our brothers and sisters suffer. We feast while elsewhere children starve. We have all been complicit in some way with this world’s cruelty.

In some ways, Monster Portraits reminds me of Leena Krohn’s exquisite Tainaron. Like Tainaron, Monster Portraits is told through the eyes of a narrator traversing the landscape of a foreign yet familiar place. It relays conversations with creatures we might consider strange, yet their uncanniness reflects the beats of our own lives. As in Tainaron, the land of monsters is obviously a physical place, a world that exists parallel to, concurrent with, or just beyond our own—but the geography never quite resolves. To me one of the most enchanting things about Monster Portraits is the names of all these fantastical places, neighborhoods and districts and lands where monsters dwell: Swoon. Soinoe. Fanderlee. Snimron. Crezhlorn. Names that have the faint ring of somewhere you’ve been, but can’t quite recall…

Unlike Tainaron, which is built from neat tidy entries of mellifluous prose, the poetry of Monster Portraits feels sprawling, discursive, meta. It’s a conversation with history, a reckoning with past monstrosities. The text is threaded with quotations from an impressively diverse selection of texts: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Google, Arabian Nights. These quotations are cited with an academic’s authorial precision at the back of the book, an ingenious way of placing Monster Portraits within a web of allusions, anchoring it to the weight of the history it bears. I found myself flipping back and forth, reconsidering certain passages based on my new knowledge of the context they carry.

These references accrete around the text, but Sofia Samatar’s writing is powerful and original enough to support their weight. There are sentences so truthful, beautiful, and brutal they took my breath away. “Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”  “Is there any love, I wondered, with the amazing color and vibrancy of the love between siblings bearing an incommunicable secret?”  “The one who acts remains elsewhere, out of sight, preparing a horror so obscene a monster could not look on it without bleeding.”

Art and words in this book are intimately intertwined, conceived in conjunction with each other, another secret between siblings. Imagery and language are in accord, and feel as if they’ve arrived hand-in-hand, neither one grafted on to the other as illustrated poetry (or poetry inspired by art) often feels. As the book says, “We would travel separately, but on the same ground.”

Del Samatar’s black-and-white drawings are arresting. Most are heavily shaded, with areas of inky blackness that set off an interplay between positive and negative space; everything is always defined in opposition to something else. The work resonates with traditional printmaking, etching, woodcuts; in its contrast that marries crisp lines with intricate design, it also feels inspired by the aesthetics of tattoo art. The visual vernacular connects to artists like H.R. Giger or M.C. Escher—weird, uncanny. There are repeating motifs of filigree, flowers and feather. And as befits these creatures: tooth and claw, carapace and bone.

Scattered throughout the book are also a few tentative sketches, process drawings. These felt equally at home. They brought a sense of movement and transition. Like the text, these works in progress are questioning and raw.

Monster Portraits doesn’t just reveal its process, but revels in it; so the work and the process become one and the same. This meta level tantalized and intrigued me, but left me wanting more. I desired a greater glimpse into the autobiographical aspects, the story anchoring the story. It seemed I was analyzing a sliver of something much deeper, broader, titanic even, buried beneath the surface. I wanted the metaphor to slink away and reveal the real, but it never quite happened.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. I like a story that leaves me wanting more. This is after all the human condition.

There are moments where the book moves toward the fourth wall, in a threat to break it down. For instance: “At the last minute he told me, ‘We can’t use this one, it’s too real.’” Is the entry I’m reading too real, or is it another entry altogether, excised from this book? “The book I was trying to write…” Is it this book? Or another book, not yet written?

This is a book about monsters, but it is also a book about writing a book. And that second book is a ghost. The first book, the book I’m holding, feels haunted by a shadow version of itself, a second book that exists above or beyond this one, buried in the cracks.

Monster Portraits carries a weighty emotional heft for such a slim volume. It reads easily, but is not easily forgotten. Oblique, enigmatic, often fragmented, yet deeply true; I read this book like skimming a frozen lake, while its claws embedded in my heart.

The post Review: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What follows is an excerpt from Desirina Boskovich’s debut novella Never Now Always out June 27th from Broken Eye Books. Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, F&SF, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as Aliens: Recent Encounters, The Apocalypse Triptych and Tomorrow’s Cthulhu. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, the Huffington Post, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Her next project is forthcoming from Abrams Image –Starships & Sorcerers: A Secret History of Science Fiction, in collaboration with Jason Heller. Find Desirina online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.

Never Now Always is the story of Lolo, who can’t remember how she came to be in a place with endless rooms and voiceless Caretakers. Her memories are fragmented and blurred, always slipping away, but at least now, she has remembered how to write — even if her only ink is her own blood. Her desperate efforts to recall her past are all she has, along with Gor, her loyal friend inside this bleak place. But perhaps her sister is here somewhere in this labyrinth, too…

(lolo)

There comes a night I cannot write. My tiredness slurps all through my bones—I feel it hard in every thought.

So weary from questions: facts I can’t recollect, days I can’t recall. My skin is filled with scars, some fresh, some scabbed. I’m losing space to cut. I hurt all times and every day. I hurt inside my chest.

I hurt with a rust-red crisscross labyrinth of the wounds across my legs, my arms, my side.

I hurt inside my heart.

This night, I’m swaddled in my bunk. There sounds the beep-booping of machines, the breathing of rapt children. The structure breathes, too, exhaling air, inhaling back. These unquiet rustlings, these songful hums.

I tell myself, Be strong. I tell myself, Be brave.

I am Lolo, and I am the child that remembered writing. I am the one that could save us all. I can’t grow tired. I can’t be afraid. Pain is just pain.

But this night, I can’t steel myself against the cuts.

“Gor?” I say.

“Lolo?”

“Can I come down?”

“Yes.”

I drop myself down this stable ladder, wincing against the pain in arms and legs, resisting urges that my groans and whimpers show. Gor cannot hear; Gor cannot know.

I crawl into his Gor-stink sheets. He wraps his arm around my shoulder. He brushes my forearm’s wound. It hurts me, but I don’t cry out.

“How do you feel?” Gor asks me. I do not remember a time before when Gor spoke these words. I didn’t know he knew such things. He must have learned in his own memory-duties what these complicated words mean.

“Tired,” I say. “I feel tired.”

“I feel tired,” Gor says. “I want to go home.”

His speech brings up such thick and awful feelings. It comes unexpected, so I can’t hold back. My throat is sore, my eyes brimming with hot tears. I feel a lurch inside my chest. I know that feeling. Such few words hold all this feel.

“Go home,” I repeat. I shape the words myself. This speech transforms me everywhere. This want becomes my heart.

The feels are everything, but I don’t know what they mean.

It’s been long since I lay tight in this bunk with Gor. Some days, some nights. I don’t know numbers. This absence is distance, getting wider. This lack is the empty feeling in my arms, but I wriggle my front to his back, hold dear. It’s been long. Does he know?

I don’t know what he knows. Our time is shot with holes.

I think of the Caretakers: it’s different for them. What one knows, all know. Their thoughts are not their own. What one sees, all see. The Voice speaks to them in ways we cannot hear. For children, the Voice is sound. For Caretakers, the Voice is something else. They have no secrets. They have no gaps. They live like one being in many parts.

What comfort, I think. If we could be like them. If we never had to feel alone again. If Gor and I were not two but one. And I knew his memories and thoughts. And he knew mine. And children would not recount their dreams because the dream would hold us all.

If we felt no need to hold our stories because they were held somewhere else. No spaces between us. No walls to separate.

This thought comes to me: one day we will be like the Caretakers. The Voice will speak in silence, and we will hear. I will be Gor, and Gor will be me. The structure will know us all. The story will be shared.

I squeeze tight against Gor’s bony shoulders, against these mournesome thoughts. In this now, our bodies hold us: my blood-marked flesh is vast and wide, my thoughts beyond a gulf that can’t be crossed. Gor squeezes my hand, draped against his own soft belly. I feel his breathing; he feels mine. There is no prick of needle nor gold syringe, but still, I feel the bliss wash over me, the lapping of the light. Gor smells like home.

“I know about before,” he says.

“Before what?”

“Before now.”

I wait in silent mirth, laughing quiet in my chest, lest he say again breakfast. But he doesn’t speak.

“What was before?” I ask finally.

“Home,” he says. “Home was before.”

Again, that feeling, like I’m struck. For a moment, I can’t breathe. The love and longing, the need and loss, all rising up. That feel like tubing in my throat.

“We’ll go,” I say. “We’ll go, Gor.”

This now is here. I’m Lolo. He’s Gor. Together in this bubble as we’ve been before. This night, we sleep soft in tangle of warm limbs and samelike smell of breath and farts.

***

In this now, there is a slope of grassy hillside. Green grass tickles rough and tender on bare legs, leaving woven mesh patterns against my skin. Undeterred, I lay content in emerald stubble, disregarding such prickles, such tickles, such itching delight. Burrowing fingertips into dirt, feeling earth embrace the whorls.

The world smells mouth-watering scrumptious. Dad tends the grill, the fire flickers with the lip-smacking savory of sizzling meats. Mom on the deck, arranging mustard and ketchup, setting out plates.

I stare up at endless sky falling toward the hush of periwinkle. The first star is Venus; the first star is another world.

The first stars twinkle splendorous against the fading light while bats swoop and dive, wheeling like fighter planes, mosquitoes their prey. The cicadas carry the song of a whir and drone and purr so loud it drowns.

Upon me flops this golden fursome beast, rough tongue aflap, wet jowls adrip, black nose all cold and snuffle. He pants and lolls and licks, and I groan and laugh beneath the doting weight.

Beside me, some giggles: just near my shoulder is Tess, sitting prim on a blanket with knees pulled up and sparkle-polished toes. “Ugh! Bentley, off,” I grumble and huff from my mutt-flattened chest.

And he’s off, my thighs the launch pad to run and pant another lap.

Tess sits statue-still with perfect gaze. Tess watches the world. Tess longs to catch a firefly, so she waits and wills the flickering aviators to come to her. I tell her I can catch one faster. She dares me. I bet her. But while she persists in her patient pose, I flail and grab at golden cosmonauts. Each wandering lightning bug escapes my grasp.

Meanwhile, Bentley has set his sights to catch a hot dog. He lingers in usual fashion around the grill, evincing innocence. “Get lost, Bentley,” Dad says and tests a beefy patty. This dog is naught but wounded dignity and sits paws forward, wholly courteous. His manner suggests he is only here to help. Dad deposits a half-dozen charred franks upon the plate and turns back to the grill.

Bentley!

He’s up like a shot, grabs one frank between his jaws, races hasty. A great hue and cry goes up from the man behind the grill. Dad chases the dog across the yard, waving his grease-charred spatula all the way while the dog gobbles it all in one choking gulp, greedy as can be. Dad yells. Bentley licks his chops, not even pretending regret. Tess and I laugh until our sides hurt, and we almost can’t contain our pee.

Bentley slinks away to nurse his paws and gloat. The rest of us take our greedy selves to the deck and fill our plates to feast on picnic fare.

Night falls. Darkness comes. The sky is star-spangled indigo. We settle upon the blanket, Tess and I beside—Bentley between us, snoring now, our fingers buried in his golden scruff.

We are like this when the first fireworks flare and spark across the sky, emerging from beyond the trees, like rage confetti being born. Bentley is alarmed by such pyrotechnics. With the second outburst, he rears up like a startled horse and whines and scratches at our hands, determined to alert us to these perils.

“Shh, Bentley,” we say.

“Put him inside,” Dad says, still tending grievance for the hot dog incident.

“But he’ll be scared,” Tess says when luminescence bursts with splitting thunderclaps once more. Bentley is quite unamused. He cowers, trembles. “I’ll go with him,” Tess volunteers, and something inside me stirs. My sister should not miss this rocket show we cherish. Such magics only happen once a year.

But Bentley quivers pitiful, clearly caught between two yearnings: the urge to run far and fast and the need to bury his trembling snout between our knees for harbor. And Tess is concerned only for this sad creature, earnest to bring him somewhere safe.

In that firecracker-dazzled instant, I see my sister unobscured, her distinct and unrepeated self. This amorphous person who has been beside me all my life sharpens into focus as a rare and peerless soul. Her innermost life unknown to me yet still a matter of fact. By this revelation, I’m stunned (as more explosions sparkle).

“I’ll go, too,” I say.

And this decides eternity. Our paths are fixed. Our destiny resolved. There is no turning back from everything to come. There is no end to how long the infinite can be. Together, with blinds closed against the racket and tumult, my sister and I cuddle and snarfle our fear-farting dog upon the couch until the pyrotechnics pass.

***

In my bunk at night, I make my sharp ink. I draw a dog. I draw a girl. I draw a lightning bug aflame. I draw explosions in the sky. I draw another girl.

These visions of a home are built on senses I’ve forgotten. The scent of grass. The smell of meat. The taste of ketchup. The feel of bare feet upon the frazzled ground. The breeze in my hair. The furry beast.

I remember the feeling of remembering. I remember thoughts about the thing.

Though I can’t recall the thing itself.

Infused with yearning, I try to draw these sensations I’ve forgotten. I hold them to myself like magic spells. I build them from broken building blocks.

I get angry with myself. It hurts so much to render these stupid symbols on this wall, and they barely even brush the truth. They are so far from the feeling they seek to hold.

My tentative scrawlings are like me: a search for words I cannot know, to ask the questions I still can’t form, for answers I do not and may never vision.

Reaching, grasping, blindfolded, and bound.

Not even close to close enough.

***

Gor and I file into the breakfast hall, surrounded on all sides by children. On the surface, all seems the same: bright lights, long tables. The walls glow yellow, their often morning hue. We line up one by one to press our fingertips to the space above each cubby and reveal our breakfast trays. The Caretakers offer their dead dull gaze. Chatter ebbs and flows as we try our voices again.

On the surface, all seems the same, but underneath, something’s changed. As I wait, I puzzle out this different feeling, handle its aspects in my mind.

Same acid glare. Same chow drowned in awful brown. Same cold and leathered meats. Same lackluster pajamas.

I press my fingertips. I take my tray.

As I walk back to my customary spot, I see it: we’ve become tight-knotted camps. The children sit in clusters. Each closed in a circle to themselves, their conversation eager yet quiet as if they hope the others do not hear.

Around Gor and I, the sitting’s sparse. It seems we are left this skimpy handful of children with no clique.

Gor is undisturbed. He scarfs down heaped forkfuls of some gloppy eats. I sit beside. I perk my ears and strain for fragments of the others’ talk.

It is, as always, talk of visions and memories and muffled dreams.

I pat Gor’s forearm. “Stay. I’ll be back.” He nods, mouth full. I grab my tray and sidle over to the closest bunch of conspiring children. They scooch to welcome me into their company and wait, expectant for my story.

But I am canny. I hold my cards. Instead, I press them with one question I’ve come to know must matter most: “How do you remember home?”

Eyes alight, they tell me of their towering world. This needle pierced from ground to sky, and them in the middle, suspended somewhere miles above the brown ground flecked with silver, the brown sky streaked with cream. How they scampered and ran in its tunnels and shafts and played amongst the humming tanks where food grew and fuel brewed. And took the elevator as far up as they dared, always climbing further toward the sky—never quite reaching. But they dreamed they’d reach the top. The ground was yesterday. The sky tomorrow. These time-meaning words they toss with certainty.

“How did it end?” I ask.

But this they cannot say. And they eye me with suspicion. Suspecting now that I am not with them, that their past is not my own. Our fragile stories cannot bear opposition. And indeed, I know this odd tale they’ve constructed—a tower vaster than any city—’tis but a dream. There’s no such edifice. There’s no such place. They are much mistaken.

But I will not disabuse rapt children of their notions. Regretful, I take my tray and move on to the next.

These kids claim to hail from a world called Moon, their home a shimmering bubble on a plane of polished rock. Above, the searing night, the diamond stars, the stretching on eternal. How quiet it must be, that dusty moonscape, undisturbed by human footstep. The kind of world where a labyrinth like our own might thrive. But they describe it lovingly.

“How did it end?”

This they know. I see it in their eyes, their heart-numb gaze, their trembling lips. The bubble pierced. The high-pitched roar as their breathings leaked away. The roar of machinery, the clang of sirens, every warning signal at once to warn at panicked volumes, to let loose bellows and wails. And this, better than silence. Silence is the worst.

They grow sober as they speak of how it feels when air runs out, the fluttering in their chests, the weak overwhelm, lips blue, blacking out. Then seeing the slick, dark orbs of the Caretakers, peering close—too close—inspecting swollen, lifeless tongues.

They are delusional, too. So I leave behind their huddle.

Other children tell of tents strung up in canopies of green. They pranced on swaying catwalks, stretched from tree to tallest tree. They dropped leaves onto the breathing, screeching green beneath. The constant chatter of birds and sweet glimmer of the dew.

But then—I’m rattled to see the girl crying as she tries to speak—the whole ground shakes, like earthquakes, as ancient trees bigger ’round than all this room are ripped and tossed like twigs. When they fall, the whole earth trembles. The forestworld turns topsy-turvy as the Harvesters destroy it all. The birds shriek in panicked fright. The sky rains blood and feathers.

I’m discouraged by their stupid thoughts. I come back around to Gor.

As I made my tours of these raving bands of lunatics around the lengthy table, Gor struck up conversation with those nearest us, or they with him. Timid but jubilant, they cite the allure of the ice cream truck, the patter of flip-flops, the feeling of sand between their toes. They remember a snowman in winter with a carrot for a nose, the mug of cocoa with melting cream, the sting of chapped and bloody lips, the fire’s bright blaze.

Such nows I have not felt myself, yet at some core level, I feel their truth. I don’t know how I know. This sense of coming home, it simply fills my bones.

With tear-choked throat, I share what memories I can.

***

In this now, a looming space with herds of frightened children, ragged breath and staring eyes, moving across the concrete floor. Shivering and much afraid.

Overhead, the roof is almost too far removed to see, where darkness gathers among the metal rafters.

We huddle close, one to another against the cold and windy drafts. It comes to me: this warehouse is larger than an airplane hangar. There are enough children in this place to populate another world.

And I am with my sister, Tess. We are together as we’ve been now all along. I hold her hand tight as can be. I am still the youngest, though only slightly smaller. I need her badly, as she needs me. We cling to each other and wait to see what days or times will come. And though my heart is beating hard and fast and my breath is coming quick, though my throat is hard and tight and shivers rattle through my trembling frame, I know we are together. This we have, at least.

I have forgotten all befores. Already, I cannot remember how we came to be inside this massive loft nor what happened to allow this circumstance. I recognize no faces among the crying, bleating children.

The Caretakers emerge into the room from some door we cannot see. So many, more than we’ve ever seen before, all congregated in one place. They stream in all directions like a horde of insects, like a nest of ants disturbed.

Tess and I cling still tighter, determined that we should not be separated. They will not pry our hands apart.

As the Caretakers approach, they bring overwhelming dread with them like a nightmare, a gross and creeping cloud. They make the edges of my sight feel dim and dark and fogged. My stomach churns, and all this story swirls along the edges. A rushing in my ears. A conviction that the world must end.

The Caretakers grip some kind of tool and press it to the forehead of each child. It whirs and grinds and emits a glare of light. With beeps and whistles, this scanner tells them something.

Tess and I watch all this with trepidation.

Until the Caretakers come to us. They scan her head, then mine, with a tickling, prickling presence just past the edges of my brain. It’s like a shadow creeping close. It doesn’t hurt. But it makes my stomach flip-flop, feel strange.

They point their pale and clammy fingers at our entwined sister hands. They do not speak. They can’t. Nonetheless, we grasp their point: let go our fingers. We refuse.

The two of them with damp and bony hands grip fast the two of us. They clamp our hands. They are stronger than they look: limp and moist but forceful. They pry apart our fingers, and though we shriek and flail, there’s little we can do. We are separated. We are two.

Grabbing fast to my right hand so tight it hurts, the Caretaker splays apart my fingers. He holds my palm to the scanning tool’s hot edge. Fast as lighting, it imprints a symbol on each fingertip. My hand stings, but it’s all too quick to badly hurt.

Soon as this code is imprinted, the Caretaker releases me. It lets go, and I almost fall. I gaze with wonder at my palm, the symbol etched upon each whorl. This blackly purple ink, suspended just beneath the skin as if always part of me.

I look for Tess, to show her, to see if they’ve done the same to her. I look for her, to take her hand in mine.

But she’s gone. In mounting panic, I scan the room. I see only lost and frightened children, so many sobbing faces.

I glimpse her back, her hair. They’re pulling her away. She’s peering over her right shoulder and trying to fight back. But the Caretakers drag her forward.

I lose sight of her amongst all the other roiling kids.

I take off in a run. I swerve and dodge, not bothering to say, Excuse me, tripping and falling more than once but pushing on. With force of sorrow, I will this crowd to part for me.

Once past this wave of children, I reach these towering glass cubes. Four walls, one roof, perfectly encased, this massive cage all made of glass.

There are six—seven—ten—twelve—too many to count. Each fills up with children as the Caretakers sort all kids into these vast transparent hulls.

I see in time, just soon enough, as Tess is herded in this glass. The crate is filled with children, all teeming, frightened, stampeding. I run as fast as I can, tripping over all and sundry, to get into this same box.

Before I’m there, the door slides shut. The edges seal.

This glass is now impermeable, as if those doors were never there at all.

I run around all sides, panting, frantic, heaving, searching for an opening. Instead, I see my sister, looking sadly through the glass. I stand on one side; she on the other.

I slap the glass with mournesome sobs and rage that I can’t break through. She does not rage. It’s not her way. She’s still and quiet as a marble statue.

She places her palm flat against the glass. On the tips of her fingers, I see her own black-purple code. Five symbols.

These letters or numbers or icons—whatever they are, these ideograms—they are emblazoned deep and pure upon my brain. This stark and graven image remains when nothing else remains. This awful vision I will not ever shake.

There’s a sort of grinding, a sound like—a steel ship hull run aground into a granite cliff? A grating sound like this. The floor opens up, becomes a tunnel or a well or a massive shaft into a cave. Her glass box drops, descends, is sucked away. And with it Tess.

But now I know: the tattoo etched into her fingertips is inscribed inside my heart. I don’t know what the symbols mean. But I know how they look.

This piece I can record. This knowledge I can keep.

***

I paint this code upon the wall above my bunk. I make it my study.

I learn this code as if it were my own.

***

The children in the memory lab, we do not leave. We have our sleeping bunks inside our pods, our room for meals, our dressing hall where cleaning happens. We have our parlor where some children talk and others play, and always, there are mystic puzzles, strange games, shifting heaps of blocks that join each other when they touch, becoming different shapes. The Caretakers prod us to the parlor, and the Voice speaks that we play, and we obey—to disobey brings pain. We go to the pedal room for exercise.

Of course, we have the fearsome spaces with chairs that bind and the Caretakers watching in each corner. In these rooms, we remember all nows that came before. And also, we forget.

There are other halls with other labs and other rooms, all filled with tools that make us tremble, shiver, weep. These, too, we can visit if we wish. All are marked with one large symbol glimmering on the walls.

Beyond, we do not go.

It’s wrong to walk in passages marked with other emblems. Why, I cannot say. I don’t recall what teachings made us know. If pressed, I could supply no reasons why the symbol looming in this concourse must be our whole entire world.

But walking in the light of other symbols is like neglecting the order of the Voice. It makes the body ache. It grips the chest with cold. It makes my fingers itch and makes my stomach churn, like heaving silver schools of fish (I know I’ve seen on tranquil screens). With every step, the pain comes worse, and I am more compelled to run.

In visions, I’ve seen the structure climb. I’ve seen this labyrinth built in the wreckage of our worldly home (sweet place of flitting fireflies and grass as green as our dwelling’s walls at lunchtime). I know how vast the maze must be. And yet, we stay in this tight space. Confined to the narrow by our own capricious feels.

Some moments I know: my sister is here. Somewhere in this tangled maze, she is. I don’t know how to get to her. Not yet. But I will.

This I know: I will.

***

It comes to me.

There are whole hours, perhaps whole days, when I forget this code carved on my fingertips. It is with me like breathing. It calls me hither and yon; it summons me to take my lunch tray in my turn, to bring myself to memory rooms like a pirate walks a plank. These things I do without quite knowing. Sleepwalking, here and there.

Then, sometimes, I turn my palm and gaze in wonderment at these characters.

One breakfast, I cup my palm and look. It’s there, of course. There all along. My breath catches quick.

I see it for what it is: my own monogram. Written on my body, which must hold all of me, all that I feel and know, however little this might be. This code my own.

And in this moment, I notice—for the first time? Nothing here is for the first time, that I’m sure—I notice the first symbol, etched into my thumb, is the same that hovers on the wall of every space in our rapt children’s lair.

I look to that hologram and back to my first stubby finger.

Hasty and ill-mannered, I grab Gor’s hand, knocking his flimsy fork away. (Ever good-natured, Gor does not reproach, just scoops his morsels with his other hand, eating lumps with fingers bare.) I turn his palm upward, compare his tattoo to my own. His thumb’s the same. This symbol, we share.

My thoughts grow quick. I run from kid to kid, grabbing hands, comparing. I do not tell them what I think. This secret is my own.

We share the same mark on our thumbs. It marks our territory, what places we can travel without rousing thoughts of buried traumas.

This now, I know. I know this map, the map that leads to her.

Before I leave, I bow beside the breakfast table and palm that fallen fork. I slip it up my sleeve. I do not need this fork. It has no urgent attributes nor skills. But I know now what it is to own something, to save one small token for myself. The feel is sweet.

I sneak back to my bunk. I pull back my mat to reveal the secret stash: things I’ve nabbed to be all my own. Syringe, first. My own first property. Then other bits and bobs: some strips of cloth from undershirts. A stolen block. A purloined spoon. A pilfered sweet, now surely stale.

My fork now joins the hoard.

Stretched out flat, I study the code etched in flaking rust upon the wall.

This is all I have. This is all I know.

Somehow, it must guide me.

***

At night, I wait to hear Gor’s steady snores below. I lay silent, eyes open, back flat and arms straight. I gaze up at my bubble’s curve and imagine I can see the before-world. When there were lawns and dogs and bikes and stars.

’Til Gor’s snuffling breaths come thick and heavy. My time is now.

I slip from bed. I tread soft upon the rails, down the ladder, past my slumbering Gor. Then tiptoe down this lengthy hallway where pods and pods stretch out for lonesome miles, rapt children fast asleep inside each one. The machine lights flicker on the walls. The glimmering arrows point to other prisons. The floor in these halls is always springy-soft, like molded bunks, so there’s not much need to tiptoe. I do it, still.

I hold my breath as children stir and murmur, as sheets rustle and breathing shifts. They are lost in dreams. They pay me no mind.

I see a clump of the Caretakers at the junction where the arrows turn to other halls. I gasp, afraid of what will happen if I’m caught: something bad, I know. I can’t remember what but feel such things will not end well.

I flatten myself against the wall as small and shadowlike as I can. And wait.

Their pale bald heads are turned away from me, so no eyes watch. I flit on past.

Into some vestibule. The door closes, and I’m in an empty room. Nothing but floors and walls, like someone commenced to build and forgot to finish. The floor glows softly, and in this dim luminescence, I see no other door.

But there are facts I know about this place: not all doors are easily seen. Some are hidden, wearing odd camouflage for reasons of their own. Some doors occur where there was no door before. Some doors are made through force of will.

I start from where I am. Pacing slow along the wall, my gentle fingers searching. Reaching high, reaching low. Exploring with my hands.

I reach a corner. I start afresh.

I go on in this fashion until my fingertips find a place they fit, five muted circles too tentative to see. I rest them there until I feel that tingling pulse. My whorls, that wall: they interface. I give command.

There is the door. I go on through.

The hard part starts.

A novel symbol hovers on these walls. Like two squiggle lines married by a slash. This symbol is not imprinted on my thumb, nor my sister’s. This place is just a place that separates. So I walk on through. But the pains begin.

It starts in my chest, this panicked feeling. This tightness, like I cannot breathe. I feel like crying out, begging for air, but I know I must not make a peep.

My stomach roils, all insides shrinking inward, clenching like a fist.

It’s like pain but also like pain’s dread.

Like something stalking me, a dread horde just beyond my shoulder but always drawing nearer.

(A Harvester, ripping children’s limbs, spraying, squirting, barfing blood.)

A coffin that encloses, buried beneath the miles of earth, the ground pressing always closer still.

(A wave of blood.)

Something that will surely hurt or kill me soon, my stubborn self as fragile as a robin’s egg.

I walk. I drag my feet along, no matter how they wish to slow. I force myself to pace through all the stomach heaves and heart tremors. I tell myself it’s not so bad.

It isn’t, though my tears come fast now, trudging down this endless hall, and my jaw aches from clenching.

I do it still.

For a moment, I think to give up, retreat. I turn around. Fall back a step or two. Away from here and back to home. And with this sudden swerve, all my body’s warning signs desist. I feel flooding relief.

But I don’t surrender. I have to find my sister before I forget again. I will forget. We all forget. Time is short.

Another word for time is short.

So I turn my face toward the future, toward the space ahead that hurts, and resolute through all that dread and angst, I go.

I am Lolo, the child who remembered writing, the child who gave her blood, the girl who remembered true the world as it was. And this pain is not too much.

But as I press on, I flash on momentary thoughts of tortures. Of being prodded through these forbidden hallways by the Caretakers wielding pointed sticks. We step, are shocked. Fall back screaming, are poked again, step forward, are shocked again. Again, again.

I will not let this vision surface. I press it down, fierce and forceful as I can. That now is past. This pain is only echoes.

I come to a new symbol: a circle within, a circle without. I see no Caretakers. This is some unending tunnel that connects many others, maybe all. These tunnel walls are dark like charcoal and blank without markings. No lighted arrows show the way. The floor’s firm and unyielding, not like the springy softness where rapt children tread.

I keep on going.

I come to a crossroads. I don’t know how to choose between two ways. One to my one hand, one to my other. I stare at my fingertips as if they hold the answer. I search my tremors.

I search my mind, but I can’t tell if I’ve been at this spot never, once, or a million times before. There is always this sense: all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. But I’m certain on no moment but the present.

This now is all.

Unknowing if it’s memory or whim, I choose left.

And walk and walk. And take more turns. Until I know I’m lost for sure.

Those pains have quieted, but I’m sore all over. My body aches from holding back, from suffocating all I feel. I feel such hurt. I’m tired.

I thought I could find her: such silliness and such delusions. I am no better than the raving children with their tales of endless skyscrapers and bubbles on the moon and swinging ropes that link the ancient trees. I, too, tell myself stories that can’t be true. To live in this nightmare without a story would be too much to bear.

I sit down for a while, rub my hurting feet. I pick at blisters and worry at my aching toes. For the longest time—truth be told, I can’t remember quite how long—my world has been no bigger than an acorn. My body struggles with such distances.

Perhaps, this night I walked halfway across the world.

Tired, I drift briefly to sleep, sitting there against the polished emptiness of a hard black wall.

In a dream, my long-lost Bentley nudges me. His cold wet snout touches my own small nose. He puts his scruffy paw in mine. “Get up,” he woofs. “Get up.”

I open my eyes. No golden beast to love. But still I stand.

I drag myself forward. The light is ramping up, the glow inside the walls slowly growing bright.

Just ahead, I see what I seek: a triangle, inside a square.

It is a jolt. This vision I’d been holding close, now so large and real. The symbol I inscribed upon the wall, remembered from my sister’s thumb in dreams. Now here.

And something else. I remember. I remember—I can’t say what.

But pain stabs across my side, and for a moment, I catch my breath, grab hard myself. It passes.

This pain is echoes too.

I search for the door into this next place.

The post Excerpt: Never Now Always appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

A twice-widowed woman seduces her father-in-law by the side of the road, as blackmail or a bargaining chip. A childless wife offers her servant to her husband as a consolation prize, then banishes the servant and her son to the desert to die. A father is called to murder his son as a sacrifice to God; at the last minute only, the Lord stays his hand. A father is promise-bound to murder his daughter as a sacrifice to God; this time, the child is not so lucky.

These are stories of a world without mercy.

In her poetry collection The Acolyte, Nancy Hightower explores the brutality of these ancient stories with unflinching vision, fully inhabiting the tragedy, the hunger, the passion, the grief. The poetic narratives are familiar, though slightly skewed — a tilt into the uncanny. The language is haunting, the imagery surreal: “Shapeshifting, double dealing / with spies and kings, we lived / on both sides of the looking glass, bathed / in moonlight while keeping watch / for the star to be birthed from our stories” (A Virtuous Woman II).

The narrative is skewed in part because The Acolyte foregrounds the stories of women, the Bible’s minor and supporting characters, so often condemned to horrible and gruesome fates for the edification or punishment of their male connections. For the most part, the women of the Bible are the original “women in refrigerators.” But Hightower depicts these women in all their power and powerlessness, humanity and inhumanity, villainy and virtue.

It can be empowering to reclaim these stories, and also terrifying.

For instance, the story of Jael. When Sisera, an oppressor of the Israelites, fled after a setback in battle, Jael found him. She promised him milk and rest and a safe place to hide. Then, as he slept, she drove a tent spike through his temple: “as the spike hits skin, then, / the skull’s soft crunch” … “just a simple tent nail / and a cup of milk; / we women have our ways” (Jael).

Women, masters of hospitality, of the domestic matters of milk and tents, also emerge as masters of treachery and betrayal. “In the south / things happen. / My mother’s belly juts out malignantly; / Jim says it’s God doing” (PTL: Circa 1981). These Biblical women are liars and tricksters, driven time and time again to subterfuge and disguises to achieve their aims. Tamar dresses as a prostitute to reclaim what’s hers. Leah dresses as her sister to steal her sister’s fiancé. Delilah cuts her lover Samson’s hair while he sleeps and renders him weak.

And yet they are also inevitably disposable: low-value pawns in the affairs of men (and the masculine God is no exception). They can be sacrificed whenever convenient, to achieve the greater good or simply to make a point. (Lot’s wife is another bright thread running through this collection, referenced in several poems; she cast a glance over her shoulder as her family fled the city they’d called home, and the Lord transformed her into a pillar of salt.)

Jephthah promises the Lord that in exchange for victory in battle, he will sacrifice whatever he first sees upon his glorious return. Of course, “Who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels” (Judges 11:34). With the lines “No ram to appear / and save me from my oath,” the poem (“Jepthah”) offers a callback to Abraham and Isaac: another sacrifice mandated by God, until the last moment when the Lord relented and sent a sacrificial animal in the blessed boy’s stead. But no such luck for the nameless daughter of Jephthah, who would never have her own story. Like the women of our own time’s mythologies, she exists only as a footnote: a supporting character, fridged to teach her father, and readers like us, a lesson about promises.

“She,” one of the darkest, most brutal poems in this dark, brutal book (rivaled only by “On Eating a Child,” which requires no explanation), lays bare the theme of women as sacrifice — even when the sacrifice of firstborn sons is the only kind that actually matters. Hightower describes the Bible verse preceding “She” as a kind of trigger warning: “But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight” (Judges 19:25–26).

Can you blame the women of the Bible for fighting back with deception, seduction, treachery — whatever minor weapons they could wield? The story of the sexes is one of asymmetrical warfare.

Hightower’s evocation of these mythical narratives is often subtle and indirect. Vivid images and pregnant metaphors fuse with other myths, chimaera-like: Lazarus meets Orpheus, Psyche meets Moses. The rich symbols can all be remade and repurposed, the stories reinvented as the storytellers change. It takes effort to tease out the connections; these poems are both minimal and dense, and there are no wasted lines.

In “Ritual,” one of the earlier poems in the collection, Hightower writes, “scratched arms and blacked out nights / the bartender and priest who both / know me by name, thoughts dark and hard / and always beyond the reach of God.” Two forms of confession, the profane and the sacred — and poetry, of course, is a kind of confession as well.

In The Acolyte, the profane and sacred come together, sweeping and lyrical, creating alternate meanings from sweat and sacrifice, murders and martyrdoms. “I push my way through voices,” says “Mary(s),” “hair gathered and ready, / only to find you scribbling in the sand, / rewriting the story. / The one they never get right.”

The post “The Acolyte” by Nancy Hightower appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915 – 1987), more commonly known by the pen name James Tiptree, Jr., was a prolific writer of science fiction and other speculative tales. Born in Chicago to a lawyer and author, her interests and occupations ranged wide, including exhibitions in the visual arts, work in the U.S. Army Air Forces and CIA, and doctoral studies in experimental psychology. Her dissertation at George Washington University concerned the responses of animals to stimuli in various environments. This experience certainly informs the story, “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats”, anthologized in The Weird. It was during her dissertation phase that Sheldon began publishing science fiction stories as James Tiptree, Jr., choosing the pseudonym in order to shield her academic reputation from potential criticism. Her body of work went on to include two novels and ten collections of fiction and essays.

During the course of her prolific career, Sheldon/Tiptree received numerous honors for her writing, including the Hugo (2x), Nebula (3x), World Fantasy, and Locus Awards (2x), and induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. Her choice of a male pseudonym is indicative of one of the most prominent themes in her work: complications of sex and gender. In honor of her contributions to speculative literature, authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler (whose own story, “The Dark”, also appears in The Weird) established The James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1991, which recognizes current authors exploring and deepening our understanding of these topics. Recipients of the award have included such writers as M. John Harrison, Matt Ruff, Raphael Carter, Caítlin R. Kiernan, Shelly Jackson, and many others.

– Christopher Burke

***

Female authors have often worked under male pseudonyms; that’s nothing unusual. But in the case of Alice Bradley Sheldon, “James Tiptree, Jr.” was more then a pen name — it was a persona. Inhabiting her alter-ego Tiptree, Sheldon achieved a clarity of vision and prowess in storytelling that transcended her other work. Tiptree allowed Sheldon to step outside herself, and in so doing, find a clearer voice, a purer authenticity.

In her outstanding biography of Tiptree, Julie Phillips writes,

“… the male name turned out to have many uses. It made her feel taken seriously when she wrote about what she knew: guns, hunting, politics, war. It let her write the way she wanted to write, with an urgency that was hers. It gave her enough distance and control to speak honestly about herself.”

As an accomplished and eloquent letter-writer, Tiptree maintained an extensive literary correspondence with many other writers of the era, and through these interchanges his identity became fully-formed. (Although many of his stories were actually Sheldon’s; even before she became one of the hottest new sci-fi talents of the decade, she’d lived a remarkably varied and interesting life.)

So it comes as no surprise that the concept of identity represents a major thread underlying Tiptree’s work, and “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats” is no exception. Interestingly, the story features yet another alter-ego for its author — because its protagonist, the eponymous psychologist Tilman Lipsitz (“Tilly”), bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Alice Sheldon, Ph.D. in research psychology.

In a fascinating and extensively researched article titled The Psychologist Who Empathized with Rats, psychologist Alan C. Elms teases out many of the similarities between Tilman Lipsitz and Sheldon. For her doctoral dissertation, Sheldon studied “the reactions of rats to novel and familiar visual stimuli” – much like Tilly. There were further connections: the same rats (“the hooded strain”), the same basement laboratory, even a similarly named supervisor. And Sheldon also fretted about her lack of productivity and struggled against precarious funding.

Sheldon was a talented visual artist, with published work going back to her teens. Drawing on this talent, she accompanied her dissertation with illustrations. These same illustrations, only slightly modified, were published alongside “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” attributed to “Raccoona Sheldon” (another pseudonym of Sheldon’s). As Elms remarks, “If anyone familiar with her dissertation had seen this story when it first appeared, Tiptree’s true identity would have been obvious a year before it was publicly revealed.”

As alter-egos, Tiptree and Tilly were both a means for exploring masculinity. But unlike the manly, masculine men that populate many of Tiptree’s stories (and who Tiptree appeared to be himself), Tilly is sensitive and fragile, a foil for the toxic masculinity represented by his colleagues and embodied by his supervisor, Welch. The contrast represents an idea that underlies many of Tiptree’s stories: that humanity is fated to be cruel and violent; that we are, by nature, aggressors. Or perhaps not humanity, per se, but men. In a time when the word “Man” meant “Humankind,” it was even more difficult to tell the difference. But Tilly is an exception; in this world, his gentleness and empathy render him a kind of freak.

Sheldon was exposed to brutality early. As a child, her parents took her on two major safaris in Africa, long trips which took months and required an impressive African support staff. Her parents and their friends considered the trip part adventure, part research; the itinerary included big game hunting, and young Alice watched as the adults killed lions and gorillas. Along with the fierce gore of fallen creatures, there was also human suffering and human cruelty. Particularly on the second trip, as Alice began to understand how both the people and the landscape of the countries they visited suffered under the devastating effects of colonization. At an early age, Sheldon absorbed the grotesquery of cruelty, and it shook her to her core.

In “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” the imagery of violence is pushed to its limits. The story narrates in cold, casual language the unimaginable horrors inflicted on defenseless creatures in an underground torture chamber. The lighting is dim and shadowy in some places, glaring and punishing in others. The bare wire cages are coated with feces and “hanks of dead skin.” The animals rub themselves raw in an attempt to escape. There are rhesus monkeys “huddled on the steel with puffy pink bald heads studded with electrode jacks,” and paralyzed dogs “jerking with wire terrors” — when they’re not being flayed alive, dissected while conscious but unable to move. (“A ‘preparation’ is an animal spread-eagled on a rack for vivisection, dosed with reserpine so it cannot cry or struggle but merely endures for days or weeks of pain.”) And of course, there are the rats. Piles of baby rats, shivering. “Selectively shocked, starved, subjected to air blasts and plunged in ice water.” Finally, their heads cut off.

This research laboratory is more like a slaughterhouse. Or an interrogation room in an extrajudicial prison. Or a scene from Saw. It’s so extreme it feels fantastical, except it isn’t — because the real world is actually this cruel.

Perhaps that’s what makes weird fiction so powerful. Its proximity to the real, without actually being real, somehow makes reality easier to see. By looking closely at the real we can make it seem strange. By placing distance between us and the real we can see it for what it truly is.

In “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” our protagonist, Tilman Lipsitz, has found himself in this “charnel house” of a research facility, but unlike his colleagues, he is kind to every creature in the lab… even his impatient and unfeeling boss. He cannot help himself. Tilly is concerned for the rats and occasionally plies them with treats, handing out the treats equally so as not to confound his experimental results.

While his experimental subjects might appreciate Tilly’s kindness, his supervisor is less impressed. Tilly is called into his boss’ office to account for the untold hours he’s wasted. You see, Tilly prefers to quietly observe the rats, exploring “the capacity of animals to anticipate, to gain some knowledge of the wave-front of expectations that they must build up, even in the tiniest heads.” Instead, he is informed he must come up with a testable hypothesis, and soon, if he wants to hold onto his position; perhaps the “preparation” described above, vivisection under paralysis. They want him to

“Take some good testable hypothesis from somebody in the department, preferably something that involves electronic counting of food pellets, bar presses, latencies, defecations. And crank it all into printed score sheets with a good Fortran program.”

This mechanization is key, and foreshadows more explicit references to Nazi atrocities that appear later in the story. Tilly’s is the era of mechanization, and research must follow the same mechanical march. In fact, even Tilly’s teaching duties are mechanized, as we learn when he sits down to grade 81 tests. The tests are multiple choice — badly written and poorly assembled — but Tilly is intended to ignore this, simply marking right and wrong. He is meant to grade using a test key, a “theatrically guarded manila template he can lay over the sheets with slots giving the correct response.” But his students, like his rats, have discovered that he is sensitive to their plight; they’ve realized that he’s listening, and have begun leaving him notes in the margins, questioning the test’s wording, the meaning of certain underlying assumptions. Once again, his sensitivity and kindness have gotten in the way of the world’s primary pursuit: efficiency.

The goal, with both the students and the rats, is to remove any excess information. Blinders on, eyes forward, only the experiment, only the subject, only the button that delivers the shocks.

It’s an astonishingly effective way of perpetrating cruelty.

But back to that conversation with Tilly’s boss. In a moment of obliviousness, Tilly begins expounding on the subjects he’s actually interested in studying: psychologists, namely why they’re driven to do such terrible things.

“You’re not a member of the SPCA are you?” his boss asks, skeptically.

Tilly isn’t… although he did once give them ten dollars.

Chastened by this meeting, and by his apparent complete failure as a scientist, Tilly returns home. He grades those 81 tests — another trial hampered by his own compassion. He drowns his sorrows and frustrations in prodigious amounts of ale… followed by absinthe.

Fortified by these libations, he resolves to go kill all his rats, reasoning that if he could just start fresh, without those already-formed connections and accretions of affection and guilt, perhaps he could finally be the scientist his superiors want.

He returns to the lab, abandoned after-hours and even more eerie in the darkness. The animals are finally alone, finding a brief respite from their torturers.

Here, in Tilly’s thoughts, the unspoken analogy that’s been shadowing this story is finally made explicit:

“All over the country, the world, the spotless knives are slicing, the trained minds devising casual torments in labs so bright and fair you could eat off their floors. Auschwitz, Belsen were neat. With flowers. Only the reek of pain going up to the sky, the empty sky. But people don’t think animals’ pain matters. They didn’t think my people’s pain mattered either, in the death camps a generation back. It’s all the same, endless agonies going up unheard from helpless things.”

And there it is, the dark ugly truth, the hideous nightmare, the unconscionable sin that has informed every line of this story, just as it’s informed every chapter of human history since: there are some things too horrific to be real, and yet they are.

Tilly fumbles with the rat-killings, euthanizing them one by one, a slow and time-consuming process. Failing at this, as everything. Then: he glimpses the rat-king.

At first it’s this monstrous thing, all tangled limbs and writhing tails, both vulnerable and grotesque. Then it becomes something else. Noble, elegant, a true King.

He follows it into the tunnel. Here, he encounters his vapid and unpleasant coworker, Sheila, or a shadow of her; the good, kind part, the part that’s already been excised to allow her to exist in this cruel, shallow world. Then, as often happens when one is drunk on absinthe, following a gold-spangled rat into a dark tunnel, the conversation turns to Descartes. Sheila quotes the philosopher, saying,

“There is no error more powerful in leading feeble minds astray from the straight path of virtue than the supposition that the soul of brutes is of the same nature as our own.”

… ‘He started it all, didn’t he?’ Lipsitz says, or perhaps only thinks. ‘That they’re robots, you can do anything to them. Their pain doesn’t count. But we’re animals, too.’”

The delusion, of course, is not just Descartes’, the long dead philosopher. Even as late as the 1980s — well after the publication of this story — scientists and philosophers and yes, psychologists, were still arguing about whether animals feel pain. Some argued that to merely suppose that since humans experience pain, other mammals feel it too, was a presumption based on anthropocentrism, not scientific. Others argued that to suppose that humans, alone among animalkind, have somehow cornered the market on suffering, is not too scientific either.

And today, although our good scientists have come around to the understanding that animals are quite capable of suffering — and not just physical pain, but also more complex forms of pain such as loneliness, bereavement, grief — our society, our culture, and our typical meals do not quite reflect this understanding. As Michael Pollan put it in a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine,

“For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. … Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig–an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham.”

And once again, excepting the vegans among us, we find ourselves looking with uncomfortable intimacy at a dark ugly truth: very few of us are Tilly. For the most part we are, all of us, Dr. Welch, ignoring the injustice that surrounds us – injustice we enable, often support – so that we can get by within the hideous brutality of a system we’ve helped create.

They follow King Rat: Tilly, Sheila, and a parade of “lost things,” accumulating in greater number as they venture deeper into the tunnel. “All the abused ones, the gentle ones, are leaving the world.” The rat leads them to “the final refuge,” “the place where lost things go.” As Sheila says, it’s very beautiful, “…only it isn’t real.”

“Staggering after them through unreality,” Tilly longs desperately to follow.

“—And yes! For a last instant he has it. …And then he tries with all his force crazily to send himself after them, to burst from his skin, his life if need be – only to share again that gentleness.”

Then he wakes, in the cold sweat of an absinthe hangover, the dirt and filth of the lab floor.

For a moment, he wonders, “Did something of myself go too, fly to its selfish joy?”

He doesn’t know. But we know.

What’s left behind of this Tilly is just a husk, a shell. A soulless replica.

Perhaps he’s lucky. In this world, soullessness is exactly what’s needed to thrive. Tilly is suddenly a new man: powerful, pragmatic, vicious, the kind of man who buckles down and does what needs to be done, collateral damage be damned, the kind of man who believes you can smash things into submission and break them into being fixed.

He’s the kind of man that Tiptree profiled in story after story, a critique presented with dry cynicism, and often through the voice of a woman. As Mrs. Parsons says in “The Women Men Don’t See,”

“‘Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world.’

…. ‘All the endless wars …’ Her voice is a whisper. ‘All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—’ ”

In Tilly’s case, what needs to be done is the pampered rats must die: he pours the whole mess of rats, cages, and carrots into a barrel, and smothers it all in burning ether. His thoughts turn again to his coworker Sheila, but this time in crude sexual terms (the word that comes to mind is “rapey”); toxic masculinity is all about domination, in every sense of the word.

As God commanded Adam: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Rats included, one supposes.

“A baby rat has run away hiding behind his shoe. Mechanical mouse, a stupid automaton. He stamps on its back and kicks it neatly under Sheila’s hamster rack, wondering why Descartes has popped into his thoughts.”

Did Tilly die? It’s an interesting question.

Often the first thing that stands out about Tiptree’s larger oeuvre is an obsession with sex and death, and the two often linked. (One of Tiptree’s most famous stories, of course, puts it all upfront in the title: “Love Is The Plan, the Plan Is Death.”) Tiptree was fixated on that brief moment of transcendence that leads inexorably to obliteration.

For example, as in “On the Last Afternoon”:

“He felt the wraith-wind of its going in his brain, the alien immensities opening to the imago… The longing rose in him, the terrified love toward what he could not imagine—…

—But he could not alone, no, and his useless death hung over him, the crashing was beating on his mortal ears.”

Or as in “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death”:

“Stupefied with delight, I gazed.
And your huge hunting-limb came out and seized me.
Great is the Plan. I felt only joy as your jaws took me.
As I feel it now.”

These are just two examples out of many.

As Tilly moves deeper into that tunnel, he too feels a sort of overwhelming, full-body contentment, surrendering to the path of the King:

“…he has never known anything as wonderful as this communion, not sex or sunsets or even the magic hour on his first bike. It is as if everything is all right now, will be all right forever — griefs he did not even know he carried are falling from him, leaving him light as smoke.”

The first time you read this story, you might think it’s all turned out alright. Tilly, the real Tilly, Tilly the soul, is somewhere beautiful – even if it isn’t real. The Tilly on earth doesn’t know, doesn’t suffer, although he certainly causes suffering. You might think, it’s okay, Tilly, the real Tilly, he found transcendence.

But that would be wrong, I think.

The real ending is the devastating one: no one knows where souls go. The beautiful place, it isn’t real. Because the real world conspires to kill the souls of everyone, all but a few who escape by dying first. As Tilly thinks, in those last moments in the tunnel: “They have stood it as long as they can and now they are leaving. The pain has culminated in this, that they leave us — leave me, leave me behind in a clockwork Cartesian world in which nothing will mean anything forever.”

And Tilly lives.

Within Tiptree’s private mythology, I think this might be the worst outcome. Transcendence that ends in death – that’s a happy ending. But to glimpse it, to almost touch it, but then be forced to go on, with only the emptiness, nothing meaning anything – that’s horror, the darkest horror that Tiptree knew.

As most with an interest in Tiptree will already know, Alice Sheldon left the real world by her own hand in 1987. At age 71, she carried out a former suicide pact with her ill, elderly husband, shooting him as he slept, and then herself. It was not a spur-of-the-moment decision: her suicide note was penned eight years before her death. A life-long sufferer from depression, she’d anticipated this moment for years.

Like Tiptree’s Mrs. Parsons, Sheldon dreamed of going away. Who could blame her? To see with clarity, and live with empathy, is an agonizing task. Only a few make it out with souls intact.

The post 101 Weird Writers #39 — James Tiptree, Jr. appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City, reprinted in Collected Fiction, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Tainaron shares some affinities with the work of Kafka, while being utterly original. Each section of the novel illuminates the next, with the weird element serving both as strange adventure and parallel to the real world. It is one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy. The following essay is a reprint of a prior 101 Weird writers feature, in celebration of the publication of Collected Fiction.

***

I

Tainaron is the kind of work that defies classification or description. There are a few things that we may say definitively about it (and only a few things). First, it is a novella narrated through a series of thirty letters. These letters remain unanswered, so we see the story through the eyes of the nameless letter-writer alone. Her topic is her travels through Tainaron, an unfamiliar city peopled by sapient insects. (We might call them insects with souls.)

Each letter is a self-contained slice of life, blending observation and introspection. Most describe a single incident, experience or conversation. Each one further illuminates the nature of life in the city. In this fragmented fashion, the letters slowly build on one another, revealing the novella’s larger arc. The structure is reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino or Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, with a crucial difference: while both of these books devote each short chapter to describing the circumstances of a unique world, Tainaron focuses exclusively on its one eponymous city. And yet, in its fluid and fluctuating nature, Tainaron the city seems to encompass many worlds itself. At any rate, the effect is similar. Scenes of increasing surrealism paint a picture of a place that, despite its weirdness, begins to look surprisingly like home.

What, and where, is Tainaron? It’s a city, like any other: it has its desirable neighborhoods and its slums, its streets and shops, its social structures. It’s home to “vanishing spires of cathedrals, the liquid gold of the cupolas of minarets, and the pure capitals of a Doric temple.” It is a great melting pot and a diverse ecosystem, where strange persons of all kinds live and work together. Sometimes, their insect nature is quite apparent; other times they seem quite human. (Miss Pumilio, for example — the frail old lady who lives above the narrator in her first home in Tainaron — does not seem to be an insect at all.) Tainaron is located at the edge of a vast body of water called Oceanos, which separates the narrator from her native city. Apparently, Tainaron is also located in a volcanic zone; scientists warn of possible destruction.

It’s a city, like any other, but it’s also a way of being, or a way of seeing. In the twelfth letter, our narrator writes, “…suddenly the earth gave way beneath my feet and I remembered once more that beneath Tainaron is nothing but a crust, as insubstantial as one night’s ice.” Something about Tainaron is fleeting and fragile; like a paradigm or a metaphor, it is upheld only through belief. The city’s emblem is the Ferris wheel. “Ferris wheel, wheel of fortune… Sometimes my gaze fastens itself to its spinning and I seem to hear, until sleep comes, the constant humming of the wheel, which is the voice of Tainaron itself.” In the end, Tainaron is perfectly mutable. It is a city of constant change, defined only by its endless state of motion.

In fact, in the twenty-second letter, as the narrator’s attempts to catalogue the city prove fruitless, her friend Longhorn informs her: “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps.” This description of the city could equally be applied to the book. Like many groundbreaking works, Tainaron is difficult to describe. It exists at the level of language, where ambiguity and nuance hold sway. It is not quite like anything else. In its unfamiliar method of exploring an unfamiliar place, it may be inaccessible at times; and yet as the story develops, the writing becomes addictive, mesmerizing. Krohn’s language is lyrical and evocative, but there’s something else, as well — her subtle, glancing way of probing at the mysteries of life and death. Unexpected insights arise from the mundane, but they are suggested so delicately they remain almost intangible.

In this circuitous style, Krohn touches on ideas, backs away, then approaches from another direction; meaning accrues in the sidesteps. The central theme is change and transformation, which threads through every chapter. As one might expect in a city peopled by insects, metamorphosis is a key aspect of life in Tainaron.

Here you can bump into a stranger, and he will come up to you like an old acquaintance and begin to remember some past amusing coincidence that you apparently experienced together. When you ask, “When?”, he laughs and answers: “When I was someone else.”

Along with transformation, another major theme is that of individuality. As these themes develop, they find intersections and interconnections, eventually weaving their way into a single question: What is the soul, and will it survive? Or: Who will we be after we’re gone?

Though Krohn would never state it in such simplified terms, the novella seems to stage a debate. On one side is the notion that people carry with them an essential sameness, lasting from lifetime to lifetime; that a soul survives throughout the ages, no matter what form it takes. On the other side is the assertion that we are all manifestations of a central essence, endlessly combining and recombining from pieces of what we once were and will be again.

Of course, the debate remains unresolved. But there is a certain reassurance to that fact; each vision is comforting in its own way.

II

Is continuity essential to selfhood? Can one separate the self from its surroundings? And must one be someone to be? These questions linger at the edges of the narrator’s many odd encounters in Tainaron. And Krohn develops them with such subtlety, it feels a bit heavy-handed to draw them out. I do so only with the caveat that there is far more on the page.

The question of identity is first directly addressed in the fourth letter. In this chapter, the narrator is taken to meet the queen: a vast, formless creature confined to a windowless cave and surrounded at all times by a crowd of busy servants. The narrator is astonished when the queen addresses her accusingly,

“You think, don’t you, that I am some kind of individual, a person, admit it?”

… It was a most extraordinary voice, for it seemed to be made up of the murmur of hundreds of voices.

Baffled, the narrator agrees. But when the queen asks “So tell me, who am I?” the narrator struggles to respond.

Before I could even think of an answer to this question, I realized at last what was happening in the back part of the room, which was filled with the queen’s great rear body…

The queen was giving birth! She was giving birth incessantly.

“You are the mother of them all, your majesty,” I replied, humbly.

But the queen is not satisfied with this answer, because, as she says, “She from whom everything flows is not a someone.” Perhaps there is no satisfying answer; to serve as the source of life is a difficult burden. To be inseparable from everything can be unaccountably lonely.

In the eleventh letter, the narrator is allowed audience with Tainaron’s prince (already a foil for the powerful queen). She is surprised to find him abandoned to his tower, a decrepit and lonely figure. It seems he has not entertained a visitor in quite some time. Eager for anyone who will listen, the prince tells her about his departed princess. The princess has been gone for ages, and the prince no longer searches for her, but when she first disappeared, he spent many hours exploring the city, searching for her in the faces of strangers. He says,

“For I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the interrupted flow of on comers there flowed only the loam of strange memories…”

The prince, at least, believes that there is an essential essence to the soul, glimpsed through its windows. He clings to the idea that he’d know his lover, even if she was someone else. But perhaps this is only a fantasy.

Finally, in the sixteenth letter, the narrator is introduced to a person whose transformations are more instantaneous. The mimic: glimpsed first as a pile of stones, then a grassy knoll. Vexed, the narrator asks her friend Longhorn to explain.

“My dear,” Longhorn said, and looked at me, waving the extensions of his antennae, “do you believe that the Mimic could have a personality? Today he is one thing, tomorrow another. Wherever he is, that is what he is–stone a moment ago, now the summer’s grass. Who knows what form he will take tomorrow.”

But the narrator feels a certain unexplainable pique against the very idea of the Mimic, and declines Longhorn’s invitation to meet him. Gently, Longhorn rebukes her: “So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.”

Perhaps the narrator’s resentment of this fickle creature reveals unexamined feelings toward the silent recipient of her letters. Letter after letter she writes to her unknown lover, receiving no answer; as readers we find ourselves the uncomfortable target of her supplications, accused of indifference yet incapable of answering. We are the lover who’s changed, or died, or simply gone away. “That you are so implacable in your silence,” the narrator writes in her twenty-first letter, “makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.”

Little is revealed about this lover, nor the narrator herself. Like the Mimic, both are vague and ambiguous, serving primarily as filters for raw experience. Yet in a rare instance in the thirteenth letter, the narrator recalls a moment between herself and her lover, walking between two churches, discussing the soul. At the same time she offers a description of herself:

I seldom look in the mirror, but always there is someone there who gives me my eyes. And the root of my nose is bluish; a line has inscribed itself at the corner of my mouth like a drypoint groove. But this is no proof copy, and the acid of everyday life corrodes, prepares that which is the soul.

III

Though our narrator has been meticulous about documenting Tainaron, she is a bit like a tourist who visits a human city for just one season and concludes it is always summer there. But fall comes to Tainaron, and then winter, bringing yet more changes that the narrator cannot escape.

The first to be affected is Longhorn, her dear guide. As he’s accompanied her on her explorations of the city, she’s learned to know him intimately — and been astonished by his kindness. She feels dependent on him for her survival. But with winter comes sleep. Longhorn must retreat into his pupal cell (a kind of cocoon for beetles, constructed from mud and debris). When he emerges, he will be someone else entirely.

Eventually, winter sleep will come to the narrator as well. Tainaron is not just a place one visits; it is a way of being. If one dares to take up residence there, one cannot be immune to the forces of change.

As I came to the end of this novella, a sort of narrative began to emerge in my head. I found that, unconsciously, I’d begun striving to assign meaning to symbols; I was looking for the key to an allegory. In my mind I was building a story about an aging woman whose lover has died, or gone on before her to somewhere else; without him her world has become unfamiliar. Tainaron is a place she creates in her mind, while she grapples with her own mortality and prepares for the inevitable. Or perhaps Tainaron is a place between worlds, a spot to pause in the afterlife.

But then, I willed myself to resist this impulse. The story is too universal; it doesn’t deserve to be contained to any one narrative, any one interpretation. It doesn’t ask to be measured.

Regardless, the three final letters cast doubt on the story as it has been told so far. Perhaps there is no such place as Tainaron. Perhaps there are no insects with souls (or perhaps there are no humans). Perhaps there has never been a lover to receive these letters. Or perhaps he has been there all along. Like the debate on the nature of the soul, I prefer to leave this story an open question.

Finally, our narrator begins her twenty-fifth letter with the following story:

Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realize that it was no more than a piece of rotten wood. Then, of course, he threw it away in disappointment.

I wonder why—already preparing to leave—he nevertheless crouched to seek once more the piece of branch he had thrown away. But how diligently and closely he had to examine it before he saw: it was a cloaked moth after all.

Look closely. Look again. This, I think, is Tainaron.

The post Transformations in Leena Krohn’s Tainaron appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In the first and eponymous essay, Ducornet puts forth the idea of “the deep zoo” – the words within a writer’s life that take on an outsized magic. These words bury themselves deep within a writer’s subconscious, imbue themselves with metaphor and thus become talismans. On this topic, Ducornet’s subjects are Bachelard, Borges, Calvino, and Cortazar. She explores the symbols each author held dear:

“For Bachelard they take the form of shells, a bird’s nest, an attic; for Borges a maze, mirrors, the tiger; for Calvino moonlight, the flame, and the crystal; for Cortazar ants on the march and the cry of the rooster.”

She also unpacks and explicates their meaning:

“…For Borges, there is an evident sympathy between the tiger’s stripes, the world’s maze, language, and the maze of the mind; for Calvino, between moonlight and the lucent transparency of clear thinking; for Bachelard, between attics and a love of solitude; for Cortazar, between the cock’s cry and the knowledge of mortality, of infinitude.”

As a writer of fiction, I have my own deep zoo; accordingly, though I’d never heard the term before, I connected instantly with the concept. Yet despite the idea’s familiarity, Ducornet also brings something unique and original to it: these implications of menagerie, of the untamable. “I am not calling for magical thinking, obscurity, or preciousness,” she writes, “but for an eager access to memory, reverie, and the unconscious—its powers, beauties, terrors, and perhaps above all, its rule-breaking intuitions, and to celebrate with you the mind’s longing to become lighter, free of the weight of received ideas and gravity-ground redundancies.”

With its divergent reveries on art, literature, politics, and nature, The Deep Zoo covers broad territories. Yet it retains its preoccupation with hidden and secret things: those that are intimate and slowly revealed. Genes, for example, or seeds, which appear repeatedly throughout these pages: “The seed is emblematic not only of potency, but of the initial impulse that engenders a universe, a universe characterized by mutability and so: multiplicity.” Seeds are considered in all their private power and mysterious life-force, and in a way are represented as menagerie as well, when Ducornet writes with typical attentiveness and flair that “[t]here are seeds that look like the noses of certain apes, the bottoms of apes, or parrot beaks, tortoise shells, machines of war, the crowns of pontiffs, caricatures of wags and luminaries drawn by Max Beerbohm.”

This meditation on seeds is fortuitous, as seeds are a metaphor for the book itself. The Deep Zoo is not didactic, but wise; not zealous, but possessed with great clarity of thought. It is simply a seed, willing to be planted on fertile ground and blossom as it is tended — and like the seed, it is mutable, shaped by its resonances with its reader’s own sympathies or secret impulses.

The seed is only one of the metaphors the text supplies to describe itself. Another is the labyrinth, both literal and figurative. On the very first page, Ducornet writes of Ottoman calligraphers, who

“delighted in creating mazes of embellishments in which the text was secreted like a treasure. The text needed to be deciphered and the task proved the worthiness of the reader. … The maze places the text within an intimate space, very like a garden, where the text hides, then reveals itself.”

The approach taken in these essays is much the same – labyrinthine. Structurally, the essays are broken into small chunks of prose, each discrete section like another corridor unfolding. It is not always immediately obvious how each piece relates to the piece before it, or flows into the next; we come closer, then drift in another direction. But each series of movements draws us closer to the matter at hand. Then suddenly we are at the center, the focus illuminated.

This is the kind of book that teaches you how to read it.

I read patiently, allowing the words to take me wherever they wanted to go. Still, over time, as meanings began to accrete and coalesce around certain words and terms, I began to see a larger theme emerging: that of Eros vs. Empire.

Eros represents the enigmatic, the organic, and magical, as represented by the self-contained life force that animates the universe and the seed; “the creative impulse, Eros breathing and dreaming within us, is radical to the core. … And like biological processes, it thrives on spontaneity, the necessary anomaly.”

Meanwhile, Empire is its opposite in every respect: an intrusive violation, a force of destruction, a narrowing of possibilities imposed by the rigidity of tyrannical rule.

And as seeds are the symbol of Eros, the Marquis de Sade’s fictional castle of Silling — the setting for the sexual violence of 120 Days of Sodom — is the natural symbol of Empire. Silling embodies a misunderstanding and a perversion of nature, built on the idea that nature is merely brutal, rapacious, and cruel, denying the creative potency and radical life force (Eros) that fuels the universe itself.

The essay on Sade and Silling is one of the most memorable in the book: a searing, blazing passage that trembles with fury and despair. Silling is “a house that demands fresh corpses” (imagery supplied by Belgian writer Jean Ray); “the calamity we will suffer or inflict upon others.” And the details of these ravages of Empire are not left to the abstract: “Silling—like Ground Zeros everywhere, like the killing fields that separate our country from our neighbor to the south, like our own densely populated penitentiaries—is simply another name for all our worst mistakes.”

In this tug-of-war between Eros and Empire, “betrayed children” are perhaps the perfect icons: seeds of potential, trampled by brutality. Such is the fate of Kaspar Hauser, a prince trapped in a dungeon at the age of four, where “for twelve years he lived like an eel in the twilight.” Ducornet draws on Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser as a framing device in the essay titled “Houses on Fire,” and there are further mentions of Hauser — such as in the essay “The Egyptian Portal,” an exploration of the work of artist Linda Okazaki. Okazaki was another betrayed child, only six years old when her mother was murdered, her dog put down, and her long hair cut — a convulsion of loss and trauma. (And, as Ducornet explores, one which forever shaped Okazaki’s “deep zoo” — particularly the dog, a Basenji, who reappears in her paintings as “a trickster and a shapeshifter,” “a protective spirit.”)

“The Egyptian Portal” also suggests, in one of the book’s loveliest passages, that traumatized children maintain an especially vibrant connection to Eros’ creative force:

“…the betrayed child who has had the strength to overcome trauma (a favorite theme of the fairy tale) may become something of a mixto; a violator of boundaries, an artist and a visionary. Trauma leads to a certain distancing from the world and, paradoxically, a novel and even essential revisiting of the world—and so reveals a portal of a kind.”

The portal is somehow both intimately connected to the labyrinth and the seed.

Of course, the theme of Eros vs. Empire is only one lens of many through which to view the pieces collected in The Deep Zoo. It is a rich, multi-textured, and fabulous work, equally transcendent and profane, dotted with images both luminous and surreal. There is depth here, and alleyways still to be explored; its seeds may blossom differently depending on the season, and the center of its labyrinth may shift.

It is a book that deserves to be read well — and read well again.

The post Portals, Labyrinths, Seeds: A Review of “The Deep Zoo” by Rikki Ducornet appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Joanna Russ (1937– 2011) was an important American writer, academic, and critic whose ground-breaking dystopian novel The Female Man (1975) and influential nonfiction tract How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) have unfortunately overshadowed a body of short fiction as various and rich as that of Angela Carter or Shirley Jackson. Russ wrote both science fiction and fantasy, with a number of stories coming from a horror or weird fiction slant. Collections include The Zanzibar Cat (1983), (Extra) Ordinary People (1985) and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982), which is collected in The Weird, has an essential clarity yet abiding weirdness not usually found in supernatural tales of this type. This June, Russ was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame alongside Judith Merril, H.R. Giger, David Bowie, and J.R.R. Tolkien, a fitting testament to her enduring legacy. 101 Weird Writers is proud to present this appreciation of Russ and her work, as written by returning contributor Desirina Boskovich.

 – Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

“Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! You only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me?”

It’s been 38 years since The Female Man was published and the passage above first made its debut, and yet it still feels like a grenade lobbed into a crowded basement. It still makes its readers confused and angry and afraid, though perhaps for different reasons, depending on the reader. Maybe that’s a testament to the provocative power of Russ’s pen, or maybe it’s an indictment of how little things have really changed, societal assertions to the contrary. Considering my feelings about this passage, here in the modern world of 2013 (it must have seemed like the distant future to Russ when she wrote this book), I can understand why in 1975 this passage was utterly incendiary. It may be unfortunate that this book overshadowed Russ’s short fiction, but it’s understandable: it was more than a story. It was a manifesto of the most personal and gut-wrenching kind. Driven by fury-filled passages like this one, it was both a confession and a rallying cry.

Needless to say, much of Russ’s most famous writing is that which grapples with what it means to be a woman; how we construct our own female identities in a man’s world. And while this exploration is tinged with righteous rage, beneath the indignation is a kind of weary despair. As Russ writes in The Female Man, “I knew beyond the shadow of hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge… Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all…” To Russ it must have felt as if the laws of the patriarchy were as immutable as the laws of nature; us gals can reason or we can rage or we can decide not to play, but in the end we’re helpless. The basic situation remains unchanged.

In 1983, Russ expressed similar frustrations in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, a satirical guidebook to diminishing the artistic accomplishments of women. To call the work “sarcastic” is an understatement; it’s shaped by the same frustration, the same weariness, the same Cassandra-like drive to endlessly testify in the face of utter futility.

I offer this background because, for me at least, it offers an additional richness in understanding “The Little Dirty Girl” – another story about grappling with the female identity. But instead of focusing on the strictures of society, with all its irrationalities and contradictions, it focuses on the strictures imposed by the self – and the damage to the psyche that comes from being born into this broken world. Instead of turning outward, it turns inward; while The Female Man and How to Suppress Women’s Writing and The Adventures of Alyx paint male privilege and patriarchal tradition as primary antagonist, in this story the antagonist is woman’s own superego, trained in the practice of unceasing self-judgment.

That’s not to say that “The Little Dirty Girl” is an overtly feminist story, or that it applies only to women. The patriarchy Russ raged against also pushes men into roles for which they are not made, into personas that feel smaller and simpler than their actual selves. Men also experience self-loathing and self-doubt. Men also suffer from the permanent sense of emptiness and loss that stem from childhood neglect. And this story is a sensitive exploration of all those things.

But the way these themes map onto the narrator’s own neuroses feels to me particularly female, or feminine. After all, the driving force of the story is the arrival of a Little Dirty Girl – a character so much more undignified than a Little Dirty Boy, at least to those of us raised up in the cult of the ladylike.

The narrator, who we know only as A.R., first encounters the L.D.G. on a trip to the grocery store. Recovering from a back injury, A.R. takes frequent “therapeutic walks” around the neighborhood, where she sees plenty of little children. (“I don’t dislike children,” A.R. says ambiguously. “Yes I do. No I don’t, but I feel horribly awkward with them.”) The little boys approach A.R. confidently, announcing whatever thoughts are currently on their young minds: “The littler ones confide; the bigger ones warn of the world’s dangers: dogs, cuts, blackberry bushes that might’ve been sprayed.”

But the little girls are more reticent:

“…They don’t approach tall, middle-aged women. Little girls are told not to talk to strangers. And the little girls of Seattle (at least in my neighborhood) are as obedient and feminine as any in the world; to the jeans and tee-shirts of Liberation they (or more likely their parents) add hair-ribbons, baby-sized pocket-books, fancy pins, pink shoes, even toe polish.”

In other words, they’re already being indoctrinated into the cult of the ladylike. “Except for the very littlest, how neat, how clean, how carefully dressed they are!”

But, of course, “The Little Dirty Girl was different.”

(I can’t help but think that this sentence holds the pain of an entire childhood; the constant tiny war fought by a little girl who’s always been a little rougher, a little louder, a little dirtier, a little more inclined to speak her mind. I fought it too.)

Anyway, the Little Dirty Girl “looked as if she had slid halfway down Volunteer Park’s steepest dirtiest hill on her panties and then rolled end-over-end the rest of the way. Besides all this, there were snot-and-tear-marks on her face (which was reddened and sallow and looked as if she’d been crying) and she looked – well, what can I say? Neglected.” She strolls up to A.R. in the supermarket, acting rather more like one of those little boys, ready to “volunteer such compelling information.” In this case, her appreciation of Milky Way candy cars.

The Little Dirty Girl offers to accompany A.R. home – to help her carry her packages, thus sparing her damaged back – and against her better judgment, A.R. accepts. And so begins her relationship with this very strange little girl. Despite the fact that the L.D.G. won’t reveal her name (she claims to be named A.R. as well), or where she lives, or really anything about herself, she keeps coming back.

At times the Little Dirty Girl seems somewhat old for her years. Her voice is hoarse: “the voice of a Northwest-coast raven.” And she has “that deep, painful chest cough you sometimes hear in adults who smoke too much.” Her manner is often adult as well; she has an air of being completely self-possessed, far too knowledgeable for her age. “If she showed no fear of me, it wasn’t because she trusted me but because she trusted nothing. She had no expectations and no hopes.”

At other times she is perfectly childlike, as when she explores the narrator’s home and is overjoyed by everything she sees (the books, the “straggling rose bushes,” the “old brown refrigerator,” the study). Or her rapture at riding the merry-go-round at the zoo, which “excited her to the point of screaming and running around dizzily in circles for half an hour.”  And her prodigious love of junk food, her ability to scarf down endless amounts of ice cream, Sara Lee cakes, Twinkies, Mallomars, Hostess cupcakes, Three Musketeers bars, marshmallow cream, maraschino chocolates, saltwater taffy, etc., etc.

But throughout these somewhat conflicting characterizations, she is always described in terms that highlight the earthy physicality of her presence, with details that sometimes verge into the vulgar. She smells “in close quarters as if she hadn’t changed her underwear for days.”  She talks “continuously while eating.” She leaves “an exceptionally dirty ring around the inside of the bathtub” and three “large, dirty, sopping-wet bath towels on the bathroom floor.” She “relieve[s] herself interestingly in the toilet” and forgets to flush.

The narrator – who is not herself immune to the cult of the ladylike – tries to make the Little Dirty Girl more like the others. She mends the L.D.G.‘s dress, combs and braids her hair (which is so tangled and snarled that A.R. has to cut the knots out with nail scissors). This ritual completed, A.R. surveys her handiwork:

“I said, ‘You look nice.’

“She got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she said calmly, “No, I don’t. I look conventional.”

Is the Little Dirty Girl frightening? I’d say she’s unsettling. The story doesn’t read like horror, exactly, but it is disturbing, nevertheless. And the situation becomes increasingly uncanny: “She came back. She never did telephone in advance. It was all right, though; she had the happy faculty of somehow turning up when I wasn’t working and wasn’t busy and was thinking of her.”

This is one of the first strong hints that the L.D.G. is a ghost. Then, of course, there’s her World War II-era clothing, the book and the poncho the narrator gave the L.D.G., which remain in the places they’ve always been. There’s the lack of response from the neighbors as the L.D.G. hangs out the window of the narrator’s house and yells, or from passersby as she screams and shrieks on the merry-go-round. And most importantly… “As surely as A.R. had been a biggish eight when we had met weeks ago, just as surely she was now a smallish, very unmistakable, unnaturally knowledgeable five.”

Summer turns to fall. Busy with the new semester – she’s a college professor – and preoccupied with her students’ demands and challenges, A.R. works herself like “a flogged horse,” adding: “As a friend of ours said once, everyone will continue to pile responsibility on a woman and everything and everyone must be served except oneself.” A.R. focuses all her time and attention on everything and everyone except herself, being painfully adult; meanwhile, the Little Dirty Girl is occupied elsewhere.

Until one day in the chilly autumn after a freak thunderstorm, when the Little Dirty Girl shows up once again. She is “shivering and glowering miserably,” desperate and enraged: the heretofore easily placated ghost now finally angry.

“You hate me! croaked A.R. venomously. “You starve me! You do! You won’t let me eat anything!

“You want to clean me up because you don’t like me!

“You like me clean because you don’t like me dirty!

“You hate me so you won’t give me what I need!

“You won’t give me what I need and I’m dying!”

It’s obvious, in this moment, that the story is about to take a turn. We are heading into the final act.  The uncontrollable hunger of the Little Dirty Girl is finally revealed, and it seems for a moment as if the story might veer into the outright horrific.

“Then tell me what you need!” I said, and A.R. raised her horrid little face to mine, a picture of venomous, uncontrolled misery, of sheer, demanding starvation.

“You,” she whispered.

So A.R. opens her arms to the Little Dirty Girl, who is “cold and stinky and extremely dirty and afflicted with the most surprising hiccough.” They come to terms with one another, as the Little Dirty Girl bawls, howls, cries, and yells. A.R. gives the L.D.G. what she wants. What she needs.

Then, like every hungry ghost, the Little Dirty Girl, once sated, disappears.

“And so there was no more five-year-old A.R. beating on the door and demanding to be let in on rainy nights. But that’s not the end of the story.”

And it really isn’t; making this an even stranger and more unlikely ghost story, there are still a couple pages to go. (Russ was never afraid of playing with structure, as demonstrated by We Who Are About To…’s challenging final third, composed of the internal monologue of a woman who is as isolated as it is possible to be.) In the remaining pages of “The Little Dirty Girl,” A.R.‘s mother comes to town. A.R. has never gotten along with her mother: “I’ve always supposed that neither of us knew why.” But it goes back to her childhood, during which her mother was emotionally removed, always preoccupied, haunted by unknown fears.

Transformed by her encounter with the Little Dirty Girl, the narrator resolves to face her mother differently this time; to confront her, to show her anger. But things don’t go the way she expects. Instead, A.R. finds herself tolerating her mother’s behavior. Perhaps, being more at peace with herself, she finds it easier to accept the flaws and failings of someone else. In turn, A.R.‘s mother chooses this moment to reveal the secret that affected A.R.’s childhood so deeply, the nightmare underlying her mother’s secret life.

“I wish I could go on to describe a scene of intense and affectionate reconciliation between my mother and myself, but that did not happen – quite… I got up then and she stood too, and we embraced, not at all as I had embraced the Little Dirty Girl, though with the same pain at heart, but awkwardly and only for a moment, as such things really happen.”

And with time, she and her mother begin to exchange letters, to talk, to begin to reveal the lifetime of things kept from one another.

Of course, nothing can erase the past. Nothing can account for A.R.‘s childhood as a daughter who “wouldn’t be kissed, wouldn’t be touched, who kept her room immaculate, who didn’t want her mother and made no bones about it, and who kept her fury and betrayal and her misery to herself, and her schoolwork excellent.” (That is, a Little Clean Girl, forever starving, forever unloved.) Nothing can heal that pain; forgiveness is irrelevant.

But perhaps acceptance is enough.

There’s no doubt that this story is a masterpiece: overflowing with uncanny vision, assembled with a clarity of purpose and economy of narrative that’s purely virtuoso. But I don’t know if that outstanding talent alone would be enough to make the story do what the story does.

(What the story did, to me at least: knocked me flat. Left me breathless. Broke my heart, or maybe patched it up a little, in the way that hurts the most while it’s happening, so it can hurt less later – like resetting a broken bone.)

This is the power of storytelling at its most brilliant and deadly. Underneath the painstakingly assembled trick of the story is a well of emotion so deep it’s a tidal wave: anger, rage, despair, self-loathing, grief, hunger, longing, loss… all forged the long way and the hard way, through years of desperation, into something a little more manageable. Acceptance. Forgiveness. Love. The strength to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “You’re OK. I accept.”

The Little Dirty Girl is not the vampire she might appear; but still, she scares me.

It’s hard to let her in.

But:

“I rocked her back and forth and mumbled I don’t know what, but what I meant was that I thought she was fine, that all of her was fine: her shit, her piss, her sweat, her tears, her scabby knees, the snot on her face, her cough, her dirty panties, her bruises, her desperation, her anger, her whims – all of her wonderful, I loved all of her, and I would do my best to take good care of her, all of her, forever and forever and then a day.”

That rage and despair, burning its way through The Female Man? This is the answer, or at any rate, it’s one answer. Confronted by an impossible, unbearable set of expectations, we are forced to accept ourselves just as we are. The depth of feeling presented by these two passages – especially when taken side by side – is a testament to Russ’s incredible talent and writerly powers: sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, but always truthful, always real.

The post 101 Weird Writers #27 — Joanna Russ appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964 —  ) is an American author who has steadily moved beyond a reputation as an heir to the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft and Southern Gothic literature to become one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation.  In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy. “A Redress for Andromeda” (2000) is a perfect example of Kiernan’s ability to portray the uncanny in original and terrifying ways. 101 Weird Writers is delighted to present this appreciation of Kiernan and “A Redress for Andromeda,” written by regular contributor Desirina Boskovich.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

Reading Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work is like being transported into another world that lies just adjacent to our own. That world looks familiar, and then it doesn’t. And then it does again. Which is to say, there’s something incredibly strange about her stories, but their vision is consistent and true.

Kiernan’s first novel, Silk, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, Threshold, received the award for Best Novel. Her fiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award and others. And the raw transcendence of her voice has only grown more confident and more powerful with the progression of her career. In 2009 she published The Red Tree, a metafictional horror story with an addictively compelling narrative and a chilling conclusion. Then 2012 brought us The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, an inventive and deeply moving novel that really defies description. Her short stories have been collected in several volumes including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; and The Ammonite Violin & Others.

Kiernan’s work is defined by its haunting qualities. Her visions grab you and hold on tight; they don’t want to let you go. And yet, despite the staying power of these stories, there’s something slippery about them, too; as much as they hold onto you, it can be impossible to get a hold on them.

Kiernan dislikes the term “horror” to describe her fiction; she prefers “dark fantasy.” There is horror aplenty in these pages. But there is beauty, too, and a dry, biting sense of humor. There is language of sublime power and mesmerizing force. There are mysteries that defy explanation, that demand their sacred right to baffle. There is seduction, too; the sexuality that pervades her stories manifests as a primal, untamable force that connects us humans with the supernatural. And, of course, there are hauntings.

“A Redress for Andromeda” is about such a haunting. Described in its most basic terms, the story is simple.  A marine biologist named Tara arrives at a battered old house by the sea, built in 1890 by a man named Machen Dandridge. It’s a crisp October evening, and she’s there for a Halloween party with a group of strangers. She’s been invited by her friend and lover Darren (the exact nature of their relationship is left somewhat ambiguous).

Her fellow partygoers are uniformly decked out in black, with ocean-themed accessories. There is a woman whose “nails are lacquered the red-brown color of kelp,” and a woman “with a conch shell tattooed on her forehead.” Ahmed Peterson, “the fat man,” is “wearing an ascot the color of a stormy summer sky” and carrying “a walking stick topped with a silver dolphin.” Tara’s sense of unease deepens, as her new acquaintances seem particularly interested in her: extremely curious, perhaps a bit pushy.

These odd conversations grow increasingly odder, until the clock strikes strange o’clock, and the party begins in earnest. A woman bangs a brass gong. Darren slips a coin into Tara’s palm. Together, the partygoers parade down a narrow staircase into a cellar — “steps that seem to have been cut directly into the native rock.” The cellar is actually an underground sea cave, where gentle waves lap against an ancient pier. The pool that fills the cavern is lit by a chartreuse glow: “the strange light is coming from the water, from the wide pool that entirely fills the cavern at the foot of the stairs…” The others in attendance, whom Tara has begun mentally referring to as “the crows,” gather around the pool “like they’ve all done this thing a hundred, hundred times before.” At the center of the pool is a jutting island of rocks, and chained to the rocks is — something. A she.

Then Tara is upstairs again. Or she’s standing in the grass under the stars. Or she’s standing at the edge of the pool and “watching the woman on the rocks, the lady of spines and scales and the squirming podia sprouting from her distended belly.” Ahmed Peterson becomes a Mock Turtle, and the woman with the conch shell tattooed on her forehead becomes a Gryphon. Darren and Tara’s new friends urge her to cast her coin upon the waters, so she can do her part to help the woman on the rocks hold back the dark forces of the sea.

It’s a simple story, at least in its sequence of events, but “A Redress for Andromeda” is anything but simple. There are layers upon layers upon layers here, challenging to untangle.

The first layer: the Lobster Quadrille. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice finds herself in conversation with a Gryphon and a Mock Turtle. (What is a Mock Turtle? According to Alice’s Queen of Hearts, it’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from. In John Tenniel’s illustrations, the Mock Turtle is depicted as a bizarre chimaera of calf & turtle, in the tradition of the Victorian-era soup.) Alice’s Gryphon and Mock Turtle describe the joys of the Lobster Quadrille, a rousing line dance enjoyed by sea creatures.

In “A Redress for Andromeda,” The Lobster Quadrille is first referenced in a conversation between Tara and Ahmed Peterson.

“You may not have lived much under the sea,” he says.

“No, I haven’t,” Tara confesses. “I haven’t.”

“Perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster,” he says.

She thinks about that for a moment, about brown claws boiled orange and jointed crustacean legs on china plates.

“I once tasted –” but then she stops herself, because she’s almost certain having eaten lobster is something she shouldn’t admit. “No, never,” Tara whispers, instead.

This conversation directly mirrors Alice’s interchange with the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland:

At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:

“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say, “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said, “No, never”) “—so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster-Quadrille is!”

Later, as Tara’s strange experience descends deeper into strangeness, Ahmed Peterson becomes the Mock Turtle, and the woman with the conch-shell tattoo becomes the Gryphon, and they begin singing lines from the Lobster Quadrille: “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance…”

“A Redress for Andromeda” is not Kiernan’s only work that references the Lobster Quadrille. In The Drowning Girl, published twelve years later, the Lobster Quadrille factors heavily in the narrator Imp’s personal mythology. Eva Canning — a woman who may or may not be a ghost — finds Imp in a museum, and leans in close to whisper:

“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied. “There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”

The words drip, and I wonder how much water will fit inside my ear, inside my skull. How much before it spills out into my mouth and down my throat and I drown in the gentle flow of Eva Canning’s words…

The singsong lines of this nursery rhyme hold a kind of hypnotic power for Imp. She begins reciting the poem obsessively, scribbling it in her notebook and in the margins of magazines. She seems to be repeating an incantation to ward off terror, but the words have the opposite effect. She is drowning in the depths of her own mind.

So how does this connect to “A Redress for Andromeda”?

The lines are fuzzy, but I think it’s a signaling, that this is the world of the subconscious, as filled with strangers and symbolism as Carroll’s imaginary worlds. Like Alice, and like The Drowning Girl’s Imp, Tara has descended down the rabbit-hole.

Which brings us to the story’s second layer: it’s a dream.

There’s this one detail at the beginning that might be a tip-off:

Darren told her ghosts stories, too, since a house like this has to have a few ghost stories, but she took two Xanax on the drive up from Monterey, and the stories have all run together in her head.

But the really surreal sequences don’t begin until later in the night, at the point that the party begins descending the stairs into the cellar. (Perhaps this should be read as a descent into another plane of consciousness?) After this point, a complete irrationality pervades everything that occurs.

Obviously, there’s the surreal behavior of Ahmed Peterson and the woman with the conch-shell tattoo, not to mention their transformation into characters from Alice in Wonderland. But that kind of thing happens. What’s so dreamlike is the story’s lack of spatial or temporal coherency. On the descent into the cellar, it’s made clear that the characters are in an underground, indoor space. There is stone overhead, “the uneven ceiling of the chamber.” Then, after Tara glimpses “the rocks and the thing that’s chained there,” there’s an abrupt change in scene. She’s outside. Darren is “pulling her down into the grass, the sea of grass washed beneath a harvest moon.” She’s outside — and yet she can still see the pool, the rocks, the woman. “She looks up at the moon instead of the pool.” She’s lying on the grass with Darren — and “watching the woman on the rocks.” She is simultaneously inside and outside, underground and aboveground. She’s omnipresent, the way we sometimes are in dreams. In fact, this story, with its casual bilocation, is one of the truest depictions of the dreaming world that I’ve ever encountered.

The nature of the dream is also curious. As mentioned, Tara is a marine biologist; when the evening starts to get weird, she imagines begging off with an excuse like “papers to grade or a test to write for her oceanography class.” The dream seems implausibly composed of the scenery of her subconscious, particularly when Ahmed Peterson and the woman with the conch-shell tattoo

lean in close and whisper the names of deep-sea things in her ears, a rushed and bathyplegic litany of fish and jellies, squid and the translucent larvae of shrimp and crabs.

Saccopharynx, Stylephorus, Pelagothuria, Asteronyx…

Caulophyrne, Lasiognathus, Squalogadus, Abyssobrotula.

Tara is the only marine biologist at the party — and who but a marine biologist could rattle off the Latin names of half a dozen sea creatures?

Another dreamlike aspect of the story is the intense emotional weight Tara ascribes to tossing the coin into the water. She knows what she’s supposed to do, but it takes her some time to rouse the courage to do it. She fights a battle with herself and her fears. When she does toss the coin, it seems to take “a living part of her down with it, drowning some speck of her soul.” This happens in dreams — the dreaming mind assigns powerful emotions to small tokens and odd symbols that in waking life might completely escape our notice. The emotion isn’t rational, but it’s real.

Which brings us to the story’s third layer: it’s a dream, but that doesn’t matter.

For Kiernan, the dreaming world is the real world. Dreams are full of power and truth and meaning; the waking world is dull and artificial in comparison. In dreams, battles are fought and wars are won and loves are gained and lost. In dreams, epiphanies come that change our lives.

Again and again, Kiernan’s fiction calls on dreams to say what it really means. But not in pulp fiction’s neatly packaged way. In Kiernan’s fiction, dreams are a language, the way magic is a language. It’s a primal language, though: its edges are rough, its boundaries are unenforceable, and its strangeness comes from a deep, essential place.

So, to my reading, the events of “A Redress for Andromeda” take place in a dream, but a dream that really happens, as much as anything that’s filtered through the unreliable interface of our consciousness really happens.

“A Redress for Andromeda” is the first of three stories that together form the Dandridge Cycle. It is followed by “Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea” and “Andromeda Among the Stones.” Both of these stories take place before the events of “A Redress for Andromeda.”  They delve into the history of the Dandridge House, connecting it with violent events in this world and the next, and revealing the Faustian bargain that led to its haunting. If this is a dream, it is the kind of dream that encompasses the world.

But a dream is no less real than a story; and a story is very, very real.

The post WFR’s 101 Weird Writers #21 — Caitlín R. Kiernan appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Leena Krohn (1947 — ) is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience.  Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City, reprinted in The Weird, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Tainaron shares some affinities with the work of Kafka, while being utterly original. Each section of the novel illuminates the next, with the weird element serving both as strange adventure and parallel to the real world. It is one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy.

Tainaron is currently available from Cheeky Frawg Books in e‑book form. In time with the book’s recent release in electronic form, 101 Weird Writers is delighted to present this appreciation of Tainaron written by regular contributor Desirina Boskovich.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

I

Tainaron is the kind of work that defies classification or description. There are a few things that we may say definitively about it (and only a few things). First, it is a novella narrated through a series of thirty letters. These letters remain unanswered, so we see the story through the eyes of the nameless letter-writer alone. Her topic is her travels through Tainaron, an unfamiliar city peopled by sapient insects. (We might call them insects with souls.)

Each letter is a self-contained slice of life, blending observation and introspection. Most describe a single incident, experience or conversation. Each one further illuminates the nature of life in the city. In this fragmented fashion, the letters slowly build on one another, revealing the novella’s larger arc. The structure is reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino or Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, with a crucial difference: while both of these books devote each short chapter to describing the circumstances of a unique world, Tainaron focuses exclusively on its one eponymous city. And yet, in its fluid and fluctuating nature, Tainaron the city seems to encompass many worlds itself. At any rate, the effect is similar. Scenes of increasing surrealism paint a picture of a place that, despite its weirdness, begins to look surprisingly like home.

What, and where, is Tainaron? It’s a city, like any other: it has its desirable neighborhoods and its slums, its streets and shops, its social structures. It’s home to “vanishing spires of cathedrals, the liquid gold of the cupolas of minarets, and the pure capitals of a Doric temple.” It is a great melting pot and a diverse ecosystem, where strange persons of all kinds live and work together. Sometimes, their insect nature is quite apparent; other times they seem quite human. (Miss Pumilio, for example — the frail old lady who lives above the narrator in her first home in Tainaron — does not seem to be an insect at all.) Tainaron is located at the edge of a vast body of water called Oceanos, which separates the narrator from her native city. Apparently, Tainaron is also located in a volcanic zone; scientists warn of possible destruction.

It’s a city, like any other, but it’s also a way of being, or a way of seeing. In the twelfth letter, our narrator writes, “…suddenly the earth gave way beneath my feet and I remembered once more that beneath Tainaron is nothing but a crust, as insubstantial as one night’s ice.” Something about Tainaron is fleeting and fragile; like a paradigm or a metaphor, it is upheld only through belief. The city’s emblem is the Ferris wheel. “Ferris wheel, wheel of fortune… Sometimes my gaze fastens itself to its spinning and I seem to hear, until sleep comes, the constant humming of the wheel, which is the voice of Tainaron itself.” In the end, Tainaron is perfectly mutable. It is a city of constant change, defined only by its endless state of motion.

In fact, in the twenty-second letter, as the narrator’s attempts to catalogue the city prove fruitless, her friend Longhorn informs her: “Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps.” This description of the city could equally be applied to the book. Like many groundbreaking works, Tainaron is difficult to describe. It exists at the level of language, where ambiguity and nuance hold sway. It is not quite like anything else. In its unfamiliar method of exploring an unfamiliar place, it may be inaccessible at times; and yet as the story develops, the writing becomes addictive, mesmerizing. Krohn’s language is lyrical and evocative, but there’s something else, as well — her subtle, glancing way of probing at the mysteries of life and death. Unexpected insights arise from the mundane, but they are suggested so delicately they remain almost intangible.

In this circuitous style, Krohn touches on ideas, backs away, then approaches from another direction; meaning accrues in the sidesteps. The central theme is change and transformation, which threads through every chapter. As one might expect in a city peopled by insects, metamorphosis is a key aspect of life in Tainaron.

Here you can bump into a stranger, and he will come up to you like an old acquaintance and begin to remember some past amusing coincidence that you apparently experienced together. When you ask, “When?”, he laughs and answers: “When I was someone else.”

Along with transformation, another major theme is that of individuality. As these themes develop, they find intersections and interconnections, eventually weaving their way into a single question: What is the soul, and will it survive? Or: Who will we be after we’re gone?

Though Krohn would never state it in such simplified terms, the novella seems to stage a debate. On one side is the notion that people carry with them an essential sameness, lasting from lifetime to lifetime; that a soul survives throughout the ages, no matter what form it takes. On the other side is the assertion that we are all manifestations of a central essence, endlessly combining and recombining from pieces of what we once were and will be again.

Of course, the debate remains unresolved. But there is a certain reassurance to that fact; each vision is comforting in its own way.

II

Is continuity essential to selfhood? Can one separate the self from its surroundings? And must one be someone to be? These questions linger at the edges of the narrator’s many odd encounters in Tainaron. And Krohn develops them with such subtlety, it feels a bit heavy-handed to draw them out. I do so only with the caveat that there is far more on the page.

The question of identity is first directly addressed in the fourth letter. In this chapter, the narrator is taken to meet the queen: a vast, formless creature confined to a windowless cave and surrounded at all times by a crowd of busy servants. The narrator is astonished when the queen addresses her accusingly,

“You think, don’t you, that I am some kind of individual, a person, admit it?”

… It was a most extraordinary voice, for it seemed to be made up of the murmur of hundreds of voices.

Baffled, the narrator agrees. But when the queen asks “So tell me, who am I?” the narrator struggles to respond.

Before I could even think of an answer to this question, I realized at last what was happening in the back part of the room, which was filled with the queen’s great rear body…

The queen was giving birth! She was giving birth incessantly.

“You are the mother of them all, your majesty,” I replied, humbly.

But the queen is not satisfied with this answer, because, as she says, “She from whom everything flows is not a someone.” Perhaps there is no satisfying answer; to serve as the source of life is a difficult burden. To be inseparable from everything can be unaccountably lonely.

In the eleventh letter, the narrator is allowed audience with Tainaron’s prince (already a foil for the powerful queen). She is surprised to find him abandoned to his tower, a decrepit and lonely figure. It seems he has not entertained a visitor in quite some time. Eager for anyone who will listen, the prince tells her about his departed princess. The princess has been gone for ages, and the prince no longer searches for her, but when she first disappeared, he spent many hours exploring the city, searching for her in the faces of strangers. He says,

“For I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the interrupted flow of on comers there flowed only the loam of strange memories…”

The prince, at least, believes that there is an essential essence to the soul, glimpsed through its windows. He clings to the idea that he’d know his lover, even if she was someone else. But perhaps this is only a fantasy.

Finally, in the sixteenth letter, the narrator is introduced to a person whose transformations are more instantaneous. The mimic: glimpsed first as a pile of stones, then a grassy knoll. Vexed, the narrator asks her friend Longhorn to explain.

“My dear,” Longhorn said, and looked at me, waving the extensions of his antennae, “do you believe that the Mimic could have a personality? Today he is one thing, tomorrow another. Wherever he is, that is what he is–stone a moment ago, now the summer’s grass. Who knows what form he will take tomorrow.”

But the narrator feels a certain unexplainable pique against the very idea of the Mimic, and declines Longhorn’s invitation to meet him. Gently, Longhorn rebukes her: “So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.”

Perhaps the narrator’s resentment of this fickle creature reveals unexamined feelings toward the silent recipient of her letters. Letter after letter she writes to her unknown lover, receiving no answer; as readers we find ourselves the uncomfortable target of her supplications, accused of indifference yet incapable of answering. We are the lover who’s changed, or died, or simply gone away. “That you are so implacable in your silence,” the narrator writes in her twenty-first letter, “makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.”

Little is revealed about this lover, nor the narrator herself. Like the Mimic, both are vague and ambiguous, serving primarily as filters for raw experience. Yet in a rare instance in the thirteenth letter, the narrator recalls a moment between herself and her lover, walking between two churches, discussing the soul. At the same time she offers a description of herself:

I seldom look in the mirror, but always there is someone there who gives me my eyes. And the root of my nose is bluish; a line has inscribed itself at the corner of my mouth like a drypoint groove. But this is no proof copy, and the acid of everyday life corrodes, prepares that which is the soul.

III

Though our narrator has been meticulous about documenting Tainaron, she is a bit like a tourist who visits a human city for just one season and concludes it is always summer there. But fall comes to Tainaron, and then winter, bringing yet more changes that the narrator cannot escape.

The first to be affected is Longhorn, her dear guide. As he’s accompanied her on her explorations of the city, she’s learned to know him intimately — and been astonished by his kindness. She feels dependent on him for her survival. But with winter comes sleep. Longhorn must retreat into his pupal cell (a kind of cocoon for beetles, constructed from mud and debris). When he emerges, he will be someone else entirely.

Eventually, winter sleep will come to the narrator as well. Tainaron is not just a place one visits; it is a way of being. If one dares to take up residence there, one cannot be immune to the forces of change.

As I came to the end of this novella, a sort of narrative began to emerge in my head. I found that, unconsciously, I’d begun striving to assign meaning to symbols; I was looking for the key to an allegory. In my mind I was building a story about an aging woman whose lover has died, or gone on before her to somewhere else; without him her world has become unfamiliar. Tainaron is a place she creates in her mind, while she grapples with her own mortality and prepares for the inevitable. Or perhaps Tainaron is a place between worlds, a spot to pause in the afterlife.

But then, I willed myself to resist this impulse. The story is too universal; it doesn’t deserve to be contained to any one narrative, any one interpretation. It doesn’t ask to be measured.

Regardless, the three final letters cast doubt on the story as it has been told so far. Perhaps there is no such place as Tainaron. Perhaps there are no insects with souls (or perhaps there are no humans). Perhaps there has never been a lover to receive these letters. Or perhaps he has been there all along. Like the debate on the nature of the soul, I prefer to leave this story an open question.

Finally, our narrator begins her twenty-fifth letter with the following story:

Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realize that it was no more than a piece of rotten wood. Then, of course, he threw it away in disappointment.

I wonder why—already preparing to leave—he nevertheless crouched to seek once more the piece of branch he had thrown away. But how diligently and closely he had to examine it before he saw: it was a cloaked moth after all.

Look closely. Look again. This, I think, is Tainaron.

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William Gibson (1948–) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the ‘noir prophet’ of the cyberpunk subgenre. John Shirley (1953–) is an American writer of novels, short stories, and film scripts, associated with both cyberpunk and splatterpunk. Gibson met Shirley at a science convention in the early 1980s and they became good friends. “The Belonging Kind” (1981) originally appeared in Charles Grant’s classic Shadows anthology series and seems to synthesize the best of Gibson’s and Shirley’s solo work. It’s a wonderful weird form of speculative fiction, creepy and thought-provoking, as ably demonstrated by regular 101 Weird Writers contributor Desirina Boskovich.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

“The Belonging Kind” is a collaborative story; in fact, it’s the only collaborative story featured in The Weird. This alone sets it apart, but the strangeness doesn’t stop there. Though it was written by William Gibson and John Shirley, two grandmasters of the cyberpunk subgenre, it is not actually a cyberpunk story. And though Gibson has since achieved the greater commercial success, at the time the story was written, he’d yet to publish a novel. Shirley was his mentor, offering him the push needed to put his work out into the world.

Of course, such strangeness demands an origin story. In an interview with The Paris Review, Gibson tells it like this:

[Shirley] was an extremely outgoing person, and he introduced himself to me: “I’m a singer in a punk band, but my day job is writing science fiction.” I said, “You know, I write a little science fiction myself.” And he said, “Published anything?” And I said, “Oh, not really. This one story in this utterly obscure magazine.” He said, “Well, send me some of your stuff, I’ll give you a critique.”

As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhaps an hour beforehand: “This is my new genius short story.” I read it—it was about someone who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drunks and prostitutes but are actually something else—and I saw, as I thought at the time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so much work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was really quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, “I hope this won’t piss you off, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique.” The next thing I get back is a note—“I sold it!” He had sold it to this hardcover horror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story.[1]

“The Belonging Kind” was published in 1981, a year after Shirley’s classic City Come A‑Walkin’. Three years later, Gibson would publish Neuromancer, the ground-breaking novel that birthed the cyberpunk movement almost singlehandedly (after sweeping that year’s awards, becoming the first book to nab the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick Award). Fifteen years after that, Gibson would pay tribute to City Come A‑Walkin’ in a forward for the new edition, stating that “John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus… [City Come A‑Walkin] is, quite literally, a seminal work; most of the elements of the unborn Movement swim here in opalescent swirls of Shirley’s literary spunk.”[2]

Gibson followed up Neuromancer with Count Zero and Mona Lisa overdrive (the Sprawl trilogy). The nineties brought the Bridge trilogy: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties. Meanwhile, the real world was working hard to catch up with the glittering high tech dystopias of Gibson’s earlier work. In the 2000s, Gibson began publishing novels that might best be described as science fiction of the present day. Not near future, but now future. These later novels have brought Gibson a level of critical acclaim often sought but rarely achieved by science fiction authors. The cultural context was bound to change; Gibson was always writing about a fast-developing future, a moving target. But an unchanging vein of obsession runs through these books: in its own way, each one is about the collateral damage of the high tech future, as glimpsed in the uncanny cracks of the present.

Meanwhile, Shirley’s obsessions have been more varied. He wrote a handful of cyberpunk novels, following City Come A‑Walkin’ with the 1980’s Eclipse trilogy (Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona) and the 2008 Black Glass (“the lost cyberpunk novel”). He writes horror of a violent, gruesome, and extreme variety, like Wetbones, Demons and In Darkness Waiting, shaping a subgenre then known as “splatterpunk.” His more recent novels delve into dark fantasy (Bleak History) and near future science fiction (Everything is Broken). He’s penned a number of commercial tie-in novels, and he’s written lyrics for the band Blue Oyster Cult (18 songs), as well as fronting a few bands himself. He co-wrote the screenplay for the movie The Crow, a gothic romance haunted by the real-life tragedy of its star’s fatal shooting during filming. His short fiction has been collected in a number of volumes, including the award-winning Black Butterflies and the most recent In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley. Basically, if it’s bloody, gritty, scary, or dark, he’s written it, and maybe lived it. Stories about Shirley, both his own and other people’s, focus on the chaos and darkness — and yes, extremity — of his younger days.

But back to “The Belonging Kind,” which came about in those extreme early times, before most of those books had happened. In an interview with 21Cmagazine, Shirley said:

My original intention, when I first started writing, was to interpret the world the way the Surrealists did: to get into those places where the conscious world – the physical world – and the unconscious world come together. To make people see the fantastic in the mundane.[3]

“The Belonging Kind” fits perfectly into this conception. Its protagonist is Coretti, a socially awkward academic who lectures on linguistics at a community college. His ex-wife has accused him of dressing “like a Martian”; “he didn’t look as though he belonged anywhere in the city.” Coretti, who isn’t “very good at conversation with strangers,” spends his social time hanging out at bars. One night, he glimpses a beautiful girl. To his surprise, she converses with him and accepts his offer of a drink. Yet, being a linguist, Coretti notices something off about her speech. When she talks to him, she’s as awkward and stilted as he is. But when she responds to a cowgirl beside her at the bar, her speech takes on a Southern tenor and twang. Fascinated, Coretti follows her out of the bar, where he watches her physical appearance transform under the light of a streetlamp.

She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair — at first he thought they were reflections. But there was no neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared, color sliding and merging like oil slicks.

Her hair shifts from coppery to white-blond, “short and spiky”; her dress changes from “the green of young corn, like a husk half stripped away” to “another dress, green satin, shifting with reflections.” That night, Coretti follows her all the way across town, watching as she goes from bar to bar, each time becoming someone else before moving on to the next spot. She meets with a male companion, who shares her talent for mimicking the background conversation of bars and her ability to transform to fit the environment.

And for the first time, Coretti knew what they were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind.

There’s one “gap in their camouflage” – no matter how much they drink, they never seem to get drunk. And that night, after following them around and drinking for hours, Coretti realizes he isn’t drunk, either.

In the weeks that follow, he searches again for the woman he first saw. Of course, she has no consistent physical appearance, but he’s sure he’ll recognize her. Meanwhile, his life falls to pieces. He stops eating. Spends too much time in bars. Then he loses his job.

But finally he finds the woman. Again, he follows her and her companion from bar to bar, then into their cab, and onto their hotel, and finally the room on the ninth floor where their kind stay.

No light burned in that room, but the city’s dim neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and allowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the armchairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nictitating membranes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of neon from the window.

At this moment, Coretti runs away, screaming. He is both drawn to the creatures, and repulsed by their alien nature. For a while, that second emotion wins out; he stops looking for the woman and her kind, and instead lives a quiet, alcohol-fueled life on the edges of society. Until one day, when the phone rings…

Based on Gibson’s account of how the story came about, it seems safe to assume that the concept came mainly from Shirley, while the surface was shaped by Gibson. If this is true, the mode of storytelling draws on both their strengths. Shirley’s work is defined by vivid, horrendous imagination, the kind of imagination that no one really wants to be burdened with, not if they ever want to sleep again. Gibson, on the other hand, excels at atmosphere, expressed through transcendently innovative images and pure burning feats of language. Through a weird alchemy, the rawness of Shirley and the hyperrealism of Gibson come together in a chimera of a story that isn’t really either. Instead, it’s subtle and understated. And somehow, both skin-crawling and sentimental.

“The Belonging Kind” is maybe horror, but it isn’t cyberpunk. Not even proto-cyberpunk. Still, it taps into an emotion that gave cyberpunk strength, and made it more than silver mirror shades, tough girls, and leather coats. It was a feeling of alienation, of numbness, of the fragmentation of society and the accompanying estrangement of modern life. It was about the sensation of being forever alone, even when you were in a room full of people: a bar, for instance. It was the rebellion of a young generation who grew up and found themselves in exile. And maybe the nascent beginnings of that cyberpunk sprawl are present in the city through which Coretti searches for his strange woman: the city with a “dim neon aura.” Meanwhile, the strange woman is aloof yet comfortable with the world around her, inhabiting her environment with both a hard edge and an easy grace; that’s an early glimpse of a Gibson heroine.

Shirley’s youthful involvement with drugs and punk rock gave him experience with being alienated from society, at the far, far fringe of the mainstream. His reaction was to violently rebel, shoving the collective face of society in its own hypocrisy, cruelty and inhumanity. His fiction explores the darkest aspects of human nature with a jaded weariness that makes it feel mundane. It was a dynamic rebellion, framed as a demand: Wake up. Wake up to the blatant nightmare you call the real world.

Meanwhile, this fictional Coretti is almost like an alter-ego. An exile, but a numb and sleeping one, who follows the path of least resistance, who finds his tribe without even trying. When he flees, they call him back.

And that is, at its core, the horror of this story. Psychoanalysts say that fear of heights is really the fear that we’ll jump; “The Belonging Kind” walks a similar edge. As terrifying as the loss of selfhood might be, it holds a certain appeal, especially for someone who’s known what it is to be on the edge of things. It would be nice to fit in. It would be nice to never have to worry about the right thing to say. It would be nice to have a tribe who knows you’re one of them, without even knowing your name. But would it be worth the price of identity? Would it be worth the cost of never being yourself, or really anyone at all, ever again?

Maybe.

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