***

Sculpture of Borne by Vladimir Verano

Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid. During my recovery, I had such trouble remembering what waited for me outside, as if I had to learn it all over again, despite having been taught so many lessons.

All kinds of dangerous ideas entered my head while groggy. It was as if the little foxes and other animals out in the desert ran in circles around my mind, barking and kicking up dust, stopping only to stare at me from afar and encourage me to wander. I kept fantasizing that I lived in a real apartment in one of the stable, lawful sanctuaries from my past. Everything would be fine—I just had the flu or a cold and was out sick until I got better. And when I was better, what would I do? When I was better, I would go back to university and to some part-time job. I would complete my studies so I could become a writer. Because the ruined city was just a bad dream and my life as a scavenger was a bad dream, and soon I would wake up, and the visions of almost drowning, of losing my parents and with them all connection with the past would prove to be an illusion, too.

The longer Wick expended time and energy protecting me, the more ideas like this took hold of me. They had only a vague relationship to my memories of flight, of trying to find refuge, of all the dangers before the city.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps. Even as I started to walk around my fortified rooms with Borne, even as I ventured out into the corridors. It was so sad a fantasy that I brushed by without recognition the revenants that told me it was a lie. The chair stuck in the wall. The filing cabinet rusted beyond use, now just a barricade at the mouth of a tunnel. The lack of libraries or other people.

Yet those sequestered weeks also contain some of my best memories because of Borne. Wick was gone a lot, spying on the Magician’s movements, providing beetles to his small band of dealers … and possibly because of our argument.

Which left Borne and me ever more time to explore. He’d gotten tired of being cooped up in the apartment. On days when I knew Wick would be out for hours, I’d take Borne into the hallways, prickly with the fear of discovery and stiff from my slow-healing wounds.

It was all a construct by then, this game of not telling Wick that Borne could talk. He had to know. But because I never admitted it and Wick never brought it up, Borne became an open secret that existed between us like a monster all its own. It made me reckless, as if I wanted Wick to confront me. That somehow our relationship would be a total lie if Wick didn’t confront me.

Ignoring the strain on my own body, Borne and I would race down dim-lit, dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as he laughed: “You’re going toooooo fast!” Or, “Why is this fuuuuuuuun?” Which just made me laugh, too. When you don’t have to run and you have the chance to run for the hell of it, it becomes a strange luxury.

Then we’d collapse at the end of the hall and Borne, in addition to his usual observation that he was hungry and needed a snack—I now let him hunt lizards and rats to blunt his appetite—would ask some of his questions. He never stopped asking them, as if he were really ravenous for the answers.

“This dust is so dry. Why is dust so dry? Doesn’t it need some wet for balance?”

“Then it’s mud.”

“What’s mud?”

“Wet dirt.”

“I haven’t seen mud yet.”

“No, you haven’t. Not yet.”

I would show Borne a photo of a weasel in an old encyclopedia and he’d point with an extended tentacle and say, “Ooooh! Long mouse!” Which brought me quickly to the idea of teaching Borne to read, except he picked that up on his own. When we played hide-and-seek, I’d sometimes find him hunched up on the edge of a midden of discarded books, two tentacles extending out from his sides to hold a book and a single tentacle tipped with light curling down from the top of his head.

He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don’t believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

But the truth is, I don’t really know what he thought or how he thought it, because most of the time I just had his questions.

***

Wick’s “disgusting” swimming pool full of biotech. Art by Kayla Harren.

Eventually, I took him to Wick’s swimming pool, which was Wick’s laboratory. I loved the swimming pool, and perhaps that meant I loved Wick, too, in a way. The swimming pool had originally had a skylight above it, extending to the top of the Balcony Cliffs, and a divot of open space remained all the way to the top, with Wick contriving to camouflage it from above with his illusions.

When the light from the hole in the ceiling was right, it formed green-and-gold waves, as if the moss and lichen on the surface had mingled with the sun’s rays and been transformed in some fundamental way. The light would glisten against the living filaments Wick had placed there as part of his work, and you could see dust motes floating and the occasional water bug or glider and, rising off the water, a mist that curled back on itself like certain kinds of ferns.

It could take a while to get used to the mélange of chemicals, which gave off a dank smell, cut through with something spicy. That spice could be sweet or sour, but was always sharp. Wick needed the light in the mornings to feed the rich, revolting, shimmering stew-brew to finish his beetles and other creations. But our shit and piss fed it, too, although the harsh smell was more of algae and peat and some bitter chemical. I’d long ago gotten used to it, even found it pleasant.

Eellike things wriggled in the mire and the fins of weird fish broke the surface only to submerge again.

“What’s a swimming pool?” Borne asked.

“A place people go into to … swim.”

“But it’s full of disgusting things! Disgusting things live in there. Just disgusting. Really disgusting.” Disgusting was a word Borne had just picked up and used often.

“Well, just leave those disgusting things alone, Borne, even if you are hungry.” I gently slapped away a tentacle he’d begun to inch toward the water. I had no idea what effect those chemicals would have on him. Nor did I want Borne eating Wick’s supplies, which would only endear him further.

Borne summarized for me: “A swimming pool is a place where people like to swim in disgusting things.”

“Close enough,” I said, chuckling. “You won’t be encountering many of those when you’re out in the real world.”

And then I wished I hadn’t said it, because I’d acknowledged that this wasn’t the real world. That we lived in a bubble, of space and time, that just couldn’t, wouldn’t last.

The post Excerpt from the Novel “Borne” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I. The Detective

The rabbit was dead. Was white. Was dead. Was six feet long. Supine. A trace of red against its mouth. A pocket watch half buried in the sand. Rubbery and indistinct, a blackish waistcoat curled across its midriff. While above us the mountain rose like a threat or a throat, unexpected.

I could smell the death in its matted fur. I could feel its death in the complete, the utter stillness of the body. The eyes stared out into a great nothing, a vast nowhere.

I was supposed to solve this.

Brown eyes, flecked with green. Fur around the mouth, stained green with grass. There was no grass anywhere around here. Bitter winds. Desiccated. Husk.

I stood up, fought the urge to sigh, fought the urge to fight against the gentle pressure on the nape of my neck.

Hush. Dusk. I had spent an hour staring at this apparition, with no insight forthcoming.

What makes death solvable or soluble? What might be considered a clue? The red hissing from the mouth like a long sleek ribbon of snake? The wound to the belly, spilling out like sawdust? The ticktock of the watch on my wrist, telling me to hurry? Should I solve the crime, I’d be much praised. Should I fail, none would care but me.

Behind me somewhere lay the city of teeth and blood and exhaustion and the cries of abandoned children, back alleys with their deeper wounds and the skies full of smoke and the streets at night lighted like strands of emeralds, the towers set to rise like knives cutting the underbelly of the blank sky.

Here, in the desert, the sky was a deep blue shot through with deeper cloud, masked by the mountain rearing out of the sand.

Out here, I had my familiar. In the city, my familiar could not always manifest himself, make himself known to me. No one could manifest in the city all the time. Out here, he could stretch, uncurl, spread his wings of manta ray black to their fullest extent. The desert glinted off of them, melting into a relaxation that seemed earned.

“Rabbit,” I said. It sounded like I just wanted to hear myself talk.

“Rabbit,” my familiar agreed.

I had no name for my familiar. I felt no need for names, even for myself. How could anyone mistake him for another? His shape formed a shadow across me, his breath a black spurling of memory, cloves, desire, and cinnamon. With the desert’s red dust around us, the mountain rising, it seemed I could be his familiar. His voice like a reflection of a star in a pool of still water, his flickering appearance like a piece of gold glimmering up to meet the reflection. In a courtyard in the city. Where a hundred thousand familiars…

“It’s not from here.”

My familiar rippled and coalesced behind me, over me.

“Not from there, either.”

Where a hundred thousand familiars gathered, the motion of their obsidian passage a mighty wave across a parched land…

Helplessness and shame overtook me, the emotions I always feel at the scene of a crime. The death that cannot be catalogued except by time. The death that cannot be avenged except by the deceased, the only person who cannot avenge…anything.

What could my familiar and I do? The taste of continual failure was like ash on my tongue. Yet I could not remember any of my other cases.

***

Sunset. Reds peeling off across the reds of the corpse, the fur flush with dust and dirt and sand.

I felt the tickle in my throat caused by the umbilical that hung between me and my familiar — this cloak, this being that spread out behind me through the celestial air. My familiar was feeding me, and I did not want to be fed.

I saw a children’s book. I saw a large white rabbit. I saw a girl in a dress. I saw a talking caterpillar. The familiar was feeding me what was not familiar. But the story seemed familiar somehow. As if I had pressed my face against a fogged up pane of glass, just barely able to see inside a house of marvels. I shuddered. Stop feeding me.

“You don’t recognize it.”

If a familiar can feel disappointment, I felt that emotion course through its undulating body and into mine. The itchiness in my throat became severe.

“This is not a real murder,” my familiar told me. “This is a dream of murder. It will fade, if you do not recognize it.”

I began to panic. I began to have memories from before the city. I really was a detective once. I knew this; it had not been fed to me. My blood crawled with the knowledge.

What I cannot solve may kill me.

The red desert dust, the clot of dust in the air, like a stroke about to claim me. I could feel the tube from its body to mine in the back of my head, my neck. I could feel it there, coiled like a question mark. The taste of lime on my tongue.

He should have had a real waistcoat. He should have been somewhere else, this rabbit. Not here.

“You will see,” my familiar said. And then said again, in another way: You will see. And you will be amazed.

For that was when the white rabbit shuddered. That’s when the white rabbit shivered. Shook, coughed, wiggled its ears. Sat up. Wiped the blood from its mouth.

“I thought you were broken,” I said to it. “I thought you were dead. I thought you did not know what you were.”

The creature turned to me, its eyes brown and deep: as deep as hazelnut in winter, by a fireplace, in a city, but not the city, except I should not have that memory. Was it fed to me? Was it me?

It turned to me, this creature, and said, “You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

“Solve me? But I’m not dead?”

“How do you know?”

II. The Accounts of Others

“Get out of my brain!” the man shouted while at some far-flung trading post. Dirty shantytown without enough water. Faded grass. A couple of horses looking close to gone. This place would not be here much longer. I had passed through selling knives, but no one needed knives.

“Get out of my brain!” he shouted again.

I didn’t know if he meant the city, or the familiar rising half invisible above him.

The familiar was dead white‚ just drifting in the breeze, in the pale sunlight. The umbilical was like a dry reed. The man could have pulled himself free at any time.

Was I the only one among them who could see it?

I met his wild stare.

“I’ve come to take you back to the city,” I said.

He ignored me. He was already there.

***

There was nothing to stop me from getting there. I had been walking for a long time, but there was still nothing to stop me. Why should there be? I could either walk or stop walking. There’s no real decision in that, is there?

The desert spread out ahead, the city where it had always been: in front of me. It never changed. It always seemed to be in the same place: a dark glitter, a black speck in the corner of my eye. A hint of a scent, taken by the wind. I never made any progress toward it. It never made any progress toward me. You could say we were equals in a way.

Sometimes I passed other people, most of them dead, their flesh flapping off of them like little flags. Sometimes I passed no one but the ever-wheeling hawks against the blue disease that was the sky.  It did not matter. Walking mattered. Finding water mattered. Finding food mattered. Eventually reaching the city mattered. Not minding the mirages mattered.

The mirages could become intense. A mirage could kill you if you let it. You had to want to let it. You had to want to let it inhabit you. It could take any shape, any form.

Like a familiar. I had heard tales about the familiars. The city blossomed with them, all manifesting in different ways. Manta rays. White rabbits. I heard about a detective once. Just once. But never again.

People in the city had lost the thread of living without familiars. People there had just lost the thread, period. Deep wired into the spinal cord. Sucking into them. Sucking out of them. A city of spines. A city of familiars. A city of people. A city of not-people. Had it created them or had they created it?

Sometimes, as I walked, I didn’t think I ever wanted to reach it, though the blisters on my feet yearned for it. Sometimes, it seemed the promise of bliss.

Walking is good, but walking can get to you. Endless walking. When it first occurred to me that the city wasn’t getting closer, I wondered if perhaps I didn’t deserve the city. Sometimes, I thought it didn’t deserve me. Perhaps both were true. But, regardless, there was nothing else to see on the horizon. Nowhere else to head for. It really was the last there. The only there.

And sometimes I would scream at the city. I would drop to my knees and scream in wordless rage. How could it keep evading me? How could it make me keep on walking?

And it’s true. I admit it. Eventually, I begged the city to accept me. I stood there and begged for this dot at the corner of my vision to let me get close.

But by then it was too late. By then it had become a little bit too…familiar.

***

The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck, although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected visions. Anyway, the umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar’s umbilical wind around the nerves in the person’s neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock, convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and a taste of lime. There is no release from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a time, the tubes glistening and churling in the lesion of the steam, the communal need. Thus fitted, all go forth in their splendid ranks. Thus filled, all go forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the city opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the eye is the world.

This is what I have been told. I have never witnessed it myself. I heard it from a walker.  A man who told me that the city is a mote in his eye. I suppose it might not be true. I cannot verify it. I cannot deny it.

***

A city in her head that could not be true made her wince. A city that she had been searching for her entire life, all across the wastelands that often revealed more of their past than made her comfortable. A city that pulled her out of herself. Something that was more than a Thought but less than an Idea. A city that became so real to her, in its scraps and tatters, that her own life became the abstraction. She saw glistening spires and sudden terror, and an illumination that nearly blinded her. She saw great black shapes passing through the sky, attaching themselves to more mundane shapes. She saw causeways made of air that yet bore weight. A thousand images that could not be real, that would never be enough to sustain her in that vision, that delectation, forever on the tip of her tongue, the word she could not say: the name of the city.

***

I left my lover in the city because I found it too intense. Now all I had of her was memories. Rosebuds. Rose petals. Dried roses. Flowers found in parks and more dangerous places. The thought of the forests in the south of the city where you could always find the blood-soaked remains of a person for whom the familiar had become strange. The visitations in the north. The long palatial glide down the ramp above which gather the blindly searching umbilicals. The music of the city that permeates the air, reaches into the stones, the trees, the rich dirt. The fragrance as of a thousand perfumes, the air jagged with the musk of familiars. The clean, strong lines of buildings. The way everything is planned, so perfectly. One can hardly contain it in one’s mind. It’s like sunlight shining on marble that turns to water that ripples with light as seen through a mirror.

I had broken from the city as she could not. I had proved stronger than my familiar, and feasted on its memories. Now, exiled, I lie in her arms every night and make love to her. Although she is not here, in these tiny rooms in forgotten towns, she stares at me from the bed. This comforts me; she has become my familiar.

The city? I remember little of it now. It is like a long caravan disappearing into distance and time. Day by day, my lover conquers more and more of my memory. Perhaps, one day, it will seem as if I never lived in the city at all.

***

A joke, passed along in the wastelands:

Two men are fighting in the dust, in the sand, in the shadow of a mountain. One says the city exists. The other denies this truth. Neither has ever been there. They fight until they both die of exhaustion and thirst. Their bodies decay. Their bones reveal themselves. These bones fall in on each other until each man is the other. One day, the city rises over them like a new sun. But it is too late.

III. The Detective

“You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

It’s dusk now, when the rabbit tells me this. It’s dusk and there’s no light except the lights of the city at our back. An unimaginable sorrow comes over me. I cannot help it, even with my familiar pumping good thoughts, good images, into me through the umbilical, the cord, the chord, the knot, the fence, the gate, the conduit that reaches him into me.

“No, you’re not dead,” the rabbit says. “And there lies part of the problem. Who can love that which is not dead?”

“Familiar?” I query. Familiar?

But there is no answer. Just the rabbit. Staring me in the eyes. Trying to tell me something.

“Do you want to return to the city?” he asks me.

I turn away to look back at the city. It is as a mote in the corner of my eye.

I tell him, “No. Not really.”

“Then leave this behind.”

The rabbit stands over me. His fur is rough, his scent thick. He brings his arms around my head as if in an embrace. There is a slight sound, indescribable, as he detaches my familiar. My familiar detaches. The weight lifts. The tickle in my throat is gone. I cough, cough again.

Above me, in the dark, with no moon, just the afterglow of sunset, my familiar floats, his voice no longer in my head, my mouth, my guts, my guilt. He is taken on the breeze. He is taken from me. Away. Toward the city. I crane my neck to watch him go. I watch him go: a black manta ray drawn to the lights.

I am alone with the rabbit. I am alone. I was sure the rabbit had been created by my familiar, but now I am not so sure. I am frantically searching my memory for some prior experience, some glimmer, some fragment that will help me.

The rabbit takes my hand, his surprisingly human, and he whispers in my ear. The black waistcoat unwraps itself from his torso and rises until it exists, whole and glistening, above his head, plugged into his neck. His familiar’s tube is bifurcated. As he whispers, part of it coils around my own head. It connects. And there is no city. And there is no sand, no thirst. And I am weeping. I can see the girl and the rabbit and the caterpillar and the rest of it. It is no comfort. I am nowhere again, like the first time, walking with the rabbit into the desert, the familiar’s familiar.

By what right should I have achieved this state? By what right should I never solve my case, only to have it solve me?

Save me. Please.

The post The City appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

AN EXCERPT FROM HOEGBOTTON’S
COMPREHENSIVE TRAVEL GUIDE
TO THE SOUTHERN CITY OF AMBERGRIS

Chapter 77: An In-depth Explanation
For the City’s Apparent Lack of Sanitation Workers
(And Why Tourists Should Not Be Afraid)

Upon the traveler’s first visit to the legendary city of Ambergris, he will soon espy crimson, rectangular flags, no bigger than a scrap of silk cloth, attached to the tops of pencil-thin stakes hammered into dirt or between pavement cracks. Such a traveler, as he peruses the Religious Quarter, the various merchant districts, or even the run-down Industrial District, may also notice the complete absence of rotten food, human excrement, paper refuse, flotsam, jetsam, and the like on the streets — as well as the almost “spit-cleaned” quality of the gutters, the embankments, the front steps of public buildings — and no doubt with a measure of puzzlement, for this sparkling condition contrasts sharply with the disheveled state of Belezar, Stockton, Tratnor, and the other picturesque southern cities that straddle the silt-mad River Moth.

Such a naive traveler (unless having had the good sense to buy this particular guidebook, available in Ambergris itself only at The Borges Bookstore [see Ch. 8, “Cultural Attractions”]) may not at first, or even on second or third glance, discern the connection between the flags, as uniform and well-positioned as surveyors’ marks, and the preternaturally clean quality of the city’s convoluted alleyways. The unobservant or naive traveler, therefore, may never come to understand the city itself, for these flags mark out the territory, and are the only daylight sign, of those unique inhabitants of Ambergris known in the vernacular as “mushroom dwellers.“¹

Travelers should expect a certain tight-lipped anxiety from the locals upon any query as to (1) the red flags, often as clotted and numerous as common weeds, (2) the preternaturally-clean nature of the city, or, especially, (3) “mushroom dwellers.” The curious outsider should not be particularly surprised or alarmed at the stone-faced non-response, or even hostile extremity of response, engendered by such questions. (See Ch. 6, “Survival,” for a list of mannerisms, sayings, and articulations that will charm or mollify angry locals.) A corollary to these questions, “When is the Festival of the Freshwater Squid?” should also be avoided if possible. (See Ch. 5, “The Festival of the Freshwater Squid: Precautions, Preferred Weapons, Hoegbotton Safe Houses.)

However, given a choice between satisfying rampant curiosity on these matters through consultation with the locals or through interrogation of the mushroom dwellers themselves, it would be advisable for even the adventurous traveler to seek out the nearest local. The mushroom dwellers generally remain mute on any subject related to their close-knit clan, nor are they likely to help the disoriented or lost traveler find his way to a safer part of the city.² Nor are they likely to converse with the casual passerby on any topic, especially as their only documented language consists of equal parts clicks, grunts, and moist slapping sounds that have thus far frustrated even the most prominent linguists.

Nor should it be expected that the average visitor will actually ever set eyes upon a mushroom dweller. These shy citizens of Ambergris³ sleep from dawn until dusk, and although the red flags often do indicate the close proximity of mushroom dwellers, they are likely to be resting below ground. Such flags — always found in clumps, except when a single flag marks the doorstep to a house or building⁴ — may simply indicate an opening to the network of old sewage conduits and catacombs that have existed since the First Construction Empire presided over by Trillian the Great Banker. (See Ch. 3, “Rulers, Tyrants, and Minor Merchant Barons.”)

It has been put forth by the noted naturalist and social scientist L.(oqueem) Bender — cousin to the great opera composer Voss Bender (see Ch. 2, “Native Celebrities) — from the bloodstained notes discovered near the sewer duct where he was last seen (see Ch. 15, “Unsolved Mysteries of the City”) that the mushroom dwellers have excellent night vision, but that as a consequence of their generations-old sleeping patterns, their eyes can no longer bear any but the weakest sunlight. If true, this intolerance would certainly explain the wide-brimmed floppy gray felt hats they wear during the day (and which, in combination with their short statures, diurnal habits, and long necks, have no doubt given them their eccentric reputation).⁵ Bender’s notes include fascinating physical details about the “mushroom dwellers,” whom he once, during the early days of his research, described as “merry little pranksters”: “I find they are remarkably strong, this strength at least partially due to a low center of gravity combined with thick, flat feet, extremely well-developed, almost root-like leg muscles, and very large yet supple hands.” Although it is not advisable to attack a mushroom dweller, or even to defend oneself from an attack (L. Bender, in his later notes, recommends standing quite still if charged by a mushroom dweller) it should be noted that their long, strangely delicate necks will break easily if the traveler can get past the clinging, flailing hands thrown up in defense (and which, coincidentally, may be groping for the traveler’s own neck).

It was L. Bender who first conducted credible scientific studies⁶ of the mushroom dwellers’ two main preoccupations: mushroom harvesting and the daily cleansing of Ambergris. L. Bender discovered that the ritual cleaning of the city’s streets provided them rich leavings with which to propagate their midnight crop of fungus. “Although the mushrooms are grown underground for the most part, and may reach heights of four feet, weights of 60 pounds,” L. Bender wrote, “on occasion a trail of mushrooms — like a vein of rich gold or silver — will burst out from the netherworld to riot in a spray of mauve, azure, yellow ochre, violet, and dead man’s gray upon the walls of a merchant’s pavilion or across the ceiling of a mortician’s practice.”

L. Bender’s studies further proved that the mushroom dwellers nightly mastery of city refuse was due not to incredible efficiency so much as to a large population — they simply exist in greater numbers than previously thought by so-called “experts,” much as a single cockroach seen implies the existence of a dozen cockroaches unseen. Second, by studying the few civil records still in existence, as well as the 30-year writings of the obsessed statistician Marmey Gort⁷, L. Bender discovered that over hundreds of years Ambergris’ citizens had altered their patterns of consumption and refuse disposal to accommodate easy pick-up by the mushroom dwellers.

The locals’ treatment of the mushroom dwellers varies drastically between valley residents and city residents (see Ch. 9, “Cultural Differences Between Valley and City, And How to Exploit These Differences to Get Better Bargains”), no doubt because the city folk have spun a complex series of legends around the mushroom dwellers, while the valley folk, who rarely see them, know them only from the watered-down versions of such stories.⁸

These legends run the gamut from the inspired to the inane, although the traveler will, as mentioned previously, find it hard going to pry even a word or two from the lips of locals. Some folk believe the mushroom dwellers whisper and plot among themselves in a secret language so old that no one else, even in the far, far Occident, can speak it. Others weave tales of an origin in the subterranean caves and tunnels beneath Ambergris, inferring that they are not of human stock. Still others claim they are escaped convicts who gathered in the darkness many years ago and now shun the light from guilt over their forebears’ crimes. The sailors on the docks have their own stories of mushroom dwellers as defilers of priests and murderers of young women to provide nutrients for their crop of fungus. The poor and under-educated spread rumors that the mushroom dwellers have supernatural powers — that newts, golliwogs, slugs, and salamanders follow in their path while above bats, nighthawks, and whippoorwills shadow them. And, even among the literati, especially among the Shortpin Group led by the noted author Sirin, irresponsible gossip has revived the old chestnut that the mushroom dwellers can “control our minds simply by spreading certain mushroom spores throughout the city’s public places, where they may be inhaled all unknowing by the general populace, this inhalation soon followed by an unnatural fascination with fungus, and, of course, an unwavering devotion to the mushroom dwellers.“⁹

However, the most ridiculous version of their origin postulates that they once belonged to a guild of janitors, ordained by the Priests of the Seven-Edged Star when that order ruled the city so many centuries ago (see Ch. 21, “Conflicting Religions”) and that, during the lawless Days of the Burning Sun, they became feral, seeking haven underground as a desperate remedy for unemployment and the persecution meted out to public workers as a form of protest against the government. (See Ch. 1, “A History of the City.”) While this theory provides an explanation for the mushroom dwellers need to “cleanse” the city of refuse, it ignores the blatantly spiritual nature of their many rituals.

In any event, anecdotal evidence from rare eyewitnesses (including two of the compilers of this book) suggests that the city folk secretly worship the mushroom dwellers¹⁰, setting out plates of eggs and moist bread or mugs of milksop for them at night, while some young girls and boys, strangely unafraid, have been known to feed them by hand as they would pigeons or squirrels. For the traveler interested in a more scholarly pursuit of the mushroom dweller myth, the L. Bender Memorial Museum, until recently kept up by his wife, Galendrace Bender¹¹, provides a good starting and ending point. The museum contains the actual bloodstained notes discovered near L. Bender’s last known location. It also displays items L. Bender stole from an underground mushroom dweller religious site, including such enigmatic objects as an ancient umbrella, a duck embryo preserved in ether, a mop even more ancient than the umbrella, and the steering wheel to a now-extinct motored vehicle.

As with most attractions in Ambergris, however, the careful traveler should not visit the museum after dark. To reiterate the safety precautions set out in Ch. 13, the wise tourist should avoid the following areas after nightfall: the Religious Quarter, the Industrial District, the Majori Merchant District, the Hoegbotton Merchant District (save for the Hoegbotton Safe Houses, half-price during the monsoon season), the docks, and the old bureaucratic center. Mushroom dwellers are notoriously near-sighted despite their fabled night vision, and have been known to mistake even the best-dressed gentleman as an exotic form of refuse, fit to be processed and dragged underground.

If confronted by mushroom dwellers (they often travel in groups of 50 or more) safe places (in addition to the Hoegbotton Safe Houses) include: (1) the top floors of tall buildings, especially buildings that do not possess dumbwaiters or air ducts; (2) the topmost branches of tall trees; mushroom dwellers are mediocre climbers at best and will, at dawn, forget their prey and return below ground, allowing the traveler ample opportunity to escape any light-sensitive sentry they might leave behind; (3) the center of large groups of fellow tourists (groups of locals may be inclined to give the unsuspecting traveler up).

The traveler planning a vacation to Ambergris this year should not be unduly alarmed by the information set out above. In fact, there have been far fewer tourist fatalities this year than in the previous three years combined, no doubt due in part to the extensive city-wide bloodletting that occurred at last year’s Festival of the Freshwater Squid (see Ch. 5). For this reason, it is the opinion of the editors of this guide¹² that even travelers who too closely investigate the apparent absence of sanitation workers in Ambergris will enjoy a pleasant stay.

____

¹ Please see “Exploration of a Theme,” the rather inaccurate if pleasant rendering by the famous collage artist of the last century, Michael Shores. Shores has included in his montage an even earlier and more whimsical drawing of the ‘monkfish’ by the celebrated draftsman Nablodsky. “Exploration” is currently on display at the Voss Bender Memorial Art Museum.

² For a list of inexpensive Hoegbotton Safe Houses, please refer to Appendix A.

³ Sometimes referred to as “mushies” by the locals when drunk, but never when sober; indeed, if the mischievous traveler wishes to provoke a full-scale riot, he simply need shout into a crowded tavern or church, “You’re all a load of stupid ‘mushies!’ “.

⁴ Do Not Enter any such marked house or building. Often, these dwellings will, on closer inspection, prove to contain relatives mourning a late relative still encased in a living room casket. The mushroom dwellers seem particularly sensitive to the presence of death.

⁵ Incidentally, L. Bender posthumously received the Manque Kashmir Award of Achievement from the Morrow Institute of Social Research for “his close friendship with and in-depth studies of the mushroom dwellers.” The book of his notes published by the Institute is on sale at the aforementioned Borges Bookstore.

⁶ Previously, there had only been such romantic renderings as a slight description in Voss Bender’s famous opera “The Refraction of Light in A Prison” sung by the distraught, suicidal Frange when he looks out of his window to exclaim:

What mystery fringed by dusky dawn
has given the soul of misery form?
Has the face of love come stumbling
crippled and confused to mewl ‘neath
a sneering moon? No, ‘tis only the elders
of the city eager to cleanse, and pray

More descriptive is this melodramatic passage from Dradin Kashmir’s semi-autobiographical short novel Dradin, In Love: “Positioned as he was at the mouth of the alley, Dradin felt as though he were spying on a secret, forbidden world. Did [the mushroom dwellers] dream of giant mushrooms, gray caps agleam with the dark light of a midnight sun? Did they dream of a world lit only by the phosphorescent splendor of their charges?”

⁷ Gort kept minutely detailed records of city denizens’ sanitary habits, including their storage of refuse. A typical entry reads: “X — outhouse use increase: av. 7x/day (5 min. av. ea.); note: garbage output up 3x for week: connex?”

⁸ As recently as three years ago, a mushroom dweller that wandered into the valley, presumably by mistake, was lynched by an angry mob of tradesmen. (Coincidentally, short travelers, defined as “under four feet six inches tall,” are advised not to visit the valley without several sets of corroborating identification.)

⁹ L. Bender seems to have disproved this once and for all in his final set of notes, when he writes, “Not only did I allow them to sprinkle my entire naked body with the spores, but I readily breathed them in. At no point did I lose control of my mind. At no point did I fall asleep, or come under the spell of a hypnotic trance.” Thus, the spores appear to be a friendly form of ritual welcome.

¹⁰ Two editors, it should be noted, preferred the phrase “secretly fear,” followed by “setting out placatory plates.”

¹¹ Sadly, Ms. Bender, a noted specialist on fungus reproduction, did not long survive her husband’s death. She disappeared one month before this revised guide went to press, leaving behind a letter in which she indicated she had decided to live in the catacombs among the mushroom dwellers. A postscript to the letter which read in part, “I believe the mushroom dwellers are doomed angles [angels?] who have lost their wings, their position, and even any knowledge of their glorious past, and now consigned to a lugubrious state of semi-awareness,” does not say much for her current mental state and it is only to be hoped that she will indeed someday emerge from the catacombs. [Ms. Bender was a frequent contributor to the Ambergris travel guide — she contributed greatly to this very article — and her expertise will be sorely missed. –Eds.]

¹² Six in agreement, two in abstention.

The post Exhibit H appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: Can you describe where you are as you’re answering these questions?

Kristine Ong Muslim: I am writing this inside my bedroom. I am writing in my single bed. My secondhand Fujitsu laptop is propped on top of a box. Attached to the laptop is a dirt-cheap keyboard whose keys are intended for vigorous typing. On the left side and flush against the wall are a computer desk and a bookshelf. I have two bookshelves in my bedroom, which is also my physical “writing room” as opposed to the intangible writing room in my head. The computer desk serves as a catch-all dumpsite. Visible right now on this catch-all dumpsite are two bars of dog soaps I bought online, a roll of tissue paper, prescription glasses, nail cutter, a clean mug and a dirty one, assorted toiletries, a solar lamp, my printer, new books and contributor copies I have yet to shelve because the shelves are full. There are also candles and a match nearby because where I am there’s this third-world thing going where electricity regularly goes off. On all four corners where walls meet the ceiling, there are small cobwebs by mosquito-munching daddy long legs. I am really lazy and will only clean when I absolutely have to. I sweep the floor like once every two weeks. Anyway, there are two empty bottles of Mirinda on the floor near my bed. There is no clothes closet. I don’t have that many clothes and have no need for owning too many clothes, so I just stash my clean clothes in plastic modular containers. Most of these containers are under the bed. Right next to the computer desk, there is a pile of dirty clothes. Well, it’s sort of a neat pile on the floor as I still have a semblance of standards. I do the laundry when the pile reaches a critical height. On the right side is a sliding glass window, which has a screen panel to keep mosquitoes away and let in fresh air. The screen is in dire need of cleaning.

WFR: What in the environment around you right now means the most to your writing?

KOM: The window with the dirty screen panel. I will have a hard time thinking and writing if my line of sight is obstructed. I have to be able to look out and see past this bedroom.

WFR: Can you tell us one unusual true thing about yourself and one unusual lie about yourself? (We will leave it to our readers to guess which is which.)

KOM: I haven’t seen one episode of Game of Thrones. I am going to be 36 soon and still don’t have a driver’s license and a passport. All these are true, by the way.    

WFR: What’s your relationship as a writer to the real versus the weird or unreal? How much contamination is there? Is there a wall, a fence, a tunnel?

KOM: There is a wall. The wall is porous. The writer-me has no choice but to live in the “real” side of the wall. The wall is leaking bits and pieces of the weird and the unreal from the other side. I can’t ever have the whole picture of the bizarre stuff that lives on the other side of the wall. I make educated guesses about its nature. I make ultimately flawed conclusions about its motivations for leaking parts of itself through the porous wall. It’s like a version of Plato’s cave allegory once again.

Outside the visible spectrum, the human eye is useless. The same is true for human hearing with its limited audio frequency range. We can’t see into the ultraviolet range, for example, and what if the things we deem supernatural are just the out-of-range stuff we have no way of seeing? Our senses only allow us to experience a portion of reality. But the human mind is something else entirely. I don’t think it is designed to be comfortable with having to make do with limited sensory perception. I believe that creative expression—visual arts, music, literature—the imaginative ones, anyway—is a form of compensation. It’s the human mind trying to make sense of this strange world. It’s the human mind grappling with its limited sensory perception and inadequate feelers. The more active the attempt to compensate, the better the resulting creative work. What I mean by “better” is that the creative work is more deeply imaginative. It may look familiar but it is obviously transplanted from outside the sphere of human existence.   

One of my life-defining moments had to do with being in a darkened room with a lab instructor doing the double-slit experiment, that classic demonstration showing the wavelike and particle-like properties of matter and light. I was in college then. This was in the late 1990s. I already knew what was going to happen when light passes through the slits, as well as the reason for the weird patterns behind the slits. But to see the results in real life—it was just mindblowing, truly crazy magical that I emerged from it a new person. For a moment there, I was convinced—and still do—that there’s intrinsic weirdness in just about everything in this universe. When reduced to subatomic sizes or magnified to enormous star-scale dimensions, all things won’t behave in a neat, rational Newtonian manner. Writing about the uncanny puts me back inside that darkened room, with that lab instructor and his magical flourish and my younger self wrestling with things that don’t make sense—but they are happening and are existing precisely because they don’t really have to make sense in order to exist.

WFR: What do you gain in your writing from making the unreal matter-of-fact?

KOM: I get to frame the unreal in such a way that it is grounded in my world, my material reality. It is not some lofty, fantastical concept anymore. When I make it matter-of-fact, I take out whatever is sacred from it. And because it is no longer sacred, I can then make it speak my language and have it use my symbols. I get to make it seem familiar and bend it to fit my misanthropic mythology where nonhuman animals reign supreme. Because it seems familiar, I increase my chances of being able to understand it better. To understand is to have power. It is why I get a high after writing something I feel was able to effectively stage the unreal in the realm of the mundane. I guess “staging” is what I’m actually doing. Like in real estate. To sell houses, professional “stagers” stage rooms in a house even if what they are in fact selling is an empty house. They put in a vase of fresh flowers, the vase angled perfectly so it adds interest to the prospective buyer’s line of sight. They put in a nice throw pillow in a strategic place, creased at a perfect spot so that the creased pillow evokes comfort. They put in a mirror at a sweet spot for adding depth and light. More or less, my body of writing is like this—all staging, bringing about livability in a totally empty house. I am offering possibilities, for example, of how a house should be.

WFR: Is distance from narrative or character something you think about?

KOM: Yes, but not as much as being consistent with the interconnectedness I’ve laid out for the various characters and places in my succeeding books.

WFR: How does a story usually come to you? What initial type of inspiration?

KOM: Most of my stories usually spring from a compelling visual that I can’t shake off such as the image of a boy who lives in a house that doubles as his body. It can also be a scene in a movie or a book. A swing that suddenly starts moving even if nobody’s on it—that became “The Playground” in Age of Blight. Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible rock-climbing Dead Horse Point in Utah—that became the dude hanging precariously while holding on to a protruding rockface in “History of the World,” the last story in Age of Blight.

WFR: After inspiration, what makes you excited about your writing?

KOM: That it is finished and may soon be published. That it is a part of me and it is out there in the world and somebody else might read it and see right through me.

WFR: How does your poetry influence your fiction?

KOM: In poetry, I think on a sentence-by-sentence, line-by-line basis. I think of where to cut a line. I pay attention to sounds of successive words. I tell a story by not focusing on telling the story. I am intuiting how a story should be even as I segue into other unrelated stories. This is how I usually write poems. And this mindset influences my fiction mainly by diluting it with needless gunk. For example, I wax poetic when I shouldn’t.     

WFR: In putting together Age of Blight what did you decide to leave out and why?

KOM: I did not decide to leave anything out. The original manuscript was much, much longer than the resulting book. The extraneous parts were cut during editing. The lackluster areas were pointed out to me for rewriting. I’m so glad the book was free of the waxing-poetic needless gunk.

WFR: Is there a reaction to the collection that has horrified or delighted you?

KOM: I am delighted by all reactions to, both good and bad reactions, as well as critical reception of the book.

WFR: What touchstones do you return to in terms of the influence of other writers?

KOM: The visceral horror in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and the first book in the Borderlands series of anthologies. The masterful fusion of the supernatural and psychosis in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper.” The inscrutable time-traveling Other in many of PK Dick’s stories. I also have a long list of ideal specimens for specific scenarios in fiction. Here’s one example. There’s a part in Nomads (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s novelization of John McTiernan’s screenplay) that has long embodied for me the perfect depiction of the inherently evil Other. In that scene, a main character was riffling through photographs he took during a long-ago Arctic expedition. The character was struck once again by one of the photographs. The photo showed a lone figure of an Eskimo. There was something strangely familiar and deeply unsettling about this particular Eskimo. I am paraphrasing, thus the total loss of potency. But the way Yarbro wrote it—I thought it was flawless and thoroughly non-stereotypical.

Some of my all-time favorite short stories include Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar,” Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn” and “The Crowd,” Margaret St. Clair’s “The Perfectionist,” William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” Howard Waldrop’s “Mr. Goober’s Show,” Ian Watson’s “Caucus Winter,” John Shirley’s “Equilibrium,” Dan Chaon’s “The Bees,” Michael Shaara’s “Orphans of the Void,” John Brunner’s “The Clerks of Domesday,” Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks,” E. B. White’s “The Door,” Howard Fast’s “The Large Ant,” Kuttner/Moore’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves…,” and Simon Bewick’s “Special Edition.”

WFR: Can you remember the first time or times you encountered uncanny fiction? What was that like?

KOM: Sometime in my teenage years. I think it was Stephen King’s we-all-float-down-here It. I’ve never really recovered past that point. I knew right then and there that the most important fiction for me had to have something to do with tapping into that cold malignant unknown. Anything less won’t be as satisfying. I worked for like five, six years as a rank-and-file employee in call centers in Manila and Cebu City. In between calls and even while taking calls, I had this little browser window open at the side of the screen. I read like crazy. I read Lovecraft, PK Dick, PDFs of science fiction pulps published in the 1930s-50s. Night after night during those years, I was physically in a swivel chair in a call center, pretending yet again to listen to another first-world complaint. Mentally, I was somewhere else, possibly in the fabled lair of It, where everyone and everything floated.

WFR: Where would you position your work and your career in relation to the contemporary fiction scene? Either genre or non-genre?

KOM: In the international contemporary fiction scene where almost everybody is skilled and intelligent, I position myself and my work as one of the blips in the great radar, a blip that is made unique solely by the fact that my voice is not honed by formal instruction or workshop and that it came from the Philippine south.

In the contemporary fiction scene in my country, however, by principle and because of my geographical location (I am not in Manila), I position myself and my work outside the patronage-politics-based English-language Philippine literary canon. English-language Philippine literature works like an exclusive club for diasporic writing (including works by mostly moneyed Filipino writers who can study in nice universities outside the Philippines, consistently get away with exoticizing Filipino culture in their writings, self-proclaim as an “exile,” or assert a “patriotic” stance in the style of a brown-person version of a white man with savior complex) and (more often than not) realist first-person creative works by writers in Manila, as well as by university-connected writers with sweet ties to Manila. I am not and will never be in this category of Filipino writers writing in English.

Then again, brilliant and innovative English-language Filipino writers thrive outside this system. These writers sometimes make flimsy zines, occasionally self-publish their books, put out works that exhibit broad vision, generally dissociate themselves from the typically private-school-groomed Philippine literati, and take on ambitious and complex themes as opposed to the suffocating realist first-person self-aware miasma. I know some of these Filipino writers in social media. I am with them in spirit. I position myself and my work alongside this group of Filipino writers—alongside them but not within.

WFR: Can you tell us something about either “Beautiful Curse” or “Day of the Builders” that might surprise us? We’re just as happy if you make something up.

WFR: The original “Beautiful Curse” wasn’t as appealing as the final version. Chris of Unnamed Press said that he might cut the story out of the collection. It was a reaction that was perfectly understandable that time and was something I’d be eternally grateful for. I rewrote the story in order to somehow whip it into shape. In the original version, the narrator’s source of torment wasn’t well defined and the ending was an awkward open ending. Now it just hit me that this new ending sounds like that of Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman.”

“Day of the Builders,” on the other hand, is a composite of historical and pre-historic elements—the Russian Empire expansion, the Paleo-Indian civilization of Pre-Columbian America, and Incan religious cosmology as described in The Florentine Codex. I was intentionally vague with the “sickness from the outsiders” bit. I want it to simultaneously insinuate mass hysteria, lack of herd immunity, and the good old supernatural leering its ugly head. The indigenous tribe in that story was in a remote location and therefore would not have acquired immunity to fight off certain diseases common in heavily populated areas. Cultural assimilation, colonization, and industrialization-fueled environmental destruction all go hand in hand in “Day of the Builders.” Although I was fully aware of how the story should end (the more technologically advanced civilization always wins), I still thought these were important issues that should be tackled in fiction. So, I did, and I hoped how I did it worked.

The post The Age of Blight: An Interview with Kristine Ong Muslim appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

***

The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Birding, too, can be a great social activity for many people, even those who spend time alone in blinds or behind giant scopes, waiting for a flicker of movement. You’re still performing this activity within the greater context of something called “birding,” or maybe even a “big year.” As a child, I kept a birding journal in which I would list every bird I saw on our travels. This started in the last year of living in Fiji and continued on through coming to Florida.

These lists were full of mystery to me because when I started them I didn’t know much about birds. To some extent, too, each line with a different bird listed was a secret code for something larger and more forthcoming. Certain moments recorded tersely in my journal open up even today to form my earliest memories: A unique kind of kingfisher in Fiji, a silhouette of a heron in Australia, and, most horrifically, a lolling lump tossed up above the reeds in Kenya, then disappearing again—tossed up, disappearing. It turned out to be a baby ostrich in the clutches of a lion. It’s hard to forget that image.

Birds can be both sympathetic and sinister in fiction because of their quality of seeming both like and unlike us. A person described in fiction as “birdlike” can embody the creepy movement of a Maribou Stork stalking prey or the frothy stillness, the feathered turbulence, of a Great Horned Owl on a tree branch. A birdlike person can be frail or powerful, friendly or menacing. Even a casual question on Facebook about favorite bird stories can elicit dozens of responses, evoke dozens of moods.

When it comes to weird fiction, you might assume that the sinister aspect of birds would be most prevalent, and it’s true that evocative imagery of this nature lies at the heart of stories like Eric Basso’s “The Beak Doctor” and classics like Du Maurier’s “The Birds.” But for the next fortnight, you’ll find evocations of birds that are more complex, and reflect, I think, the ways in which we revere and admire birds.

The stories we’ve chosen for our celebration of birds in fiction range from originals to classic reprints. Our showcase original is Leena Likitalo’s “Ocelia, Ocelia,” which plays with our perceptions of both birds and human beings. The story has an exuberance buttressed by sadness that I find refreshing. It also displays a wild imagination and a wisdom in knowing that imagination requires grounding in something real at times. The details about the birds, the reprise of the opening lines, the way the meaning changes—all of these things make “Ocelia, Ocelia” a unique story that I find hard to classify or to compare to other fiction.

A similar exuberance in a completely different register brings to life Greer Gilman’s “Down the Wall,” which to me dives down into the recesses of language and detail to create another unique approach that succeeds, like Likitalo’s story, in part by the boldness of its rhetoric. “Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance.  Old craneycrows, a skulk of powers.  How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing.” Is there any possibility of a crane-crow after this not informed by those words?

The pirouetting dance begun by Gilman turns into a rough downhill plunge in Brian Evenson’s “The Din of Celestial Birds,” a kind of surreal dream of a horror story that begins with an empty cage and a memory of a feathered body and becomes ever more concrete and yet diaphanous as the story progresses. The opening in some ways seems to evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and to respond to the strangeness of that story by creating an ever deepening abyss.

You’ll also discover more traditional chills and creepiness here, of course. Claude Seignolle’s surprising “The Ghoulbird,” translated by Gio Clairval, offers up not just sumptuous prose and an interesting narrator, but an ultimately complex and harrowing supernatural element. Seignolle is seriously underappreciated in the English-speaking world and “The Ghoulbird” was a translation specifically contracted for our The Weird anthology. We’re happy to offer it here to you online for the first time.

Liz Williams’ “The Hide,” also from The Weird, seems more like a birdwatcher’s approach to the weird, owing less to the Decadents than to contemporary mainstream fiction. With its precise characterization and the way the uncanny is layered into the story, Williams’ evokes the English landscape in a masterful way and leaves the reader feeling extremely unsettled.

Some stories have less of an uncanny element. Michael Blumlein’s tale of love and loneliness. “Bird Walks of New England,” another never before available online, contains at its core a possible mis-sighting or wrong-sighting of a strange bird. This element, almost akin to the heart of M. John Harrison’s classic “Egnaro,” tells us the world we live in is odd and driven by rhythms and seasons we only see the edges of.

I hope you immerse yourself in these stories over the next fortnight, and that you appreciate their range and the different kinds of treasures on offer. And the different views of birds.

The post WFR’s Weird Birds Fortnight appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

As noted in the Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 4, 1984 (p. 112.), edited by Memon, “[The author] thinks that the so-called modern modes of literary expression, like surrealism, symbolism and the absurd, and ideas like existential freedom, have always been present in a very positive manner in our mystical literature. Therefore, as she says, the debate on whether these literary styles have been borrowed from the West or are basically indigenous is mostly irrelevant. The point, as she puts it, is to make use of these modes of expression in a creative way, to assimilate them, and not to take them up merely as a fashion or, worse still, as a matter of plain opportunism.” Asghar’s “short stories can be read as serialized crises of identity, as attempts to come to terms with one’s subconscious compulsions. It is more like trying to acknowledge and relate them to one’s outward, day-to-day existence.”

According to further information in the Annual, Asghar, born in 1938, disappeared from the literary scene for many years after getting married, re-emerging much later writing under her married name, Khalida Husain. Her work has appeared in many anthologies of Urdu and Eastern literature from Oxford University Press, Penguin, and others. I, for one, will be seeking out more of her work.

As for the translator, Muhammad Umar Memon has long been active in writing and translating fiction from Urdu. He also had a distinguished career as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin. You can find out more about him from this fascinating interview at The Short Form. Also, this in-depth review provides more context about Urdu literature, in the context of an anthology edited by Memon.

Many thanks to Anil Menon for bringing this story to our attention and to Memon for allowing us to reprint it.

***

For further context on fiction in Urdu, I interviewed Usman T. Malik, a Pakistani writer of weird fiction who lives Florida. His novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn is forthcoming at Tor.com in April of this year and he is currently a finalist for the Nebula Award.

Weird Fiction Review: Urdu exists primarily in Pakistan and parts of India. Are there regional differences?

Usman T. Malik: Yes. Several regional dialects exist because of seepage of vocabulary from local languages such as Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, Seraiki, Balochi et cetera. Spoken Urdu in India is called Hindi and has more Sanskrit words than Urdu spoken in Pakistan. Hindi is written in a different script, however, than Urdu, which is written in a Persio-Arabic style called Nastaliq.

WFR: Are there specific (Pakistani) literary traditions in terms of Urdu?

UTM: Historically, Urdu literature was dominated by poetry, whose early proponent was the great writer and musical genius Amir Khusro. Khusro was a mystic polymath credited with having systematized northern Indian classical music. He is also said to have invented the sitar and tabla, while at the same time produced massive amount of Urdu poetry. His influence was on both the language and its literature, and his couplets have influenced later Urdu writers tremendously.

Early prose in Urdu was mostly epics (daastan) and literary memoirs (tazkara). Short story (afsaana) and the novel came later. Mirat-al-aroos, The Bride’s Mirror (1868) by Deputy Nazeer Ahmad is usually considered the first Urdu novel.

WFR: What would you imagine are the main difficulties or issues in translating Urdu to English?

UTM: It depends on the age of the manuscript, I’d say. The farther back in time we go, the more ornate and contextual the writing becomes. For example, certain maxims that were commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth century don’t make much sense now. With time and misspeaking, they’ve changed–much like in English where a misspoken word used at large slowly becomes part of the linguistic canon.

Realistically and generally speaking, the two big hindrances might be deficiency of skilled translators proficient in both English and Urdu, and money. In Pakistan at least we’ve been watching a class divide wherein because of lack of standardization of education in the country, rich and upper middle class kids go to English medium schools while poor kids go to Urdu medium schools. This is problematic on several levels but in terms of literary loss, we’re losing the urbane literary ‘moderate’ who feels at home in both literatures and cultures.

WFR: Have you encountered fantastical or SF-nal works originally written in Urdu? Anything in particular you might recommend?

UTM: Urdu has a long history of fantastical literature. Two of the great epics are Daastan-e-Amir Hamza (translated into English as ‘The Adventures of Amir Hamza’ by Musharraf Ali Farooqi) and Talism Hoshruba (which Musharraf is in the process of translating). An incredible dark fiction/horror novel is Kaala Jadoo, Black Magic, by M.A. Rahat.

WFR: Do you have a favorite work in Urdu?

UTM: Several. Instead of one work, I’ll give you two poets and two short story writers: Mirza Ghalib and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (poets). Munshi Premchand and Saadat Hassan Manto (short story writers).

The post Khalida Asghar’s “The Wagon” and Fiction in Urdu appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This week on Weirdfictionreview.com, we’re revisiting our coverage of Alfred Kubin, and his masterpiece The Other Side (1908), about a strange city and the dream-like events that occur there.

I talked more about my enthusiasm for this novel on NPR’s To The Best of Our Knowledge this past weekend. The Dedalus edition of The Other Side was reprinted late last year.

There are several interesting facts about the book and the writer.

• The Other Side has a cult status partly because it’s long been a favorite of a variety of writers and artists. It would be hard to believe, for example, that Mervyn Peake had not read Kubin prior to writing his Gormenghast novels. I would be willing to bet the great Angela Carter had also read Kubin, along with Leonora Carrington, before writing her novel The War of Dreams, also titled The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
• Kubin had been commissioned to illustrate a book of Edgar Allen Poe novellas by a Munich publisher in 1907.
• Not long after publication of The Other Side, Franz Kafka read and enjoyed it, and then later used elements from it in the creation of his own The Castle. (Kubin might have been aware of Kafka’s early work, as well.)
• Kubin also created illustrations for the influential early German SF novel Lesabendio by Paul Scheerbart, among others.

Kubin was a wonderful example of a writer and artist who had very fine control of technique, but also allowed his subconscious to lead his creative expression. The result is unique in fiction—and in art.

The post Celebrating Alfred Kubin’s 1908 Novel “The Other Side” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

(The city of Pearl, from The Other Side)

The work of Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) fits loosely within an Expressionist/Decadent/proto-Surrealist tradition. A highly praised artist, he produced only one major work of fiction: The Other Side, published in 1908, and excerpted in our The Weird compendium as an early precursor or influencer of modern weird fiction. Although still underrated, the novel has managed to retain a cult status simply because it has long been a favorite of a variety of writers and artists. It would be hard to believe, for example, that Mervyn Peake had not read Kubin prior to writing his Gormenghast novels. (The Other Side is perhaps most akin in tone to Peake’s Titus Alone.)

The details of Kubin’s life relevant to his fiction are these: his mother died when he was ten, he had a sexualized relationship with an older, pregnant woman when he was eleven, and his father was a tyrant whose death in part triggered the writing of The Other Side. Kubin, in his nonfiction, is amazingly frank about all of these personal issues, giving us rare insight into motivation and influence.

These events, as well as unhappy romances, contributed to his uneasy, melancholic state, which manifested itself in unique visions, which then manifested in his art as the truest way of portraying the nightmares occurring in his head. Kubin had no internal editor telling him “no, this is too much.” Moreover, he may not even have realized that what he was creating might startle people. Did it amuse or horrify him when gentlemen and ladies who viewed his art reportedly fainted?

There’s the sense, too, in reading the praise of Kubin’s contemporaries that they found him too rough, too flawed, and yet it’s impossible to separate out the “good” from the “bad”–a condition common to some of the best “weird” writers and artists. As Austrian critic Richard Schaukal noted in a 1903 review, “He has not studied drawing. That is clear at a glance. But what does that tell us when confronted with this stunning oeuvre!” Given these underpinnings of Kubin’s inspiration, it’s perhaps remarkable that The Other Side has as much story as it does; not merely a series of images strung together, it is a true masterpiece of rising tension and horror.

The Other Side tells the tale of a Munich draftsman asked by an old schoolmate named Patera to visit the newly established Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. Patera rules the Dream Kingdom from the capital city of Pearl. The wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with his wife through Constantinople through Batum, Batu, Krasnovodsk, and Samarkand—Samarkand being the last of any identifying landmarks on their journey.

The narrator soon finds that the Dream Kingdom is, well, a kingdom of dreams. People experience or live “only in moods” and shape all outer being at will “through the maximum possible cooperative effort.” A huge wall keeps out the world and “the sun never shone, never were the moon or the stars visible at night.…Here, illusions simply were reality.”

Over time, strange rituals and aberrations have sprung up. Pearl also shifts in odd ways, and in this sense has a kinship with M. John Harrison’s far-future Viriconium, which also functions from more of a metaphorical than a chronological foundation. This doesn’t bother the narrator at first, but as the city’s changes become more and more grotesque, it’s clear that the Dream Kingdom is faltering, descending into madness.

Despite the claustrophic atmosphere and unseen horrors that form the emotional foundation of the novel, The Other Side is remarkable not just for its vivid imagery, laden with surrealistic subtext, but for how the relatively modern aspects of the novel—American tourists, for example—are perfectly integrated into a timeless, festering milieu. The battle that occurs between the irrational and rational as the Dream Kingdom disintegrates takes on an updated Grand Guignol quality that oddly enough has the texture of modern-day war. It’s almost as if the novel channels Apocalypse Now by way of Hieronymus Bosch.

Where did The Other Side come from, other than from Kubin’s visionary art? Consider this tangle of influence: Kubin had been commissioned to illustrate a book of Edgar Allen Poe novellas by a Munich publisher in 1907. At roughly the same time, Kubin met with Gustav Meyrink to discuss illustrations for Meyrink’s novel-in-progress The Golem. When Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Not long after publication of The Other Side, Franz Kafka read and enjoyed it, and then later used elements from it in the creation of his own The Castle. (Kubin might have been aware of Kafka’s early work, as well.)

Labels like “outsider artist” aside, Kubin was definitely connected to the creative communities of his day. Indeed, when Kubin arrived in Munich,Germany, to study art as a teenager, who should he be discovered by than the iconic Franz Blei, who was also one of Kafka’s friends.

Blei gives us a semi-amused description of Kubin as a “frail young boy who was always dressed in black and had a pale face that was always straining a little to grow dark and pretending to be as shy as a young world that had been dragged from a hollow into the light.”   (Blei was a bit mischievous, his bestiary of modern literature describing Meyrink, for example, as “the only mooncalf who dropped to earth and which is now in captivity…Officers of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and German Deputies wanted to ban the public exhibition of the Meyrink because, so they said, it gave a distorted reflection of them in its one big eye.”)

That Kubin was a creator who either “was compelled by forces that guided his hand,” or trained himself to be so compelled, is clear even from his description of his reaction to an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich in 1882:

I grew moody…And now I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white–it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.*

In that context for Kubin’s inspiration, there’s perhaps no finer evocation of the effect Kubin achieves in his art and in The Other Side than this 1903 description from the Berliner Illustrirte: “This art always dreams of the last things in apocalyptic fantasy; its beings and forms are not of this world, and you cannot measure them by the ruler of correctness or anatomical possibility; they are complete distortion, total gruesome exaggeration; just as their landscapes dream away in the eternal twilight behind time and space. But you will always find one thing in this art, which dispenses with every depiction, every illustration of being, it has a convincing power to make things present and will grip you and sweep you away, conveying to you ideas and moods of uncanny reality that will burn themselves into your brain as if with hot iron punches…the suggestion of this foreboding art of the soul, the rare, the distant, the lustfully dreadful…is always powerful and enduring.”

The Other Side still appeals to a modern reader because of these qualities, after many novels initially seen as more enduring have faded from memory.

All quotes not attributed taken from the excellent and highly recommended Alfred Kubin: Drawings 1897–1909 (published by Neue Galerie).

The post 101 Weird Writers Preview: Alfred Kubin appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Mike Allen first made a real splash with his unique Clockwork Phoenix series, which he edited in addition to Mythic Delirium. But he’s an interesting and unsettling writer of dark, weird fiction as well, with a first collection out that’s beginning to get some buzz. Library Journal just gave his Unseaming a starred review. You can buy the collection here. Recently, I interviewed Mike about his work and weird fiction via email.

When did you start writing?
I’ve made stabs and feints at writing since grade school, but it was never a constant thing. For much of my youth I thought I was going to be an artist when I grew up, and I started out college as an art major before eventually figuring out that my passion lay with writing. (Though my preoccupations in art and writing were much the same; see one of my old drawings below as an example, heh.)

What drew you to horror and weird fiction?
There’s a broad reason and a narrow reason, both rooted in morbid curiosity and childhood trauma. The broad reason: I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the dark and the monsters in it. In fact, one of the stories in Unseaming stems from a nightmare I had as a toddler. This part of my nature metastasized permanently in the third grade, when our teacher read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to us for Halloween, setting off night terrors that bedeviled me for years. Becoming a connoisseur of horror and finally a writer of horror made it possible for me to regain control over my own imagination.

The narrow reason results specifically from the intense adoration I had for J.R.R. Tolkien in my pre-teen years. I read everything Tolkien, not just his works, but works about him, and even the works of writers who were discussed in essays about and critiques of Tolkien. The late Colin Wilson, in his treatise “Tree by Tolkien,” made much ado about how Tolkien’s writing compared to some fantasy author named H.P. Lovecraft. In the Appalachian town where I grew up it wasn’t easy to get my hands on books by any out-of-print writer, but when the chance to read a bunch of Lovecraft finally arrived I pounced on it, thinking he was someone in Tolkien’s vein. And given what my first exposure to Poe did to me – oh, boy, was I in for a shock!

But following right on the heels of that, tracing connections away from Lovecraft the way I had from Tolkien, I began exploring the wild ranges of modern fantasy short fiction, which is where the weird thrives.

Your work can be very disturbing in a way that’s graphic, but also subtle. Do you have a good sense of when to go in a particular direction when it comes to the horrific elements?
For me that stuff is based more on gut feeling than careful construction: I’m really hard to scare now, at least when it comes to reading stories and watching movies, so I try to figure out what would get through my own defenses. Usually it’s not a matter of leaving everything off stage or putting everything on stage, but some artful combination of the two. Or put another way, if what you have seen is this horrific, just imagine what’s still waiting in the wings…

Where’s the autobiography in your work?
It’s there in every story, but it’s chopped up and recombined like Frankenstein’s monster with anecdotes I’ve heard, things I’ve read, encounters I’ve had as a journalist, and stuff that I just flat out made up.

Does your editing inform your fiction? And does it ever get in the way of your fiction?
It’s strange: the fiction that I pick for Clockwork Phoenix and Mythic Delirium is on the whole quite different from my own stories. I tend to write in two modes: contemporary horror or really over-the-top surreal speculative fiction. You’ll find examples of those in the books I edit, but also a number of quieter stories that seem to fall completely outside my writerly nature. I’m perfectly willing to showcase them but I have no urge to produce them.

Certainly editing a book can get in the way of writing one, especially as my projects, both as an editor and as a writer, keep getting more ambitious. But, I actually tried to put editing projects aside in order to focus more on writing, and found that the absence drove me nuts, just as going too long without writing drives me nuts. So my creative life is now one vast wonky scheme that has me hopping from project to project to project. Like Marcello Mastroianni at the end of Fellini’s 8½, I choose it all.

What drew you to write a sequel to your Nebula-nominated story? And was it difficult to re-enter that milieu?
Originally I had no plans to write a sequel to “The Button Bin,” but an email exchange with a film producer caused me to think about whether it could be expanded. The creative part of my brain started worrying away at the problem, and of all things, as I was listening to “Lux Aeterna,” known to many as the theme from the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, an image came to me of a man whose flesh was violently unraveling, like a spinning, flapping window shade, revealing nothing underneath but more and more layers of flesh, the stitched-together, coiled up skins of thousands. I knew then that the tale would have another chapter. Other scenes grew from that first seed, and my job, essentially, was to explain them: who were these people I was seeing, how did they end up in these terrifying predicaments? That part, actually, turned out to be uncharacteristically easy. I was on fire with the sequel, “The Quiltmaker,” from beginning to end.

What elements or qualities do you love in short fiction, personally?
The economy; the relative freedom to experiment and to deviate from commercially acceptable things (such as happy endings! or tidy resolutions, even); the sense of intimacy, like you’re sitting at the table with the writer as she spins a tale.

It’s funny: you’d think, as crammed with activity as all our lives have become, we’d value the short story more. Instead it seems like everyone wants to speed read long novels, without much concern for actual comprehension of the materials so ingested. I lack the ability to speed read, and I consider that a blessing, and also a practical reason to appreciate short fiction.

The post Mike Allen’s Unsettling Collection “Unseaming” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.