“The mere touch of cold philosophy.”   –   Keats

Reviewed in this column:
Love Among the Particles and Other Stories by Norman Lock (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013)
The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla; trans. Mitch Ginsburg (Tor Books, 2013)
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013)
The President’s Hat by Antoine Laurain; trans. Gallic Books (Gallic Books, 2013)
Bitter Orange by Marshall Moore (Signal 8 Press, 2013)
Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories by Karen Russell (Knopf, 2013)

Selecting short story collections for this column is fraught with difficulty. I’ve lost count of the number of books sent to me on the basis that they have a weird story in them. But one weird short story does not a collection make, and insofar as I make any rules for this column beyond exercising personal taste, for a collection to earn its place I want the bulk of the stories to show that they participate in an aesthetic of the weird.

For an example of the kind of short story collection that does pass my test, let us turn to Love Among the Particles and Other Stories (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013), the latest collection from Norman Lock. I was initially a little put off by the title, which carried with it strong overtones of the scientific rather than the fantastic, and by the first story in the collection, ‘The Monster in Winter’ which, while undoubtedly well-written, seemed to lean rather heavily on Robert L Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for its effect. Indeed, at times, I wondered if Lock wasn’t relying on Stevenson’s original to do his work for him. However, as I read on it became clear that I was doing Lock a disservice. He is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself, often with a first-person protagonist, who may or may not be called Norman. At its most obvious, it surfaces in stories like ‘The Monster in Winter’ which picks up where Stevenson left off and imagines an afterlife for Edward Hyde, in which an unscrupulous young American called Drayton attempts to exploit Hyde through a dramatic recitation of his own confession, only to find himself in turn exploited. Except that Lock seems to have turned Stevenson’s story inside out.

Lock takes a similar approach with Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, in ‘Each According to His Sentence’. ‘The Captain is Sleeping’ and ‘A Theory of Time’ both seem to me to resonate with Bruno Schulz’s ‘At the Sign of the Hourglass Sanatorium, and in particular with that peculiar railway journey that precedes the narrator’s strange experiences in the sanatorium itself. First, we have a narrator roaming an enormous ship, searching for a young woman whose name seems to be constantly transforming itself into something new, almost but not quite like the previous name, and meeting people who seem to have no idea where they are, how long they’ve been on board or indeed, where the rest of the ship goes. The ship is apparently laying a cable but when the narrator finally reaches the cable-laying apparatus, it is to discover the captain’s mother knitting a cable from black wool. What does this mean? One thinks in part of the child’s knitting dolly, endlessly spewing out a cable that has no real use. One thinks also of an unholy engagement between modernity and futility, symbolised by this vast ship that seems to encompass the entire world but for no obvious reason – where is the cable being laid to? And from where? There is no answer other than that the narrator must take up the task rather, one suspects, as others have done before him, a task stretching out to infinity, rather like that cable.

‘A Theory of Time’ actually takes us onto a railway train – again, it appears to be a motif of sorts for the world itself, travelling onwards, ever onwards, meeting people coming the other way. ‘I begin to suspect we are travelling to no purpose’ says the narrator near the story’s opening. It is perhaps an obvious thought – the purposelessness of his journey set against everything we know about the nature of railways, ordered, running to timetable, their destinations and intermediate stopping places laid out – yet there is something wonderfully strange about this journey that offsets any sense we might have of ‘yes, of course, been done before’.  And Lock does this time and again, taking a trope that seems familiar to readers of the weird but analysing it in the fiercest detail.

‘From what I have heard of dreaming,’ says one character in ‘Ideas of Space’, ‘it is a lawless and absurd place’ and the same could well be said of these stories. While they possess an internal logic of sorts, their grip on what we might know as reality is more than a little tenuous. We might easily float away if we did not concentrate on the tale being told, but the manner of the tale’s telling demands that we pay very close attention. ‘I noticed how he attributed a space to dreaming and I thought this justifiable now that my own dreams were becoming more spacious’ says another character in the same story. And the dreams in these stories are indeed spacious, yet underlying their spaciousness is a densely knotted critical fabric; Lock constantly interrogates the business of writing fiction, confusing the role of writer and participant. When Roland Barthes spoke of the death of the author it was only to propose that everyone was in part author of the story she was reading, endlessly reformulating it, and this is something that Lock almost insists on, so open is he about pointing out the fictionality of everything we look at.

While Norman Lock addresses the artificiality of fiction, Ofir Touché Gafla’s The World of the End; trans. Mitch Ginsburg (Tor Books, 2013) might be said to address the fictionality of life. The World of the End was Gafla’s first novel, originally published in Israel in 2004. As the English title might hint, it is intended as a playful novel. In particular, it plays with a certain trope of the fantast, one familiar to fans of Peter S Beagle’s A Fine And Private Place, that of a functioning afterlife. If you’ve not read Beagle’s novel (and really, if you haven’t, you ought to do yourself a favour and get on with it), it concerns Jonathan Rebeck, who has been living in the Yorkchester cemetery for nearly twenty years, because, well, it seems better than anything else on offer. Rebeck is fed by a raven who steals food for him, as ravens are wont to do. Rebeck befriends two new ghosts, Michael Morgan, who strongly suspects his wife poisoned him, and Laura Durand, a victim of a traffic accident. As they fall in love, so Rebeck finds himself befriended by the newly widowed Gertrude Klapper, though he hasn’t realised it yet. This charming posthumous idyll is interrupted when Michael’s body is to be exhumed, because his wife has been charged with his murder.

It is a trope that can be traced through goodness knows how many other novels, including Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which is very much an homage to Beagle. But whereas Beagle and Gaiman incline to the whimsical (not that there is anything wrong with whimsy, and they both do it very well) Gafla’s novel reminds me rather more of Kevin Brockmeier’s bleaker The Brief History of the Dead (although Brockmeier’s novel was published in 2006) where the dead enjoy an afterlife in the City only so long as there are people alive to remember them. Gafla’s characters do not vanish with memory; instead, the question is, why do the living suppose the dead will remember them?

Gafla’s protagonist is Ben Mendelssohn, an epilogist by trade; that is, a man who specialises in endings, supplying them for writers who don’t know how to end their scripts or novels. He also describes himself as a ‘righter’ rather than a writer; insofar as he is known, he is known for being unknown. This already hints that we are in a setting that is perhaps more fabulistic than realistic, focusing on the world as a teleological artefact. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that Ben’s beloved wife, Marian, has lost her life in what are described initially as ‘bizarre aeronautical circumstances’, and that fifteen months after her death, he has decided to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Their friends are delighted, seeing this as a sign of a new beginning for Ben, and are consequently taken aback when, during the culminating firework display, Ben shoots himself, his intention being to join his wife in the afterlife he presumes must exist, and where he is certain he will be reunited with Marian.

The more one looks at it, the more the idea of an afterlife seems so odd, and I say that not just because, philosophically speaking, I don’t believe in survival beyond death. According to some religious traditions, we will meet our ‘loved ones’ in the life that is presumed to come after, while other religious traditions suggest we will be reincarnated, going through many lives before we are somehow perfected. The assumption, though, is that this is not it, this is not all there is. There is something else we move on to, or else we experience some sort of release, some moment of ineffable certainty.

Ben, driven by an apparently simple desire to be reunited with Marian (though pausing long enough to spend a year working out so that he gives her the surprise of his brand new, well honed body, after she commented on his bagginess) pulls the trigger and waits to see what happens next. What happens is that Ben finds himself in a reception centre, along with all the others who died on the same day as him. The world of the end, it turns out, is akin to a slickly managed retirement community, or maybe a cruise ship, somewhere where your every whim and desire can be catered to, within firmly delineated parameters. Everyone who dies on the same day is assigned their own room in the same building, easily locatable. Their new existence is marked by all sorts of ‘benefits’ and yet, looking at the lists of things no longer permissible, one begins to wonder if this shiny afterlife isn’t just a little bit restrictive. There is the mandatory nudity, to take one example, and the emphatic insistence that one shouldn’t move house, because it’s tidier for the bureaucrats (though people do – there is a thriving economy of rule subversion). Most startling of all, for Ben at least, Marian is not, as he’d imagined, waiting for him. Although the names of new arrivals are read out, he learns that no one ever comes to meet them. And even when couples are reunited elsewhere, it’s very different to how Ben imagined it. Undeterred, given he cannot envisage his life without Marian, Ben embarks on a search for her, aided by the afterlife’s very own private investigator, the Mad Hop.

Ben’s journey through this glossy afterlife is a novel in itself, a guided tour round death, orchestrated by the Mad Hop, whose skills as a PI are somewhat doubtful, but who clearly sees what Ben does not, that Ben simply cannot bear to let go. Ben is so engaged in the drama of his own life that it has never occurred to him that people have lives when they are not under his gaze and that, with the best will in the world, even he cannot know what his wife is really thinking. In part, his search seems to be orchestrated by others to show him the truth he cannot yet accept, moving back and forth across the border that death represents, challenging our assumptions about what it means in terms of absence and separation. Death as a kind of endless cruise, so relentlessly overflowing with opportunity it’s almost unbearable, says a lot about the way so many people live by convincing themselves that death will be better. Yet, as Gafla seems to suggest, all of this relies very heavily on the dead accepting death for what it is, and indeed the living accepting that beyond death things must inevitably be different.

‘Not to know yourself’, Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby (2013), ‘is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotions’, and this is certainly true of Ben. His profession brings with it a deliberate self-effacement and he has compensated by placing himself firmly at the centre of his own emotional drama, to the point where he can see nothing but himself. But he is by no means the only one. The reader is also privy to a broader web of connections that Ben for the most part cannot access. Galfa seems to delight in exploring the ways in which lives intersect without people being aware of what’s going on, or indeed the stories they tell themselves about one another. Take Ann, a small, unassuming woman, who watches Ben every day as he works out, falls in love with him, is surprised to receive a bunch of flowers from him … except that another man at the gym has assumed she is watching him … and in turn it seems that his brother might have been responsible for Marian’s death. Except that Marian appears to be still alive. And Ann herself is not entirely what she might seem to be. To herself she is a creature of infinite mercy, easing the terminally ill and those too badly injured to recover into death by persuading their relations to agree to euthanasia. To at least one person who encounters her, Ann is a monster, intruding on private relationships.

Gafla delights in teasing our imaginations and our narrative expectations with such revelations, and clearly loves intense narrative complications. His novel overflows with the improbable, and he is not at all afraid to experiment with different kinds of literary convention under the one narrative roof. On the one hand, The World of the End may be a kind of moral tale, in which Ben, the arch-executor of endings has to come to terms with his own endings; on the other, it is a truly chaotic journey through the complications of human life. And it is that absurd, surrealist sense that pushes this novel into the ‘weird’ for me, in particular because it is, ironically, so seemingly straightforward on the surface. It is the effect of the accumulation of detail that prompts the reader to start thinking ‘hang on …’. It is a rich and involving read.

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (Reagan ArthurBooks, 2013) may, to some, sit oddly in a column on weird fiction. To all intents and purposes it is a realist narrative, concerning the lives of the Todd family, Hugh and Sylvie, and their children, in particular, Ursula, ‘little she-bear’, born in a snowstorm in 1910. However, as will quickly become apparent, this novel is not quite what it purports to be. How to account, for example, for the way in which the narrative revisits the circumstances of Ursula’s birth, over and over. She dies, strangled at birth by her umbilical cord; she survives, thanks to the doctor’s quick thinking and a pair of surgical scissors; she survives, thanks to her mother’s foresightedness and a pair of surgical scissors, and so on and so on. Time and again, and I use that phrase quite advisedly, the novel comes back to this first moment of Ursula’s life, trying out variations on the theme of her presence in the world. But this is not the only point in Ursula’s life that is open to negotiation. As a teenager, she is raped, avoids being raped, is kissed but not attacked, becomes pregnant, avoids becoming pregnant. A little later, we see her exploring the various options open to a girl of her class during the interwar years – university education, much to her mother’s disgust; secretarial work, marriage – and then looping back round to begin again. Yet each time the story begins again, so to speak, more and more is stripped away, with the focus more and more on the differences in the details, or some detail, irrelevant in one time, suddenly comes into sharper focus in another version.

Ursula’s progress through life is choppy, with some moments more likely than others to dissolve into a series of possibilities – the Second World War is particularly notable for this, not surprisingly, but nothing happens between 1947 and 1967. There are versions of her life in which Ursula seems to be entirely unaware that there have been alternatives, and others in which she is seen as possessing some sort of second sight, or displays a sense of déjà vu, and one in which she is all too acutely aware of what has gone before, and in which she directly acts to prevent what she believes will happen.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Life after Life has received a mixed response in the critical press; my favourite is still the three commentators on a radio arts programme literally unable to get to grips with the novel’s structure, whereas any reader familiar with the fantastic will have immediately worked out what is going on. My first thought, when I began reading this novel, was that it obviously had some sort of relationship to J.B. Priestley’s time plays, Time and the Conways in particular, moving back and forth in time, accompanied by an apprehension, which can’t be fully articulated, that there is something else going on, and the briefest of glimpses of other possibilities. Priestley was influenced by J W Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, in which Dunne theorised that all moments in time are taking place simultaneously; it is only human consciousness that means we perceive time at a fixed rate. Only through dreams are we able to perceive the various possibilities. This in turn throws open all sorts of possibilities as to what’s happening in Life after Life. Ursula, sensible, methodical, alert to everything around her, stands like a quietly mythic figure, the pivot of a kaleidoscope of potentialities. 

Life After Life is not an overtly ‘weird’ novel; indeed, it is, if one is so minded, possible to read it simply as a commentary on the position of women in the early twentieth century, and how young women attempted to subvert the strictures placed on them by earlier generations. Yet, having said that, it’s also an interesting example of how writers who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves as ‘genre’ writers, or whatever term we’re using this week, can take certain ideas and tropes and use them in subtle and interesting ways. In which case, Life after Life is certainly of interest to readers of this column, rather as J.B. Priestley should be. And even if you remain unconvinced by that argument, it is still an exquisitely well-written novel and worth your attention for that.

Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat; trans. Gallic Books (Gallic Books, 2013) is delightfully quirky, another of those novels that could be read, just about, as a realist narrative, except that, to my mind at least, there is a discernible thread of strangeness in it. This depends on whether you believe that an article of clothing can be somehow imbued with mysterious powers. Most of us, I think, have an article of clothing that feels somehow special, or different. It might be lucky socks or a jacket that makes us feel particularly good when we wear it, or a much loved shirt or a sweater … there’s a pair of ankle boots I still miss. It’s probably superstitious nonsense, but suppose, just suppose it wasn’t.

One night, Daniel Mercier, a frustrated middle-ranking executive in Paris, decides to treat himself to a meal. His wife and child are away, he’s despondent about his work, he needs some kind of fillip in his life. Settled in an expensive restaurant, worrying a little about the likely size of his bill, he is amazed when Francois Mitterrand and a couple of aides are seated at the next table. Mercier spends the evening in a daze, feeling as though he has somehow been touched, even briefly and tangentially, by greatness. After Mitterrand’s group leaves, Daniel discovers that the President has left behind his black Homburg. In a moment of … insanity? who knows … Daniel keeps the hat for himself.

Who knows what strange powers might permeate the hat but for Daniel the transformation is sudden and miraculous. In a meeting he finds the confidence to disagree with his manager which brings him to the attention of the departmental head, and suddenly Daniel finds himself promoted beyond his wildest dreams, heading his own department in Rouen. On the day he and his family travel to Rouen, Daniel leaves the hat on the train.

Thus the hat passes from one person to another, and a series of remarkable transformations that occur: a young woman has the courage to finally dump her married lover and pursue other dreams, a famous perfume-maker emerges from years of depression, inspired to devise a new fragrance, while yet another temporary owner of the hat decides suddenly to start collecting modern art.  All through this, Daniel is trying to retrieve the hat … and so is someone else.

This is a delightful piece of whimsy (and as I said, there is always a place for whimsy) but there is something more to it. We might wonder whether the hat itself does possess mysterious properties. Has Mitterrand’s power somehow permeated the hat, to the extent that it can influence subsequent wearers? Or is it merely that the hat is a particularly satisfying item of clothing? Or is there something peculiarly transformative about headgear in general – the old slogan runs, ‘if you want to get ahead, get a hat?’ Is it the act of appropriation in unusual circumstances that enables people, having made the first step, to free themselves sufficiently to utter a truth or recognise something they’ve hitherto concealed in themselves. Is the hat just possibly a magical item? That’s for the novel to answer, or not, but it is well worth the reading to find out. As weird fiction goes, it’s very low-key but utterly irresistible.

Marshall Moore’s Bitter Orange (Signal 8 Press, 2013) is a much darker prospect than The President’s Hat but for a good part of the novel it exhibits a similar low-key approach to its weirdness. The novel begins with an almost farcical encounter in a small convenience store in San Francisco. As he tries to avoid dropping a bottle of wine, Seth Harrington manages to knock several other bottles off the shelf. The woman serving in the store goes berserk with rage as Seth and his flatmate, Sang-hee, try to clear up the mess. In exasperation, Seth stashes a bottle of wine in his rucksack and leaves without paying. Incredibly, given that she suddenly appeared at his elbow while he was doing this, the woman didn’t notice.

About two-thirds of the novel is devoted to Seth’s coming to terms with the notion that something odd is going on. He can somehow convince people he’s given them a high-denomination bill when he’s given them a dollar He can somehow make himself simply not be there but only in very specific circumstances, many of which involve acts of violence at odds with Seth’s usual demeanour. Somehow, an element of illegality is always involved. Seth sees it in terms of becoming invisible but that’s too unsubtle a description of what’s going on, if indeed anything is going on.

Having convinced himself that he possesses this peculiar ability Seth attempts to verify it, and then enlists Sang-hee’s help to document it. The results, as they so often are in such circumstances, are mixed. Sang-hee simply doesn’t see what happens, although he cannot deny that, for example, Seth has managed to acquire a new iPod for him with very little outlay. When Seth beays a man unconscious with a chair, defending Sang-hee, or so he believes, Sang-hee simply doesn’t see it happen. Is it Seth’s imagination? Is it merely coincidence? Is it that Seth is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of 9/11. Or is it something else? “He theorized time had sped up, compressing the episode into a flash of existence too brief to perceive. This theory frightened Seth more than anything else had.”

What is at issue for Seth is that his mysterious invisibility comes upon him in moments of moral ambiguity, the points at which he is most likely to be able to get away with something that is wrong, be it passing a dollar bill as a hundred-dollar bill, a voucher as a cinema ticket, or at moments when he can get away with something like stealing a bottle of wine or any number of other things.

Having said that, what is most interesting to me is the way in which Seth struggles to come to terms with possessing this weird skill, and trying to figure out what he should do with it. Is he condemned to a life of crime, should he decide to exercise the ability some more, or is it possible to direct it in a morally responsible way? What starts as a way of mildly amusing himself by freaking people out becomes a moral burden when he sets out to test what he is capable of doing, and wins himself a fortune on the gambling tables of Las Vegas, a fortune he can’t realistically claim. His life is governed by an inexplicable ability. He has no way of accounting for it, can’t get rid of it even assuming he could explain it. It dominates him and he has no idea what to do. “The horror of his situation struck him: if he could turn imperfectly invisible in morally grey moments, what were other people capable of doing?”

And here, I have to say that the novel’s resolution is, to my mind, rather less than the build-up to the moment of revelation. Others may find the ending less unsatisfactory than I did, but to me it felt rushed, as though Moore, having got this far, didn’t know where to go next, and transformed a slow-moving meditative piece into something faintly preposterous by suddenly inserting a wham-bam denouement. It feels too as though there may be a sequel in the offing, something I don’t think the novel really needs. And yet, I still find Bitter Orange sufficiently fascinating, up to that point, to recommend it, with reservations.

Having begun the column with a short-story collection, I shall end with another, Vampires in the Lemon Grove; Stories by Karen Russell (Knopf, 2013). Her earlier collection, St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves attracted many favourable reviews, while Swamplandia! is a wonderful novel for lovers of the weird. Nor does this new collection disappoint.

I’ve been trying to think how best to characterise the stories. Lately, I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds (2011), and though my disagreements with her perceptions about science fiction and fantasy must wait for another time and place, I find that her brief observations on horror useful here. Plain, ordinary horror, to paraphrase Atwood, is something you might meet in the streets. The problem here is that in certain lights, Karen Russell might be regarded as a horror writer. Some stories, such as ‘The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis’, about an unearthly child and an even more unearthly scarecrow, press up very close to something I understand as horror, as does ‘The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach’. ‘Reeling For the Empire’ reminds me more of something like William Sansom’s ‘The Long Sheet’ while ‘Proving Up’ is a strangely mesmerising account of frontier homesteaders who seem to have moved far beyond the American West. Russell’s subject matter may vary – ‘The Barn At the End of Our Term’ features American presidents reincarnated as horses (no, really), while the eponymous ‘Vampires in the Lemon Grove’ is about precisely that but is also a very sharp meditation on the representation of vampirism, and ‘The New Veterans’ concerns a masseuse who finds herself tapping into her clients’ experiences through contact with their skin – but what particularly marks Russell’s work, I think, is an intense interest in people, how they respond to a situation rather than the situation itself, although there is no doubt that Russell also has an eye for the quirky and unusual story. At times I feel we’re heading into Kelly Link territory, in terms of topic, though Russell’s telling of each story is more conventional than Link’s would be.

These are people with very human dilemmas, yes, even Clyde the vampire. For all he is struggling with a desire to drink human blood (though Magreb, his wife, repeatedly tells him that vampires don’t actually need to drink blood), this is a story about struggling with the nature of desire and addiction rather than a story about blood-sucking. Similarly, ‘Reeling for the Empire’ can be read, on the one hand, as an horrific tale in which women are transformed into human silkworms, but on the other, one might think of it too as a commentary on the total factory culture that exists in certain countries. ‘The New Veterans’ deals with Beverley, a trained masseuse who treats Iraqi war veterans, and finds herself embroiled in the strange world of Derek, who apparently has the death of a comrade tattooed across his back. But strange as that scenario might seem, it’s only the beginning of a story which draws a comparison between the malleability of flesh and of memory.

This is a rare collection too in that I find it hard to pick a favourite. ‘Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating’ is perhaps a little weaker than the others, though the title more than makes up for that. Otherwise, the sheer variety of the stories makes every one a winner. Russell has a distinctive storytelling ‘voice’ but draws her ideas from all over. I like her way of somehow domesticating the ideas without taming them, rendering them in such a way that one can accept the story without immediately thinking ‘what?’, only to realise a moment or two later that actually, this really is the most peculiar thing you’ve read lately, until you move onto the next one.

Looking back over this selection of novels and short-story collections, I’m struck yet again at how capricious the weird can be, how it manifests itself in the most unexpected ways, how it is both disturbing and yet transformative, and most particularly, how it is always lurking, waiting to irrupt when you least expect it … ideally, when you least expect it.

The post The Mere Touch: Weird Reviews appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The mere touch of cold philosophy.”  –  Keats

Reviewed in this column:
The City’s Son by Tom Pollock (Jo Fletcher Books, 2012)
Boneland by Alan Garner (Fourth Estate, 2012)
Celebrant by Michael Cisco (Chômu Press, 2012)
The Folly of the World by Jesse Bullington (Orbit, 2012)
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit, 2013)

Samuel Johnson famously opined that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” On the other hand, William Cobbett, ever a man for contradiction, described London as the “great wen of all” and pondered the fate of “the metropolis of the empire”. London is probably the most storied of European cities, with a long history, stretching right back to its probable founding by the Romans, though I can’t help feeling there must have been some sort of earlier settlement at the river crossing. Over two thousand years, alongside a demonstrable history it has acquired a rich oral tradition, constructed layer upon layer, by generations of immigrants and settlers, and with that has another kind of history.

Welsh myths tell us, for example, that after his death, the head of Bran the Blessed was finally brought to the south of England and buried on the white hill, on which the White Tower, part of the Tower of London, was later built. The idea was that so long as Bran’s head remained buried, the country was safe from invasion, and it is, they allege, still there (though quite how this accounts for the Norman invasion is anyone’s guess). Others claim that King Arthur dug it up, saying that only a strong leader and a powerful army would protect the country, and King Harald so very nearly managed that. There are smaller stories, too – the dip in the line between two underground stations is, allegedly, to avoid cutting through a plague pit, though quite how anyone knew it was there remains a mystery. Covent Garden tube station is allegedly haunted, as are half the theatres in the area for that matter. If you go to the Embankment gardens, just behind Charing Cross, you can see the old watergate, and appreciate just how wide the pre-19th century Thames really was. For that matter, if the tides are absolutely right, it’s allegedly still just about possible for a very tall man to ford the Thames between Lambeth and Westminster. There’s a Chinese supermarket in Soho the upper rooms of which feature some of the best preserved Georgian woodwork in central London. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Every street has a story, or deserves a story, and many writers have recognised this. Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, drawing on Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, posited the idea that Nicholas Dyer, clearly modelled on Nicholas Hawksmoor, pupil to Christopher Wren, and architect of a number of striking buildings, most notably Christchurch, Spitalfields, was engaged in satanic practices, to whit building churches across London to a mystical pattern and carrying out human sacrifices. Nicholas Hawksmoor, a twentieth-century detective, is tasked with solving a series of mysterious murders carried out near Dyer’s churches. You can probably make a guess at what’s likely to be going on (and I still occasionally have to remind myself that the real Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect, was not a practitioner of the satanic arts, at least not so far as we know).

More recently, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere posited the idea of a London under London, a parallel city in which the names of the underground stations took on new life, while China Mieville’s King Rat similarly assumes the existence of a mysterious other London. Currently, Ben Aaronovitch is enjoying immense success with his DC Peter Grant series, beginning with Rivers of London (published in the US as Midnight Riot), although Aaronovitch’s novels are, by comparison with Gaiman and Mieville, more prosaic in tone, despite their subject matter. Paul Cornell’s London Falling, which I’ve not yet read, seems to head back towards Hawksmoor territory. But of the most recent crop of London novels, the one I currently find most interesting is Tom Pollock’s The City’s Son (Jo Fletcher Books, 2012), first in the Skyscraper Throne trilogy.

Unlike most writers who take London as their topic, Pollock has not reached into the historic or the mythic past but has instead focused on how the weird might seek to manifest itself in the contemporary city. We meet it head on, in Filius Viae, the Son of the Streets. Is he a homeless teenager, or something more. If we are to believe Gutterglass, he is the son of a goddess, Mater Viae, but Gutterglass seems to be an animated pile of rubbish, able to alter his or her appearance at will, leaving the reader wondering whether this new London is not simply a figment of a teenager’s imagination. Yet if it is, what an imagination he has. We see him first in combat with a Railwraith, formed of ‘electricity: its memory, its dreams’, closely allied to London’s Underground system. ‘The rails are their conductors. They can’t survive away from them for more than a few minutes’. Except, of course, that this particular Railwraith was a long way from the Underground.

And thus we become aware of the existence of Reach, the Crane King. And when Filius and Gutterglass talk of cranes, they don’t mean birds. Anyone familiar with modern London will know that the chief distinguishing feature of its skyline is cranes, some of them enormous. New tower blocks are going up all over the place, and the city is dotted with building sites. It makes perfect sense that the ancient powers that lurk around the city should turn to cranes, these highly visible signifiers of modernity, using them, and the other symbols of technological progress, as a new way to exert their power over London. Reach, or so he believes, represents everything that is to come, and he is determined to take over London and destroy Filius.

We might regard this as nothing but an intense act of imagination on Filius’s part, a way of filling in the empty hours, were it not for Beth Bradley’s unexpected ride on something ‘train-like, but more animal somehow’, which leads her in turn to an encounter with the Railwraith and her first meeting with Filius, whom she memorably describes as ‘concrete-coloured’. Beth herself is something of a child of the streets. Neglected by her father, who is in mourning for his dead wife, Beth has nonetheless tried to maintain as normal a life as she can, while pursuing a fascination with making art on the walls of London. An act of revenge for the treatment of her best friend, Pen, by one of their teachers has forced Beth to leave home and school and try to make some sort of life for herself. Her intense feeling for the life in the streets might make her a natural companion for Filius; certainly, her delight in the new world she discovers as a result of their meeting is intense, even though Filius is burdened with the knowledge of what is to come.

How best to understand Filius? The alert reader will have already noticed several things. First, Pollock acknowledges the influence of Alan Garner in his work (along with Neil Gaiman, China Mieville and David Almond in particular). Second, anyone familiar with Elidor, the only one of Garner’s novels to feature, even fleetingly, an urban setting, will remember that when the children receive the treasures of Elidor, one of those treasures is a spear, which is given to Roland, the youngest child. Roland is the only person who doesn’t try to deny his own experience of Elidor, even while his siblings try to forget it. And Filius’s preferred weapon is of course a spear. The connections multiply – Garner referenced King Lear in using ‘Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came – ’ and it is tempting to think of that Dark Tower re-envisaged as a skyscraper.

Garner’s engagement with the city was driven by the tension between the seemingly unchanging countryside of Cheshire and the relentless post-war reconstruction of central Manchester. For all that his evocation of a city under siege from bulldozers is starkly memorable – and when tranformed into Elidor it becomes hideously Piranesian – one also has the sense that Garner is constantly seeking a way out, a return to the landscape with which he is most familiar, already lovingly delineated in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. 

By contrast, Pollock willingly embraces the city of London, filling it with strange and wonderful characters. One delights in the presence of the Sodiumites, creatures who inhabit the older street lights and the Whiteys, the inhabitants of the new Blankleits. The Pavement Priests, the moving statues, even the mirror-folk, as well as the cast of human street-dwellers whom Filius recruits to his cause, as he battles to take control of London. There is a sly humour at work, too. The Mother’s cats, it turns out, are named for the old, lost rivers of London.

This is good, so far as it goes … and I admit to personally being a sucker for the idea of secret Londons. However, a ‘but’ hovers in the air. While Pollock has a wonderful eye for the ways in which aspects of London can be made as extraordinary as they are commonplace, and it is hard not to be caught up in Beth’s enthusiasm, the story itself remains as yet a little thin, a little more conventional than one might perhaps hope for. Yes, there are certain revelations late on which I imagine will significantly transform the story in the second volume but for now we are dealing with a story which is in some ways surprisingly banal. Pollock seems to me to be rather less confident in portraying Beth’s home life and that of her friend, Parva, Pen. Beth’s father’s sudden awakening to his daughter’s problems seems a little too sentimental, while Pen’s problems with a particular teacher, not to mention her difficulties living as a modern Asian girl with fairly traditional parents, though they dominate the first few chapter, all too quickly fade into the background, and when they do reappear, are handled in a way which seems somewhat perfunctory, given what they initially provoked. Yet the atmopsheric nature of Pollock’s London seems to offset this, and I look forward to reading the sequel, The Glass Republic. 

Having mentioned Alan Garner, I have hummed and hawed about discussing Boneland (Fourth Estate, 2012) in this column. I keep putting this off, mainly because Garner is for me so very much sui generis it is difficult to imagine constraining him with terms such as ‘weird’, however capacious they might be. He simply overflows and defies definition. Nonetheless, if you haven’t already taken note of this novel, allegedly the concluding part of the Brisingamen trilogy, you should, though I do not advise pressing it upon eager children who have adored Weirdstone and Moon of Gomrath and are clamouring for more, not unless they are already sophisticated readers. Even then, I suspect elements of it will sail straight over their heads although I don’t doubt they will also quickly recognise the familiar rhythms of chanted place names and identify some of the connections.

In Boneland we once again meet Colin, but as a middle-aged man, an astronomer working at Jodrell Bank, in the heart of the Cheshire landscape that Garner has claimed for himself (indeed, it is situated almost literally at the bottom of his garden). This futuristic eye looks deep into the past, viewing events that have long since taken place, and stands as a usefully tangible metaphor for Garner’s own creative process in this novel, linking the present and the deep past.

The narrative focuses on Colin’s conviction that his sister, Susan, long missing, is trying to contact him again. Quite how Susan went missing, no one knows; indeed, most people Colin knows have denied that she ever existed. Colin himself does not remember how she was lost as he recalls nothing before his eleventh birthday, although after that he remembers everything in excruciatingly Borgesian detail. Colin himself lives on Alderley Edge itself and insists on returning there every night. He sees himself as its guardian in some way not fully articulated, the latest in a long line of guardians that might include the wizard Cadellin, the Green Knight, and reaching back further, deeper into the past to a mysterious shamanic figure who stalks Colin’s dreams, armed with a flute made from bird bones.

Is this entire novel a fever dream – as the novel opens, Colin has been in hospital for some unspecified procedure and has insisted on discharging himself rather than leave the Edge untended overnight – or should we take Colin’s experience at face value? Is he in fact surrounded by guardian figures who recapitulate the various aspects of his childhood experience s, preparing him for his sister’s return? It is almost impossible to tell: the novel resists easy interpretation, like most of Garner’s work post-Red Shift. The preoccupation with sound rather than word, with something so deeply felt it is almost impossible to articulate meaningfully through words is coupled with what might crudely be called a recapitulation of everything Garner has ever touched on in his writing. Familiar motifs resurface – the stone axe, the blue-silver combination, the playing with dialect – but suffused with bitterness and sadness. One is left with a sense that Colin represents the last bulwark against darkness, and he is not intending to go gently.

All of which is to make Boneland sound deeply trivial and of course it is not. It is, however, one of those novels that is better read than written about. And to some extent the same is true of Michael Cisco’s Celebrant (Chômu Press, 2012). This is a novel that makes perfect sense while one is reading it but which proves oddly elusive when one tries to pin it down on paper. This much we know: a man called deKlend is seized with the idea of going to the city of Votu. Why, he doesn’t know, but does there have to be a reason? Does Votu even exist? A series of encyclopaedia entries suggest that it does but given it seems to be deKlend who is reading these extracts can we be sure that the encyclopaedia has a physical existence beyond his mind? Indeed, one character insists that deKlend is actually in Votu already. Is it actually a place or is it instead a state of mind?

Of all the cities I’ve written about in recent reviews, Votu is the most elusive. It is present in every word of this text and yet the nature of the city is impossible to pin down, lost in the flow of words. So many words. And yet, at a sentence-by-sentence level this novel is perfectly intelligible. Only as the sentences gradually pile up into chapters does the reader begin to realise that the novel is somehow eluding her efforts to grasp it. Words ebb and flow, images come into focus and then recede from view again. Fragments make sense but how do they link together. What are the pigeon-girls and the rabbit-girls? How are they connected to one another. In the end, it’s simpler to let the story overwhelm one as a reader and then seek out glittering pieces of narrative as they catch the eye.

Or, to put it another way, one of my favourite things to do in a strange city is to sit in a coffee shop or bar, watching the city go by, trying to make sense of the patterns of the neighbourhood, observing as an outsider, telling myself stories. The bigger the city, the busier the neighbourhood, the more complicated the story. I might even imagine myself into the story while failing totally to understand what’s going on. In part, I think this is what Cisco attempts with this novel; if deKlend is, as he seems to be, some sort of homeless dweller of the streets, half crazed, then this is his experience of the city, doubled, because the reader almost certainly doesn’t have his frame of reference to work with. It makes for a heady brew, a novel that needs to be read more than once, and on the understanding that it probably won’t completely make sense with subsequent readings. We look for sense in what we read; Celebrant denies us that and reminds us that the world is not a structured, sensible place. It is strange, peculiar, only ever half-apprehended. To lose one’s concentration even for a moment is to be perhaps forever thrown out of kilter.

That sense of being somehow permanently adrift is caught again in Jesse Bullington’s The Folly of the World (Orbit, 2012), though in a rather plainer language than that used by Michael Cisco. The Folly of the World is one of those novels that displays a distinctly fantastical sensibility without, so far as one can tell, a truly fantastical act ever being committed (although there are odd hints that not all is what it might be). Yet neither can it be said to be a ‘historical’ novel – and of course the worry always persists that a novel set in a period or place of  which one knows very little somehow acquires a fantastic patina simply by being unknown to the reader. This is not, to my mind, the most appropriate way to read things but there are novels and moments when it is difficult to do anything else. 

Jesse Bullington has pinned The Folly of the World very firmly in time and place – 1421, Holland, the aftermath of a huge flood. A drowned landscape, people struggling to live, water, water everywhere, water, and mud, and drowned villages. And a man who is determined to claim his birthright by whatever means, even if that involves finding someone willing (or obliged) to dive into the ruins of an inundated house and recover a ring from the finger of its dead owner. Jan Tieselen has conceived this audacious plan, and now only needs an expert swimmer, who turns out to be Jolanda, the much abused daughter of a dye-maker, living in muddy squalor with her father and a clutch of brothers. Jan buys Jolanda from her father and sets out to tame her, as he thinks. Jolanda has dreamed of escape without really being certain what freedom might look like. Even now her freedom is limited but it’s infinitely better than what she had before. Even when things go wrong. Especially when things go wrong. Although the ring is recovered, the expedition goes horribly, bizarrely wrong, not least when Jolanda, seemingly half fish herself, is attacked by what seems to be a monstrous catfish, capable of heaving itself out of the water. Having gorged, so their guide suggests, on human flesh, it has turned man-eater.

There are two ways to do this. I can tell you about the European wels, which is indeed a monster catfish; it can grow up to thirteen feet long and is none too fussy about what it eats. Catfish have even been observed lunging at pigeons sitting on branches over the water so they are more than capable of adapting to the environment in which they find themselves and improvising. They are rumoured to be picking off waterfowl in the rivers around the Olympic stadium in London.

Or we can talk in figurative terms. Given the period in which this story is set, why not think about Jonah and the whale, about the leviathan which swallows humans whole, which is both monster and metaphor, embodying evil. What else swims in the muddy depths of this story? All three of the main characters emerge from water, vanish back into it, are somehow mysteriously swallowed by it and yet saved by it. Like eels, they squirm through the story, happy on land and on water, no one knowing where they’ve come from, where they vanish to.

As I’ve said, there is nothing overly fantastical about this story, other than the apparent capacity of Jolanda, Jan and Sander to keep on surviving. Their story is grubby for the most part, confidence tricksters trying to maintain their grip on Jan’s family fortune (though it is by no means clear that he is entitled to this). Sander impersonates Jan, Jan has vanished. Jolanda is keeping the show on an even keel and in many ways is the one who benefits most from this new life that has been wished upon them, skilfully steering her way through the shoals of social disaster.

Outside the bleak landscape of mud turns to ice. Bodies wash up in the rubbish, vanish under the ice, war comes, then goes again. No one really knows what’s going on. But we keep reading because the oddity of this story is so compelling. And it’s not the people, vividly drawn as they are, but the landscape that is so strange. It’s so grim, so dark, so utterly unrelenting. The grey skies, the black land, the drowned villages, they grind down the soul. one wonders how on earth anyone, anything, can survive. All that is light and beautiful seems to have vanished, replaced by the grotesque and the ugly, yet somehow hope continues to live, in tiny cracks and crevices, small moments of kindness.

Wink is a far cry from Holland. The greyness of European skies is replaced by the sunshine of New Mexico. It is a small town, quiet, pretty, not on any maps, the kind of place that immediately arouses suspicion in the mind of the experienced reader, assuming the mere mention of New Mexico, with all its connotations of strangeness, hasn’t already set off warning bells in the reader’s mind. One might already be suspecting that American Elsewhere (Orbit, 2013) is being just a little self-conscious, aware of the tropes it’s employing. Robert Jackson Bennett does, after all, have a certain form in this matter, as those who read my review of The Troupe may recall.

We both crave ordinariness and suspect it. The perfect town is a staple of horror films and novels, yet the thought of that quiet little retreat is difficult to resist. Mona Bright, the novel’s protagonist, craves peace and quiet after a difficult few years. After the death of her father, a man she loathed, Mona finds that she has inherited, among other things, a red Dodge Charger, which is useful as she has also inherited her mother’s house in New Mexico, and has only a few days to claim it. Given she is currently in Kentucky, this is going to require some serious driving.

Mona’s experience, as she attempts to locate Wink, this curiously elusive spot, seems oddly familiar. Caught in a maze of roads and research, she finally locates the town’s position when she discovers more about the Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory, situated on the edge of town, and the place where her mother, dead by her own hand, once worked. Again, it’s being heavily signalled to the reader that things are afoot. Does the author love to tease? I think so, indeed I hope so. We have, it seems, reached a point where the story can go one of several ways. To go one way is to read the story as a fairly traditional techno-thriller with scientific underpinnings – an experiment gone horribly wrong, a crossing between worlds and no obvious way back. To go another is to find a story of vaguely eldritch horror, insufficiently tentacular to please Lovecraft, I suspect – and the setting is anyway rather too sunny and conventional – but perhaps closer to Algernon Blackwood in some ways. The forests and plains are replaced by desert but there is that same uneasy sense of something lurking just out of sight, something which presses hard on the soul, as ancient presences gather.

And to go a third way is to find oneself in a story where the simple binaries of good and bad are insufficient to deal with what’s going on. Yes, there are ancient presences lurking beyond the boundaries of Wink, but there are equally ancient presences lurking in plain view if one only has the skill to notice them. It is the interplay between the traditional threat and a more ‘contemporary set of monsters which in part makes this story so rich and so unexpected, that and the reasons why the creatures are drawn to Wink in the first place. Without giving too much away, science has worn away the membrane between worlds, creating a bruise which acts like a beacon. It is a wonderful image.

Wonderful too is the way that Bennett allows the novel to unfold at its own pace. It takes six hundred pages to do so but they’re not dull pages by any means. Instead, Bennett represents the pace of life as it is lived in Wink, slow, thoughtful, with occasional flashes of violence. As Mona gradually uncovers the true nature of Wink she has the time to become acclimatised to the strangeness around her, to accept it, to face down her own demons and make peace with herself and the world. And as well for it takes a steady nerve to deal with sibling rivalry on a grand cosmic scale. I’ve yet to read a novel by Robert Jackson Bennett that I didn’t enjoy, and this is no exception. American Elsewhere is as different from The Troupe

I’ve yet to read a novel by Robert Jackson Bennett that I didn’t enjoy, and this is no exception. American Elsewhere is as different from The Troupe as chalk is from cheese and yet they show a similar relish for exploring those places in the world where strangeness breaks through, just to see what might be found.

Which in truth could be said of all the novels I’ve looked at this time around.

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Maureen Kincaid Speller has been a fantasy and SF critic for over 25 years, contributing reviews to Interzone, Strange Horizons, Foundation, Vector (the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association) and The Zone, among others. She also has her own blog, called Paper Knife, from which her series of linked reviews of the 2011 BSFA Novel Award and Clarke Award shortlists was nominated for the BSFA Non-Fiction Award 2012. Two of her reviews were recently included in Speculative Fiction 2013, edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin. In 2011 the British Science Fiction Association produced a chapbook of her critical writings, And Another Thing: A Collection of Reviews and Criticism, edited by Jonathan McCalmont. 

She earns a living as a copy editor and proofreader, and is partway through a Ph.D on Native North American literature and ethical approaches to critical theory. She lives in Folkestone, Kent, UK, with her husband, Paul Kincaid, and spends what’s left of her spare time growing vegetables.

The post The Mere Touch: Weird Reviews appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The mere touch of cold philosophy.” – Keats

Reviewed in this column:
The Man who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé, trans. Sophie Lewis (Pushkin Press, London, 2012)
Requiems and Nightmares by Guido Gozzano, trans. Brendan and  Anna Connell (Hieroglyphic Press, 2012)
The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories by Andrew Duncan (PS Publishing Ltd, 2012)
Crackpot Palace by Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow, NY, 2012)
At the Mouth of the River of Bees and Other Stories by Kij Johnson (Small Beer Press, 2012)
We Bury the Landscape by Kristine Ong Muslim (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012)

In Montmartre, on the third floor of 75b Rue d’Orchampt, there lived an excellent gentleman called Dutilleul, who possessed the singular gift of passing through walls without any trouble at all. He wore pince-nez and a small black goatee, and was a lowly clerk in the Ministry of Records. In winter he would take the bus to work, and in fine weather he would make the journey on foot, in his bowler hat.

In this column, I try not to taxonomise the weird so much as point out places where it has lately manifested itself and discuss the nature of that manifestation; if it helps, think of the column as a field-spotter’s guide. In fairness, with a title like The Man Who Walked Through Walls, this collection of short stories, by the French writer, Marcel Aymé (Pushkin Press, London, 2012, trans. Sophie Lewis), doesn’t necessarily take that much spotting. But a title is one thing; the stories themselves might not live up to that promise.

Yet the first paragraph of the title story, quoted at the head of this section,  immediately suggests otherwise. It’s a prime example of one way of presenting the weird, as part of something so ordinary as to be utterly unremarkable. Dutilleul’s ‘singular gift’ seems to be no more important to the narrator than his appearance or his daily habit, though of course this is also intended as a teaser, insofar as you read the line, continue on through the thrilling account of Dutilleul’s banal daily life before suddenly braking mentally and then backing up several sentences, to see if you really had just read what you thought you’d read. To find that, yes, actually, you had.

To judge from the stories gathered in this collection from Pushkin Press (and here I should note that quite apart from the quality of the stories themselves, this is an exquisite little paperback edition which sits sweetly in the hand, with everything about it being just right) this is very much Marcel Aymé’s modus operandi. He seems to work from the assumption that what he is saying is in fact perfectly ordinary; it is for the reader to remark upon its oddity. His job is simply to unfold the idea and take it to its logical extent. Thus, despite having discovered by accident, during a power cut, that he has the ability to walk through walls, M. Dutilleul goes to a doctor to see about having the skill excised because he has no use for it. The doctor’s pills seem unsuccessful, and Dutilleul carries on with life until he acquires a new boss, who makes his life a misery, at which point it occurs to Dutilleul that he may just have a way of getting his own back.

And granted, if you were to keep coming into your office to find the head of a particularly recalcitrant employee seemingly ‘hanging’ on your wall, making rude remarks, it might just tip you over the edge. And similarly, if you had genuinely just driven your boss to distraction, life might afterwards seem ever so slightly tame, prompting you to find new ways of amusing yourself, like … ooh, I don’t know, committing insoluble crimes, and then ensuring you were caught so you could commit impossible escapes …

Other stories in this collection include ‘The Sabine Women’, about the avatars of Sabine, who has the gift of ubiquity; ‘The Tickets of Time’, which deals with shortages by permitting non-productive members of society only a certain number of days of life per month, and ‘The Problem of Summertime’ which addresses the ways in which we control time. Other stories are perhaps more immediately absurdist rather than weird in their affect but Aymé’s fascination with the twisting of logic persists throughout.

I’d not come across the work of Marcel Aymé before this collection, and my understanding is that although he was a prolific writer very little of his oeuvre is now available in English (although Pushkin Press has published one previous collection of his stories). It seems to me to be a terrible shame that more is not available.

 If the weirdness of Marcel Aymé’s fiction lies hidden in plain view, so to speak, the stories of an earlier writer, Guido Gozzano, seem to belong to a more familiar type, with first-person accounts of strange encounters, mysteries lying long unresolved, carefully evoked gothic atmospheres and so on, and yet even then something is still not quite ‘right’ about the stories. Somehow, they twist in the reader’s mind and set off in other, more unexpected directions. Take the opening story of Requiems and Nightmares (Hieroglyphic Press, 2012, trans. Brendan and Anna Connell), ‘The Real Face’: here the narrator is hearing what has happened to old friends while he has been away from Italy for a couple of years, among them the artist Nino Prandi. ‘The mad are like the dead: one must forget about them; life is pressing’ but something drives the narrator to decide to visit Prandi, be it sadness at return or some sort of vanity. ‘I wanted to see him again, be recognised, make him talk.’

The journey to the asylum, taken on foot, like a pilgrimage, gives the narrator the chance to recall his acquaintanceship with Prandi, a man obsessed with animals, whose studio contained ‘a fox, a lynx, a squirrel, an ermine, a caiman, a giant squid’, the last a thing so preposterous one doesn’t so much query the artist’s sanity as the narrator’s in claiming it. The artist’s fancy is that he can discern animal-like characteristics in his sitters, and when they sit for their portraits he incorporates these characteristics. And yet, strangely, while viewers often see the likeness, the sitters never do, much to the amusement of the artist’s friends.

What happened to Prandi while the narrator was away is never made entirely clear except that it would seem his habit of linking people and beasts has completely overwhelmed him; now he sees the creature rather than the human. The narrator’s conviction that with him it will be different, that he will somehow win through to Prandi’s sanity when everyone else has failed – his description of himself as ‘more than a relative’ intrigues the reader but lies in the text unexplained – is of course dashed. He leaves, only to find himself lingeringly haunted by something that Prandi said during their final meeting.

In some respects, ‘The Real Face’ is perhaps atypical in that it twists its shape only at the end. In another story, ‘A perverse desire has taken hold of me’, says one character, ‘a need to make others suffer as I do’ and it is this impulse that seems to drive so many of Gozzano’s tales, for the reader as well as the character. So often, Gozzano toys as much with the reader as with the characters, as in ‘The Handsome Hound’, promising much, offering strange temptations, only for the promise to be dashed at the last moment in an unanticipated moment of rejection. ‘The Altar of the Past’ offers a mystery of a locked room yet when the contents are revealed to the narrator, his incomprehension is all the greater for his failure to understand the reason for their presence in the first place. In the end, such is the power of Gozzano’s ability to develop an atmosphere, the more straightforward a story turns out to be in its resolution, the more disappointing it begins to seem. These odd little stories worm their way under the skin in a most peculiar fashion.

Like Aymé’s, Gozzano’s is a new name to me; a generation older than Aymé, born in 1883, he is clearly influenced by the European symbolist writers as well as by the likes of Oscar Wilde and, as Brendan Connell’s Introduction notes, by D’Annunzio and Arturo Graf. Again, this volume is a welcome addition to the bookshelves though I must also note that it is marred in places by a variety of typographical errors, some irritating, others, such as missing footnotes and inaccurate running titles, more annoying.

The other collections I’ll be looking at this time round come from contemporary American writers, so various considerations about the territorial and historical flavours of the weird will inevitably come into play. Andrew Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (PS Publishing Ltd, 2012) is perhaps the most overtly ‘weird’ in terms of subject matter, in that Duncan has a taste for the Fortean and this often features in his writing. The stories in this collection deal among other things with ‘real’ zombies, voodoo, The Winchester Mystery House and Flannery O’Connor’s pet chicken. But it is not the subject matter that defines them as ‘weird’ for my purposes (no matter how peculiar a story’s subject might be, this does not necessarily and immediately transform it into a ‘weird’ story, as this column’s slush pile only too clearly shows). Nor, for that matter, is it the setting. True, Duncan’s work very often uses early twentieth-century southern US settings, which immediately suggest ‘southern gothic’, and a number of his stories are clearly in dialogue with such ideas, using the macabre and the ironic to look at social issues. At the same time, Duncan’s use of the fantastic somehow steps to one side even in a genre which supposedly employs the fantastical for particular effect.

‘Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse’ provides a good example of this. It’s based on true events: the young Mary O’Connor of Milledgeville had a pet chicken which she taught to walk backwards. It’s one of those offbeat stories so beloved of news reels in the early twentieth century and sure enough the internet offers up a brief clip of Mary O’Connor’s chicken. We know, of course, that Mary would become Flannery, one of the finest writers of the twentieth century but the clip offers a moment when this might have been all there was, the most exciting event of O’Connor’s life. At the same time, there would still have been that lingering question – not so why did she do it as what kind of child would do such a thing in the first place? A remarkable one, clearly, and one who will become a writer. And this, for me, is the joy of the story as the young Mary spars with her rather unimaginative family and a priest who is way, way out of his depth in dealing with a chicken called Jesus, and the repercussions of that encounter.

It is, though, ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’, that sticks in my mind most clearly as a ‘weird’ tale. Here, Duncan take the hobo story of a mythical land of plenty with lemonade springs and every other kind of comfort and wonder, and transforms it into a life-and-death struggle to maintain the very integrity of the belief when someone wants to leave the land of plenty – after all, why would anyone want to leave? It’s  a good question though it’s also Duncan’s choice of viewpoint that makes this work so well. It seems strange to suggest that one might find the weird in a story that’s so offbeat to begin with but that’s the joy of this collection. Its weirdness seems so … well, ‘ordinary’, in that it appears to fit comfortably into the landscape and be unremarked upon because, well, this is how the world ought to be anyway, and yet still there are stories that catch the reader unexpectedly.

Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace (William Morrow, 2012) steers a similar course between the unremarked and the remarkable, though where Duncan’s stories begin from a position of seeming familiarity and gradually unfold into strangeness, Ford’s stories seem to begin from the point of being at least a little out of step with the world. Wherever one finds them, his stories somehow look as though they don’t quite fit, as though they could use a little easing at some point or other. I came across ‘The Coral Heart’ in a collection of sword and sorcery stories, for example, and though it was quite the best story in the anthology I was hard-pressed to argue that it was a sword and sorcery story at all. All the elements were there but somehow it was as though a connection wasn’t quite being made as it should be. Throughout, one was conscious of looking at the story as story, weighing its relative merits as what it claimed to be, while knowing instinctively that it was something else altogether … but what?

It’s a point Ford raises in the note to one of his stories, ‘Daltharee’, about a bottled city; it’s a story which, as he comments’, ‘just barely misses adding up and making sense’, a deliberate move on his part as ‘I was interested for a while in stories that are made to be consciously misshapen or broken in some way’. It seems to me, though, that this just barely missing adding up is a characteristic of a certain kind of weird story – the gap between sense and something else is infinitesimal, barely even visible, and yet in some way one cannot fail to notice it even while not seeing it.

This emerges most clearly perhaps in Ford’s first-person narratives, the ones featuring a writer called Jeff Ford and his wife, Lynn, the stories that actually look more like afterwords from the beginning. Is this a story? Is this something ‘real’ or is Ford spoofing the listener? The more one listens along, the more difficult it becomes to be certain just what is going on. ‘The Double of My Double Is Not My Double’ is a case in point: how many doubles can one person have, and do the doubles have doubles? The idea teeters on the brink of insanity but so long as you don’t examine it too closely the world just about holds together. Press too closely and everything we take for granted begins to crumble away. same for stories like ‘Down Atsion Road’ and ‘86 Deathdick Road’; perhaps it’s a New Jersey thing, though it spills out into so many of Ford’s other stories, like ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, a story of jazz and an evening on the town that never seems to end so often does it change.

It took me a long time to work out what it was about the titular story in Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees (Small Beer Press, 2012) that was so strange, I mean, apart from the idea of a river of bees in the first place, though this didn’t seem to disturb me. I was doing something else entirely when the thought suddenly popped into my head: ‘the river of bees moves uphill’. It is the small moment of oddity that catches one unaware even as one accepts the reality of the broader peculiarity. Thus, we accept the fact that Linna and Sam, her elderly dog, are engaged in a journey rich in metaphor when they begin their road trip. Sam is clearly dying and the trip will most likely be their last together. We understand that Linna’s suddenly finding she’s driven as far as Montana is emblematic of her reluctance to let go of Sam. Even the idea of the Bee River, an intermittent phenomenon, isn’t that surprising; out beyond the urban boundaries, in the territory of freeways and big skies, why shouldn’t there be bee rivers as well? Why not find the source of the bee river? Officer Tabor recognises the call in Linna, perhaps unsurprisingly as his own father before him had similarly responded to the call. We know the outcome of this journey even before Linna undertakes it but still something strange persists. We accept the existence of the bee river and yet there is no reason for the bee river and no one seems to need there to be. And the mouth of the river lies uphill.

There is in this story a certain inherent trust in the universe to keep on doing what it does, irrespective of what we think, and most of Johnson’s most overtly ‘weird’ stories contain this. Indeed, in ‘26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss’, Geof, Aimee’s boyfriend, says as much, knowing that things for the most part make sense. Or rather, he accepts that things make sense, that 26 monkeys climb into a bath tub each night onstage, vanish and turn up later that night. It doesn’t actually matter that they go or indeed where they go, it matters that they come back. By the same token, does it matter that the dogs of North Park talk to Linna, in ‘The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change’? It’s not the talking that is significant but the stories themselves that are important. We must accept the things we most want to query.

All of which suggests that one strand of the weird invites us to reconsider entirely how we tell stories and how we understand them. I’ve been thinking about this every time I come back to Kristine Ong Muslim’s We Bury The Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012). Subtitled ‘An Exhibition-Collection’ it’s a collection of flash fictions written in response to a series of paintings. Reproductions of the paintings are not included in the collection, perhaps not surprisingly, although Muslim has provided a webpage with links to all the paintings she’s written about. The question has been all along, should I read/look simultaneously, or should I simply read and hope the fictions make sense depending on how I visualise the paintings. Or, and this seems to me to be the most interesting approach creatively, do I simply read, creating a story from my imagination as I link the pieces together, and simultaneously create a new exhibition in my mind’s eye?

Which has brought us a very long way from M. Dutilleul’s casual rejection and then embracing of his ability to pass through walls yet I suspect that the weird resides now, as it has always done, in that moment of decision to do or not do.

The post The Mere Touch: Weird Reviews appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Reviewed in this column:
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA; Pushkin Press, UK, 2012)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate, 2012)
Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway (Granta Books, 2012)

After more of a hiatus than I intended (let’s just say my first term of teaching was far more exciting than I anticipated), I’m happy to be starting 2013 by delivering another column to Weird Fiction Review and getting myself onto a regular schedule again. Of course, January is the graveyard of good intentions and new year resolutions, but I have a good feeling about 2013. A very good feeling.

If the weird is very much an urban phenomenon, it nonetheless still manifests itself in many and varied ways. And by one of those strange chances that seem to be so characteristic of the weird, towards the end of last year there appeared three very different novels which offer us three very different representations of the city, all of which are distinctively weird in their execution.

The first of the novels is Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Pushkin Press, 2012; trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) which might at first look like a particularly densely written historical novel. The clue to its being something different lies, perhaps, in the fragmentary gazetteer entry tucked in among the epigraphs and dedications at the beginning of the novel, like a tattered cutting from an old newspaper, worn and illegible from too much handling. This in itself should be held as an indication that something strange is afoot but if not, the entry surely makes it clear.

Wandernburg: shifting city sit. approx between ancient states of Saxony and Prussia. Cap. of ancient principality of same name. Lat. N and long. E indeterminate due to shifting co-ord. […] Despite accounts of chroniclers and travellers, precise loc. unknown.ations

This promises much: a shifting city, situated between ancient states, but only approximately; chronicled but impossible to locate. Surely here we are entering into liminal territory? The very name of the place – ‘wandering town’ – insists upon it, while anyone familiar with the political history of the area knows already that this is a region of fluid territorial boundaries, with towns finding themselves belonging first to one kingdom and then to another, all without moving a single inch. In that case, why shouldn’t a town become completely mislaid somewhere in the border zone?

As if this weren’t enough, the town itself remains strangely aloof from the approaching traveller. ‘For some time now Wandernburg had been visible in the distance, to the south. And yet, thought Hans, […] the small city seemed to be moving in step with them, and getting no nearer’. Only after Hans dozes off does the elusive town seem to relent and allow his coach to enter. When he wakes, he is already at the town gates. There is no moment of approach, only the spectral vision of a distant citadel followed immediately by the visceral thickness of a wall in which Hans senses something cold, ‘as if it were a warning about how hard it would be to leave rather than to enter’.

And thus it proves, as Hans’ overnight stay becomes two days, a third day, then longer, open-ended. The coachman no longer stops to see if he wants to move on while Hans has come to an agreement with Herr Zeit about his room. Time is, quite literally, at Hans’s disposal as he settles into Wandernburg, or perhaps Wandernburg begins to settle into him as he begins by trying to make sense of its bafflingly unstable geography, then gradually immersing himself in its daily life. The reader in turn wonders about Hans – Hans Hans, to give him his full name – an intellectual of some sort, a writer, or translator, or maybe an agitator; a man with a mysterious trunkful of books but no clear destination. The canny reader might turn back to the novel’s title and wonder what, exactly, it means to be a ‘traveller of the century’. ‘You talk like a detective’, says the organ grinder whom Hans has befriended,

And perhaps Hans is, though as he explores every stratum of the town’s society, it is difficult to determine what it is he seeks. He befriends the mysterious organ grinder, and through him meets Reichert and Lamberg, working-class intellectuals with whom he discusses the plight of the town’s workers. At the same time, Hans finds his way to the salon run by Sophie Gottlieb in her father’s house, filled with the supposedly great and good of Wandernburg, who profess a more genteel, frequently stultifying brand of discussion, somewhat to Sophie’s frustration. Few welcome Hans’ taste for dissenting opinions but he forms friendships with those who do, and he and Sophie pursue a love affair that is by turns blatant, scandalous and intellectually satisfying to them both as they make love, talk, work together on translations.

If one were being reductive, one might argue that Traveler of the Century is nothing more than a rather wordy account of Hans and Sophie’s love affair, with far too much conversational detail. However, that would be to entirely misunderstand what is going on here. As at least one reviewer has noted, Traveler is better read as a ‘total novel’, something deeply immersive, all-encompassing, perhaps akin to the work of people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the totality of its detail (though emphatically not magical realist – this is a very European novel). By the end of the novel, while we still know very little about Hans himself, we have an intensely rich and detailed understanding of the town and its inhabitants, what they think and feel, how they respond to the outside world, and to Hans as its newest representative. We learn about the darker side of civic life but at the same time, even at the novel’s closing we realise just how little we still know about the place and the people.

For my own part, I was initially attracted to the novel by the various references to  Wandernburg’s unstable geography in the reviews I was reading – the potential collapse of boundaries is, I have to admit, a key personal signifier of weird fiction. At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing how no two reviews seemed to be about the same novel, which struck me as very intriguing. Having read it, I can understand why. Traveller of the Century is so huge, so all-enveloping, it effectively invites each reader to construct their own novel within its framework, surrounded by the story yet somehow independent of it too, rather like Wandernburg itself. Each novel butts up against the others but remains complete in itself. And for those familiar with the European novel tradition, the narrative is replete with references to other novels, offering a whole new layer of intertextual overflowing, while those familiar with Schubert’s Winterreise have probably already acknowledged the presence of the organ grinder.

Sam Thompson’s Communion Town (Fourth Estate, 2012) makes explicit that which is obliquely understood
in Traveller of the Century, that a city is composed of many different stories, often contradictory or tangential to one another. While Traveler of the Century offers the reader a superficial unity, one that many of Wandernburg’s inhabitants work studiously to maintain, all neatly encapsulated in those city walls that seem so reluctant to let one go, Communion Town, with no obvious geography to contain it, is a heaving mass of … I was going to say ‘discrepancies and contradictions’, but that would imply a unity that the narrative does not, very particularly does not, possess. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the narrative is invariably working against this. ‘A City in Ten Chapters’ runs the subtitle, but it is not a city so much as ten different cities, told in ten different voices, each city so different from the next almost the only thing they have in common is an intermittent coincidence of street names, along with a fear of dark nights, when the Flâneur allegedly walks abroad, and the presence, in the shadows, of pale, mysterious monsters.

Whereas Wandernburg’s geography seems to stabilise the longer one remains there, the geography of Communion Town, insofar as Communion Town is a place rather than an abstract idea of a city, is endlessly flexible. It might be London, except for a reference to something I definitely recognised as being in Brighton, but what about that strange Mediterranean harbourside and the hinterland that made me think of a West Indian sugar plantation, not to mention the distinctly American mean streets of another story? And look, didn’t we catch a glimpse of that person, oh so briefly, in an earlier story, just walking down the street? Communion Town transcends topography and seems rather to exist in folds of the imagination; indeed, in one story, it seems to be a huge model on the floor of a room, created in response to a misunderstanding, made out of bits of scrap, a child’s building blocks and anything else that comes to hang while in another story it becomes impossible to distinguish between the memory city and the real city – are the characters themselves part of an act of imagination (yes, of course they are, but not that act of imagination, I mean a fictional act of imagination). In yet another instance, the character who cannot enter the city might in fact be a city in her own right. But the trick, always, is to avoid seeing Communion Town as a single organic whole. Yes, the reader might forge connections between different chapters, but they are temporary, fragile, like most of the relationships made within the city. Little if anything is permanent, except for the city itself, layered, storied, preserved, vibrant yet strangely unreal and inaccessible. From the first nervous arrival of the refugee seeking asylum to the last messy break-up and unexpected departure, it is a place of meetings and farewells rather than a place of permanent residence. To become rooted in the city is to be absorbed into it, transformed, and rarely for the better.

Not only is Communion Town a series of stories, it is also a kind of compendium of the ways in which people write about the city. Thus the classic PI story vies for attention with the classic detective story, though each in its turn is subverted by Communion Town itself. Alongside these traditional city narratives are the stories of love found and lost in the city, stories of refuge gone sour, stories of renewal and darker accounts of human nature twisted in some mysterious way by its contact with the immeasurability of Communion Town. Even then, nothing is quite what it seems. A traditional story of a private investigator working for a client can be transformed into something temporally and chronologically unstable, bringing together scraps of myth and references to Shakespeare to reimagine a Prince Hal for a new (old) city.

Attempts to pin down Communion Town are invariably futile. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the chapter entitled ‘The Significant City of Lazarus Glass’, a classic Holmesian-style detective story that is simultaneously a lovingly crafted pulp parody of itself. Here, Lazarus Glass, brilliant detective turned master criminal, has transformed Communion Town into an act of imagination, a memory city, at first as a means to detect crime but later as a vehicle for his own passions, to avenge perceived slights against him among other things, but requiring him to become ever more deeply involved in the construction of the city’s fabric, to turn it to his own advantage. To achieve this, however, is to remain locked in a battle with others who would alter the city in ways inimical to his plans. For the city to live, it must be always out of control, a fact that Glass doesn’t fully understand. As others’ stories indicate, it is the city’s very monstrosity that feeds it. To attempt to shape it along rational lines is to bring stasis, a condition that Communion Town instinctively resists.

Again, this seems to have been a novel, a series of episodes, call it what you will, that divides opinion, insofar as people either seem instinctively to ‘get’ it or find it too peculiar and elusive to make much of it at all. For my own part, I love the complex layering, half-hints of relationships, not to mention the sense that all this is round the corner in every town, if you know how to look.

Strangely enough, it seems to have been a year for novels that divide opinion and also fit the brief for this column, for to Traveler of the Century and Communion Town I must add the strange and remarkable Hawthorn and Child (Granta Books, 2012) by Keith Ridgway, a novel which has attracted a considerable amount of attention thanks to recommendations via social media, and deserves every scrap of it. If Wandernburg is no town in particular and Communion Town is all towns yet none, Hawthorn and Child is reassuringly set in the easily identifiable territory of North London. More than that, it starts out as a detective novel, with Hawthorn and Child as the detectives at the heart of the story, taxed with solving the mystery of a young man who was, as he so memorably puts it, ‘shot by a car’. Except that this is a car that no one can identify and that doesn’t show up on CCTV, except, perhaps, for one brief, shadowy moment, in another street altogether. More than that, there seems to be no obvious motive for the shooting and Hawthorn and Child’s superior is impatient to wrap things up and get on with other jobs. He has two men in a car who look as though they might fit the bill as perpetrators, though the car they’re driving is nothing like the description given, but CCTV definitely places them as being in the area at the time, and so on, and so on. So far, this is all very familiar territory, the stock-in-trade of any number of contemporary crime stories, except, perhaps, for that being ‘shot by a car’, but intriguing though it is, even that isn’t what prompts me to draw this novel to your attention.

What happens next is … in fact, the question is, what does happen next? The novel may start within the recognisable structure of a detective novel but very quickly distorts and overflows its narrative container, sprawling across the streets of London like spilled entrails, messy, no longer easily fitting into the space in which they were originally contained, almost impossible to control. Insofar as there is a structure, it is provided by the presence of Hawthorn and Child, detective partners, possibly friends too, but very different in their methods and their outlook on life. We follow them, most often Hawthorn, into their private lives. Hawthorn, we sense, is a man with a knack for connecting seemingly random ideas when he’s working on a case. He is, Child assures him, a terrible detective but he is intuitive whereas Child is methodical, does things by the book, takes better notes, takes care of himself.

They have an ongoing case, the pursuit of a ‘broker’ called Mishazzo, a man whose business is not easily defined, though it is almost certainly criminal. Sometimes he seems to be involved in the handling of stolen cars, other times he deals in property, and still other times he visits people. Yet we do not watch with Hawthorn and Child. Instead, the narrative slips in and out of other people’s viewpoints, moving further and further away from the two detectives, into the lives of other people, all linked by a tenuous thread of connection to Mishazzo. We see Hawthorn and Child’s boss, Rivers, his daughter Catherine, her boyfriend Stuart, their lives simple and ordinary yet touched suddenly by the bizarre death of an old friend of Rivers, who seems, inexplicably, to have hung herself while burning herself to death. We see Mishazzo’s driver suddenly realise he can no longer continue with his life when it threatens his relationship, we follow Mishazzo’s associates out to the edge of London, to a small garage, to a group of men working there on cars, and to a bizarre story, a manuscript of a fantasy novel, which draws in another viewpoint figure, and so it goes on. There are burglars, hostage-takers, paranoid schizophrenics.

The narrative twists and turns, the reader tries to make connections, but if they exist they are mostly fleeting, as if the reader briefly catches someone’s eye and then contact is broken, almost before it is made. There is only a vestigial sense of linearity, precious little causality, and no resolution, none of the things we might expect from a detective novel; no neat and tidy moment of restoration, in which the world is once again made whole. Things momentarily acquire importance then fall away again as the narrative interest moves elsewhere. There is oddness, weirdness even, but it swims in and out of focus, along with the more obviously mundane, to the point where it is impossible to determine what is real, what might be imagined, even within the terms of novel. We might even begin to wonder if Hawthorn and Child themselves are constructs within the fictional framework, figments of someone else’s imagination, but if they are, we will never be quite certain. Hawthorn and Child must forever remain a series of intriguing but elusive possibilities and in that lies its wonderful strangeness.

I’d be hard put to pick a favourite from among these three novels and I’m not even going to try, not least because they are so different, yet all three have haunted me in their various ways since I first read them. The idea of the city is so replete with possibility it’s fascinating to watch different authors drawing out such different aspects of that potential. All three deserve your attention.

The post The Mere Touch: Weird Reviews appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The mere touch of cold philosophy.” – Keats

Reviewed in this column:
Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klíma (Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2011)
The Orphan Palace by Joseph S. Pulver (Chômu Press, 2011)
Bluegrass Symphony by Lisa L. Hannett (Ticonderoga, 2011)
The Man From Primrose Lane by James Renner (Sarah Crichton Books, NY, 2012)
Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2011)

Since I accepted the invitation to become Weird Fiction Review’s book reviewer, I’ve been thinking a good deal about what I mean when I say ‘weird fiction’. The ostensive definition – what I point to when I say ‘weird fiction’ – can only go so far in accounting for my choices in this and future columns and so some sort of rule of thumb is maybe in order. But while definitions have their uses the reviewer can all too quickly be transformed into gatekeeper, determining how weird is weird enough rather than being open-minded. In part one defines by discarding, so for me weird fiction is mostly not science fiction, nor classic and contemporary fantasy, nor urban fantasy nor paranormal romance, nor ghost story … except that it might have elements of all or any of these and be weird as well. Likewise, experimental form does not automatically mean weird content but the two do, on occasion, go together. And anyway, rules exist to be broken.

Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, having winnowed out that which is accounted for through rational explanation and that which is accounted for by the supernatural, leaves the reader with the moment of hesitation, wherein resides the purely fantastic story. However, for Todorov, the ‘fantastic’ is inevitably fleeting, vanishing before the end of the story because the reader must and will opt either for the real or the supernatural explanation. Todorov’s understanding of the fantastic is, to my mind, so refined as to be almost unworkable in terms of practical criticism, but I’ve always liked that idea of the moment of hesitation, that teetering on the brink of possibility. And in turn I’ve always been interested in the kind of fiction that pushes that moment of hesitation beyond the brief questioning flicker of uncertainty, depriving the reader of the swiftly following moment of relief as understanding arrives. Which is not to say I want my reading experience to be stretched beyond endurance but I suspect that somewhere in that extended moment of hesitation, just as panic sets in, but long before the reader says ‘oh, this is just silly’, there is a sweet spot of profound uncertainty wherein resides the weird.

But the weird is not simply a matter of an exquisitely drawn-out moment of hesitation. Scott Nicolay recently presented his Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction here on Weird Fiction Review, and this has also contributed to my own thinking about weird fiction, not so much for the things he discards as ‘not weird’ as for what he insists is essential: place and atmosphere. I might in part disagree about place, depending on how one defines that, but yes, weird fiction, classic and contemporary, definitely has an atmosphere about it, and for me at least, it is atmosphere, that literary equivalent of a faint mist rising out of nowhere, that first tends to catch my interest. Interestingly, Nicolay also quotes Caitlin Kiernan’s dictum: ‘dark fiction dealing with the inexplicable should, itself, present to the reader a certain inexplicability’, which seems to lead us straight back to Todorov’s moment of hesitation.

So, these are the thoughts that preoccupy me as I turn to my first set of reviews for Weird Fiction Review. My first choice is Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klíma (Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2011), not least because his name was previously unfamiliar to me. One thing I have learned since I began reading The Weird is that while I am familiar with the Anglo-American tradition of classic weird writing, I know almost nothing about the European tradition, and I am in haste to rectify that. Klíma, like Kafka, his younger contemporary, was born in Bohemia, then lived a peripatetic life, spending money as it came his way, before finally settling to writing. Much of Klíma’s work was published posthumously (he died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty), and was then suppressed by the Soviet authorities, but his ‘vision of one’s innate ability to achieve inner freedom, to pursue spiritual sovereignty through deoessence’ subsequently inspired artists and dissidents. Klíma’s philosophy ‘in which all reality culminates in an absolute subject’, to the point of ‘the subject fully understanding his substance and becoming the creator of his own divinity’ underpins Glorious Nemesis, a short novel which also draws on Sturm und Drang and English Romanticism.

Sider, the novel’s protagonist, is a man deeply moved by the Alpine landscape through which he is travelling, so much so that on the spur of the moment, he gets off the train at Cortona, where he spends an idyllic few days, overwhelmed by ‘mysterious, monumental sensations’. In his heightened state of receptivity, Sider teeters on the brink of a great revelation that somehow eludes him, though he relishes the lack of clarity of these sensations. ‘The entire world intoxicated him, existence itself was his lover, songs erupted from his inner being, and at night he was embraced by magical dreams …’ It is hard not to think of Wordsworth’s response to the landscape in The Prelude but the heightened emotional response both to Cortona and to leaving it seems to owe more to Sturm und Drang and indeed, as the story unfolds Sider’s emotional responses will guide him more than any engagement with the landscape.

Sider’s disenchantment with Cortona itself is replaced by an obsession with two mysterious young women, one of whom is the living embodiment of his recurring dream of Her, ‘indistinct, flickering and yet powerful’, Sider’s pursuit of the women finally leads him up the mountain, that classic Romantic site, where they vanish. In the meantime, having failed to obey a summons to return home, he has been financially ruined, and must now work to recoup his fortunes.

Until this point, Sider might seem to be a fanciful young man with more money than sense and an inclination to find things about which to obsess. The one woman’s resemblance to his vision can be accounted for insofar as we assume Sider is fantasising about a type rather than a person. It is only some years later when, as the narrator puts it, ‘the emptiness of [Sider’s] soul become more profound, calling on something to fill it’, the woman begins to appear to Sider, in visions and in the street. Sider now believes in her corporeal existence but his pursuit of her takes on a profoundly hallucinatory nature; parts of the town where he is lives assume aspects of Cortona, and when he finally returns there, he finds the other woman, Errata S., seemingly incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. Sider is caught up in a bizarre series of events in which he may, or may not, have killed an old woman; in which the two young women may or may not have fought over him; have been ghosts, or have impersonated ghosts. The layers of explanation negate one another and the novel shifts in register from being emotionally overwrought to the unfathomably peculiar, until the denouement takes a distinctively more transcendental direction.

How much of what happens in this story can be construed as ‘real’ is a moot point. Sider’s initial encounter with Cortona seems to be external to him while his long and confused pursuit of the women becomes increasingly internalised  to the point where Sider is apparently journeying deep into his own soul, engaging with the eternity of his own divine essence. Or else he is mad. Either way, this story has characteristics I associate with other continental weird writers, most notably the way that real and imagined experience collapse into one another over and over, to the point where reality and fiction become totally blurred. The flavour is distinctively different from American and English writing of the same period, which often seems reticent by comparison, determined to re-establish those boundaries. Glorious Nemesis is perhaps not an enjoyable story but it is intellectually challenging.

Moving to the present day, The Orphan Palace by Joseph S. Pulver (Chômu Press, 2011) certainly cannot be accused of such reticence. Ostensibly, the story of a road trip made by a serial arsonist and killer, from the West Coast to the East, in search of his childhood nemesis is not promising material, and I don’t mind admitting that The Orphan Palace initially seemed to sit far out on the edge of my reading comfort zone. However, it quickly became clear that there is much more to this novel than a trail of dumped cars, torched buildings and broken and bloody bodies.

The reader is travelling with Cardigan, a man damaged by his childhood experiences, first at home, then in Zimms County Home for Orphaned Children, where he spends years at the mercy of Doctor Archer. His friend and fellow survivor, Sharkey, has found peace running a bar in Long Beach and wants Cardigan to stay with him, but something still gnaws at Cardigan, and only a return to the site of his childhood trauma can assuage this. We assume, because narratives of this kind usually demand it, that Cardigan is seeking a cathartic showdown with Archer.

However, Michael Cisco raises an interesting point in the introduction to this novel, when he talks of Cardigan as the paranoid man who ‘knows’ and ‘understands’ everything, and I think this is key to appreciating how The Orphan Palace works. Everything in this novel is very real to Cardigan; the novel may be a road trip across the United States, but we can also read it as a painstaking mapping of Cardigan’s own mental territory. To read the novel is then to in part decode Cardigan’s thought processes and to reach some understanding of what prompts him to commit murder and arson as he goes, and also to understand the influences of others on him. The most notable is Huey, another orphan at the Home, convinced that he is the quarry of  the Hounds of Tindalos, and Tibet, who offers Cardigan a gentler framework of Eastern philosophy around which to build his life. The novel in part lays bare Cardigan’s struggle to find a belief system which can sustain him, so we might also read this novel as Cardigan’s attempt to construct a narrative in which he explains himself to himself.

Cardigan’s view of the world is quite literally black and white. Black is bad and he sees himself as a kind of vigilante, keeping Blackness at bay. However, the reader is entirely reliant on Cardigan’s construction of that moral landscape; we have no other clues as to why some people are Black and others White, yet oddly, instinctively, we trust Cardigan’s judgement and accept his view of the world, even when it makes no sense, or perhaps because it doesn’t. For all of its strangeness, his world possesses a coherence, and in particular to one strand of it, although at the same time this narrative thread calls Cardigan’s entire existence into question.

Time after time, as he travels, Cardigan finds himself in what he comes to call the Ghoul Hotels, identical in design, the same woman (Ms Kafka) on reception, the same room, the same film on the tv, the same books on the shelves. What at the beginning seems like a coincidence begins to take on a new significance for Cardigan as the journey continues, becomes a quest to understand the significance of the publisher Shadow House and the film company Shadow Brothers. Or is it that Cardigan chooses to interpret the endless series of identikit budget motels as something sinister rather than tedious, and to cast himself as some sort of saviour for Ms Kafka’s people.

The metafictional quality of The Orphan Palace is difficult to ignore. How much is Cardigan trying to find ways to describe what is happening in his head, how much is direct outside experience is hard to tell. There are odd little moments when characters seem to have strayed in from somewhere else altogether. Cardigan’s encounter with the engaging demon hunters, Cake and Dune, and the afternoon he spends working with them, contrasts strikingly with his own daily life of countering Blackness in the world and contending with the Animal that demands fire. It offers a momentary glimpse of a different life, one that Cardigan might be part of if he chose, except that the lure of his own road, however dangerous, however suspect, is too strong. Perhaps he cannot write that other story except in brief snatches.

In the end, it is impossible to decide what in Cardigan’s life is ‘real’, what is ‘fantasy’. One might feel that Cardigan’s entire journey is an imaginative construction rather than something actually happening within the frame of the novel, but it is impossible to tell. Instead, this novel seems to be one long hesitation between the real and the supernatural, constantly shifting ground, catching the reader unaware, making her sympathise with a man who can only express himself in fire and blood.

While we cannot take for granted Cardigan’s view of the world, the stories in Lisa L Hannett’s collection, Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga, 2011), require that the reader simply accept. We are in very different territory to Pulver’s America, somewhere close to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or the American South of Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, but a world in which strangeness is fully realised in a way that these writers only hint at. And it’s in that unblinking acceptance that the integral weirdness of most of these stories lies. Take the comedy of a woman with a flock of fortune-telling chickens and a shape-changing fox-husband (‘Fur and Feathers’): Aurora’s efforts to help her clients, protect her flock and become reconciled with her husband intermingle the quotidian hopes and fears of people with little left to lose but still desperate for help and comfort with the promise of something magical but also with Aurora’s own longing for the recalcitrant Reynard. O’Connor’s interest in carnival freakshows resurfaces in Hannett’s ‘Forever, Miss Tapekwa County’, a story in which becoming a carnival-show mermaid is seen as a life-enhancing transformation; the reader is left thinking not so much about the horror of the change as that it is a perfectly natural part of life. Similarly, in ‘Wires Uncrossed’, although Bo may have sprouted tentacles or antennae and be able to tune in to people’s phone conversations, the story focuses on his desire to reunite his estranged parents rather than the oddity of his own situation, and therein lies the strangeness. Nonetheless, the first story, ‘Carousel’, remains the most arresting with its extraordinary moment of revelation as moths work on the broken body of Cassie, a young girl whose hopes of escape have already been doubly dashed. and raise up her spirit. Yet, this is a contemporary world in which the small moments of familiar normality, trucks, seatbelts, telephones, vie with other forms of power. The apparent timelessness of Hannett’s stories, that eternal fantastic present, is persistently if quietly undermined, disorienting the reader time and again.

Hannett offers one approach to dealing with the weird in the modern world but her stories raise a more general question. In 2012, where does the weird live? How does it survive? Although the advent of the electric light proved not to be the death knell of the ghost story, as some had feared, the nature of the English ghost story changed after World War Two. Perhaps so much violence was, ironically, inimical to telling ghost stories, or perhaps it was simply that the academic milieu from which so many fine stories emerged no longer existed. Pastiche abounds but the modern ghost story is a very different beast to its ancestor. The same, I suspect, must apply to the weird if and when it doesn’t deliberately turn away. We might turn to Fritz Leiber’s ‘Smoke Ghost’ for early pointers on weird modernity but how do other contemporary writers deal with it?

The Man From Primrose Lane (Sarah Crichton Books, NY, 2012) by James Renner seems very brash by comparison with Hannett’s stories. It is bright, suburban, a world of Kettle chips and Tivos, and seems to offer little in the way of weirdness. Yet, even from the beginning, a distinct undercurrent is detectable. The novel’s tone reminds me somewhat of Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place; the grieving husband and his small son, getting by after the inexplicable death of Elaine, wife and mother, struggling to make sense. In flashback we see David and Elaine’s complex courtship, his lack of comprehension set against her capricious responses, his disbelief when finally she accepts him. There is a sense of entrenched inertia as the framework of life somehow slides through Neff’s fingers.

Set against this is a death, the murder of the Man from Primrose Lane, an eccentric old man never seen outside without a pair of mittens on his hands, whatever the weather, and a different pair every time. The murder itself seems to be eccentric, more so if it is actually a murder. How might a man chop off and liquidise his own fingers before killing himself, and more pertinently, why would he do such a thing? Here we have no delicate meditation on lost love but something altogether more Fortean. Neff, perhaps a little conveniently, is formerly a successful true-crime writer, and his publisher is convinced that investigating the murder will provide the therapeutic push that he thinks Neff requires.

Certainly, when he realises that the Man from Primrose Lane possessed a false identity Neff is intrigued, but as the investigation brings him ever closer to home, to the disappearance of his own wife’s twin sister in childhood, and to the secret his wife seemed to be concealing shortly before her death, one begins to wonder what is actually going on. The discovery of Neff’s own fingerprints compounds the sense of wrongness. At this point, the novel looks set to transform itself into a lively if unorthodox police procedural, except that bizarre coincidences persist. The novel is seriously straining at the seams and one wonders if it can actually take the strain. It has actually reached the point where the author may have to invoke the ‘with one bound he was free’ card. Except that he doesn’t, and it is at this point that the novel settles into the sweet spot. It is also the point at which I haver because I do not want to deprive the reader of the necessary revelatory moment of ‘oh, so that’s what’s going on’. Suffice it to say that a suspicion had begun to form in my mind from quite early on that temporal discrepancies might be in play, but not in a classically hard science-fictional way.

While it is possible to tidy the novel’s denouement away in a flurry of quasi-scientific explanations, something still doesn’t quite ring true, and I don’t think it is entirely the result of the novel making its escape from authorial control. It’s certainly an ambitious novel, and the author has a struggle on his hands, but its exuberance overcomes the weaknesses and moments of convenience in the plot. Buried deep in the heart of the novel there is still something that remains fundamentally inexplicable, something that wanders back into the reader’s mind when she least expects it, something that can’t quite be answered, and it is this rather than the more obvious trappings of Fortean weirdness that finally convinces me that this novel itself belongs the weird.

However, when it comes to the contemporary weird, Kirsten Kaschock’s Sleight (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2011) is the most remarkable novel I’ve encountered in a long time. It focuses on sleight, an art form which is remarkably elusive; indeed it seems to be not so much an art form as a denial of art, an effacing of performance, a self-abnegation, perhaps even an indulgence given one wonders if it actually exists. One learns, mainly from footnotes to the main text, that it involves sleightists (the actual performers) and objects (architectures) which they in some way move with and around on stage, and link together in assemblages of people and objects, but this is performance which is form stripped of narrative and which, when done well, manifests its success through the performers no longer actually being visible on stage. The performances themselves are somehow ‘drawn’ by ‘hands’ yet at the same time sleight appears to be an art form which almost from its inception has been ossified, slavishly adhering to its original forms. Preference is given always to men although it seems that women may, on the whole, be the better sleightists and indeed it was a woman who brought sleight into being. Creativity is simultaneously necessary yet suppressed. It is, if you like, the highest form of performance art in that the sleight troupes seek no recognition as individuals, and indeed exceptionality in performance is institutionally frowned upon. Audiences do not applaud, and there is much debate as to whether they actually understand what it is they are seeing. One might suppose that sleight, as an art form, is somehow related to the Emperor’s new clothes in its very invisibility.

One might also suppose that Kaschock has written a very clever satire on the state of dance as performance; it is certainly possible to read the novel as such, certainly if one has any knowledge of the history of certain dance troupes, but I actually think there is rather more to the novel than a simple commentary on the insularity of ballet masters. Kaschock poses fascinating questions about the nature of art and creativity through the medium of this art that is not actually a performance medium at all, at least not in this world. Except that she presents it in the most plausible manner imaginable, not just holding it in place with suitably academic footnotes but bolstering its reality through interviews and critical commentaries. The novel maintains a tone of complete rationality throughout – one is vaguely reminded of the Officer’s account of his bizarre machine in Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, except that sleight seems rather more reasonable.

Sleight follows the fortunes of the Monk troupe as it collaborates with West’s Kepler troupe. West fancies himself as an iconoclast, determined to turn sleight inside out, by introducing everything that has been historically undesirable: colour, costume, lighting, music, narrative. His motives are not entirely clear: there are suggestions that it is a long and complex revenge for a perceived adolescent humiliation. West himself is no sleightist, at least not in the accepted sense, although he is a gifted director. In which case, he is a sleightist of a different stripe, manipulating people rather than structures, absenting himself when there is trouble, bereft of scruples when it comes to achieving what he wants. On this basis he has no hesitation in manipulating both Clef, a brilliant technical practitioner of sleight, and her sister, Lark, retired from sleight but troubled by her inability to fully express her creativity, into working for him. Lark is beset by Needs, physical embodiments of the feelings she cannot fully articulate. Her Needs are transformed into pigments with which she colours what she calls Souls, bowl-like knots of wood. Lark and Clef are estranged, having fallen out over Kitchen, Clef’s lover, once Lark’s as well.

West has an instinct for finding people’s weak spots. In bringing Lark and Clef together again, West is perfectly he is setting up a potentially toxic dynamic within the troupes, and deliberately exacerbates this by also bringing in Byrne, an artist, and his wayward brother, Marvel. The boys’ mother always regarded Marvel as the more talented child while Byrne is the one who carries the guilt for his father’s death. As if this weren’t enough, West insists that this group of damaged and fragile people work with a story recently in the news, of children kidnapped, abused and transformed into weird art by the Vogelsangs. Their story has come to light because they have deliberately drawn attention to themselves, seeking recognition for their work. It is not difficult to see why West is similarly drawn to their story.

It is perhaps glib to say that West simply doesn’t understand the forces he is working with but in this instance it is undoubtedly true, in the same way that he believes he can transform sleight into a commercial art form, something it inevitably seems able to resist with ease. The irony is, perhaps, that this is West’s finest performance but in ways that the audience cannot actually see, which is of course what sleight in its pure form is supposed to be about. In trying to be iconoclastic West has remained true to the roots of the form.

West dominates the latter part of the novel as he brings his flawed creation to performance, and Kaschock’s handling of his struggle is well controlled. His slide into failure is inevitable, of course, but that inevitability is well paced. However, for me the novel’s fascination resides more in the first half, trying to understand the strangeness of this art form that everyone accepts so easily, tracing its history through the footnotes, and to an altogether different revelation as to its origins. Kaschock’s skill in calling into being something which, we suppose, doesn’t exist, and the intensity with which she writes about it is truly impressive. This is one of those novels that lingers in the mind long after the book is closed.

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