Asked to define her personal aesthetic as a writer here at WFR some time ago, Womack pithily responded that “Beauty is complicated.” An epigraph to “Orange Dogs”, the first story in Lost Objects, develops this sentiment further. It is ostensibly a quotation from an old German treatise on butterflies, and it reads “Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit”, or “They warn that they are poisonous.” For Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, this is true. Beauty is complicated; so too are poisons, butterflies, the world. Womack attempts to shoulder that terrible awareness of apocalypse across this assembly of short stories. Some succeed; others, ambitious, stumble. On balance, they offer much to a generous reader. In the effort, they continue the response that weird fiction shapes to the question of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Chthulucene?), even while they broaden the ambit of weird fiction by introducing new spaces and settings for creative imaginations.

Womack is an Andalusian writer, graduate of the Clarion Creative Writing program, frequent editor, and co-founder of Ediciones Nevsky / Nevsky Books. These many filiations with the literary world yield a crop of diverse settings and characters in her stories. She cut her teeth in translating core texts of modern weird fiction from English into Spanish, including Karen Tidbeck’s Jagannath and Amatka, as well as the classics of gothic fiction from Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to Lord Dunsany, and you can trace those influences in surprising fashion across the offerings here. The settings of Lost Objects range from an eerie Eastern Europe to a genetically-reinvented Scotland, and from a Thatcher-esque world of English mining to a frozen world of ice and storms. Her protagonists are intellectually curious but socially-marginal characters, children and librarians, old scientists and regretful scroungers. For a debut, Lost Objects looks to a great range of sources and shoulders an immense weight.

***

Lost Objects is divided into two sections. The first offers a number of shorter stories, of which one of the best is “Black Isle”, a story set in Scotland that concerns the generic reconstruction of entire species and biospheres. Other stand-outs are the mysterious “Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur” and “Orange Dogs”, mentioned above. (You can also read “Orange Dogs” here on Weird Fiction Review if you are so inclined.) Across these stories, apocalypse and survival take on many faces, while human desires—and regrets—take flight in lyric moments of the imagination. Over and over again, the things humans make that will exist into the future are put in jeopardy. For example, “Black Isle” posits a mysterious company whose re-envisioning of the genetic sequence has allowed for massive changes to the ecological life and animal composition of the world after the sudden vanishing of birds and other animals. “Neo-Bio” has made artificial creatures such as blue bears and orange lizards possible—and also necessitates the laws against these aesthetic disasters. To the dismay of the scientists at the forefront of this change, however, all is not as it seems, and the recreation of the world according to XenoLab may not be as sustainable as claimed.

In contrast to the semi-recognizable corporate earth of “Black Isle”, “Orange Dogs” foresees a broken, limping world of scarcity wherein knowledge of the old world is rare and parcelled out, and where creatures that we may be familiar with have transformed beyond comprehension. What were once butterflies are now hunters that use venom, giant insects roam the world, seasons have changed, and floods have reworked the distribution of lands, cities, of lives. Anxieties over children and progeny of various kinds, natural or unnatural, recur in these stories, as do concerns with fraught relationships in the decay of social networks. Crucially, in these short stories, as in another of the more evocative tales, “Little Red Drops”, guilt and regret shadow each of the major characters. So too do acute if slightly akimbo one liners lodge themselves in the imagination. For example, see the one-line self-reflection provided by Olga, the narrator of the latter story: “What a fierce thing was she, a jilted woman.”

From the evidence provided, Womack prefers to frustrate resolution and the narrative impulse to tie up loose ends. Closure is clearly a relic of the past and can no longer anchor the lives of the people in her tales. Instead, climaxes frequently bring readers to a transformative awareness wherein the world itself—or at least the guilty, haunted visions of that we see through the eyes of Womack’s protagonists—seems to change. The first section of Lost Objects comes to a close with the book’s most intense effort to pay witness to change in its moment of world-altering gravity, “Marvels Do Not Ofttimes Occur”. Here, a “celestial phenomenon” leaves its prospective early modern viewer (placed in Nuremberg, 1561) astonished and alarmed. The pious recorder’s voice is particularly striking and plaintive—as poignant as a story of death, destruction, and disappearance can be. As the recorder writes there, “For all that we have suffered, and have deserved to suffer, may God grant us his help. I put my hand to this true account, at Nuremburg, the third anniversary of the death of Doctor Johannes Bugenhagen of Wollin. What would he have made of it I wonder.”

The second section of Lost Objects primarily consists of “Kingfisher”, a short story about a librarian whose relationship with birds, beauty, work, writing, and her husband result in a delirious turn of affairs. The beginning of this story is a blurred boundary between an initially recognizable world and a later turn toward something much weirder. Take this early passage, for instance. It in, the narrator-writer reflects on her sleepy life in a small village:

I was getting bored by then. Of the friendly faces, the easiness of it all. I started fantasising that I needed to deal with some obstacles in order to produce good material. That I needed to be a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit cold, a little bit unhappy. An excuse as good or as bad as any other, designed to clear my mind of the real fear: that I would never write again. My fellow classmates from the writing class I had attended were doing very well for themselves; some were doing incredibly well for themselves. I was ashamed of how jealous this made me: until then I had always thought I was a good person. I felt happy for them, but I also kept wondering why I could not be as successful as they were.

Given what follows, this passage suggests an uncanniness to the story in the sense that Tzvetan Todorov discussed years ago in The Fantastic. Its prosaic elements anchor the story in a world much like ours, one nervously familiar to that produced by the news headlines and deep-seated anxieties we all know too well. So too are the protagonist’s deep concerns with her employment and employability. The expensive education she has received has not prepared her for a living in a small village where fishing, farming, and small-holding are primary sources of economic and household sustenance.

Like those protagonists in the shorter stories, the narrator of “Kingfisher” feels intense regret when she reflects on the past. As she admits, “sometimes it felt as if all the sacrifices that my parents had made to provide me with a better future had been for nothing.” If the world of the past is one of capitalist expansion and sacrifice, one that foresaw only better tomorrows while it devoured the bone marrow of today, the new world is smaller and much reduced in ambition.

Possibilities that had been obvious to our parents even one generation back were now impossible dreams. Housing was unaffordable, so we would never own a place of our own, although at the same time there were hundreds, thousands, of houses and rooms empty up and down the country. They were just owned by other people, not us: banks and companies and trusts and corporations. […]  There were not many cars anymore, no air travel, although I was secretly happy about this. I remember flying once, when I was very little, how frightening it was, how miraculous it felt. But the wrong kind of miracle, like black magic. […] This brave new world was about wanting fewer things, not more things. There were no more certainties.

The disappearances that mark “Kingfisher” include those of animals and even children. Without tracing the story too closely, and following its dreams and nightmares, the revelations of the story yield perhaps less than the fact of the complex network that it is trying to harness into a coherent individual’s story during such transformative change. Womack’s book does not end there, however, but with the fleeting and yet majestic “A Place for Wild Beasts”. It might be the sequencing of the collection, but the opposition of the long and sometimes laborious “Kingfisher” with the brilliant snippet of “A Place for Wild Beasts” suggests that the best passages in Lost Objects are those in which the lyrical imagination is given room enough to take flight, at which point it—quicksilver—vanishes.

***

The contemporary imagination faces a plethora of near-unimaginable forces about which just enough is known for the mind to shy away in horror or disbelief. Among her inspirations from the gothic traditions of Spain and England, Womack cites newspaper material concerning climate change, social inequity, and the new Gilded Age culture. These things beggar the imagination, even as they are the creations of ordinary forces and human acts. Perhaps the most significant indication of this transformation is that the current geological epoch is named after human activity. In the time of the Anthropocene, telling stories about the future is fraught with anxiety. Merely imagining what a future might be like is difficult, both materially and emotionally. Historians Christophe Bonduel and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in their recent study The Shock of the Anthropocene that Anthropocentric imaginations must accept a “double reality”:

On the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 billion years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new status that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans.

Can this knowledge be incorporated into the vision of world-historical time that supplies literary fiction its material? Lost Objects suggests that it might be possible—maybe—in weird fiction. The multiple reductions and disappearances within Womack’s stories hint at what many people already know: society is unsustainable. As Andreas Malm notes with understated severity in The Progress of This Storm, “Expect more gifts of history to be withdrawn, one after the other, primarily from those who never received very many of them in the first place.” There is always more to consider. What is to be done when the intimate and everyday nature of work—its precarity for some and its meaninglessness for others—is “a scar across our collective soul”, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Perhaps, as the protagonist of “Kingfisher” wonders, our imaginations must catch up with our needs and desires, which must themselves freshly confront the world. As the editors of the recent book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet point out, “Life has been monstrous almost from its beginnings.”

What a world. There will always be fiction to offer an interpretive lens, a prophetic augury. With the publication of Lost Objects, Marian Womack rises to the challenge. She offers stories of crisis wherein the nature of human work and our capacity to prepare for and live within the future as we understand it are put to the question. They bear that weight about as well as can be expected. Cumulatively, they suggest than that the human ability to create a future is failing, and that the “lost objects” of the title are the dreamt-of lives that would—that could—exist however many years from now. Whatever form they take, the prediction that Womack makes with certainty is always this: they will be almost unrecognizable.

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— The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today, the revival of interest in Anna Kavan is ongoing. The first Anna Kavan Symposium was held at the Institute of English Studies in London in 2014 and, in 2017, a Kavan-dedicated special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review followed. We now have Penguin Classics’ new edition of Ice. This revival is well-timed; Kavan’s unflinching vision still has great power. More and more, the world as we know it is ending; to some degree, it looks like this is our fault. In Kavan’s last novel, Ice, the apocalypse isn’t ecological—it is psychosocial, a premonition of the emotional actions that lead to a world’s end.

Kavan knew much from the painful and passionate events that punctuated her life. She knew solace too, of a kind; in the 1930s, Kavan took up a lifelong addiction to heroin accompanied by a syringe she called Bazooka. A lurking danger of weird fiction is the frequency with which its writers’ psychological distress can be championed in and of itself. What this tendency fails to attend to is the critical charge that attends the revelation of that distress as a product of repression or alienation. Kavan’s heroin addiction and psychological turmoil resembles the schizophrenia of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus insofar as the need to discern symptoms from subjects (or causes from corrosions) is not always undertaken with care. As Carole Sweeney suggests in her article “Keeping the Ruins Private”, heroin was not a crucial element of Kavan’s writing even if it may have been “essential” to her life. Insisting that Ice be read only through the lens of heroin addiction not only denigrates its author. It also misses the evidence provided by the novel itself. Nevertheless, and however it is read, this dark allure helps to draw Kavan’s texts into the terrain of the weird.

Along a different line of thinking, much can be made from Kavan’s decision to take up the name of one of her characters. She made this decision upon leaving a sanatorium in which she had been coping with the dissolution of her second marriage and a failed suicide attempt. Her name was legally changed in 1939. This act of auto-deictic fixation overwrites her societal identity with that of literary fiction. Yet to read her work following this act as complete auto-fictionalization is to miss the point she made in her destruction of all her journals and personal diaries before her death.

Kavan’s texts are a compound act of self-creation. They are replete with the tropes and entrapments of the written word but entirely composed as an ever-changing monument to the self-in-danger. As Kate Zambreno puts it, Kavan wrote as if looking in a mirror. She rearranged the usual divisions between subject and object, writer and character. This allowed her to see more clearly, to write more clinically. Or, as Jonathan Lethem puts it in his new introduction to this edition, “one feels at the mercy of an absolutely precise and merciless prose machine, one simply uninterested in producing the illusion of cause and effect” (ix). This machine is as capable of destruction as it is of creation. Both are subsumed under the general power of fiction which is not to make things happen but instead to make things seem and appear.

This writing strategy calls for a tactical reading of the novel’s agile code-switching where things are and are not as they are presented. The effect is much stronger than in literary realism’s tired gambit of the untrustworthy narrator. For Kavan, the structures on which common visions of the world are based are understood as already deceptive. What emerges is a whirlwind of symbols, a torrent of affective structures that parade, narrate, detonate. In a directly related effort, and much like surrealists as different as André Breton and Leonora Carrington, Kavan devotes herself to a vision of the female body as a contested site subject to patriarchal control, as Nathalie Ferris argues in her 2017 article “The Double Play of Mirrors”. The gambit of code-switching is perhaps nowhere as frequently evidenced as in the play of meaning attributed to women’s bodies from all directions. Ice examines the violence that women are subjected to from its most direct source: the male gaze.

There is more. In Kavan’s novels, much as in her life, people and characters travel without end. As Zambreno argues, major characters in her novels ceaselessly travel only to “stop in small, indiscriminate towns where rows of faceless houses are as closed-off as their inhabitants; finding strange faces and obstacles everywhere, the landscape one of silent hostility.” This is true for Kavan’s last novel, Ice. First published by Peter Owen in 1967, Ice has now been issued in a new edition by Penguin Classics.

Ice

The novel begins with a man driving along a dark road. It ends with the same man still driving, but now accompanied. Along the way, the man’s travels (no characters are named) take him from ship to plane across battlefields and over mountains, through networks of shadowy resistance fighters and into the ceremonial banquets of military overlords. In this world, society is ending, fragmenting as mysterious walls of ice encroach on human habitations and prise apart political and personal relationships. There are stranger things too: mutants, dragons, sacrifices. Amid all the action, it is difficult to tell what is real and what is otherwise.

Most apparent is the traveler’s obsessive need to control a woman with extraordinarily pale hair and a damaged past. At one point, the traveler had been “infatuated” with her, he admits. He was—is—drawn to her fragility and psychological damage. These are the residue of a sadistic mother but also, one suspects, the way she has been treated by her husband, briefly shown in the first chapter as an arrogant and controlling partner. She is described as glass-like. Think: brittle bones, shockingly white hair, and intense eyes. Think: someone you can see right through. Most strikingly, she rarely speaks. Celine Magot in a 2016 article for Miranda argues that she is a “voiceless body, the summation of external pressuring voices.” The woman tends to confuse the man, as if she were phantasmagoric, or perhaps a host of women or just an illusion born of fever, desire, and sadism. He confesses that “at times she hardly seemed real.” This ethereal transparency lends her image to a host of other women in the novel and whips the traveler on in his obsession to find her and, maybe, to protect her. Or perhaps to be the force of destruction in her life.

The man’s obsession drives his fantastical travels across war-torn countries and beats as the psychotic heart of his relationships with others. This is most true for his relations with other men who seem the caretakers of the woman as she herself flees, travels, and hides. She recognizes this strange conspiracy and, at one point, accuses the men of being “in league together.” The truth is nowhere near that simple. At another moment, he examines another man and sees almost a mirror of himself:

It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing; her only function might have been to link us together. His face wore the look of extreme arrogance which always repelled me. Yet I suddenly felt an indescribable affinity with him, a sort of blood-contract, generating confusion, so that I began to wonder if there were two of us…

Over the course of the novel, the traveler’s major antagonist is another man known simply as the Warden with whom he feels kin and who early in the novel is shown in a sexually abusive relationship with the girl that verges on coercive incarceration. It is this spiraling proliferation of relationships between abusive and arrogant men contracted across the perceived possession of a tortured woman that the novel’s tracks move on, ceaselessly and patiently propelling itself into new variations that never propose an escape from this damaged cycle of relationships.

The man proves unable to tell hallucination and dream from his surroundings. At one point, the narrative admits that “the hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.” Some readers may find this frustrating; others, may find that, despite the horrors on display, the greater danger may be the unspoken gaps between recorded events. The protagonist realizes a strange syncopation between his fragmenting world and himself: “In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.” His search for the girl is cast into relief by these moments of apparent clarity, and he even calls this mad obsession a “senseless, frustrating pursuit.” He is put on trial—perhaps real, perhaps an elaborate and theatrical court of the mind—where he is called “a psychopath” and deemed “totally unreliable.” But at no point does this resolve substantially interrupt the novel’s tracking of the man’s obsession; his relentless pursuit is never truly threatened. This failure indicates something perverse in these moments of clarity. They may be acts of self-deception, mock resistance thrown up in ironic despair. Nothing successfully stops the man’s quest for long.

Ice is sometimes called science fiction or slipstream, given its premise of the collapse of society and the oncoming encroachment of ice. Yet the novel’s propulsive relationships take centre stage. In a weird light this apocalyptic vision becomes existential, epiphenomenal, and almost beautiful. Kavan’s writing is a howling Arctic wind. Her prose possesses a surgical precision that exposes both care and catastrophe, as in this passage that mixes urgency and obsession with a high imaginative capacity:

I should have to start searching for her all over again. The repetition was like a curse. I thought of placid blue seas, tranquil islands, far away from war. I thought of the Indris, those happy creatures, symbols of life in peace, on a higher plane. I could clear out, go to them. No, that was impossible. I was tied to her. I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth’s core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing sea. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice. Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight. I saw the dead moon dance over the icebergs, as it would at the end of our world, while she watched from the tent of her glittering hair.

Across its glittering, cool intelligence, this book remains a viscerally disturbing. It casually, almost repulsively knocks aside the usual notions that many modern readers hold regarding sympathetic characters, linear narrative plots, and liberal norms. Instead, it dedicates itself to confronting psychological violence and the heritage of trauma. Reading it, I often thought about how the video game Bloodborne carries a similarly disdainful, hideously compelling charge. In playing that game—if you are successful—you forcefully enact terrible and increasingly grotesque acts of violence that transform your own perception of the world. In this, the game shows its most genuinely brilliant and troubling feature: the consumer vicariously, viciously participates in the assault upon their sensual conception of the world. Likewise in Ice, where the protagonist’s unrelenting quest for the girl of his imagination calls upon the reader to inhabit that protagonist’s world and choices.

The comparison with Bloodborne is worth concluding. Where Bloodborne refers to a cosmic horror tradition descending from the Lovecraftian weird, Kavan’s Ice refers instead to a Freudian tradition of psychological childhood and early adulthood damage. In this latter case, a child’s upbringing sows the seeds from which the adult identity develops and flourishes. Thus, where Lovecraft imagines a perception of the universe exploding upon one’s realization of cosmic others, Kavan’s weird imagination destroys the coherence of the world the more one comes to understand the epistemological force of gendered violence and traumatically disturbed upbringings and intimate relationships. In addition to this difference, the two also differ in form. In a video game such as Bloodborne, the player vicariously commands the acts of their avatar; it therefore offers players an act of becoming. In a novel such as Ice, the reader constructively co-creates the world of the text’s progressive narration; it therefore offers readers an act of imagining.

Ice throws its creative reader to the brutal black dogs of masculine violence, again and again. It can be called weird or slipstream, apocalyptic or perhaps dystopian. All can be true. But for us, for now, it is also an act of illuminating brilliant, of devastating horror. Kavan is ruthless. That is her gift, for in it there is a deep emotional clarity that rejects easy depictions of violence and of victims and victimizers. Ice confronts its reader with the insidious violence that masculinity channels through the men whose travels perforate the world as they obsess over women in dangerous conditions. Kavan’s cool gaze reveals that the costs of violence are exacted on men and women: not equally, but associated, and in some ways alike. Reading Ice is to be thrown into the unblinking miasma of loneliness and confusion that abuse requires for its domination.

Thinking about contemporary gender politics and the way that Ice reads today in its new issue, I find myself returning to observations made by bell hooks in her book The Will to Change (2004). Here, hooks describes men very much like Kavan’s unnamed narrator and her violent icicle, the Warden. The narrator’s ambiguous fascination with the woman’s thin wrists—delicate, beautiful, and easily broken—recalled for me the following passage: “The fact that men often mix being caring and being violent has made it hard for everyone in our culture to face the extent to which male violence stands in the way of males’ giving and receiving love.” Men in Ice fixate on their shared need to control the girl and bypass any and every moment of potential real engagement or possibility of mutual care, which the novel indicates is improbable, if not impossible. There are clear connections to be drawn with today’s gender politics, without question.

As hooks goes on, in a frequently quoted passage, “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” Ice pushes this theme further and makes a prediction of its diagnosis, thus showing the way best not taken, the world best not lived, the cost exacted by cruel, demeaning obsession. This is a point made also by Leigh Wilson: Anna Kavan’s fiction does not deny the existence of cruelty, obsession, and abuse; instead, it asks “whether they are inevitable, what the nature of their existence is, and what the possibilities for change are.” It is never crass but instead possesses a dangerous weight, the way a beautiful glacier looms above. Ice follows to conclusion its protagonist’s obsession and gender-based violence as a desire—not for sexual fulfilment—but for control, possession, domination.

Anna Kavan’s imagination finds a home in the weird. The traveler finds himself mirrored in other men. More urgently but never explicitly, his behaviour is compared to the crushing, alienating ice that destroys society and ruptures relationships at a global level. Foregrounded by Penguin’s choice of cover artwork, the woman appears and disappears from scrutiny. There is no hiding it: Ice is a difficult and demanding book. And yet it may be a necessary one, insofar as it leaves behind it a sense of quickened life and a powerful case to diverge from the dark course charted by its characters.

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In the U.K., Carrington’s collected short works are available from the new feminist publishers, Silver Press. The Debutante and Other Stories is the first title in their catalog, and features an introduction by Sheila Heti and an afterword by Marina Warner, Carrington’s premier editor, translator, and champion.^[1] The big presses are in on the action as well with Little Brown/Virago’s launch of a brand new biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead.

While these centennial efforts are a much needed push towards a proper Carrington revival, it is still a bit messy and with important works still languishing in the stacks. Both Dorothy, A Publishing Project and Silver Press claim their new collections to be first complete editions of Carrington’s work, but they both have excluded longer short works, like the novellas Little Francis and The Stone Door, which originally appeared alongside the other tales in The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse. The content is also mostly the same with the exception of “The Skeleton’s Holiday,” which appears in The Debutante and Other Stories, and is excluded from The Complete Stories. The previously unpublished stories “The Sand Camel,” “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” and “Jemima and the Wolf” also appear in both volumes.

The differences between the U.S. and U.K. editions are more nuanced. Silver Press has provided more historical and literary context (as well as better publishing history) with their front and back matter, as well as some nice artistic flourishes with a few photos and illustrations. The Dorothy version is a no-frills arrangement featuring the stories as they appeared in The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse collections. Silver Press ordered the tales chronologically. None of this makes one book more preferable. In fact, it makes their subtle differences compliment each other while demonstrating, perhaps, what each national market is interested in finding within Carrington. (This is an idea I will explore further after I’ve completed reading all of the stories).

Which brings me to the point of this introduction. This centennial revival has been a dream to surrealist readers. Now any reader can find most of Carrington’s work outside of academic anthologies and out-of-print collections, and can form their own library without a rare books budget. As a result, not only will this broaden the discussion on the role of women within Surrealism and Modernist work (as well as women’s literature, in general), but also restore the history of women authors working within the Weird and other Fantasist traditions.

That’s a huge reevaluation, and I am thrilled to be able to commemorate it and participate in it here with a special read-along of these releases. My plan is this: with both the Dorothy and Silver Press collections, I will review each Carrington story individually, then evaluate the collections as a whole. After that, we will move on to look at the NYRB’s releases,  Down Below, The Milk of Dreams, and last, but not least, we will discuss the life of Carrington herself as guided by Moorhead’s new biography.

So, without further a do, let’s party like hyenas:

NOTE ON SOURCE:  Because WFR.com is U. S. based, and the two collections share an almost exact TOC, I have decided to use the Dorothy, A Publishing Project collection for the majority of this read-along. However, a thorough evaluation of The Debutante and Other Stories, will follow after all of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington have been presented.

The Debutante

“The Debutante” is perhaps Carrington’s most read and anthologized story. It first appeared in Andre Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor in 1940, highly significant as Carrington was one of two women writers included among the 45 contributors. (Child prodigy, Gisèle Prassinos, was the second). An anti-fairy tale full of desire and empty of consequence, the unnamed narrator is a wayward rich girl who prefers reading Swift and going to the zoo over dressing up and flirting with suitors. All of this makes the ball her mother is throwing her very vexing, and she persuades her best friend, a hyena, to attend the ball in her place.

After breaking the hyena out from the zoo and sneaking her home, the friends scheme to pass the beast off as the Debutante with her gown and a sinister mask made out of the maid’s face. The only dead give away that cannot be cloaked is the hyena’s smell, but the girl sends her down anyway. With the hyena successfully launched into society, the girl relaxes with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels until a bat flies into her window and disturbs her. A harbinger of bad luck, the mother comes up and informs the girl her little trick didn’t work. Fed up with the guests’ snobbishness about her smell, the hyena tells them off, while devouring the maid’s face. She “bounds” through the window to return to her natural animal state leaving the Debutante to remain in hers.

Like most of Carrington’s work, this story is highly autobiographical and it’s easy to assume that Carrington is only expressed within this story as the eponymous debutante. However, Joanna Moorhead has a really interesting theory in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington that Carrington broke herself apart into different aspects of her being, and her bestiary therefore represents individual aspects of her self. In this story, she is both the debutante and the hyena, a past and present evaluation (and catharsis) of her new life at the time of the story’s composition in 1937.

Before this year, Carrington was the daughter of one of the most affluent families in England. She was presented at court, and expected to marry rich in both money and title. Like the debutante, she longed for solitude among her books and paintbrushes and yearned for something more. All of that changed when she met Surrealist artist, Max Ernst. They fell in love, and she fled her abhorred debutante life to live with him in France where she found both sexual and artistic awakenings. From an autobiographical perspective, “The Debutante” is a transmutation. While Carrington begins as the debutante, she ends (in 1937, anyway) as the hyena.

While the hyena will go on to embody a much more mystical and deeper meaning in Carrington’s work, in this story, the hyena’s symbolism is simple. She embodies our deepest animal natures that we attempt to formalize and escape with civilizing notions. As a result, individuality can get lost within the regulations and expectations of society. Perhaps that is the significance of the girl reading Gulliver’s Travels, a satire that pits the eponymous protagonist against a series of conforming societies that Gulliver never quite fits into and ends up being exiled from in some shape or form.

Which makes the conversations between the hyena and the girl an interesting exchange of class and hierarchy. While the girl can’t even be bothered, the hyena—who is incarcerated and at the whim of her zookeepers—would love the chance at attending a ball because it conveys a life beyond the cage. It is somewhat resonant of “The Prince and the Pauper,” where each person holds a preconceived notion of the other person’s life. The Hyena thinks human society would be easy to infiltrate with a little small talk. The Debutante presumes civilizing rituals would tame the Hyena long enough for at least an evening. If you took these two presumptions and plugged them into a Venn Diagram, in the overlapping middle are both characters’ judgements on the upper class system and the notion of civilized society. With its emphasis on superficial ritual and protocol, everyone in the Debutante’s circle is so disconnected from the natural world that that they are oblivious. They don’t sense what is under their nose—literally—because all that is expected is for something to be there.

The girl is not impervious to this, either. Although she dismisses tradition, she’s still above it all and doesn’t hesitate to take what she wants. The person who gets the brunt of the horror is, of course, the help. When the hyena proposes killing the maid for the use of her face, the girl merely shrugs once the hyena promises the maid a swift death: “I certainly wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t hate having to go to a ball so much.” As long as it doesn’t inconvenience her, all bets are off. It is a sly depiction of aristocratic indifference—everyone and everything is disposable for their convenience.

Which is why I really like this story—it is sort of an antithesis to depictions of wealth at the time. The narrator could be seen as an anti-Flapper. She has no interest in glitz or status and finds society stifling rather than riveting. She would not fit in at Downton Abbey or Blandings Castle, or any other British homestead where the Bright Young Things were celebrated. No, “The Debutante” is one big eye roll to all of that, something most people within the middle classes would gawp at over their Gatsby party martinis. It’s a rebellion that seems dated, but due to the high tide of nostalgia washing over our recent entertainments, it is still able to bring into check how antiquated and stultifying the concept of aristocracy, and its attainments, still are.

The Oval Lady

“The Oval Lady” is a companion piece to “The Debutante.” It is about Lucretia, a sixteen year old aristocrat trapped in the proverbial tower that is her family manor. Given to standing and looking outside of the window, her strange loveliness and stillness attracts the unnamed narrator. Intrigued, the narrator enters the house to befriend Lucretia and is drawn into a magical playroom where the resident hobbyhorse wizard, Tartar, is able to manifest an imaginary game of horses into reality. The playmates are interrupted by the maid, who chides Lucretia for her arrested development, and drags her kicking and screaming to her father.

Before him, Lucretia is reprimanded. “This is the seventh time that I have had to punish you, and you are no doubt aware that in our family, seven is the last number. I am afraid, my dear Lucretia, that this time I shall have to punish you pretty severely.” He does this by burning the hobbyhorse. The narrator has gone unseen during this whole exchange, and is left in the dining room alone with the terrible sounds of a tortured horse coming from the playroom.

“The Inn of the Dawn Horse” by Leonora Carrington

Carrington’s bestiary is further developed here and recalls The Inn of the Dawn Horse, her self-portrait painted in 1937. We see Carrington and her hyena in a playroom with a white hobbyhorse hung overhead and a white horse running wild outside. Her untamed hair mimics the manes of both animals, connoting a new found connection with freedom, imagination, and inner natures. A liberty that isn’t necessarily won in either tale. However, if you look at some of the numerical patterns laid out in the story, their divination points towards escape and self-actualization.

The story begins and ends with sevens, and her age is even an indicator of this number that represents will, desire, and perfection. Perhaps seven is the last number in Lucretia’s family because it is at the summoning point of realization and determination. Threes and Fours occur less, but with maximum significance. The playroom is on the third floor, and with the magpie’s arrival, the group of three becomes four, thus opening up the imaginary realm for their game. In fact, right before Lucretia is transformed by the snow into a white horse, the magpie chants “Horse” three times. If threes are all about potential, growth, friendship, and creativity, then four is the manifestation of all of that. It seems that once the playroom has reached this magical capacity its transformation is dissolved when the Maid, a fifth wheel as it were, interrupts the reveries.

Perhaps the most poignant mystical queue Carrington uses is within the title itself. We know the oval is a special distinction: “For these aristocrats, even plates were oval, not round like ordinary people’s.” Nonetheless, the plates are the only objects that receive physical attribution. Lucretia is described in straight-angles and her father is simply geometric. Puzzling, as I presumed Lucretia was the title’s subject. Then I looked to the negative space of the story and realized that she was not necessarily the ovoid lady in question.

The Oval Lady is a cosmic egg. While the cosmic egg is usually meant for a larger creation of the world, here it is more personal and deals with not the creation, but the individual awakening, of Lucretia (and Carrington). Keeping Moorhead’s assessment in mind, perhaps the Oval Lady is the unnamed narrator who—with the exception of participating in Tartar’s game—is a terse observer who goes unnoticed by everyone but Lucretia. Perhaps she is Lucretia, an older conscious form, and is a fulfillment of Lucretia’s needed incubation in the unconscious.

Why not? The only detail we have about the narrator is that she is shorter and older than the girl. Could it be, then, that the Oval Lady is the narrator—a matured Lucretia— looking back on this pivotal scene, not through a window, but a memory portal? Through it, she is witnessing where Lucretia has reached a point of no return, a point where some cosmic eggs are about to be broken. It is the future looking to the past to meditate on the present. It’s kind of pure tarot.

The Royal Summons

A Queen goes mad, and a woman is summoned to a sovereign council to deal with it. The solution is to assassinate and replace her. All but the woman is eager to do the deed, and the council opts to select an assassin by playing a game of draughts (checkers). The woman, who is friends with the Queen, and actually there as her proxy, sees nothing good coming from this scene, but goes along with the crowd because figures her inadequacies at the game will disqualify her from the responsibility.

The Royal estate is magical, perhaps an old magic, but more Celtic than Gothic. Again, I am reminded of Alice in Wonderland, but rather than just Alice going against the Queen of Hearts, it’s her and the Queen verses the majority. But also the fantastical elements are more whimsical than sinister. There are bath sponges swimming in goat’s milk, flowers growing from woven tapestries, and talking trees, who seem to be the guardians of the regency. The woman and the council play checkers through Dawn, and to her dismay, the trees announce that she is the winner simply because she was the only one that didn’t cheat. She tries to run away from her fate, but the trees uproot and chase her down and force her to accept. So shaken is she by the Cypress that she chokes down her conscience and fulfills the mission.

I have to admit this story didn’t speak to me as readily as the last two. I don’t necessarily see Carrington within the female characters, and was thrown off by the female characters’ compliance when previously they were fierce rebels. A bone was thrown to me, though, when I learned that the French term for Draughts is Le Jeu du Dames, the game of Ladies. And while in the states we call the reigning monarch in our checkers Kings, in Europe they are Queens.

The role of Muse is every bit as constricting as debutante, and while Carrington found a place to explore and discover herself within Surrealism, she still had a patriarchy to contend with. Up until Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini came on the scene, women’s participation in Surrealism was considered inspirational and recreational—they were les femmes enfants that ignited l’amour fou. They also came with an expiration date, something Carrington witnessed in her relationship with Max Ernst.

Not only was he cheating on his second wife, the once femme enfant Marie-Berthe, with Carrington, but she found herself spending orgiastic, idyllic holidays among his former lovers. I don’t necessarily see Carrington as the jealous type, but I can see the emphasis on youth, beauty, and ingénue staples promoted amongst the much-older male leaders of the movement, as well as the laundry list of discarded women by 1937, as something of which the intuitive and skeptical painter stayed leery. So, perhaps one reading of this story could be its confrontation with the age-old feminist conundrum of in-fighting and competition championed by a misogynistic society that finds women disposable. As soon as someone is crowned Queen and she no longer fits the male ideal, they find another piece to depose her and take the crown.

A Man in Love

A caught thief is punished for stealing a melon by having to bare witness to her victim’s strange tale. Like “The Oval Lady,” it is a story where the narrator is brought inside a stranger’s house, only to find weird shenanigans afoot. In this instance, it’s a dead woman, named Agnes, lying on a bed of grass. Or, at least, the narrator thinks she’s dead. The fruit merchant claims otherwise, saying she has felt warm even though she’s been still for forty years.

How this bizarre situation occurred is what the merchant relays. On the night of their honeymoon, they sought lodging at a “sinister looking café” outside of Paris. It was being protected by a fox and two wolves, and the only person that answered their knocking was an old crone who barred them access. They refused to leave, and he eventually found a window to break into. They found themselves in a magical kitchen, ate of the animated vegetables, and slept on the floor among sentient rats and other unnamed horrors. But what really did the bride in was the drafts. Straight out of Poe, almost, it was a “strange draught” in the kitchen that chilled and killed—or comatosed—Agnes.

There are hints to what the classical tradition of the story’s magic is:  there are transformative creatures like the wolf and fox, the domestic alchemy found in the Crone’s kitchen, and the Crone herself. The mythpunking of the Crone is brilliant. Not only does it go beyond Celtic myth, but also addresses Western poetic notions of the death of a beautiful woman (Poe’s conceit remixed within Surrealism as Convulsive Beauty) and the worship of body over the female temple of the mind. Carrington illustrates this by showing the Crone (who embodies female wisdom within Celtic legend) only as a head and Agnes only as a body. The Crone protects her hearth through the wolf and fox manifestations, but when it is ultimately breached by the fruit merchant, poetic justice is served ironically via the poetic principle. The Crones female magic gives the Merchant, and what society wants from all its brides, a beautiful and eternal body that silently submits.

It’s a heavy scene the narrator is hearing, and she cuts it short by escaping when the merchant is overcome with tears. Man, was I relieved when she fled. A sense of dread haunts the vignette. Especially when the innocuous punishment was made ominous when the merchant tells the thief that he’d been waiting forty years to catch someone red-handed to punish them thus. Why? To alleviate loneliness? To unburden his soul? Or to lure the wicked into some kind of fairy tale switch-a-roo with the farm-to-table sleeping beauty? In any case, the dread she rightfully flees is the story’s real crux, and is made more mysterious from its old magic and revamped myths.

Uncle Sam Carrington

Carrington’s family was one of the wealthiest in Lancashire, but not the oldest. They were the nouveau riche. This major status flaw was of much worry and contention to Leonora’s mother, whose art was social climbing. She was obviously very brilliant at it, as the Carringtons were invited to all of the balls and Leonora herself was presented at George V’s court. Even so, Leonora would often hear her mother lament that someone wouldn’t acknowledge her in the street for her lack of pedigree.

This desired elitism, then, is what drives this story. An eight year old is burdened by her mother’s shame of her uncivilized relatives. She hates seeing her mother upset, and sets out on a journey to find solutions. As little girls often do in these circumstances, she finds herself lost and wandering into an enchanted forest. The first indicator is a vicious scene of two cabbages fighting like beta fish: “They were tearing each other’s leaves off with such ferocity that soon there was nothing but torn leaves everywhere and no cabbages.” Further on, she befriends a horse who takes her to see two ladies that deal in remedying “family shame.”

The Misses Cunningham-Joneses are refined and elegant witches living among ancient fauna and dignified knickers. This is glorious because the witch in the wood is usually anything but civilized. But when you meet the Misses Cunningham-Joneses, they aren’t sweating over a cauldron in their backyard, but playing draughts while dressed for tea.

They ask the child into their parlor and quiz her on her heritage. When the girl evades the questions, the elegant Crones warn her that they can only help if there is some kind of line connecting her family with “the affairs of the oldest and most noble families in England.” The girl thinks of some dead duchess’s lorgnette left in her mansion. The loose connection is tight  enough for the witches, and they disappear to work their magic.

The horse encourages the girl to spy on them. They find the ladies shouting Charm school axioms as spells while whipping their vegetables. When they finish, they return with two carrots and a zucchini. The girl exchanges a pot of jam and a fishing hook for the magical food. The vignette ends.

I am a bit dissatisfied with “Uncle Sam Carrington.”  While the previous stories are all vignettes, they all have circular and clever conclusion: the thief continues her interrupted action of stealing the melon; the councilwoman continues her deception to its final conclusion; the Debutante is caught in her deception; and the magic in “The Oval Portrait” ends with Tartar’s destruction. In “Uncle Sam” however, I don’t see any return or point to the story. While I love the imagery of the cabbages and the Charm School Crones, the adventure does not seem fully concluded where it ends. Like the duchess’s lorgnette, the ending is sufficient, but still very loose. However, sometimes fantastic stories are made better by their loose associations than anything else, so I’ll just shrug on to the next one.

The House of Fear

The same equine premise drives this tale as the last when the narrator befriends a horse who wants to show her something. She follows him to an establishment where “There were a number of creatures in ecclesiastical dress.” There is going to be a party in this bizarre cult menagerie and she is invited.  When she returns that night, she is enveloped within the team of these mystic horses and follows their charge to the Castle of Fear.

Fear, the castle’s mistress, is a one-eyed woman who may either be a really homely human or some kind of chimera: “She looked slightly like a horse, but was much uglier. Her dressing gown was made of live bats sewn together by their wings:  the way they fluttered, one would have thought they didn’t much like it.”

This is an annual get-together the women’s horse friend informs her, but the girl can’t help notice that no one seems excited about the events. She learns why:  First, the ancient castle is freezing; Second, Fear is an erratic and didactic hostess who has devised a series of impossible games for the evenings entertainment. The horses do as they are instructed, and enact the games to a horrifying effect: “…the horses began to beat the floor with their hooves as if they wanted to descend to the depths of the earth.” Despite the narrator’s trepidations, she stays still among the mayhem hoping Fear won’t see she isn’t (and can’t physically) participate. It ends on a note that is perhaps the most cryptic of the stories read so far: “It went on like this for twenty-five minutes, but…”

Those ellipses say more about the story than the story itself. The string of horses, as well as Fear, poke somewhat at the group-think dynamics that oiled and ran Surrealism. Fond of experimental games, the group always held organized parties where either a visual or verbal game was devised to explore further territory of the untapped conscious.     While that lead to a lot of the core group’s great work, perhaps Carrington found it a bit tiresome. Perhaps, like she did in England, she was feeling expected to always perform during these automatic parlor games. There is a great passage in this story about the narrator’s inner nature to stay home and just talk to herself, and I can’t help but see the “but…” as the conclusion of that musing. She doesn’t really want to participate in the group antics, but she’s in it now, and no matter how much she tries to remain invisible, they all are seeing her and watching how she performs.

“The House of Fear” was Carrington’s publishing debut. Introduced and illustrated by Max Ernst, it appeared as a limited edition chapbook in 1938. According to Joanna Moorhead, the pamphlet was more of a public validation of the couple’s blooming relationship than anything else. Ernst riffs on the horses and birds motif for their personal symbology they held for each other. He teases her about her inadequacies in a way only lovers do, not necessarily professional colleagues. Asking why, in any sort of professional seriousness, whether the writer you are introducing can “even read” seems like less than a good endorsement, I’m sure Ernst knew the intended audience would eat it up. With a print run of 120 copies, “The House of Fear” had no ambitions of being read beyond the Surrealist coterie. Therefore, Ernst knew that the audience he was declaring and exhibiting this love to would understand this contextualizing much more than the satirizing of the group itself.

___

^[1] Alongside Katherine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan, Warner worked with Carrington directly in the 1980s to translate her French and Spanish stories into English for two major collections The House of Fear:  Notes From Down Below and The Seventh Horse and Other Tales that were published by E. P. Dutton/Virago in 1988. Dutton also published Down Below at this time. These two works make up the majority of both Dorothy, A Publishing Project’s and Silver Press’s collection.

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There is no shortage of good horror and weird fiction about ventriloquism, but it’s always focused on the dummies, isn’t it? Arguably the best part of

I say this because I came to Jon Padgett’s debut collection The Secret of Ventriloquism with certain expectations, in large part grounded in the body of past dummy stories, and those expectations were largely subverted and challenged, for which I am very thankful. There are strange dummies in these stories, most notably the dummy Reg in the title story, but overall Padgett is interested in looking at ventriloquism as cause for a weird occasion from a different direction altogether. His stories seem to take a step back and apply the kind of uncanny questions that we focus upon ventriloquist’s dummies, in all of their unlife, to the ventriloquists themselves, and by extension to humanity: what are we to be imbued with life and thoughts? And what are we to believe—that we’re ever acting under our own power, that we’re masters of ourselves: our bodies, our minds, our voices? And if we can be understood to be no different than dummies, then surely we are in fact being animated by voices not our own.

Padgett’s prior experience as a working ventriloquist shines through the authority in the writing of stories such as “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism,” a step-by-step guide for the reader to become first a practitioner of ventriloquism, and then a practitioner of the occult art of Greater Ventriloquism. What separates the two, you might ask? (And that is an important question, because this Greater Ventriloquism is the fictional philosophy cutting through all of the stories in this collection, giving them a much appreciated spine of intent and eerie energy.) The trick to being a Greater Ventriloquist, it seems, is to take the lessons one gains in manipulating a ventriloquist’s dummy and then realize that you can “control all the animal-dummies around you” the way one might control the non-animal variety. If the implications of that seem disturbing to you, I will not spoil the rest of the story (I wouldn’t do that anyway); suffice it to say, though, the story leaves you thinking of ventriloquism less as a stage trick or performance and more as a kind of vastation.

That sense of vastation is also something that cuts through the collection as a whole. In “Organ Void,” for instance, the protagonist encounters a homeless person on the side of a highway and makes a deal for a cardboard sign bearing the title of the story, after which they begin to be figuratively and literally emptied out. Being emptied out makes sense, of course, in the context of ventriloquism. As the cutaway diagram on the cover of Secret makes clear, dummies of all kinds are ultimately empty; all the better to be imbued with voice. “The Infusorium,” meanwhile, makes use of the other meaning of vastation, “being laid to waste,” with a story set in a decaying industrial town with strange soot soaking into everything and everyone, with horrifying consequences. In that story, it seems, the only way to solve anything is through purging by fire, but even that just contributes to the vastation of the land and the people, one way or another.

Like “20 Simple Steps,” “The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” makes key use of the imperative tense, taking the form of a mindfulness exercise that leads the reader through four stages of developing awareness of themselves. Padgett in fact excels at this kind of direct address to the reader, in a tone that reflects that of a seeming self help guru (in his introduction to the collection, Matt Cardin mentions that Padgett is influenced by, among others, Eckhart Tolle). This seems strangely appropriate at a time when readers are swamped by self help manuals and personal care how-to’s, but the goal of “Mindfulness” is a grotesque one: to gain enlightenment via revelling in the grotesquerie and transience of one’s own existence. The final stage is a kind of oblivion: “Accept as the days and nights go by that you are a walking skeleton, an ambulatory miracle of meat. New thoughts come, but they arrive from beyond the foam, beyond the foam, beyond the foamy sponge of your brain.” Of course, if these new thoughts don’t come from your disgusting, transient body, or the “foamy sponge of your brain,” then where do they come from? (A Greater Ventriloquist, as it turns out, or something even more unnerving.)

I’m loathe to go much further in identifying high points of the collection, largely because this is a collection that begs to be read as a whole, and then also to be revisited past the first reading. Stories like “Origami Dreams,” for instance, thrive via a kind of nightmare logic; characters gain and lose fingers without notable causation, houses unfold into other structures against the laws of architecture (and physics), and identities shift and lock into place outside even the barest sense of consent on the part of the persons involved. All of this provides that frisson that comes from removing the boundary between reality and fantasy, but the story can also lack a sense of purpose unless one reads it in the greater context of the collection as a whole, and the principles created and revealed therein. My recommendation for reading, then, might be to first read “20 Simple Steps” and the title story, an exceedingly strange and creepy one-act play, to get a sense of the mythos Padgett is creating, and then read the collection as a whole from there—rereading those stories again along the way, of course.

In retrospect, Padgett’s notable achievement with this collection is to thematically and philosophically explore the notion of ventriloquism in weird horror in a different way, and certainly a more contemporary way that aligns nicely with certain pessimistic strains of thought à la writers like Thomas Ligotti (who was also Padgett’s mentor; Padgett himself founded Thomas Ligotti Online, one of the most notable online venues for discussing weird horror). When we understand that we are no better than dummies—when we see the strings that move us and hear the voice that animates us—we become the uncanny object, as opposed to the dummy. Our own embodiment thus becomes a vessel for great horrors. It’s eerie enough to make one pine for the good old days as a kind of relief, when dummies were dummies, ventriloquists were ventriloquists, and the horror was only in our minds. If only that was ever the case.

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In The Last Days of New Paris, failed surrealist revolutionary Thibaut wanders a shelled out 50s Paris filled with “devils and fascists and errant art.” After the explosion of the S‑Bomb, the city becomes an enclosed warzone where Nazis fight to harness the power of surreal manifestations to win the war. Art becomes reality: women riding sentient bicycles, exquisite corpses come to life from illustrations, Arcimboldo’s fruit faces stalk marketplaces, demons are raised from hell by Nazis. Thibaut rescues Sam, a photojournalist, from pursuit by Nazis and trained wolf-tables (yep you read that right, these wolf-tables are based off artwork by Victor Brauner. It’s a China Miéville novella, what did you expect?).

At heart, The Last Days of New Paris is an exercise in Situationist dérive, drawn from the origins of flâneurie. Indeed, Miéville has taken the metaphysical metaphors of Baudelaire and planted them firmly in surreality, with demons raised through the gates of hell prowling the streets of Paris. Lauren Elkin’s recent work Flâneuse: Women Walk The City makes an excellent companion piece to Miéville’s novella. She writes “A more politically engaged descendant of Baudelairean flâneurie reigns today, one that operates by dérive, or ‘drift’. A mid-twentieth-century group of radical poets and artists calling themselves Situationists invented ‘psychogeography’, in which strolling becomes drifting and detached observation becomes a critique of post-war urbanism.” Paris becomes a psychogeography of surrealism; Thibaut and his revolutionary group, Main à Plume, are the precursors to the Situationist movement, where avant-garde art collides with Marxist politics.

He writes of Thibaut’s wanderings: “And if you go on walking like that and stay safe and keep out of sight then you will come some time to be alone again and there will be a stretch of window and bricks untouched by war and you could, for an instant, believe yourself back in old Paris.” Later, the great fear is that Paris will become an “empty city of charming houses.” Miéville takes on the role of post-war psychogeographer by placing himself firmly in the novella as the vehicle for Thibaut’s story.

Here is a novella ticking the boxes of expectation of Miéville’s work. There are monsters, cities, politics and supernatural flâneurs. There are concepts the reader will recognise from his collection Three Moments of an Explosion: mystic playing cards, sinister art and the trade in illicit magical artefacts. Like many of Miéville’s protagonists, Thibaut is an observer. He watches history unfold and ruminates on that which has already unfolded. At times, it appears the story belongs to Sam who is most active in the fight against the Nazis; Thibaut seems impotent and frozen by his past, ever the drifter surviving in Paris.

Since Italian photographer Felix Beato documented the Second Opium War in the late 1850s, photojournalism has played a significant part in the documentation of war. Photojournalist Sam takes on the role of documentarian, and later in the novella, so too does the author and reader as witness. Like surrealist art made of found objects, The Last Days of New Paris is both a book left to be found within and without the novel.

However, it is in the depictions of Sam where the worldbuilding becomes flimsy. While it’s clear from the outset her camera is not usual, nor is her appearance at the edge of the wood while being pursued by wolf-tables and Nazis, it was jarring that the camera and its use would be portrayed so inaccurately for the period when he insists that it is a real camera. “That camera is a camera. But it has other uses too,” says Sam. Most jarringly for photographers, Miéville writes: “She hands him one [film canister] and nods permission. Thibaut unspools it a little, lets a streetlamp outside the window shine through it. He squints at the tiny images. Occluded streets in negative.”

But film and negatives are not the same thing. Did he mean negatives? For to pull a roll of film from a canister and expose it to light would destroy it. Film becomes a negative once it has been developed. And what sort of camera was she using? If this is a continuation of World War II, a lot of photojournalists were using the bulky Speed Graphic, which did not take rolls of film. Or is she using a Contax II, like Robert Capa?

It wouldn’t matter if the world was less detailed, but Miéville’s work is consistently detailed with depictions of surrealist art, so much so that there’s even an appendix. It seems that the practicalities of creating art have been ignored. And when the images Thibaut sees from her “film” affect his actions, it becomes a major issue for me when the plot device is incorrect, no matter how magical the lantern.

However, it’s hard not to admire a writer who can use the words sastrugi, glossolalic and pleromic correctly in a sentence. There’s some beautiful language amidst the destruction of Paris, most notable the description of the epicentre of the S‑Blast at Les Deux Magots. “A whimper, a shriek, the burr of insects’ wings, the tolling of a bell, a city-wide outrushing, an explosion, a sweep and stream and a nova, megaton imaginary, of random and of dreams.”

While critics may complain about the absurd ending, it’s also a nod to the pulp influence in Miéville’s work. The Nazis mostly take on the role of cannon fodder; when named they are in anonymous groups, ready to be destroyed by an exquisite corpse, a surrealist gun and a magic camera. This is referenced later in the appendix as the anti-Nazi propaganda campaign ‘The Soldier with No Name’ by Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe. I’ve written previously for WFR about the desire to attribute Nazi behaviour to supernatural occurrences; it works for me in this book because it ties into their search for superweapons, regardless of how real or unreal they might have been.

There’s a high level of detail in the references to surrealist art, particularly in the use of the Exquisite Corpse as both a vehicle for creation and a monster itself. Exquisite Corpse, a game played by surrealists who drew elements of an image then passed the folded paper on for someone else to add to it, becomes an integral part of the New Paris story when these papers come to life. In fact, there are so many complex ideas brought up by the relationship between these images and the city, that this review can hardly do them justice.

Following the chains of influence, from surrealism to the 70s, with its pulpy-arty mélange The Last Days of New Paris is also reminiscent of comics magazine Métal Hurlant. Although drawn from surrealist imagery, the floating Eiffel Tower suggests another floating pyramid over Paris, that of Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy. Apocalypses are not new to Paris, nor to the bande dessinée. The surreal and supernatural is a reaction to the reality of the destruction of war; especially visible in Japanese manga Akira. With its rich visuals of surrealism, I wonder if The Last Days of New Paris would have worked better as a graphic novel.

But our time in New Paris feels too short. Names are listed, dropped and left in a roll call of city places. If you haven’t been to Paris, you may find yourself wondering about the Bois de Bologne and the Prison du Cherche-Midi. The unnecessary author intervention at the end serves to emphasise the continuing theme of bearing witness, even in fiction. I would have rather lingered a little longer in the surreal city, like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, where an unhinged survivor recollects the events which led up to his entrapment in a decaying world.

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Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.

A demon is exorcised from a toe, a recovering addict takes on an ancient magus, an author is exposed to the strange totemic power of words, and a ruthless industrialist reaps what he sows during his foray into an unusual form of engineering.  These are some of the ludicrous and unsettling delights to be found in Jeffrey Ford’s latest collection, A Natural History of Hell from Small Beer Press.

The stories meander among “high” (in short story form) fantasy, magical realism, satire, science fiction, and horror, and Ford takes care to demonstrate that these are not mutually exclusive territories.  While they range far and wide within the general realm of speculative fiction, what shines through as perhaps the strongest unifying element is the author’s interest in received cultural narratives, such as fairy tale and myth, and the ways in which contemporary life (relative to whichever story is in question) interacts with and deforms them.  A laundry list of explicit references and subtle allusions abound throughout the collection, and Ford’s penchant for metafictional devices is deployed to great effect in order to create tension between the present and the past.  “Rocket Ship to Hell”, a piece that could be described as an apparent love letter to living science fiction fandom between the 1950s and the present, does not have a great deal in the way of plot, suspense, or character development.  Nevertheless, it manages to create an overall sense of uncertainty by rendering unclear where the division is between the inner and frame stories, reality and drunken bullshitting between sort-of colleagues.

Virtually every story in A Natural History of Hell has as a lynchpin some kind of received tale in the world of the story, and the events which unfold in the main plot are designed to reveal both the strengths and the fragilities inherent to narrative and identity, subject and object.  As perhaps the clearest illustration of Ford’s experimentation with these ideas, in “Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart,” a first-person scholar recounts a legend that rests upon flimsy-at-times evidence from diaries and other such artifacts, a tale which features a third-person character named “-I-” (short for Ismet, but seemingly done to provoke these questions of narrative authority) and another character of a different age and gender with the same long form of the name.  Humans in many of these short works are fragile, rendered into salt in an instant, while stories endure even if in fragmented form through strange forces of quirks of consciousness, as in “Word Doll.”  The mere title encapsulates a conflict between an inert facsimile of human form and the persistent life of the proper case Word from which human consciousness develops, and the story’s namesake is firmly entrenched in the psyche of those on whom it is bestowed, changing their interior monologues in profound ways.

“Word Doll” concerns “Jeffrey Ford,” a writer, and his encounter with a strange anthropologist who unspools a tale largely concerned with the supposed totemic power of words, but it is left artfully ambiguous whether or not in “reality” the eponymous word doll has its power merely by an inherent quality or if the listener is equally complicit in constructing the power of such utterances.  The uncertainty is made possible largely by the author’s inclusion of himself, specifically as a purveyor of words, from early in the story.  “The Thyme Fiend,” one of the strongest pieces on display, features a young Midwestern boy coming of age while dealing with frightening visions and an unsolved murder.  Ford uses playful but resonant references to a number of works, such as Hansel and Gretel and Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (which we’ve covered here before), all of which enrich the story and add appropriate tension rather than descending into overdone pastiche.  The tension and strangeness of the story is balanced by judiciously placed moments that are all too recognizable to most anyone who has made it through adolescence, and the awkward but necessary milestones of transitioning to adulthood make for a fine anchor amidst the bizarre events that propel the plot (and likewise for several others in the collection).

Ford’s stories do not shy away from their heritages, and they unapologetically make frequent use of witches, magicians, reanimated skeletons, rocket ships, and other signposts of specific genres while acknowledging that they are not entirely that same genre.  Often their function as plot devices is purposely eroded by another crucial element of Ford’s fiction: his careful use of violence. There is a kind of precise cruelty contained in the union of fictitious creatures and specifically modern (relative to fairy tale or other folklore used as reference points and context within Ford’s stories) kinds of violence, such as the calculated efficiencies of industrialization applied to living creatures and gunfire used on strange spirits from an ancient folktale.  In most cases, the violence manages to surprise in an artful and convincing manner.

Mixed in with all the elements under discussion is a fine display of humor that often appears at the most unexpected of moments.  “Blood Drive,” while both hilarious and disturbing, reads as a kind of Wayside School Is Falling Down as composed in a strange fever dream conjured by Wayne LaPierre, and although its satirical barbs are sharp and well-aimed, the story feels a bit out of place among the rest of the works in the collection.  The collection’s opener, “The Blameless,” while a fine story on its own seems a bit too absurd to function as an effective overture, even in a collection filled with absurdities.  It would perhaps have set a better overall tone if it was a bit further back in favor of a story like “The Fairy Enterprise” or “The Last Triangle” (which mashes together an ancient magic with the horrors of modern drug addiction and recovery), both of which strike a balance more representative of what would follow.  “The Thyme Fiend” encapsulates many of the ideas explored throughout and is perhaps the best, most robust example of a story that could function as a centerpiece, but it lurks near the end of the book.  In “Blood Drive,” violence itself is the context, which very much seems to be the point, and it works well as satire with a message while not being quite as memorable in terms of plot as stories like “The Fairy Enterprise” and “Mount Chary Galore”, which deploy violence (at times as intense as incidents in “Blood Drive”) on a longer trajectory of cause and effect.  To be fair, “Blood Drive” is itself a depiction of a culture with a warped sense of context and causal relationships, but its effect doesn’t quite linger as much as most of the other stories.

A few minor caveats aside, “A Natural History of Hell” is an excellent collection of stories originally appearing in diverse outlets, along with a brand new tale original to the book.  By revealing the underlying instabilities of foundational narratives and the strange worlds that they struggle to articulate, Ford breathes plenty of life into the Weird and leaves the reader with a pleasant uncertainty as to what they have just experienced, along with a desire to read it again and see what else emerges next time.  This distinctive effect could only be achieved by a thoughtful and unique voice pushing the boundaries created by work that came before even while paying homage to the same.

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Perchance to Dream is a new collection by Penguin Classics of Charles Beaumont’s work. Veering between horror, science fiction, dark fantasy and the weird, Beaumont’s stories examine grand themes of death, humanity and sex, all with a sinister and malevolent echo through 1950s America.

With an introduction by Ray Bradbury and afterward by William Shatner, it’s clear that Charles Beaumont bounded enthusiastically towards fiction, taking small ideas and spinning them into stories with sharp endings. He was a remarkably prescient writer, forecasting everything from internet dating to curved televisions in homes to wearable devices. The importance of the collection is not to be understated; Beaumont died tragically in his 30s from what is thought to be early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Before this collection, it was difficult to find many of his stories in print or online.

There’s a quote on the back of the book from Dean Koontz which rings true, that the stories “provide a clear window into the fears and hopes of his time.” No more is this evident in the preoccupation with status and legacy, evident in the desire to memorialise a city in The Jungle, or the obsession with a beautiful car in A Classic Affair, and the fear of nuclear destruction in Place of Meeting.

The fears strike closer to the male psyche in the recurring themes of sexual performance, masculinity and impotence, the driving force in one of the stand out stories, The New People, where an impotent man, his virginal wife and strange son move into a new neighbourhood. In this story, suburban boredom is the impetus for deviant behaviour, which escalates to horrific proportions, forecasting Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby to be published nine years later. The other stand out is In His Image, the disorienting story of a man who takes his fiancé back to his home town, only to find out that no one remembers him.

His stories are overtly sexual, and focus on the transgressive nature of sex in the 50s, with direct discussion of orgies, virginity, sex outside of marriage and even a brief (albeit unhappy) queer character in Night Ride. The Howling Man, featured in The Weird and this collection, ties sexual transgressions to the release of the devil (for a more detailed analysis, read my essay in the 101 Weird Writers series on Charles Beaumont).

Then there are the flat out weird stories, with the bizarre hybrid monster of Fritzchen reminiscent of China Mieville’s recent short story Sacken. Or the deliciously disturbing necroaudiophile Mr Goodhew in The New Sound. And the deftly written Mr Aorta in Free Dirt, a character familiar to readers everywhere as the man who won’t pay for anything.

It is in these short, almost flash fiction stories, where Beaumont’s concision in creating a world and a mythology shines. Familiar elements anchor the reader in the formula that works: set up the situation, the protagonist reminisces how he got there, and punch out the reversal. And where the reversal style of story from the 50s and 60s can often come out cheesy in contemporary analysis (We were on earth the whole time? NOOOOOOO!), there were moments where I gasped in delightful surprise when a twist caught me off guard. But to tell you which stories they were would spoil it.

Beaumont also demonstrated a humorous side, with his time-travelling tale Father, Dear Father, psychologically frustrated vampire in Blood Brother, or the prescient The Monster Show. While not all of the stories in the collection are supernatural (The Music of the Yellow Brass, Night Ride and A Death in the Country), they all discuss facing death in different ways. Like a toreador flagging a bull, driving violently towards it or falling towards despondency.

My favourites from this collection are those that deal with the obsession with self-image and representation, most well known in The Beautiful People. In a dystopian future, a young woman refuses to have a transformation from her current, ‘ugly’ body to a beautiful body like everyone else, after filling her head with notions from books (heaven forbid those books full of dangerous ideas!). In this society, beauty is associated with peace, and is enforced by constant videos of war, colonialization and politics. Like Bradbury’s famous Fahrenheit 451, Beaumont’s story echoes the sentiment that books are essential to an open and free society, where TV is a tool of enforcement and control.

This story turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone as Number 12 Looks Just Like You. Scott Westerfield acknowledges this episode as a childhood influence over his bestselling YA series Uglies, where teenagers are forcibly transformed into “Pretties”.

However Beaumont’s representation of women is directly contrasted in You Can’t Have Them All. A ladies man uses a super-calculator to meet his ideal woman. Unfortunately there’s 563 of them. To ensure his conquest of each woman, he uses a love potion of “herbal tea” to make them sleep with him. This story has major issues with consent, made even more shocking by the protagonist’s frivolous attitude towards the women in the story.

Given the ongoing discussions of representation across speculative fiction, two of the more problematic stories in the collection — The Jungle and The Magic Man – deal with racial issues. While The Jungle has the best intentions to decry colonialism and invasive development, the tribe in the story is made up of one-dimensional Kenyans, who beat drums in their village, fighting off developers with “guns and spears and arrows and darts” (p 16), and use magic to eventually scare off the obsessive designer. The Magic Man is the weakest story in the collection, partly for its unlikeable protagonist, who tells tales of cannibals from the Sandwich Islands, which distracts from the story’s conclusion.

Despite my issues with the stories above, this is a worthwhile and important collection, preserving an author’s work for a new generation of readers. Read them. Get angry. Be shocked. Laugh. Charles Beaumont’s work will certainly provoke your imagination.

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

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

She also unpacks and explicates their meaning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Setting aside the genre-bashing, is The Vorrh a great book? Certainly, it contains flashes of what look, at first, like genius. Catling is a poet as well as a novelist, and he has a poet’s gift for making the ordinary strange. Early on in the novel, Catling describes the city of Essenwald, which has been transported from Europe into Africa and reassembled stone by stone. As the city grows, its new residents use local materials to build houses that mimic the decaying grandeur of their neighbors’ resurrected homes. I can think of no better metaphor for the unsettling mixture of the near and far, the familiar and the foreign, that characterized the unheimlichkeit of the colonial endeavor, and insights like this surface regularly throughout the novel. Catling mixes real-life figures (the photographer Edward Muybridge, the poet Raymond Roussel) in among the robots and the angels and the monsters that populate this teeming novel, as though to remind us that when one is writing about colonial history, even the most horrifying of inventions may lie disconcertingly close to fact.

When speculative fiction writers take on a topic as brutal as the European incursion into Africa, I tend to prefer it when they confront the subject head-on, as Catling does, rather than regaling us with the adventures of the Bleuropeans in Schmafrica, or printing all the maps upside down. I also think it’s important that books that grapple with these difficult subjects be accorded the freedom to describe real ugliness, and even to hit the occasional false note. After all, if a novel’s use of history’s violent subject matter sometimes makes us feel uneasy, surely that is preferable to offering up yet another comforting Just-So story about the past.

And there is no doubt about it: this book is unafraid of ugliness. The Vorrh opens with a scene of a man cutting up his lover’s body, and the passage lingers over descriptions of her glistening viscera, dismembered limbs, and decapitated head. Other reviewers have praised the beauty of Catling’s descriptions, but I thought the prose was most effective when it went straight for horror— a scene in which an undead fetus opens its eyes and blinks at the doctor who aborted him is gruesome and indelible. That sort of grotesquery, however, exists alongside a more disturbing kind of darkness: the novel partakes of the language, tropes, and imagery of the virulently racist colonial narratives with which it is in dialogue, and it contains several nightmarish depictions of black bodies in the grips of mute suffering, religious ecstasy, rabid violence, and uncontrolled sexual frenzy. These descriptions come to us filtered through the warped consciousness of the colonists the book portrays; opinions on whether this lens provides sufficient distance will no doubt vary depending on the reader. I found myself exhausted by them, and, eventually, by the book as a whole, but the truth is I might have been more ready to think critically about these elements if The Vorrh hadn’t lost me for other reasons early on.

In The Vorrh, a silent hunter, a well-meaning colonist, a decadent homosexual, and a devoted guide wander through the forest and weird things happen to them, but none of those events quite are as bizarre as the way these characters behave. Here is an example. One of the book’s other main characters, Ishmael, is a shrunken, pale, not-quite-human teenager with one eye set in the middle of his forehead. He has spent the entirety of his life in an Essenwald basement, being raised by robots, one of whom, Luluwa, occasionally has sex with him. Shortly after we meet him, he is rescued from the basement by a young woman named Ghertrude, who takes it upon herself to bring him upstairs and take over his education. Ishmael, who is as entitled a brat as one might expect of a child reared by machines whose sole function in life is to serve him, soon asks pettishly when Ghertrude will take over the job of his sex robot and mate with him. This exchange made my skin crawl, but I didn’t mind that. What I minded was the fact that Ghertrude enthusiastically agrees to this charmless proposition, with no explanation given beyond a suggestion that Ishmael is unusually well-endowed.

This is a problem, because you can transport me to a distant planet and tell me we’re in Schmafrica and print all the maps in reverse and upside-down, and I will still not believe for a second that the prospect of screwing a stunted, basement-reared adolescent Cyclops who calls sex “mating” would ever arouse a woman, no matter how many lewd hints are dropped about his penis size. Worse, the encounter between Ishmael and Ghertrude has a much more disturbing counterpart later in the book, when an African woman, in the process of escaping captivity, pauses to violently rape the photographer who has imprisoned her. These are only two of dozens of instances where the book’s characters act in ways that defy any good-faith attempt at explanation.

In the end, for all that it gestures towards the facts of history, The Vorrh is not truly interested in exploring what it was like to be either a perpetrator or a victim of colonial violence—but its deeper problem is that it’s not sufficiently interested in exploring what it’s like to be anyone at all. The book’s characters are secondary to its plot, acting in ways that defy belief as soon as the plot demands it of them. The story, in turn, functions primarily to move us through a series of surreal set pieces: a sentient bow hewn from a woman’s corpse, a forest where angels walk, a gibbering anthrophophagus, a man whose hands are removed and sewn back on upside down. Many of these images are stunning—and a few of them will stay with me for a very long time— but in the absence of believable characters, that is not enough to make a book great. Despite its beautiful language and admirable ambition, The Vorrh is all gaudy surface, empty at its heart.

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