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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Editor’s note: The following is a review for the short story collection,

A little over seven years ago now, I read Steve Rasnic Tem for the first time. This experience came via his long short story, “The Man on the Ceiling,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Melanie Tem. To put it simply, this story helped broaden my idea of what horror and weird fiction could be. It frightened me and broke my heart in equal measure, this tale of dark shadowy presences, their status never fully literal or figurative but there nonetheless, affecting the Tems and shaping their lives whether they liked it or not. The writing was matter-of-fact and simple, but complex in the emotions it evoked; the strangeness of the story was strange, and the figure of the Man on the Ceiling clawed into my brain for years and resurfaced in my own moments of pain and sorrow.

Those strengths are ever-apparent in Steve Rasnic Tem’s Figures Unseen, published by the impressive Valancourt Books (who have been doing marvelous work bringing lesser-known Gothic gems back into print). These stories have been selected by Tem himself, taken from years of short story collections. After reading this new collection and reflecting on my own first experiences with Tem’s writing, I can say with certainty that he is a treasure for our field. His work, as I mentioned before, will haunt your imagination and your heart in equal measure, and it both expands and defines the genre.

If you have never read Tem’s work before, this would be an ideal place to start, since it crystallizes his strengths so capably. Tem has a knack for crafting believable characters that readers become easily invested in; we crawl inside their heads and feel their fears, sorrows, and desires as they try to make sense of their surreal worlds. We are so heavily embedded in his characters and how they feel about their circumstances that questions regarding the “reality” of these story-worlds ultimately become moot; what matters more is that they’re real to the characters, and therefore real to us.

“Out Late in the Park” is an emblematic story in this regard. I spent a fair amount of time trying to reconcile all of its disparate aspects: a group of senior citizens playing baseball in a park with childlike attitudes; a strange woman with a dark red tongue who always seems to have insects in her mouth and disappears when the protagonist looks away from her; the confusing, indeterminate passage of time in the story, where even the characters don’t know what will come for them from one day to the next; and more elements I don’t want to spoil. Suffice it to say, the struggle to understand is the story. Near the end, the protagonist narrates, “Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable.” This statement doesn’t just provide the guiding principle for this story. It could very well provide the principle for the collection as a whole. More importantly, though, that struggle always feels very real and, more often than not, full of sorrow.

What really impressed me in Figures Unseen was the range Tem displays with regards to the severity and kinds of surreality in the stories. In “The Bereavement Photographer,” the specter of weirdness is subtle, only cropping up in the title character’s suspicion that dead children come alive for brief moments of flickering anger and sadness when he takes bereavement photos for families at the local hospital; beyond that detail, the story could easily take place in our own world. In “City Fishing,” though, it’s hard to find anything that does feel like it belongs in our world. There is a father-son hunting trip, which is something that happens fairly often. That trip takes the characters into the heart of a crumbling city, though, down a street that plunges into a darkness which feels otherworldly and scary to the characters (and, again, to readers). The nature of what they are hunting is ambiguous, but definite enough to set a reader’s teeth on edge.

This is one of those collections where, because of the variety of approaches and styles deployed by Tem, the reader will very quickly gravitate to certain stories based on their preferences. “Angel Combs” is a personal highlight, as are “Wheatfield with Crows” and “The Figure in Motion.” I also enjoyed “The Company You Keep,” which, without spoiling much, could be read as a perspective-flipped version of Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” “A House by the Ocean” is a slippery, melancholy ghost story as only Tem could tell, and “The Cabinet Child” put me in the mind of a very delicate kind of Victoriana-inspired fantasy, with an ending revelation that will, again, break your heart. “Red Rabbit,” which is reprinted here on Weird Fiction Review, is another highlight. If that story is your first exposure to Tem, much like “The Man on the Ceiling” was mine, expect the imagery and the emotional dynamic of that story to stick to you like honey, or something much darker and redder.

I will also say: if you pick up this collection and read it — and you definitely should — don’t just rest here. Explore Tem’s other work, which includes hundreds of short stories and several novels. His writing is a treasure trove, and it will provide inspiration for many a budding artist or writer, much like it did for myself. Tem’s writing makes the weird and the horrific deeply personal, and it clings to our imagination not just for its uniqueness, but also for the recognition at the heart of it that the horrifying sorrow of his characters is our sorrow, too.

The post Review of Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Figures Unseen” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I first encountered the work of M. John Harrison in the form of “Egnaro” when it appeared in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.  I knew immediately that I had found something special, even if I was more than a little late to the party, and ever since it has served as a kind of model for what I think is meant by the term weird fiction at its most nuanced.   “Egnaro — in the beginning at least — hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.”  You Should Come with Me Now, the author’s latest collection, continues to explore similar territory with an eclectic group of stories united by a powerful imagination finely tuned to the inexplicable quiet forces that propel lives through their existence, often branching off unawares into another lurking nearby.

The collection’s subtitle is the deceptively unspecific, “Stories of Ghosts,” and ghosts in their most elusive sense are indeed a unifying element of the collection.  They’re not always the remnants of humans or other creatures that were once living, however.  Sometimes ghosts are architectures and pathways that have been or will be abandoned, hints of ideas yet to be breathed into life but which have a preternatural ability to be articulated, strange loops whose antecedents can never be traced, rootless leftovers of a deconstructed subject-object ourobouros.  The devil is in the details, as a brief flash of an image might show up that harkens to a prior story, expanding the world of each through allusion and serving to recontextualize events in profound ways.  Harrison consistently bends his prose style in service of confounding the subject-object relationship and holding a microscope to the uncertainties that come of it.  Passive voice, second-person, deliberately ambiguous referents, all are used effectively to tell tales whose effect is not only that of unsettlement but also sympathy, not merely strange but also familiar.  The story “Psychoarchaeology,” which follows workers surveying for remains of deceased British royals in parody of historical relic-selling practices, is one of the many interesting examples that purposely undermines the idea of the subject, cause/effect, and the historicity implied by such:

“It’s as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers.  Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this?…It’s certainly not possible to learn from them.  All they mean to us is what we want them to mean.  To claim we can learn from them because they had, at base, the same emotions as us, the same satisfactions, the same fears, the same ‘needs’, is in itself a projection.  They aren’t the past in any material sense:  brought to light, they’re what they are now, not what they were then.  At best they’re a geological resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available…”

A Rain of Silent Objects

YSCwMN opens with “Lost and Found,” a vignette indexing items in a restaurant in a half-state of abandonment, cataloging objects that may have been left behind yet are still in use by persons unseen. A lively emptiness.  So much of Harrison’s work, particularly earlier in the 2010s with the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, has pushed the subgenre of the “Big Dumb Object” story into new territory, and the kitschy lack of obvious utility of the objects cataloged here and elsewhere hint at a history not to be uncovered but that shapes the ways the reader might uncover the selves that populate the stories. This piece and others of similar length, some a mere half-page, act as a chorus to set the tone, a kind of guidebook for a postcyberpunk hauntology through which move the stories’ human inhabitants.  Some of these vignettes feel incomplete on their own, but taken as a part of the whole collection they render more vivid the lengthier, character(ish)-driven stories.  One of the strongest, “Rockets from the Suburbs,” is a master-class in getting mileage out of each word and sentence.  It reads like a prose poem of sorts, with compact sentences describing a suburb until the author deftly shifts perspective in a way that recontextualizes not only the scene we’re reading about but also the medium itself.  His scene is set with brisk, compact phrases and directives, descriptions of noises ambient and specific, and “Against this, the tendency of things to be.”

Another vignette, “Places You Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself,” might well serve as a thematic centerpiece for the collection.  A kind of litany of missed opportunities and subjectless sentences, it kept returning to me as I was reading about the more robustly developed characters in stories like “Yummie” and “The Good Detective,” two of the strongest pieces.  “Yummie” follows the dreamlike life of a heart attack patient, Short, during his surgery and subsequent months, during which he has regular encounters with strange people who may be spirits that serve as a counterpoint to his inability to recount a cohesive narrative of his own life.  “When Short failed to answer — because this was not a past he could recognise, let alone own or identify with in any degree — he waved one hand dismissively and seemed to fade a little.”  “Yummie” is one of the more meditative pieces in the collection, and its success comes down to a quiet ambiguity that is unique to Harrison’s work and underscores many other stories in YSCwMN.

You Have to Get Away From It All

Characters living mundane lives that they’re unable to reconcile with themselves recur in most stories, but it’s a theme that does not end up feeling recycled.  “Cicisbeo,” another of the strongest works here and alluded to in “Yummie,” follows a man who gets drawn back into the life of a former romantic interest, who has since started a family while he still wishes to rekindle their passion.  Lizzie’s husband, Tim, has retreated to the attic and become steadily more withdrawn, even as a new baby arrives and the narrator is pressured into progressively more uncomfortable interventions.  As the story develops, Harrison succeeds at eliciting a sense of malaise that will show up in many other stories and which drives Tim to seek escape from the life he thought he wanted, and the author resolves this perpetual retreat in spectacular fashion.

Readers of Harrison’s blog will also find some dysfamiliar settings in Autotelia and the Ambiente Hotel, his oft-visited cousins-apparent of the Strugatskys’ Zone.  “In Autotelia” brings us what may well be a passing reference to “Egnaro” in its focus on two people seated across from one another on a train to a strange destiny/ation, a kind of alternate present divided from their England by a mysterious polluted zone that once was called Norwich. Autotelia, we learn, is populated in part by “teenagers dressed up as people who have an aching sense of how to be a teenager,” another relationship between subject and object confounded by their own verbing.  In Autotelia we find shops mostly empty, as in “Lost and Found,” save for sparse items dismissed as “kitsch” by outsiders.  In Autotelia, the narrator conducts required examinations to check for deformities and perhaps other unspecified maladies preparatory to Autotelians transitioning to “our side of things.”  But although the mysterious Autotelia is a strong presence in the background, it serves to highlight Harrison’s interest in the lives of “ordinary people” that shows up in so many of these fictions.

The most interesting exploration of Autotelia in YSCwMN is “Cave & Julia,” which concerns the relationship between a journalist and an actress whose brother was “lost” long ago at a mysterious site of significance to a culture long gone.  The brother’s disappearance at the site creates a paradox of identity that affects both of the eponymous characters, and is perhaps one of the best realizations of Harrison’s interest in the destabilization of identity.  The story’s main theme is carefully set up with a deceptively simple statement that doubles as part of Julia’s history: “They [people] knew her founding narrative — the loss of her brother and the subsequent prosecution for manslaughter.”  As she recounts seeing her brother’s apparition in the wake of his disappearance, he’s described as “just one of the fictions that lives here.”  As Cave grapples with his own inexplicable experience of ancient site, Harrison plots out a life from a telescoped point of view whose focal points now feel different from the life he was supposed to lead, and although this development stems from an encounter with something uncanny, its effects feel all too anchored to the real world.  In a sense, a new life has been constructed:

“He felt his surfaces change and soften, but detected beneath them a concreted layer of debris, an identity he could date very accurately to his struggle across the cloister, a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.”

Humor shines through more strongly in YSCwMN than in previous works of Harrison’s fiction with which I’m familiar, and it is often deployed to highlight rather than diminish the quiet strangeness that unites these stories. For all the subtlety found in these inner lives and routine pedestrian routes, we also have shocking and absurd dreams of decapitations en masse that may or may not be hilarious, and Elf Lord expats from forgotten secondary fantasy worlds flipping through cable TV channels.  Most of the time, the humor works, though on occasion it features more prominently in stories or vignettes in a way that causes them to feel a little underdeveloped in comparison to the bulk of the collection.

We Live in the Thinnest of Worlds

What interests me perhaps the most about Harrison’s fiction is his ability to craft a tale of unsettlement whose effects are rooted in processes of creation, transition, and recontextualization more so than suspense or the prospect of violence as a catalyst for change.  The architecture of a staircase of cosmic dimensions jutting into the ether, uncanny constructs exerting themselves on a person’s identity from deep in the past or future, “cultural stresses” leaping beyond the boundaries of their medium to transform the observer: such story elements all put me in mind of an Egnaro conjured into a state of probable-being by a bystander hearing its qualities uttered. These imaginative devices are skillfully written as mere half-steps from the architectures we pass without comment on the street every day, rendered all the more convincing by faithfully capturing the minutiae of human experience that we so often struggle to convey to one another but which comprise our “empty moments.”

Seldom are there straightforward problems and answers posed in these stories, but the enigmas within are rich, imaginative, and realized with a degree of precision and insight that is hard to find anywhere else.  I’ll conclude by returning again to “Egnaro” for the best summation I feel I could provide of You Should Come with Me Now:  “It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible will gall you forever.”  Each story in YSCwMN reveals another small part of the outline, leaving just enough to allow the artfully unstated to thrive within and remain with the reader.  As Lucas says in “Egnaro”: “we all love a mysterious country.”

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Spells

Permeating these works is a fascination with urban life—European city life circumscribes the consciousness of the protagonists in most of these stories.  In their urban wanderings, buildings and public squares become a kind of living relic of history looming over the moments of citizens and revealing that the relationship between past and present is far more complex than we often assume, and that it may be more of a two-way street than we’d like to believe.  The secrets lurking behind the 20th century European streets, tucked away in obscure courtyards, or hidden in the inventory of a forgotten shop call to mind some of the same fascinations of setting that one encounters in the New York- and Paris-set weird fiction of Robert Chambers, or perhaps Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street,” which literalizes this general idea and builds an entire plot out of it.

Even as there is temptation, generally speaking, to account for great evil by turning to the supernatural, de Ghelderode’s fiction takes care not to entirely remove it from human agency.  It seems safe to assume that this tendency is at least in part abetted influenced by Europe’s escalation into World War II that would have been contemporaneous with the creation of many of these stories.  Threaded through virtually all of them are persistent reminders that hell might well exist entirely independent of a supernatural order: “Why, this is hell!  It’s this monstrous city, its everyday existence. And the damned? They’re my hideous fellow men and me too in their sordid flock!.” (“The Devil in London,” 29)  The observable and rational are sufficient in some ways to account for the idea of hell, and yet the devil may ultimately put in an appearance anyhow.  The ennui that pervades “The Devil in London” and “The Collector of Relics” evokes the sense that this corporeal existence is simply not the one we were meant to inhabit, a sentiment that will strike many readers as sharing a kinship with the modern author Thomas Ligotti.  If the book stumbles on occasion, its main obstacle is an excessive reliance on the same character type that so frequently makes such observations as the one above: the lone, depressed, sick, unmoored, solitary male wanderer in search of distraction from the malaise of the mundane.  Or a “demoralized soul,” as he puts it in “Fog.”  Indeed, one might lift any number of lines from these stories and find sentiments common to both Ligotti and de Ghelderode.  In “Rhotomago,” the protagonist exclaims that he “… pursued my own journey into the unfathomable, dreaming that for once I was sleeping without dreaming!” (83)

The strength of prose and complexity of theme are more than sufficient to recommend the book despite the limitations imposed by the use of relatively unvaried protagonists, but it will likely stand out as a weakness to some and has been discussed by scholars engaged with de Ghelderode’s work:

“Voiced by dedicated solitaries, the narratives discount social or even human relationships…Women too are in short supply; Ghelderode, in a draft prospectus for a planned further collection of stories, promised that women would feature more centrally but, as it turned out, no such stories were written.” (Introduction, x).

Women characters are certainly in short supply; however, it is a mistake to view the “dedicated solitary” as necessarily eschewing the importance of social and human relationships.  It seems not just shortsighted but counterproductive of de Ghelderode to craft so many tales in which the thesis is that “hell” could consist of “this monstrous city” and “my fellow men” but then have a glaring omission of such a large demographic that could add more depth to such treatments.  However, that caveat aside, I submit that the frequent juxtaposition of supernatural and sociohistorical forces under which the protagonists labor is done precisely as a means not of discounting social relationships but of critiquing them from a broader perspective, even as de Ghelderode’s critique could be improved if it were broader still in terms of which people are represented in the story.  It is worth noting a distinction between a lack of close friendships as a “solitary” (this is certainly true of most of the protagonists) and a discounting of human relationships entirely.  Introverted though the narrators may be, there is ample direct, ground-level social interaction that forms crucial components of plot and serves as a vehicle for such critiques, particularly in stories like “The Collector of Relics, “You Were Hanged,” and “The Odor of Pine.”

Octave Mirbeau

Although both Ligotti and de Ghelderode have clear predecessors in the Decadent movement, we can see a much closer connection to the Decadents with the historically proximate Belgian fantasist.  Echoes of French author Octave Mirbeau abound in the cynical frankness and casual cruelty with which one character in the story “You Were Hanged” discusses old and new means of execution contrived by societies in different historical periods.  The characters in most of the stories commit their fair share of transgressions, but the author is careful to foreground such individual ignoble acts against a backdrop of larger systemic cruelties like executions, which comprise an essential part of the structure of sociohistorical power operating in conjunction with the supernatural of de Ghelderode’s fiction.  The hypocrisy that underlies the use of powerful institutional violence against individual transgressors of social order is a theme that one will find in many forms in such literature, and it features prominently in this collection as well.  For example, one of the strongest stories, “You Were Hanged,” takes as its premise a discussion about state-sanctioned violence and explores differing moral responses to it as its specific tools of execution change with history, and supernatural events force the protagonist to confront such horrors from a perspective uncannily removed from the present in an effort to dissect the idea of “progress.”  The recursive relationship between materialist and supernatural concerns is introduced immediately in the first story, “The Public Scribe,” which features a wax dummy “tasked” with recording the ephemera of history in the material form of writing while undergoing a transformation that could not be accounted for by material processes.  Events disembodied by time become history, and here history becomes reembodied as it reattains material form.  The animation of abstractions like time and history recurs frequently throughout the collection and reveals an underlying anxiety about the power they hold over life.

While any astute reader will undoubtedly come away with a great deal to digest from these stories in terms of philosophical discussion, the literary craftsmanship that makes them so effective is remarkable.  Returning for a moment to “You Were Hanged,” for example, one can note several details that at first appear trivial but are threaded through the story such that the conclusion renders a completely different and nuanced significance to them than expected.  The cumulative effect of this is also contingent on any number of subtleties of language that seem to have been well preserved by the translator:

“I was under the clear impression that I’d been in that place [Saint-Jacques Plain] forever, and that my existence had never extended beyond that oblong square.” (153)

In a brief sentence and with the pointed use of “oblong”, de Ghelderode and Maclennan create a complex symbol that coheres perfectly with the themes of the story and the larger collection by inextricably entwining life, death, and social constructs that precede and survive the individual.  In this story as in several others, time and history explicitly become forces alive in ways that are usually invisible to us.  One might well encounter “the breathing of clocks” (159) in an inn adjacent to a setting of historical cruelties.  Sometimes this is direct and catastrophic and at others more restrained in a manner that might remind readers of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.  In much the way that an innocuous post in a wall may in another era have been the final destination for a condemned person, de Ghelderode frequently explores the significance of the idea of the historical relic in changing social contexts: common items afforded outsized importance as a byproduct of human action, history being an amalgamation whose power becomes greater than the sum of its parts and in turn acts on its descendants.  Many of the stories here are built around a “tunneling” effect of time, with two sets of significant events set apart by a lengthy interval during which the narration distances itself from events on the ground.  The cumulative effect is a volume of weird tales that remind the reader that history asserts itself upon the individual even while quietly hiding in the background.

“The Public Scribe” serves as one of the more subtle treatments of the erosive effects of time on human existence. In it we see a plot device, the infamous mannequin, that has become a fairly commonplace fixture of the weird.  The animate and the inanimate are juxtaposed in an exploration of the ways in which the uncanny valley of the mannequin threatens to usurp the former.  De Ghelderode himself wrote plays for marionettes and was influenced by puppet theater, and he seems to have a particular fascination with exploring exactly where the border between life and not-life resides (or if it can be safely said to exist at all).  Perhaps he’s drawing on his fascination with time and asking us, “what is a mannequin but the appearance of humanity frozen in an instant of time?”  Throughout the collection are frequent appearances of masks and other similar manifestations of these themes. Their usage in a context that consistently emphasizes the degradation and horror of corporeal existence begs the question:  which is truly the more unsettling prospect–attaining human consciousness or experiencing the loss of it?  The author is careful to present both sides of the equation in “The Public Scribe.”  If from the broader perspective of history the human condition is akin to “musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed.” (“A Twilight”, 146), then it seems a foregone conclusion to de Ghelderode that neither prospect could be a clear preference, and therein lives true horror.

De Ghelderode’s sense of the fantastic exists at times within a Christian context and at others within an apparently invented, at-times haphazard one that achieves much by way of implication and subtlety, even as it remains unclear as to whether the author aspired to create a singular mythos like Chambers’s King in Yellow tales.  In Chambers, there is a constant current of madness and the incomprehensible lurking just beneath the surface of events, and de Ghelderode’s fiction has a similar quality. This is significant especially when considering the biographical data; as the author fell into ill health in the time preceding and during the stories’ creation, scholar Roland Bayen conjectures that his “stories bear witness to an ‘increasing neurosis’, indeed are ‘the fruits of crisis’” (Introduction, viii).  But Chambers is not the only fixture of the weird that we might be tempted to admit to the discussion.  The hallucinatory, landscape-disrupting visions that occur in several of the tales in Spells have a vivid, bold, and intense quality.  For an author with such an interest in place and its influence on consciousness, it is not surprising that crises of the personal are strongly linked to crises of geography and the like.  In particular, such an occurrence in “Fog” might well remind readers of Belgian contemporary Jean Ray’s story “The Mainz Psalter”, with both stories featuring conjurations of hidden worlds lurking adjacent to our own.  De Ghelderode writes:

“During this respite I entertained many such speculations, and all the more easily in that I didn’t have to deal with my usual rational self. Alas! No ecstasy goes without a reversal.  The state of grace left me.  And I felt myself in danger.  Streams of lights climbed the walls, this time coming from down below, coarse reflections of nocturnal fairs lit up with opaque red and green smoke. What I saw could only be an invention of delirium: mouths once more, down at ground level and reaching toward me.  A monstrous host surrounded me of which only the mouths were visible.  Oh! Abject mucous membranes salivating and spitting, swallowing words that I sensed were sordid and that I congratulated myself on not understanding…I was abruptly galvanized by the image of a nearby hell over which I was cataleptically suspended.” (136)

In Spells, there is a malevolence to the universe that becomes apparent whenever the supernatural manifests on the page, but the author is careful to always give the devil his due and remind the reader that human action and events play a part in that malevolence.  There’s a persistent association of social evils and the uncanny, particularly as in “You Were Hanged” and “The Odor of Pine”.  Readers will also note a more direct engagement with real-world religion than in many of the authors of weird tales to which he’s most comparable, which is perhaps not surprising given the overlapping of theme with preceding European authors like Mirbeau, who wrote nothing of the supernatural but obsessively critiqued the real-life figures purporting to be conduits to it.  De Ghelderode’s writing has been described by scholars as anticlerical, but his fascination with religious relics, churches, and other physical remnants of Christian belief systems reveals what seems best described as nostalgia made problematic and ambiguous by the ways in which he ties such holy artifacts to social ills.  Mortal sin, atonement, and many other religious constructs form the core of anxiety that plagues some of the protagonists, but they exist alongside and entwined with the materialism represented by real historical tribulations that seem to carry an equal weight that survives into the present.  In “The Collector of Relics,” for example, norms of both religious and secular life are simultaneously tested and transgressed by the protagonist as a byproduct of his own personal contrarian obsessions.  As the narrator states regarding whether or not to discover what might lurk inside a dim antiques shop: “I’ve found myself tempted to cross the threshold.” (69)  Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, there is an animus in the character that conflates these two categories of social norms under a reactionary, impulsive, and accelerating disgust.  It becomes clear by the conclusion of “The Collector of Relics” that the reader would be advised to allow for multiple interpretations of the idea of crossing thresholds as the protagonist continually pressures the collector to pursue progressively more taboo objectives, and the preservation of this ambiguity in translation is vital for understanding the story.

De Ghelderode’s fiction has not been broadly available to English readers, and this edition of Spells will hopefully do its part to remedy that.  The consistent execution and thought-provoking, nuanced premises in these stories are enough to render them overlooked classics (at least, to non-Belgian audiences)—there are no real low points to speak of, and it seems unsurprising that the stories are among the final efforts produced by an author with a lengthy and well-developed body of work.  In short, Spells will have much to say, some of it new and some of it quite familiar, to most readers of the weird.

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Suitably impressed by the dark tenor of this subversive aesthetic—the book’s “handshake” becomes a tender skin-graft, if you allow the metaphor—I was unprepared for the subtle humour that permeates these stories. In Devlin’s tales, a generous spirit busily hums under the threnody for a dying world.

Given the broad remit of weird fiction, the ten stories collected in You Will Grow Into Them exemplify diversity. They range from the short and scary to the more unsettling or darkly fantastical. I advise reading them in the order they are published, simply because—for me, anyway—it worked nicely. Some may be familiar to Interzone readers, or from elsewhere, but many are fresh to this collection.

A word about Unsung Stories, the publisher of You Will Grow Into Them. Under the “What We Do” section of their website, they list a simple mandate: “Weird stories, beautifully told.” Judging from their website, they have a small staff and a brisk catalogue of thirteen titles. You Will Grow Into Them is their most recent publication. New publishers of the weird are always a welcome sight.

***

One of Devlin’s primary occupations here is a general vision of organic decrepitude and the strange regrowth of new kinds of life. The volume’s fascination with despoliation and fungal blossomings yields a rich discourse on the mushrooming afterlife that springs up after the worst that can happen actually happens. Uncanny and deeply weird, these new lives are ambivalent at best. In this regard, it finds an unlikely fellow-traveler of these weird, resilient trails in Anna Tsing’s academic study The Mushroom at the End of the World.

As “Two Brothers” suggests, for instance, decay is possibly only the hidden face of how people are “made” in a time of increasingly technocratic modernity. The story condemns authoritarian patriarchy by way of examining the bodies and emotional states that are cast out or disallowed for its better functioning. By multiplying human bodies, “Two Brothers” edges carefully toward a vision that sees how human frailty disappears at the mark of a triumphant inhuman carapace. What is weird in this tale is not the father’s behaviour; it is fact that something skeletal and human still lives in the trees and the mud, no matter its distance from recognizable society.

Many references take up an English world. This goes far beyond the invocation of Saki’s decaying aristocracy in “Two Brothers”. In fact, if a person were interested, they could draw connections from across the canon of weird fiction. “The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him” reads as a Wellsian dystopic take on a John Collier story. “Passion Play” is a deliciously religious story of failure in the vein of M.R. James. “The Bridge” miniaturizes the spiky delusion of Synecdoche, New York with an eye to Robert Aickman’s creeping mysteries, while “The End of Hope Street” extends the unplaceable dread of Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” over time. Even the fictional history proposed by “Songs Like They Used to Play” settles itself in the apparently mundane world that is a bed and breakfast in contemporary York.

Of the many stories here in which human forms decompose and reform (or are transformed), the body’s new life is highly ambiguous. Unlike the visceral shudder of watching masculinity disintegrate in “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” treats its subject with ephemeral delicacy. Here, the weird grounds itself in a generous posthuman ecology where “Everything that used to be alive now makes this a richer world.” Theorists of degrowth and readers of deterioration, rejoice! Elsewhere, the oddly-claustrophobic “We All Need Somewhere to Hide” similarly finds the changeability of forms to be a liberating and not entirely devastating possibility. Not incidentally, like “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” is a “coming of age” narrative that demonstrates an awareness of gendered identities and of the forces at work in shaping them. This same awareness illuminates many of Devlin’s other stories.

There are peaks and valleys, naturally, and some stories yield an occasional rough edge. “Dogsbody”, for instance, is an interesting concept but largely without the conceptual richness apparent elsewhere. That said, its concerns about economic deskilling in an increasingly abstract world of financial speculation do feel quite timely. In this wolfish world, the modern economy’s gloomy “deskilling” effects are accompanied by an unexplained plague of strange transformations.

Presenting a somewhat contrary situation, “Her First Harvest” revels in a suggestive world-building imagination but does not travel very far, contenting itself with a dance of posthuman possibilities. This story cultivates a freshly imagined post-apocalyptic ecology through the stately arrangements of a pre-Darcy Elizabeth Bennett who has just been left in the dirt a little too long—not a sentence that I’d have anticipated writing before picking up this book. These are enjoyable stories, but they are not the best this collection has to offer.

In contrast to the narrative directness of many of the other stories, “Breadcrumbs” and “Passion Play” distinguish themselves through complex reflections on characters who themselves tell stories and whose activities license a sophisticated play of represented action and aesthetic richness. In “Passion Play”, the collection’s first story, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of her friend Cathy as she thinks herself backward, into the past, even as her footsteps carry her forward. A religious element is added to this temporal juxtaposition as this progress becomes an unholy or uncanny version of the Stations of the Cross, with the difference here that reflections are organized around the disappearance of a young girl and the strange, Jamesian ghost story of the “cross-hatch man”, a figure marked by his specific elision from religious iconography. The mysteriousness of this tale is bolstered and not undercut by the simultaneous admission of a domestic situation that may or may not explain Cathy’s disappearance.

While the dense Catholic skin and mysterious climax of “Passion Play” indulge in weird fiction’s common reference points, the remarkable “Breadcrumbs” stands independently of any such comparison, although it gnaws away at fairytale commonalities with glee. A paean to the dream of ecological rebirth edged in fanged versions of fairy-tale transformations (think Disney, red in tooth and claw and hung, screaming from the ceiling), this unpredictable gem busies itself in the vivid fantasies and weirder fate of a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie. “Breadcrumbs” draws copious from stereotypical images only to transcend them all in its final images of the courage rooted in patience and dreams that helps her to sever her past from her future. There is much here for a weird fiction reader; suitable, in fact, for a girl whose “mother once fed her worlds.”

With a name like You Will Grow Into Them, readers could confidently expect a focus on the organic processes of transformation. From the fungal dirt to the dreamy trees, these stories rehabilitate thoughts of posthuman growth, often with an eye dead-set on the mechanical inhumanity of redundancies and blind repetition.

***

Weird literature’s associations with terrifying knives in the dark or the inarticulate horror at the cosmic sublime are familiar—perhaps too much so. Deeper than these signs is weird literature’s characterization that “its interior is less repressed than unrecognized”, as China Miéville writes in his “Afterweird” to The Weird. Dodging typicality, Malcolm Devlin’s stories spin webs of hospitable darkness and thoughtful involution into the darkness of the unrecognized.

In You Will Grow Into Them, transformations are painful and strange, yet they also extend the hope of liberation. Fiction takes its readers up to the moment of vision and no further; it implies consequences and causal logics. Stories like “Dogsbody” and “The End of Hope Street” suggest that the bitter resistance to change may engineer fates that might be worse than death: to live uncharitably and ungenerously, selfishly cloistered in a shell of one’s own mundane devising. At their most extreme, Devlin’s stories glimpse the failing wills or the fractures of escape that mark the ends and beginnings of any given transformation.

In “Passion Play”, despite all her patient mimicry of a lurid type of weird fate, the unnamed protagonist remains trapped in the lurking horror of reality itself. The story ends with a common refrain on the inability of people to understand what lies directly in front of them, as the young girl sees “Faces that have witnessed everything and seen nothing at all.” At the other end of the collection, “The End of Hope Street” plays with mysteries of space and compression. In one of its many powerful images, “The End of Hope Street” leaves readers by picking out a character whose self-delusions leaves him isolated and without refuge. This almost-Nietzschean last man cleans out his house to paint everything a blinding white: “Layer after layer after layer, he painted, as though he might ward off the darkness by making the whole house shine.” Here, as elsewhere, strict moral associations between light and dark, good and bad, are traversed and interwoven. While hospitality’s invitation toward transformation is refused, isolation becomes the grim death of nihilistic purity.

On the whole, however, Devlin’s stories are characterized by their absence of fear in the face of strange changes. They oppose the grim stupidity of the horrific sublime with the quiet ironies of consciousness and the inexplicable flights of fate. It is a mark of distinction that, here as in much of the weird, visions of the world are made unstable and porous, even as they reveal how dangerous life has always been. Cracks emerge. Inevitably, bodies start to pile up. Almost worse, bodies begin to go missing. Who knows what will appear in their place? Generosity is not softness; darkness may be more comforting than any light. You Will Grow Into Them promises much, namely, a fate of incorporation into forming uncertainty. It delivers gleefully, warmly, and well—with a distressingly strange and inexorable smile.

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Much of Link’s fiction operates in an allusive manner, carefully paying homage to predecessors while de- and reconstructing some of their stories and characters into things that become entirely new entities. The collection opens with “The Summer People,” a likely nod to the Shirley Jackson classic. While the Jackson story derives its sense of disquiet from the seemingly mundane, Link’s story is rich with the bizarre and demonstrates that what might be strange to one person could be perfectly normal to another. Context determines the bizarre, and what is strange to one person might bring to another the same trappings of day-to-day drudgery and longing to escape as we all experience in the “normal” world. Other stories interact in unique ways with Ray Bradbury, Frank Baum, and Egyptian mythology, but are never fully dependent on the reader recognizing the allusions for the story to have a powerful impact. “Light”, another of the strongest in the collection, takes a trope explored by Weird luminaries Alfred Kubin, Eric Basso, and others—a mysterious epidemic of persons afflicted with inescapable sleep—and forms it into something entirely different, but no less unsettling.

One of the strongest pieces, “I Can See Right Through You,” works as a kind of disjointed character study of an aging film star and his lengthy (and possibly not entirely natural) relationship with a costar. Disappearance and loss form the lens through which we see the protagonist, forming a sort of overture for a theme that is explored extensively in this collection: what are ghosts, in a modern sense of the word? This question comes back in several stories, such as “Two Houses” and “The New Boyfriend.” Whether explained as a disappearance or a missed connection, most of the characters in these stories are searching for someone who is never fully there or can never be fully understood. “Secret Identity”, in its turn, takes the form of a lengthy e‑mail sent to a person who is never present in any definite sense. In this story, Link focuses heavily on a girl’s coming of age and first experiences with romantic love in what seems to be the 21st century. “The New Boyfriend” explores similar territory, and they each succeed at creating rich characters with whom the reader can empathize in a short space. In both cases, the objects of their affections are defined by the ways in which they are absent. Whether these are realistic absences or something more bizarre is beside the point.

Another of the collection’s highlights is “Two Houses”, which is one of the most interesting takes on the ghost tale I’ve ever read and may be my favorite Kelly Link story. Using a perfectly constructed Russian doll structure, much like her earlier work, “Lull”, it indicates that the author is able and willing to continue to push the boundaries of how we perceive certain genres. “Two Houses” first appeared in a collection of works inspired by Ray Bradbury, and Bradbury fans will certainly catch the allusions, but the story stands perfectly well on its own merits. The interactions between frame and nested stories are perfectly constructed in a manner that is perhaps more refined and restrained than “Lull”, and the effect this has on the reader is indicative of Link at her best. When a group of future astronauts awakens from a deep sleep, they ponder the “mystery” of what happened to their sister ship, which disappeared some time into the voyage. Sprinkled throughout, the group entertains itself with ghost tales that intersect in bizarre, unsettling ways with the present. Like “The New Boyfriend”, this story again forces the reader to ask, “what is a ‘ghost’ and what does it mean to us in our present, specific context?” To parody the shifting significance of ghost tales in human history, the ship’s A.I. changes the setting to accompany the tale being told, and at times performs the function of a ghost in its own way. “Two Houses” works perfectly as an intriguing deconstruction of the tropes that make up the story’s costume, and the result has lingered with me for quite a long time after initially reading it over a year ago.

“The Lesson”, though not one of the strongest pieces in Get in Trouble, had some truly touching (and terrifying) moments while tracing a couple’s anxieties over the birth of a daughter via a surrogate mother. Although it might have benefited from a less explicitly pointed ambiguity at its conclusion, it contains one of the strongest images in the entire collection—a juxtaposition of birth with the eruption of black beetles from a work of taxidermy—a perfect summation of the combination of joy, fear, life, and death that the characters are attempting to navigate. “Valley of the Girls” mashes together Egyptian mythology and the misadventures of the wealthy in a world that is a slight sidestep from our own. While also not one of the collection’s standout pieces, it contains perhaps the most interesting way of looking at issues of class which, though present in other stories, remain closer to the surface in this one.

If there is a single unifying theme that runs through the works in Get in Trouble, it is that identity is uncertain, even while we are compelled by external events to find certainty. These uncertainties may sometimes manifest in the guise of speculative story elements, but they are instantly recognizable and resonant: nurses refusing to use names for babies (“The Lesson”), customizable video game characters that can be sold, scrapped, or recreated differently (“Secret Identity”), allusions to heroes who don’t know they’re heroes (“Origin Story”), a character stating that she doesn’t know what she is and must one day find out (“The Summer People”), and a woman with an extra shadow that has gradually become a real, distinct person (“Light”). Link often connects questions of identity to her thoughtful allusions, suggesting that we are, at least in part, defined by the stories we tell ourselves, whose meaning is fluid and changes with context. The prose in most of these stories is a kind of minimalism that itself works in service of these questions of identity. Often, dialogue markers are left out, attributions are sparse and deliberately basic, and characters at times become subordinated to a group personality. This tendency creates much of the subtle sense of disquiet that makes Link’s fiction a pleasure to read, reread, and dissect.

Make no mistake, these are sophisticated stories that almost always withhold an easy “solution”, exhibiting China Miéville’s “unsatisfy me, frustrate me” sentiment perfectly. The works in Get in Trouble are in part about humans trying to connect with one another, but they’re just as much about figuring out if they’re actually human or something else entirely. These explorations of identity show a constant tension between a character’s choice and external determining factors, which is an old discussion, but placed it within new, bold, and exciting contexts. At the core of these stories are issues that form the foundation of any strong work of fiction—longing, uncertainty, fear, a desire to escape an inescapable past—Link has simply added other questions, like “What if the person I long for isn’t a real person?” and “What do we even mean by placing a partition between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’?”

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Cover by Santiago Caruso

The short story is by far the most popular form of weird fiction — after all, when an idea or situation becomes familiar, it ceases to be weird. Thus, we find the landscape of strange literature littered with short story after short story — some good, others bad. With thousands of potential new short stories being written each year, it’s nothing short of a herculean task to weed through them all and find the best ones. Michael Kelly and Laird Barron have undertaken this chore though with the inaugural volume of a new best-of series, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One.

The series follows an interesting format in that each year, a new guest editor will join the project. For the first year, series editor Michael Kelly chose Laird Barron, a well known and well respected name when it comes to weird fiction. The anthology opens with an informative foreword by Kelly. I was rather disappointed to hear that many publishers did not respond to Kelly’s requests for material. I hope that the success of this first entry might remedy this.

The next chapter, “We Are For The Weird,” is a introductory essay by Barron on what sorts of parameters define the weird tale and what makes a story worthy of inclusion into this best-of collection. It also gives some background to Barron’s life and his admiration for weird writers like Algernon Blackwood. The name itself is a clever play on name of the short story collection by Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard, We Are for the Dark.

This is then followed by a opening chapter by Simon Strantzas called “The Nineteenth Step” which served as the introduction to the anthology Shadows Edge. This narrative is reminiscent of the introduction of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in terms of both function and excellence. From there we begin to dive into a series of weird tales starting with Tremblay’s “Swim Wants to Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks” which chronicles a meth addict’s encounter with sea monsters. Tremblay has been on my radar since I first read his work in The New Black. Tremblay is followed by the humorous scifi adventure from A. C. Wise, “Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron,” which gives a few nods to past weird writers.

Then came one of my favorite entries, “The Year of the Rat” by Chen Qiufan, a futuristic scifi story that describes a weird battle between Chinese soldiers and genetically engineered rats. I was rather impressed by both Qiufan and his translator, Ken Liu, a writer who sometimes translates Chinese fiction. I think story affirmed why anthologies are essential: to help readers discover new authors and works outside their normal periphery. Another standout in the book was “Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar, who recently won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and British Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It weaves a rather interesting narrative through a chain of correspondences from a young girl who has dreams involving E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann.” It starts out innocent enough but soon descends (or ascends?) into the realms of weird. In terms of weirdness, Jeff VanderMeer’s “No Breather in the World But Thee” was weird even by weird fiction standards and served as the final entry to the anthology.

On the creepier, darker side of the weird fiction spectrum, Scott Nicolay deftly crafts a modern Gothic tale in the “Eyes Exchange Bank” that recalls Poe’s writings. Nicolay’s debut collection has received a lot of praise and it’s easy to see why. In addition, there was also a story from Kristi DeMeester, which managed to be both short and creepy; Richard Gavin’s tale “A Cavern of Redbrick,” which features the ghosts and jinns as part of a horrific family drama; a story about Emily Dickinson from Jeffrey Ford, which worked out well even though I was initially a bit skeptical; “Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman that featured a weird sort of birth; and “Furnaces” by Lisa Llewellyn, about a young girl from a small town where things aren’t what they seem.

Some of my favorites in this collection came from authors I had not read before. Damien Angelica Walters presented a fragmented story involving two lovers in “Should I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” In “The Krakatoan,” Maria Dahvana Headley crafts an interesting family story told through the viewpoint of an astronomer’s child. Karin Tidbeck’s story “Moonstruck,” which also centered around a celestial theme, follows a child whose mother is obsessed with the moon. Finally, in “The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska, we get an interesting ghost story set in Poland during World War II.

There were also some solid stories from authors I was well acquainted with like John Langan, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., and W. H. Pugmire. Overall, I was pretty impressed with Barron’s and Kelly’s ability to balance out established weird writers with some of the newer and lesser known voices.

The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One leans slightly more towards the darker end of the weird fiction spectrum, but it does so without sacrificing the unique prose that has been a mainstay in the tradition. Certainly, the variety of stories is one of the book’s strengths. In the end, I think it’s a very satisfying anthology that should appeal to fans from those new to weird to even some of the more erudite. Without a doubt, the series has much promise. It should be interesting to see how next year’s volume with Kathe Koja at the helm will compare.

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