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.

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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.

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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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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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