Bandersnatch, edited by Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace

Given the editors of the anthology Bandersnatch—Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay, who until recently co-edited Fantasy Magazine—it would make sense to expect similar stories to those in the magazine. That would be a mistake here—their selected stories give a different feel to this anthology, and while the broad result is less to my taste, I commend them for being willing to pick such stories, even if it may confound some readers. And these stories are confounding at times, challenging. Few if any are immediately transparent on the first read. And as the editors say in their introduction, these are stories that ask readers to “cozy up to our strange, dark, and unpredictable creatures of imagination.”

In “Taiga, Taiga Burning Bright” by Alan DeNiro, the narrator is in Alaska (taiga is the name for a type of northern forest biome), having stolen something he calls “the Restitution” from some organization he calls “the secret.” What exactly either of these are is never clear, though the Restitution seems to be alive in some sense, and the secret apparently employs (or is made up of?) gun-toting polar bears.

The strength of this is in the narrator, whose voice might best be described as engagingly insane—he relates events, whether completely mundane or ridiculously absurd with the same matter-of-fact tone. Unfortunately, even with the cool-factor of the military polar bears, it’s not enough to make the story a complete success—the complete lack of revelation of what’s going on left this story feeling like a well-written but otherwise forgettable narration of a drug trip.

Aimee Potwatka’s “You Are Not My Husband” is the second person imperative story of a woman in a less-than-stellar relationship who dreams of her husband becoming something else. And then of what the woman must do when he—or something seeming to be him—does.

My experience as a reader has been that second person usually works best when the things happening are so far outside of normal that any reader will feel a shocking dislocation. For the first half of this story, that isn’t the case, as it describes what could be the life of any number of people today. It’s only later when the strangeness settles in that the story comes to life. A perfectly fitting ending does much to redeem the lifeless first half.

“I Am Meyer” by Carol K. Howell is a very fun piece. It is narrated by Bashful of the Seven Dwarfs who doesn’t speak but communicates through Post-It notes. It riffs on the familiar story with Blanche, LaReina, and Mr. Prinz at WonderWorld. But its main focus is on the dwarfs and other storybook characters and what they’ll do now, after the story, in the very modern world. In addition to its fun surface, this story manages to explore ideas of identity, of the names those in control give others and the names they claim for themselves. A very worthy read.

“Summon Bind Banish” by Nick Mamatas begins at the Egyptian pyramids in the early twentieth century with Alick, who performs rituals in an attempt to summon a spirit. After being immersed in the perspective of his first wife, Rose, the story whiplashes readers in a direct address about Alick’s sexuality, his racism, and other facts about his life. Then another whiplash brings the story to more recent times and a narrator who finds enlightenment in old esoteric books he finds in the college library.

From there the story continues with both Alick and the modern narrator. Alick’s character—a despicable man, though at times almost pitiable—makes it difficult to fully enjoy the story. His storyline also falls prey to the misguided idea that shock value (or what might have been shocking to readers several decades ago) by itself makes the story more edgy, more valuable. But the ruminations of the narrator about two different worlds superimposed and how that plays out through the rest of the story make for an interesting read.

Vylar Kaftan’s “Scar Stories” is quiet but effective. It begins with a dinner party where the guests tell the stories of their scars, and it builds as people begin sharing very personal stories of scars both physical and emotional. Soon, even inanimate objects are talking, eager to share their tales of being hurt. It’s a powerful piece.

In “Border Crossing” by Ursula Pflug creates a story as bizarre and unexplained as DeNiro’s earlier story but more effective, one that leaves the reader intrigued and wondering, instead of merely perplexed. The border of the title is between two worlds. In one of those worlds, an unnamed man is a dog, and in the other, human, but Melanie is able to cross between and visits him in each, seemingly unaware that he’s the same person.

There’s much more—the duplicate body parts Melanie is able to grow and then feeds to the dog, the coffee cans the man always wants her to open, the colors that aren’t any colors she knows. It’s a strange and allusive swirl of images that manages to hold together.

“The Children” by Bogdan Tiganov is another perplexing piece. It tells of Gavros and the other Romany children who live on the outside of society. After setting up his story as a beggar and a boy who is jealous of the affections of an older girl, another woman comes and tells him a story about a special puppy named Creanga. The story never really returns to Gavros, but tells how the family of puppies missed what once came with the sun. So Creanga sets off in search of the edge of the land to find what happened. He discovers many things, and his return points to the importance of paying attention to the world and of stories.

Either of these parts could have been a fascinating story alone—and the puppy story comes closer to being complete of itself—or they could have worked well as two strands that played off of or reinforced each other, but instead, there seems little connection between the two. The formatting at the point where the story switches makes me believe that a line or two might be missing in my (electronic) copy, which, if so, may explain how separate the two parts feel.

Seth Ellis’s “The Sidewinders” is the most lighthearted story here. Bizarre, but not in a way that leaves the reader behind at all. It tells of an iguana and a soda can who talk together in a ditch—each becoming more like the other as they do so—while Car goes riding by. The story is short but wonderful in its bizarre humor.

“Calamansi Juice” by Afifah Myra Muffaz joins the ranks of stories here that are difficult to pin down. It follows two storylines—in one a teenager waits for and boards a bus, in which the characters are simply given names like Asian Girl (the main character), White Girl, Black Man, etc. In the other, Matriarch cleans up around the house and remembers her child. The two lines come together as Matriarch makes the citrus juice of the title and Asian Girl rides the bus thinking of calamansi juice, which leads to a strange ending just this side of surreal.

I found the story less successful in its elusiveness, its refusal to explain itself, than “Border Crossing,” but certain images will stay with me, especially from the final scene.

More than the other stories here, Seth Cully’s “Roadkill” has the feel of horror. In it, a bizarre monster that people don’t usually recognize as anything out of the ordinary hunts victims on a train. The writing is good, but ultimately it’s nothing more than that—a monster story with nothing going on at any other level.

In “Pink” by Laura Cooney an angry, spoiled girl laments life in America, the parties where she doesn’t fit in, the way people treat each other. She’s not an easy narrator to care about, though there are moments of interest in the story, in her strange dreams and at times her keen observations. There’s also a section (dream? imagination? reality?) about her affecting and infecting people by getting them to unknowingly eat bits of her, that despite what some readers might consider a significant yuck-factor, works nicely. As a whole, though, the story fades quickly from the mind.

“A Perfect and Unmappable Grace” by Jack M. Haringa is much more accessible on its surface than most of the others here but without being merely superficial. In it, Dr. Stone allows New York gangsters to bring their wounded to his house so he can try to save them. He is also obsessed with the writings of a German-speaking scientist he only names “the Old Man” and with the mystical meaning of the numbers and equations he finds there.

It isn’t until late in the story that it becomes clear that Stone is searching for the perfection of those formulae in the shapes of the faces and bodies of those the gangsters bring in, which sets up an ending that is strange in a good sense, not fully explained but suggestive in a way that encourages the reader to enjoy and ponder the images portrayed.

The final story, and a strong one to end the anthology on, is Karen Heuler’s “Down on the Farm.” It is a story of genetic manipulation and body-part farming, flipping between the point-of-view of the girl Tercepia who, it’s clear early on, is the result of one of these experiments, and a shady man named Portafack, who has come to the farm to purchase Tercepia or one of her sisters.

A great deal of the pleasure of the story is in the careful revelation of the details of exactly what’s happening. It has subtly horrific details that never overwhelm it, probably because of the naïveté of Tercepia and the fact that Portafack’s intentions are left as unspoken (even if obvious) implications. It isn’t that those details are surprises when they happen—what revelations there are come with plenty of hints and clues to not take a reader by surprise—but it’s simply in watching this story play out at its careful pace that the story succeeds.

Publisher: Prime Books (November 2007)
Price: $13.57
Hardcover: 192 pages
ISBN: 0809572664