ChiZine #36, April-June 2008

ChiZine offers us another helping of dark, intimate speculative fiction in issue #36. As with the previous issue, I’m very glad for ChiZine’s apparent preference for straightforward plot- and character-oriented fiction, but often its stories do not achieve the spark they’re reaching for.

In “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft,” a collaboration between Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, Jim Payne hopes to earn some easy cash by selling old correspondences between his great-grandfather and H.P. Lovecraft. Unfortunately, collector Flemger wants more from Jim than just the letters, and his ambitions as a Lovecraft fan are rather extreme…

The story opens well, engagingly written and easily laying out the premise—which is interesting and full of potential. Unfortunately, the freshness soon comes to an end. When Flemger offers Payne some tea, of course the tea is drugged, and from that point on, plot progression is accomplished solely by a motley collection of the oldest tricks in the book. This reviewer is not overly familiar with very much of Mr. Lovecraft’s work, but Flemger’s plan and the thwarting of it do not feel like Lovecraft himself is essential to them; he’s merely a placeholder—which is a shame, both because something more Lovecraftian could probably have been done, and because, more significantly, the earlier parts do focus on Lovecraft, raising points and issues that are simply left to dangle aimlessly. I may well be missing layers of significance that would be clear to a Lovecraft devotee—but if this is this case, so will other non-devotee readers.

Jason says there are no rules in the world, that they’re all made up in Grant Palmquist’s “Dry Rain.” But then, as a young boy who shoots down pigeons and tortures lizards, Jason is perhaps not the most reliable source of wisdom. But he’s our narrator’s only friend in the world, or perhaps vice versa, and so we watch Jason’s development from boyhood to adolescence, his increasing nihilism and violence.

“Dry Rain” didn’t quite work for me as a story; Jason’s character is too clear and familiar from the very beginning to have any feeling of development, suspense, or conflict. If the author is counting on the reader’s concern to carry this story—about what Jason may do next and how far he will go—then he has failed, because he’s made it clear from the start that Jason has no limits. If he doesn’t kill in this scene, he’ll kill in the next; it’s just a matter of time. So suspense is not the issue here, and change is not at stake. But as a character study, this piece works rather well to demonstrate phenomenon we may be familiar with but have not experienced ourselves: The way Jason’s perceived success reinforces his nihilism, the way his supposed “freedom” is narrow and unsatisfying, his frustration and inability to cope when he runs into rejection he can’t overcome or ignore, and most of all, our narrator’s silence and helplessness. The narrator knows the end as well as we do and yet never makes any effort to avoid it. Still, though this is never addressed directly, we understand why the narrator stays quiet. Actually, none of these elements are directly addressed, but they’re all there, interesting to observe and to consider.

“Small Monuments” by An Owomoyela uses the familiar trope of a nuclear apocalypse, approaching it with a lyrical bent:

North near Los Alamos one siren screams. Old-world newspapers boasted this warning would endure even if the reactor went down. Three years, they guessed it. Faithful sentinel, they called her. Her voice flew up in her throat and she started screaming; wind whipped around the turbines feeding power back to her and she’s been screaming ever since.

She’s been screaming ten years, now.

In this bleak, radiation-flooded desert, a small tragedy plays out between survivors Raul and Anisha. It’s a solid story but suffers from its use of a cliché subject without achieving any sort of twist or other distinction to set it apart. Though a personal story is told, the characters and plot are simple, and the focus seems to be on the environment. And though the lyricism with which this environment is described is sometimes evocative, at other times it feels stilted or unclear. The result is a solid story, which is no small achievement, but which is also not the same thing as an enjoyable story.