Farrago’s Wainscot, Issue 5

Farrago’s Wainscot presents itself as a quarterly journal of experimentation, decay, and the problems with form and “as evidence of new ideas about artistic meaning.” Reviews of Farrago’s Wainscot have at least twice referenced the term “interstitial,” and the magazine left previous Fix reviewer, K. Tempest Bradford, feeling like an anime character with huge question marks hovering above her head. But despite this strangeness, or perhaps because of it, many readers will feel they know exactly what to expect from Farrago’s Wainscot before even reading a word.

“Identified: Musings (Attributed to Mardun, T.)” by Toiya Kristen Finley opens issue 5. The story takes the form of a letter, written by the narrator to an unnamed associate. At the head of the letter, a handwritten note identifies what follows as “evidence,” and black marker obliterates important areas of text throughout. What unfolds is a narrative of paranoia and betrayal in a world of secret post offices and lost libraries that blends elements of escapist fantasy with urban realism. Finley’s story demonstrates definite influences from fabulist texts such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword, with which there are numerous parallels, not least the metafictional structure of story-within-story which Finley takes to its extreme by having her characters repeatedly refer to their own existence within a work of fiction. Unfortunately, the weight of narrative experimentation in “Identified: Musings” quickly overwhelms the story Finley is trying to tell, and despite occasional flashes of brilliance, the overall effect is of a morass that most readers won’t wade through to find the reward that awaits them at the end.

“Mr. Water Bones and His Wife” by Paul Jessup is the standout story of the issue. In a few deft strokes, Jessup sketches a menagerie of character grotesqueries and puts them into play in a sick, disturbed, but oddly touching story. Mr. Water Bones, some kind of mad scientist, sets about pickling himself to attain immortality. When the reality of the situation dawns on his wife, she quickly realises that cleaning her husbands pickling / immortality tube is not for her and sets about having an affair with Zoom, one of Mr. Water Bones’s idiotic assistants. If you hadn’t already figured it out by the time Zoom renames himself Steel Bulletcock, this is an absurd comedy that isn’t afraid to be both prurient and guttural to raise a chuckle from the reader. Jessup shows a natural talent for storytelling and creating characters who are grotesque but still very much human at heart (even if not in body).

“The Writing’s On The Wall” by Matthew Kressel makes no compromises in expressing the voice and thoughts of its narrator. A hard drinking, drug popping, street smart young man tells the story of his encounter with a punk girl with a difference. There isn’t a swear word or an example of young male misbehaviour that doesn’t get crammed into Kressel’s story somewhere, and all the tropes of urban youth culture are jammed into the telling. The narrative voice is compelling and well crafted and carries the reader through the story. Less effective are the fantastical elements of the story which clunk around like spare parts in the boot of a car. Urban realist fantasy is among the most difficult genre hybrids to carry off well, and while Kressel storms both the urban and the real, the fantasy just doesn’t click.

“Praise and Criticism for M. Rekling’s The Bottle“ by Alex Dally MacFarlane presents a ghost story through the filter of repeated retellings. M. Rekling is the author of The Bottle, a “history of Retyelnen’s most unusual haunting,” and hence of the death of his own sister—a book we learn about through a series of reviews from various fictitious publications. Whilst there is an implicit sense of mystery, the real question is what MacFarlane was trying to achieve by employing such distancing effects. It isn’t possible to engage on any emotional level with a series of reviews, and there isn’t enough depth or detail to enter effectively into the world of the story, so the reader is left with the intellectual challenge of matching conflicting accounts of the same story to reach some understanding of their truth or otherwise.

“Between the Lines” by Jonathan Wood is the most ambitious story in this issue. Employing the long established mode of the personal journal, Wood tells the story of a guerrilla war being fought in the territory of an enormous library that seems to make up the entire world of the stories narrator, a young brother who is part of a team dispatched on a covert mission. There are some clever touches in-between the lines. The development of a single location into a microcosm is reminiscent of both J.G. Ballard and James Lovegrove, and Wood carries off his world-building to great effect. There is a grand sense of humour and inventiveness throughout, as the two factions of Fictionists and Non-fictionists conduct their war through the library’s Romance and Mystery sections, employing negotiation bombs and parentheses weapons along the way. Wood is careful not to extend the joke too far and brings the story to a sharp, if somewhat confusing, conclusion.

A number of poems, non-fiction pieces, and two serial stories round out Issue 5, with the poetry of Joselle Vanderhooft particularly worth taking the time to read more than once.

Farrago’s Wainscot certainly succeeds at being the eclectic, experimental magazine it sets out to be. All the work featured is highly distinctive, and the best contributions are genuinely rare and inventive. If the magazine has a weakness, it is that much of the writing is experimental in the way that most readers will have encountered many, many times before. That aside, however, the space that Farrago’s Wainscot creates for literary invention within genre fiction should be valued, and the magazine is a great addition to the flourishing online short fiction publications.