Postscripts, #12, Autumn 2007

Parasitic ghosts possess a child. Zombies storm a library. Aliens receive murder lessons from a serial killer. A mute screams. This haunting and often surreal issue of Postscripts (a publication with which I was previously unfamiliar) makes me wish I could regularly subscribe. Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers have assembled an intriguing cast of writers and characters for this creepy autumn outing. Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” by Scott Edelman and “Ghost Technology From The Sun” by Paul Jessup, show thoughtfulness and literary craft that deserve special recognition and remembrance.

The unnamed narrator (I suspect his name is Walter) of “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” is a writer doing research who seeks refuge in the rare book vault of a library, which is attacked by zombies. Walled in with his books, he struggles to comprehend what is happening by telling stories, mostly of what he imagines is happening in the world outside the library. His meta-narrative is an exploration of the impulse to write and why telling stories is human. All the vignettes our male Scheherazade formulates to forestall and forget the inevitable involve affection or dedication of one kind or another: bonds between people, or between humans and zombies. Death doesn’t part his husbands and wives in their love or hatred; mothers adore their strange children; priests attend to their flocks; and survivors seek other survivors. The unflinching mayhem of this story is heartrending rather than perverse or disgusting, as life is destroyed and, tattered, continues in unlife. Again and again, our narrator images a man on a mountain, who has never heard a whimper of the chaos below, poking in the dirt with a stick and talking to his son, a darkly hopeful image which recalls the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree in W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

In “Ghost Technology From The Sun,” if she were luckier, Marybeth might be one of the children skating in that Old Master poem, as the adults await the miraculous birth. Instead, when we first see her, she is wishing for a blessing of her own, like the ones her mother and many of the other women of God’s Foot carry in their swelling bellies. She is an innocent magician, a conduit for terrifying words and images from the hungry dead that the Master seeks to propitiate, offering them worship and dark tithes. Her cornhusk dolls rustle with voices, and like Donnie Darko, she is visited by a disturbing rabbit with ambivalent desires and access to gateways which wishes to take her away from her home. Jessup uses beautiful (but not overwrought) language to build a febrile, surreal fantasy world as symbol-laden as a fairy tale and as sensual as a waking childhood nightmare, whose narrator sounds like a little girl rather than a mystic or a philosopher. Its farm setting and moonshiner’s brew of folkloric and Lovecraftian elements is only too appropriate for the harvest season, when holidays like Halloween glut our hunger for horror, and the Day of the Dead and Samhain bring departed spirits to the homes and hearts of the living.

“Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” ends the issue with a story about writing, and “The Cane” by Patrick O’Leary begins it with one. The surface narrative, in which young writer visits an older writer and comes away disgusted with the seemingly facile way he spins tales, lies over the top of a lesson about writing and the marks that lesson leaves. The voice of the frame narrative of this piece is a bit awkward, but its subtext is haunting.

Social commentary and old-time spook story come together in “Rap-Tap-Tap.” When Liza Reynolds tries to stop neighborhood children’s mischief, she finds that scare tactics can be an awkward and dangerous tool. The background and ways of speaking that B.B. Roo constructs for her protagonist are evocative, and Liza is likeable. It is easy to understand her frustration and sympathize with her worries. Some of the language is overwrought, but Roo spins effective psychological horror and keeps the reader as uncertain as Liza, and the ending unfolds tidily. Almost too tidily. One thing that’s maddeningly unclear is the source of the denouement, although I suppose the natural answer makes more sense than the supernatural.

The gray town of “Here Comes The New Way” by Iain Rowan reminds me of some of the towns (including the one in the mountains) in The Book of Flying by Keith Miller. It feels allegorical, yet in some ways resembles St. Petersburg. The story drags a bit, for example in Piotr’s confrontation with Michael (is he a cult leader, or is he a conduit?). Its inhabitants’ seduction by a fiery and painful hope, however uncertain, is psychologically honest, although the ending is cryptic. The viral spread of the burning cult resembles the spread of zombism in “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man.”

The “New Way” movement also eerily echoes the epidemic of destruction Luther unleashes in “The Greatest Serial Killer in the Universe” by Robert T. Jeschonek. Luther’s predicament in the middle of the story made me think of the old saw where a kid caught smoking his father’s cigars is forced to smoke a whole box, which puts him off it for good. The twist at the end is a bit confusing, and in some ways predictable, but its still a clever tale.

“Life, Learning, Leipzig, And A Librarian” by Brian Aldiss is also based on an interesting concept—a brilliant man tries to live using a less than ideal synthetic brain—but it doesn’t work anywhere as well as Jeschonek’s story. The reference to Nash at the beginning is extremely annoying (why does he matter?); the plot is loose-jointed, to say the least; the title doesn’t make sense; and the only female is a blow-up-doll of a character. In addition, there are lapses in its internal logic: why would someone gifted (or cursed, as the case may be) with encyclopedic knowledge be aware of the hippocampus but unaware of the reproductive organs?

“Three Unlikely Futures” by Will McIntosh is weird, more of a set of related vignettes than a story, but nonetheless well written and interesting. These three futures work well together in that they are all similarly weird and horrible (and somewhat annoyingly, blamed on the French): in the first, set in a suburban neighborhood, all inanimate objects are shrinking; in the second, set on a beach, all animals are spontaneously committing suicide (except for people); and in the third, set in a traveling carnival, the Earth’s gravity increases, killing and injuring some, while just disabling or weakening others. All of the protagonists’ trajectories arc toward the tragic, and humiliation, penury, disaster, death, and straitened circumstances close in on their lives like buildings collapsing. It’s almost like an odd remix of the Book of Revelations, if you imagined all of these things happening at once. Global warming and its bloody handmaidens whisper behind the wallpaper of the plot, like bricked-in ghosts.

“Hummingbirds And Pie” by Robert Weston is as surreal, incoherent, and loose-jointed as “Life, Learning, Leipzig, And A Librarian,” but as haunting and cryptic as “Ghost Technology From The Sun.” “Hummingbirds” and “Ghost Technology” both deal in dreams, although Weston’s narrative feels more like an odd interlude generated by Nyquil than Jessup’s bad acid trip. The idea of someone making a living by synthesizing sounds is an interesting one, and the whole story is effectively overlaid with the same sense of foreboding present in “Three Futures,” although to what end I can’t say. Weston’s attempt to address discrimination and social change in the bear dream is admirable but ultimately just surreal.

“Hummingbirds” and “Elephant Speak” by Darren Speegle are equally opaque to me, although both seem to be trying to make some sort of important point that I keep missing by inches. A couple’s child is born handicapped, and they are encouraged to send him to a home because he is a “ghost” who will grow increasingly violent as he becomes older. His pale skin, which was bred out of humanity through some sort of eugenics, has become associated with feral behavior. Although I understand and appreciate “Elephant Speak”’s thoughtfulness, I didn’t warm to what reads as racial essentialism (although as far as I can tell, this is supposed to be an argument against it. . . ) or Speegle’s comparison of human children to farm animals. This story is a tangled mess of painful, violent images whose message is too muddled, broad, and clumsily argued, hobbled by shock tactics and overwrought language (e.g. “the naked discs of her eyes”). Speegle tries to address race, disability, and a hard science premise all at once and trips himself in the progress. I think an improved version of this thought provoking tale might balance all three more gracefully.

“96 Tears” by Rosanne Rabinowitz is a confusing love story. The chemistry between the two main characters works well, but the narrative starts slowly, and their enthusiastic and incoherent expostulations about mathematics are sappily mystical. Near the end of the narrative, the main character acts oddly, even heartlessly toward the other for no apparent reason. Maybe if I’d heard the original song, which Rabinowitz refers to over and over again, I might get this story.

The pieces in this issue share a foreboding mood and creepy or dreamlike subject matter, appropriately for an issue set for release around Halloween, although for all I know, this publication leans toward the macabre regularly. These are original pieces (even the weaker ones), and most are well written and vivid. The illustrations aren’t bothersome, but they’re pretty mediocre overall and don’t add much, although I admit I’m also not used to reading publications with pictures, and that might bias me against them. The opening editorial is cute and highlights the lack of attention short fiction gets in the book market and on “best of” lists. I’m also curious enough about Dangerous Visions to want to seek it out, based on Lisa Tuttle’s admiring mention.