Something Wicked, #8, November 2008

Something Wicked out of South Africa is new to me, and very welcome it is too, with its mix of familiar genre tropes and more edgy, even slipstreamish material. Not all the stories in issue #8 work, and a couple are very poor indeed. But the best of them indicate a willingness to stray outside the confines of traditional horror and explore the potentially more fertile terrain beyond.

These include C. S. Fuqua’s “All the Brave Soldiers,” which explores the double-edged sword of reanimation. Here, political expediency and the need to avoid an unpopular draft has led to the utilisation of breakthroughs in medical science to resurrect and redeploy battlefield casualties. Its two narrative threads follow the tragic attempts by Kayla Richards to adapt to her new mode of existence, and her father’s need to indict the politicians and system that led to her brutal actions. It’s a fine and gruesome piece of storytelling, which both alludes to Richard A Lupoff’s classic zombie space war epic “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama” (in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions 1972), and makes the experience more intimate, and perhaps more effective.

Another highlight is “Black Dragon River,” in which Karen Runge weaves an eerie portrait of a malevolent landscape, one that has a profound affect on the protagonist, an outsider newly arrived in the harsh country where China borders Siberia. There is no apparent action here, no sequence of events unfurling to represent a conventional narrative. Instead, Runge adopts a second person voice to convey the alienation and isolation felt by her character. The language is precise, the metaphors disturbing, and the mood always tentative, always contingent on something signified by its absence. The story is bleak and unsettling and avoids the consolation of cozy reason.

William Bolen’s “December Warning” is very good too. It gives us a unique variation on the zombie tale, one in which the protagonists are the inhabitants of a rest home for the elderly and infirm. Having lost the vitality of youth, these folk are considered unfit for consumption by the zombies who have overrun the world. The zombies’ behaviour is also determined by traces of humanity, or at least by their former human programming, and so rather than feeding on these old folk, the rest home staff, who have become zombies, continue to look after and care for them. Until, that is, two of the elderly inhabitants fall in love and begin to display an ardour which signals—for the zombies—a mouthwatering vitality. Bolen’s writing is simple and unburdened by the usual excesses of the subgenre, and it’s all the more affective for that.

Rereading Douglas Smith’s “By Her Hand She Draws You Down”—it first appeared in The Third Alternative in 2001—I was struck by its bleakness, by the unjustness of the fate inflicted on its two protagonists. Here, I was reminded of the tone of some of Harlan Ellison’s best work, particularly those collected in Deathbird Stories, where many of the protagonists seemed to be the unwitting victims of dark, irrational forces. First time round I was impressed with the deftness and economy of Smith’s handling of the central conceit: Cath is compelled to draw out of an unnatural hunger, one that feeds off the essence of those whose likenesses she captures in her sketches. Powerless to control this insatiable need, and fearing that it will eventually compel her to consume her boyfriend, she makes a shocking choice. Without wishing to spoil the ending, what comes across in this second reading is the rightness of Smith’s decision to avoid telling us how, or why, Cath has been cursed with this power. Our confusion about her ability is mirrored in her boyfriend Joe’s doubts and fears. His indeterminate reasons for staying with her—love or fear?—means that whatever choice he makes at the end will be fatally flawed.

In the interview South African writer Richard Kunzmann gives to Sarah Lotz, we learn that his work has been compared to Cormac McCarthy. I doubt if such comparisons were made in relation to the story he contributes to this issue; there’s little of the stripped down tautness of McCarthy’s prose in “Lost in Recollection,” which in fact owes more to two other writers he admires: Michael Marshall Smith and Neal Stephenson. This post-cyberpunk tale borrows elements of the former’s novel, Spares, and the latter’s Snow Crash, two landmark works of their type, and yet still manages to seem oddly old-fashioned. Despite its premise—a tech firm’s security man falls victim to his desire for the woman responsible for developing the firm’s latest virtual reality application—the sense of horror and desperation that Kunzmann’s technophilic noir tale seems to strive towards is never fully realised. The dialogue is largely unconvincing and the stupidity of the protagonist, while not out of place in a noir story, jars with his role in the firm. That said, the story’s dénouement is both appropriate and effectively bleak.

Someone should remind Jonathan C. Gillespie of the law of diminishing returns. It’s not enough that the protagonists of his story, “The Eighteenth Floor”—construction worker father and son, Morgan and Jeff—are menaced by an unseen, presumably unnatural threat, but in an effort to ramp up the fear factor, he locates them on the eighteenth floor of the steel skeleton of an unfinished high-rise. At night. With the fog creeping up through the girders. Where cellphones fail to work. And the elevator loses both power and its braking system. Okay, so even if we don’t feel it, we’re going to be bullied into being afraid. Except that horror doesn’t work that way. It works through the gradual subversion of the mundane world, the accretion of small, seemingly insignificant ruptures in rational behaviour and thought. We cannot be told to be frightened, we have to feel it for ourselves, and that, sadly, Gillespie doesn’t allow us to do. Other than the awkward, tense relationship between father and son, which is rendered with economy and something approaching feeling, the author’s inclination to pile on the already over-familiar horror conventions has precisely the opposite effect to that intended. Rather than horror, this reader was overcome with ennui.

In “Customer Service,” protagonist Harry Romero is gifted with the power of telepathy. He uses his power to amuse his restaurant’s customers and, through word of mouth, to generate extra business. So far, so benign. Where Jordan Ross departs from conventional scrutiny of the idea is in making telepathy as much curse as it is blessing. Through his ability, Romero is able to tell his customers what they want to eat before they have even placed their orders. However, what is revealed only gradually is that once he has learned what someone desires, he is compelled to satisfy their need, sometimes with dark and unforeseen consequences. We have been here before, perhaps most notably in Robert Silverberg’s superb 1972 novel Dying Inside, and while Ross’s ambitions are more modest, he manages to combine elements Grand Guignol with a sympathetic portrait of guilt and despair.

Erik G’s essay on women in science fiction, “Janet (and James) in the Cosmic Garden,” is a worthwhile skip through the contribution made by women to science fiction’s evolution, particularly since the 1960s. The emphasis is on three writers who emerged out of the 1960s New Wave, none of whom were particularly allied with it—although all three had stories in Ellison’s Dangerous Visions series—Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and James Tiptree, Jr. Although brief mention in made of other female writers, and there is some discussion of the work of C.J. Cherryh, it is clear that G most wants to celebrate the work of Tiptree. Although the essay lacks depth and sustained analysis, it provides a heartfelt reminder of Tiptree’s range and skill as a writer of extraordinary, provocative, and beautiful science fiction. There’s also an amusing column by Irish crime writer John Connolly, whose work is as influenced by Stephen King as it is by the likes of James Lee Burke. Connolly’s fiction is well worth checking out, as he’s not afraid to deploy elements of the fantastic in his otherwise realist milieu.

“The Genesis Jack-O-Lantern” by Richard H. Pitaniello is an apocalyptic horror tale about…pumpkins. If this were a horror spoof or pastiche, then Pitaniello might have got away with it. But there is no attempt at humour, and what we’re left with is a brutish story which displays an amoral cruelty towards its protagonist. It matters not that Mary’s fate is undeserved—so much of horror is concerned with the injustice and randomness of fate—but that Pitaniello cares so little about her that he makes her little more than a charmless vehicle for delusion and fear. By investing so little in his characters, he undermines his own story and robs it of the impact for which he was, presumably, striving.

Unfortunately, “Tracking Schwarzel” by Werner Pretorius is not much better. To work, the story requires a steady increase in tension, and this should be possible given the scenario: two WWII soldiers on a covert mission close in on the mysterious Captain Schwarzel, head of a top secret German military unit. However, though the tale is short, Pretorius fails to grab our attention as he focuses instead on the interaction between the two would-be assassins. The sense of unease that we are told is felt by the protagonist fails to carry through to the reader, and consequently, any tension there might have been quickly dissipates beneath the stilted dialogue and the entirely predictable climax.

Lauren Beukes’s “Dear Mariana” is a slight tale that uses the epistolatory form to touch upon the fragile line separating love from obsession, and even madness. The narrator’s missive to a former lover hints at potential violence, but really the story is too brief to convey any real sense of menace. Other writers have been here before and used the form much more effectively.

“One Last Binge” by Sarah Lotz posits the question: how would a vampire survive in a society where the potential food supply is ravaged by obesity, AIDS, various cancers, and other illnesses? It’s a clever story as the vampire narrator, Dave, struggles to stop from gorging himself on the morbidly obese and suffers the consequent health problems. How does a vampire find the equivalent of a low-fat, low-card diet? Lotz comes up with a predictable, though amusing, solution that exploits another of our consumerist society’s ills.

In a story that is burdened by exposition while offering no revelation, Charles Cilliers’s “Peter the Shoemaker” attempts to explore the philosophical implications of divergent and parallel universes on the secular mindset. His protagonist speculates about the possibility of finding faith at the end of doubt, and at the story’s end, puts the question to the test.

To finish on a positive note, perhaps the best story in the issue is by William Ledbetter, who crafts an unusual and emotionally charged tale around elements borrowed from American Indian shapeshifter folklore. In “Over the Moon and Running,” former professional tennis player Dina Gurov has lost the use of her legs following a car accident. Now, five years later, she wakes one night to find herself threatened with kidnap and imprisonment by a strange man who promises to heal her, asking that in return she pay an as yet unspecified debt. In less skilful and less restrained hands, this might have been a mess, but Ledbetter never lets his potentially disturbing material get the better of him. Dina is far from the stereotypical besieged female victim so often lazily portrayed in the genre, and Frank, a man we initially think to be a monster, is shown to be an altogether more complex character. The relationship that develops between the two feels natural and unforced, and Ledbetter isn’t afraid to end a pretty violent story on an optimistic note.