Spicy Slipstream Stories, edited by Nick Mamatas and Jay Lake

So just what is “slipstream” anyway? There seem to be multiple definitions, or more precisely non-definitions, of what may or may not be considered a genre. It’s generally agreed that the term was coined by Bruce Sterling in 1989, and that the main element of slipstream is that it makes the reader “feel strange.” It appears, in general, to be more or less literary fiction with elements of fantasy. Authors such as Franz Kafka and Shirley Jackson are invoked. The terms “cognitive dissonance” and “magical realism” are bandied about, but there seems to be a consensus that slipstream ultimately defies definition and is more of a subjective literary effect than a genre. Perhaps it’s just reality slightly skewed, or life as reflected in a carnival sideshow mirror.

Does that leave you confused? It does me. The editors of Spicy Slipstream Stories are just as vague as all the would-be experts, but quite clear on their intent:

Spicy Slipstream Stories was born of two things—a burning desire to make fun of all things “slipstream,” and a love of the occasional brilliant line that bubbled out of the classic pulp tales of the first part of the last century.

Conclusion: these stories probably don’t take themselves too seriously and may incorporate many of the more lurid elements of pulp fiction. They may not follow the accepted rules of storytelling, and can be expected to leave you lost and confused on occasion, but there will be interesting bits to pique your interest along the way. Do they succeed? Read on.

“The Call Girl Detective” by Lori Selke is, I think, more of a character sketch than a story. We learn conflicting information about the call girl detective and her origins, some of which may be true. Or not. As for plot, the detective is looking for her missing sidekick, George, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Her search is hampered by her nemesis, the hotel detective.

If you’ve ever listened to a muffled conversation taking place in another room, or maybe a radio tuned so low you can only make out a word or two, you’ll understand my reaction to “The Call Girl Detective.” Nothing quite makes sense, yet there’s a nagging feeling that there must be some meaning to it all. There are tantalizing clues, but no resolution to speak of. Maybe that’s what makes it slipstream. My personal preference is for stories with a beginning, middle, and end, in which something happens, if only a bit of character development. This one didn’t do it for me.

On to “Heroes Welcome” by John Bowker. Here we have James Carter, a wealthy, dashing, daredevil adventurer, admired and pursued by droves of beautiful young women. Of course Carter’s real talent, besides attracting said women, lies in getting other people to take care of his problems, such as his young, hero-worshipping copilot, Tim.

I really enjoyed this story. Besides turning a few stereotypes upside down, it has moments of quiet humor. Carter’s true nature becomes apparent early on, although it takes awhile for the ever-loyal Tim to accept the reality. As for the beautiful women, who manage to find Carter even when he’s stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean, they turn out to have far more practical natures than one would expect of mindless groupies.

Lisa Mantchev weaves a tale filled with magic and mysticism in “Sequined with a Vengeance.” Two strippers compete for the attentions of Dominic “Silver Tongue” Marlowe. Lily, billed as “Belle Diamante,” wows the crowd when she peels down to her diamond-studded skin. Inari, who dances with a snake that can also become a dragon, has a talent for creating illusion or magically twisting reality. But neither is quite what she seems, and the reader is in for a wild ride as assumptions are challenged and appearances shift like so much smoke.

I especially enjoyed the touches of metaphors and symbolism run amok, as, for example, when the callboy literally bursts into flames of longing for the beautiful Lily and has to be doused with the fire bucket. That, and the fact that all the shifting clues and surprise revelations that change the apparent nature of the plot still make up an internally logical whole. Well done.

“The Blue Shift” by Joe Murphy is an erotic tale of an older police detective whose best friend, many of his companions, and even the corpses whose murder he’s investigating keep changing into beautiful women. All the off-and-on women are clothed in blue shifts and have attributes that would suit them to grace the covers of any pulp magazine. The detective is nearly overcome by lust, but he himself is also subject to the metamorphosis, or is at least seen as a female by one of his policemen.

As the body count grows, the detective pieces together the clues to track down both the scorpion-like creature responsible and the human who made it happen. As might be expected of Murphy, the bizarre becomes believable background, merely one facet of an internally logical story, and secondary to the interaction of the characters. An interesting story, but not as good as Murphy’s stories about Sprokly the clockwork girl.

Shades of Indiana Jones characterize the next piece. We’re back in 1938, in the era of Nazis stealing historical and archeological artifacts. Angeline Hawkes’s lengthy title says it all: “The Fantastical Acquisition of the Sword of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana.” Seems the sword was loaned by Mexico to the Texas State Government for a special Alamo presentation and has disappeared along with a known thief, Odell Roberts, who is rumored to be working for the Nazis. Roberts was once a Ranger, and is thought to have inside connections, hence the need for an outsider to go after him.

Quinn O’Reilly, a private detective and sometime assistant to the Texas Rangers, teams up with gorgeous Mexican intelligence agent, Anna Rosa Ramirez, to try to retrieve the artifact in question, before Herr Himmler spirits it off to Germany. While the beautiful Anna Rosa might qualify for the “spicy” part of the story, where’s the “slipstream” part? This appears, on the surface, to be an ordinary detective/adventure story.

But wait, dear reader, there’s more. Remember the lessons Hollywood has taught us about the mystical aspects of such treasure. Adolf Hitler himself gets into the act, with a “Great Machine” that will magically extract power from the sword and several other artifacts. The thieving Odell displays hidden depths, and Anna also is not quite what she seemed to be. With plenty of twists and turns to the plot, it’s a rollicking good adventure story, whatever else it may be.

Now let’s move west and almost 90 years forward in time. “Outside the Box” by Lynne Jamneck is set in Hollywood in the year 2027. Or maybe it isn’t, unless the Statue of Liberty swapped coasts. At any rate, it’s in a future time when you can store almost anything in a device called a McCallister Box—even dreams.

The story begins with a more or less stereotypical pulp fiction detective, except this one seems to be female but just as amorously inclined toward the ladies as her earlier male predecessors. Enter the obligatory beautiful woman with a problem, and we’re off and running. Chasing a boxful of stolen dreams.

I’m guessing this one qualifies as slipstream or a send-up of such, as reality keeps shifting and the traditional pulp fictional elements seem to lead to blind alleys. Multiple disconnects give the story a dreamlike quality—which is perhaps the intent. Oddly enough, the ending works.

“Little Black Dress” by Carrie Vaughn features Shirl, a high-priced call girl. Jerry, a bodyguard and the love of Shirl’s life, has recently died in the line of duty. Shirl refuses to take time off from work, refuses to mourn, as she forces all her pain into a hard little knot hidden deep in her heart. The pain and her memories are all she has left of Jerry; she won’t give it up.

Despite her profession, Shirl could be any woman, bravely carrying on in the face of loss. Vaughn strengthens that identity when she sends Shirl to a penthouse party to meet her client.

Shirl didn’t know what the party was for, who was throwing it or why. Standing unobtrusively by a wall, at the fringes, she waited, holding a glass of wine. She was anonymous among the starlets and trophy wives. They all looked like prostitutes, in a hundred little black dresses.

The story takes a slight twist into the fantastic when we learn that Shirl’s hidden treasure, that hard knot of pain hidden in her heart, has literally become a gemstone, one of great value. And the client isn’t interested in the services he paid for; he has something else in mind.

I found myself drawn into the story, feeling the tension, and hoping for a rescue. A thoroughly enjoyable story.

Here’s one for the mathematicians, or more precisely for those who believe in the mystical powers of numbers. Pythagoreans would have approved. “Proof of Zero” by David J. Schwartz is a little difficult to follow, as the plot and reality keep shifting, each new segment heralded by a string of numbers. Eventually we can piece together the basic premise: there are two competing strings of numbers, each being chanted by a particular group’s adherents, which have the power to shift reality.

Richard Wotojowicz is, by turns, a private detective looking for a missing mathematician/playwright or a police detective investigating her murder. As a subplot, Richard’s police partner, Diaz, has a running argument going with his wife, who doesn’t believe in the existence of zero.

Actually, Richard the private detective used to be a cop and had a partner named Diaz, who is now dead. So maybe we’re just slipping around in time, or maybe bouncing between parallel universes that sprang from a common point.

And then there’s the theater group, the Infinity Prime Players, who present plays “based on the great proofs or mysteries of mathematics.” The missing and/or dead woman was their chief playwright and seems to have stumbled across some interesting numerical sequences. Looks like the secret societies got her, one way or another.

If you don’t mind working a bit, you can piece together the story. For me, it required the technique I learned over 40 years ago when I first read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. You sort of scrunch up your mind and mentally squint, letting the story flow through you while turning off that critical portion of your brain that’s screaming “this doesn’t make sense.” If you like tales of secret societies and conspiracy theories, you might find it worth the effort.

If you thirst for Bulwer-Lytton parodies, bursting with excessive adjectives, the point of view constantly changing as they interrupt themselves with sundry asides and reflection, their sentences running on for paragraphs and shifting subjects like a flood-swollen stream, then, dear reader, “Revolt of the Ultraists!” by Richard Becker is the story for you. I suspect it also epitomizes the effect the editors were seeking: a pulp-evoking burlesque of slipstream.

The plotline is fairly simple. A young girl named Malatesta seeks to avenge the death of her brother. She hires Karl, an enhanced—“changed”—human, to track down the killer and execute him while she watches. As Karl follows the dead man’s trail of “latent quantum residue” through the decadent city, we’re treated to a worm’s-eye view of opportunism and depravity. There’s plenty of sex and violence along the way, as the trail leads from the slimier parts of the city to those marginally more refined.
Also included are various philosophies, commentary on religion or lack of it, a lament for the death of feminism, and an occasional gem of an observation that almost makes trudging through the sometimes-tedious narrative worthwhile. I was intrigued, for example, by:

A rat slowly dragged a broken piece of CPU into a storm drain for another of their god-awful experiments.

And this:

Floating billboards were a stupid idea, with all the deadly weight and heft of a regular billboard and only flimsy retrellors to keep them aloft. But they were effective, despite the occasional jellied pedestrian or crunched vehicle…

But, as with all the other inspired weirdness, it’s just background; nothing really comes of it. In summation, the story has its moments, but I probably would have liked it more if it had been a lot shorter.

“My Polymorphic Lover” by Mike Philbin explores an erotic encounter between characters one and two from each of their points of view. We begin with character one, a real estate developer, planning to convert an abandoned cotton mill into apartments and make lots of money. Enter character two, who entices character one to go with him in his shiny little red car. Character one doesn’t quite know what’s going on, and has no idea why he went along so willingly. Then the nightmare begins as character two starts changing: clothing, age, race, sex—he/she seems to be multiple people. And character one, confused and frightened, is assailed by long-repressed memories. Do the two share a past, or is character two somehow inducing the “memories” that keep bubbling up? What does it all mean?

Character one runs away; character two follows. Multiple changes of locale, various sex scenes, more memories—some of them bizarre. Then, to character one’s horror, he also begins to shape-shift. At that point, we leap to character two’s point of view for the remainder of the story.

Well, it’s certainly spicy enough, and the reality shifts would seem to qualify it as slipstream, I think. But I can’t say that I liked the story all that much. Just not my thing, I guess.

The title of “Wild Tchoupitoulas” by Chris Nakashima-Brown seems to refer to a street of that name in New Orleans. The protagonist, Stan, wins a five-day cruise in a magazine sweepstakes. A couple of days out of Miami, the ship meets with disaster; whether from a storm or some monstrous sea-beast isn’t clear. Somehow Stan is transported from there to New Orleans, which also is isolated from some sort of disaster. Or maybe the world ended and this is all that’s left. A girl he met on the ship, Penelope, appears there also. He picks up more female friends, or they pick him up; they have a few adventures of sorts, and they all wind up living together in some sort of postapocalyptic commune feasting on Vienna sausage, Campbell’s soup, and whiskey.

Is there a point to all this? I don’t think so. I’m more inclined to quote Homer Simpson: “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” And yes, there are probably literary clues, such as the prominence of Samuel R. Delaney’s novel, Dhalgren—but few understand that one either.

“Hydraulic” by Ekaterina Sedia explores our tendency to cling to our preconceived notions of “normal,” regardless of what our senses tell us to be true. Faced with an uncomfortable reality, we retreat into the safe, remembered events and images of the past, however illusory they may be.

Lewis is an FBI agent, the FBI being a branch of the Bureau of Licensing and Intellectual Property (BLIP). The United States has long since severed ties with the rest of the world, and Warner/AOL/Disney appears to be the federal government. The economy is based on rain, which powers generators. To keep the rain going, the Weather Bureau has been accused of stealing clouds from Canada. Battery charging by anyone but the government is a crime.

Lewis does his job, but his main life focus is on virtual reality games, specifically those featuring the beautiful Callie Swainson. He considers himself in love with Callie. When his job calls for watching a man named Jack Eslinger, whose suspected crimes include illegal battery charging, Lewis is amazed to find Callie in the man’s company. He daydreams of sending Eslinger to prison and rescuing Callie from evil associations. That Callie and Eslinger might truly care for each other, that Eslinger might even be taking risks to help Callie, never crosses his mind.

As a subplot, we see Lewis’s cat turning green, possibly from “algal symbionts” in his fur, with Lewis paying little or no attention as the cat gradually turns to slime. It’s an annoyance, but one easily and quickly tuned out. Immersing one’s self in virtual reality is far more important. Given the parameters established, this story makes sense, and the ending is quite believable. Maybe that’s why I liked it.

What fun! “Here I Come” by A. H. Jennings is about a worldwide assortment of comic book-type superheroes. Despite their superpowers, the various characters turn out to be remarkably like us. They still have doubts and fears, likes and dislikes, and the usual relationship problems.

Young Erica, a newer member of the group, seems to think she has to work harder, do more, be the best. Is she compensating for her discomfort with the fact that her mom gave up the superhero business when she was pregnant with Erica? The more experienced members of the group tell her to slow down or she’s likely to burn herself out, or maybe not be available when she’s really needed. She’s ordered to rest, but instead has a few experiences that make her doubt her own sanity, or the rationality of the world. This is the story of how she comes to terms with it all.

It’s nice to know that superheroes are human, too. And I loved the episode where she fights the Fremont troll, brought to life by parties or forces unknown. Although, like many Washingtonians, I’ve always thought of the folk sculpture under the Aurora bridge as more of a gentle giant, myself.

Publisher: Lethe Press (Sept. 2008)
Price: $14.58
Trade paperback: 284 pages
ISBN: 1590210255