Although I often feel ambivalent about entries in this series, the most recent Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant, struck me as one of the most consistent collections in quite some time. (The editors and I do not share even remotely similar tastes in poetry, so I pass over those in silence.) Most of the horror entries might best be described as "mildly creepy" or "eerie," rather than "frightening," so those in search of blood-and-guts--while some are on offer--might wish to look elsewhere. As always, some themes recur. Child abuse seems to be one of the popular horror topics of the day, which some readers may (in fact, probably will) find understandingly off-putting; on an odder note, who would expect two stories involving Iceland and rocks?
Many of this year's stories are quite openly revisionist, reworking conventions from folklore, fairy tales, the gothic tradition, and, in some cases, specific stories. The most obvious example of the last is Gary McMahon's "Hum Drum," a sly nod to M. R. James' "Oh Whistle, And I'll Come to You, My Lad," told from the POV of an expert in hauntings whose track record is not, shall we say, always so good. While James' tale mocks those skeptics who must learn to believe in the supernatural before they can protect themselves from it, McMahon's suggests that even true belief cannot derail a supernatural plot once it is "set in motion" (41). Karen Russell's "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" reimagines the vampire by turning her narrator, "Clyde" (!), into a victim of Gothic cliches: Clyde has so thoroughly bought into the vampire tradition of both fiction and film that it's shattering to discover that almost all of it...is wrong. Horror stories usually feature a protagonist who must learn to appreciate the power of superstitious, outlandish traditions, the better to undo them (rather like the characters of Men in Black, who get their news from the tabloids), but here tradition brings on a different sort of intellectual crisis. A far darker example of genre decomposition is Veronica Schanoes' "Rats," which announces in the first sentence that "What I am about to tell you is a fairy tale and so it is constantly repeating" (310), but turns out to be not so much a fairy tale as a reflection on how we transform ugly realities into fairy tales. While, at first glance, "Rats" promises to be a twist on "Sleeping Beauty," it is actually a loosely-disguised retelling of the relationship between Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious; the magical "needle" (312) is a hypodermic. By the end, the narrator pulls the fairy tale logic apart entirely, to reveal the shallow commercialism that drives the popularity of such stories: "Death has no narrative arc and no dignity, and now you can silkscreen these two kids' pictures on your fucking T-shirt" (317).
"Rats" is not the only story that wonders about how certain narratives get sold to the public. William Browning Spencer's "The Tenth Muse," which seems to be a nod in the vague direction of The Shining, mixes demonic possession with the popular romance of authorship. Here, the figure of the great, tormented artist, who produces one legendary work before lapsing into silence or second-rateness, brings with it a legacy of literally incendiary violence. Laird Barron's "The Forest," which does a fine job of misdirection, features a dying woman whose life has been derailed by her appearance, years ago, in a hit film documentary. "An eighty-seven minute film shot on super-sixteen millimeter consigned her to professional purgatory," permanently objectifying her as a "woman-child" (201) instead of the intellectual she actually is. And, in what is arguably the collection's most unpleasant tale, M. Rickert's "Holiday," the murder of JonBenet Ramsey gets smashed together with something resembling Capturing the Friedmans (n.b.: deduced from print descriptions of the film). The narrator, haunted by the ghosts of murdered little girls, is trying to write a memoir about life with dad, but gets caught up in the now-forgotten story of little Holiday, once "everyone's little girl" (28); when he admits to his agent that his own father is guilty of molestation, the agent informs him that "[t]he market is satured with them [stories about molesters]" (33), but then suggests that yoking the two tales together might make for a marketable product. While the narrator's eerie transformation into the popular idea of an abuser is interesting, I must admit that I was genuinely disgusted by the ending, and not in the good "oooh, scary" sort of way.
Meanwhile, both Jeffrey Ford's "The Drowned Life" and M. T. Anderson's "The Gray Boy's Work" turn on literalized figures of speech. Ford takes that metaphor for financial ruin, "drowning," and turns it into an effective vision of an underwater Hell that appears to be of our own making. His protagonist, Hatch (he doesn't have an escape hatch), works "at an HMO, denying payment to people with legitimate claims" (158), and his cry "I'm not responsible" (169) sums up everything that's wrong in this particular universe. Anderson comes up with an AU vision of the American Revolution, in which personifications like Victory and Despair (who isn't) actually walk the landscape. A father returns from the war, supposedly a hero, but turns out to be a runaway; his conflict with his enraged son, who has been the man around the house, sparks the arrival of the whining, contaminating Gray Boy. The increasingly dangerous battle between the son and the Gray Boy turns back into a figure for the struggle between the fallen father-hero and his disappointed son.
The neo-folklore tales draw on a number of narrative frameworks, ranging from anthropology to faux oral tradition. Kij Johnson's "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change," the most striking example, deromanticizes the fantasy motif of the talking animal. Like Karen Russell's vampires, pets are trapped in human narratives; Johnson asks what might happen if dogs who learn to speak also learn how to shape their own self-determining tales. As the narrator reminds us, "some stories cannot be controlled" (437). Lucy Kemnitzer's "The Boulder" brings an archaeologist to a Icelandic farm occupied by a very dangerous rock indeed. Archaeology and folklore work together to uncover its mysteries, although not before suggesting that life inside the rock might not be as bad as one supposes. Holly Black's "A Reversal of Fortune" and Delia Sherman's "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche" both involve winning bets with the devil (or the just plain demonic), although Black's eating contest is decidedly less traditional than Sherman's dance-off. In both cases, beating the devil becomes a metaphor for vanquishing more amorphous modes of oppression, whether class in the first instance or patriarchy run wild in the second.
Last but not least, I also enjoyed Elizabeth Hand's "Winter's Wife" (a.k.a. the other Iceland and rocks tale) pits those who believe in being stewards of nature against a greedy corporate raider, with thoroughly rocky results. Garth Nix's wacko take on the fantasy adventure tale, "Sir Hereward and Mr. Fitz Go to War Again," features androgynous walking puppets, female swordsmen, magic needles, and godlets who devour the countryside. Daniel Abraham supplies the charming "The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics," in which the cambist faces off against the Lord Mohun-esque Lord Iron in ever-escalating contests to define equivalent values. The amusing end result is a tribute to the power of economic prudence, among other things. And Tim Nickels' "England and Nowhere" offers an increasingly strange meditation on life and death from the point of view of a man who, we eventually realize, is on the verge of death himself.
Well, if you have Iceland, you're going to have rocks. I have to wonder if Mary Robinette Kowal is commissioning stories.
Posted by: Todd Mason | November 05, 2008 at 10:29 AM