Note: The following is an excerpt from a paper I wrote this semester on metafiction and dark fantasy. I’ll probably publish other chunks of it over the next month.

 Horror fiction is supposed to be strange.  It’s also supposed to make you feel strange; after all, it’s named after the emotion it is attempting to incite.  Sigmund Freud referred to a particular strain of this feeling as “the uncanny” in his seminal 1919 essay of the same name, and admits, “the uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions…is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life”.  Jeff VanderMeer once wrote that “The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing”, and this sensation is often created by juxtaposing the real with the fantastic, the familiar with the unknown.  Part of the reason for Stephen King’s immense success was his willingness to reject the Gothic traditions of the past. Unlike the crumbling castles and arctic wastes of Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein, King placed his supernatural creations in more contemporary feeling hometowns and backyards, mingling with friends and neighbors.  The emphasis on realism makes the weird weirder, the unknown more inscrutable.

Horror writers and weird writers have found ways to evoke the “real world” beyond using familiar settings or characters.  One recent trend of interest is making novels more interactive.  By emphasizing the role of the reader and making her a more active participant, interactive stories gain a sense of immediacy, a presence that seems to extend beyond the printed page.  Most of these novels also incorporate multimedia elements–fake magazine articles, blog posts, screenshots from imaginary web pages– further connecting the work to the world of the reader.  At the same time, this interactive approach amplifies the oddness of any supernatural or fantastic events in the story.  The “realness” of the text makes the “unreal” aspects of the story appear more ambiguous or mysterious, and a more interactive text tends to increase possible interpretations, not limit them.

A good example of this intersection of ambiguity and reader participation is Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.  Originally available in parts and later in whole on Danielewski’s personal website prior to its print publication, Leaves tells the story of the Navidson family’s encounter with a strange house.  Upon returning from a family vacation, the Navidsons discover a corridor has suddenly materialized between their living room and the children’s room, and the interior dimensions of the house keep shifting.  Will Navidson, a renowned filmmaker, ropes his brother and a trio of explorers into investigating the corridor, with disastrous results.

Danielewski’s basic plot, while intriguing, is not entirely new–Kathe Koja’s award-winning novel The Cipher (about a hole that suddenly appears in an apartment building storage closet) covers similar ground.  The real appeal of House of Leaves is its structure, as Danielewski surrounds the Navidson’s story with layers of commentary, criticism and associated narratives.  The tale of the Navidsons is presented as a critical nonfiction work, The Navidson Record (with footnotes), by a blind author named Zampano, whose mysterious death brings the work into the hands of Johnny Truant, who reads The Navidson Record, comments on it, and is changed by it.  Many of the footnoted comments are scholarly analyses of The Navidson Record from theorists of many disciplines, providing yet another layer of interpretation to Danielewski’s main story.

The manipulation of the narrative in House of Leaves extends to the text itself.   Some pages are clotted with columns of text and blue-lined text boxes, while others have only one or two words on a page.  A footnote denying any comparison between the Navidson house and specific styles or examples of architecture stretches for eight pages.  Some of the novel’s text is written upside down or in a spiral shape.  Danielewski, whose father was a filmmaker, admits he was inspired by film to shape the typography of his book: “That had been the design from the very beginning: to use the image of text itself in a way that had been studied very carefully for a hundred years by exquisite film-makers and to increase the reader’s experience as they progress through the book”.

All of this manipulation of narrative and text presents a dilemma for the reader: how does one read this book? Do you read the main story about the Navidsons, then go back and read Johnny Truant’s story embedded in the footnotes? Do you skip the extensive (and tedious) footnotes, and only read the shorter ones? Do you use the index at the back of the book, or pay much attention to the three appendices? Danielewski has cleverly designed his novel as a puzzle, from plot (Johnny Truant finds late in the book that a rock band is using House of Leaves–Johnny’s unpublished annotation of The Navidson Record–as an inspiration), to interpretation (almost every page contains footnoted critical analysis by somebody) to the reading experience itself.  Leaves manages to mimic reality and obscure it, like a science textbook torn apart and haphazardly reassembled.  It confuses and delights, and does so almost wholly due to the metafictional elements Danielewski uses.

I love writing, and consequently, writers. I love their brazen faith as they stare at the blank page, certain that the words will come. I love their sense of play, their willingness to live in their imaginations. Most of all, I love their eloquence, their ability to explain the world with just the right words. My love of writers (and my understanding of their struggle) makes it easy to say nice things about their work. Sometimes, however, a writer comes along whose work speaks to you in a more profound way– who tells stories that remind you of your own, or the stories you want to be writing. These aren’t writers that you admire, these are the writers you want to be.  

For me, Dale Bailey is one of those writers, and The End of the End of Everything is my favorite collection published this year.

Every story in this collections works. Every story. That includes “Lightning Jack’s Last Ride,” which is about a former NASCAR driver in an oil-depleted future. There are few things in this world that I hate more than NASCAR, but I still enjoyed this story. That’s how good Bailey is.

What makes Bailey’s stories so special is how much attention he pays to his characters. Some writers let the fantasy or science fiction element in their stories take precedence over everything else, but Bailey does the opposite. In his work, the speculative elements illuminates the lives of the characters, enhancing our understanding of them. Bailey’s stories may contain dinosaurs (Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous”) or feral girl scouts (“Troop 9,” with its heart-stopping last line) or lake monsters (“The Bluehole”), but they’re really about the important things: relationships, the nature of love, what it truly means to be human. His characters struggle to make moral choices–every one of these nine stories involves at least one character making a momentous choice–and live with the consequences of their actions. Bailey’s stories aren’t clever, or bristle with incident; that’s not what they’re about. They’re about heart, about rejecting or accepting the darkness in ourselves.

The title story in The End of the End of Everything makes good use of Bailey’s pervasive themes. Here we have an artist’s colony waiting for the world to end, as an amorphous apocalyptic event (dubbed “the ruin”) is heading their way. It has already reduced most of the world to ash, and cannot be avoided. The artists have taken to throwing nightly suicide parties, where the host of each party kills themselves at dawn. Everyone else drinks and drugs and swaps sex partners, waiting for the inevitable. Bailey follows a quartet of artists as they get caught up in these parties, then have a crisis of conscience. Bailey takes us down a dark path here–so many of these stories do–but he asks all the right questions: how are you going to act when it all falls apart? What really matters to you? What’s truly in your heart, and is it going to save you or destroy you? It’s funny that my deepest connection to Bailey’s work is on a thematic level, but I guess these are also the things I care passionately about, the things I want to write about.

Bailey isn’t as recognized in either the science fiction or horror community as he should be. I hope this collection (and his recently published novel, which I can assure you I will be reading soon) change this. Either way, I am so very glad I have found another role model (like Nathan Ballingrud and Steve Tem) for my writing career, a writer I can aspire to emulate as I take my next steps forward. Thanks, Dale.  

We are in the middle of a horror fiction renaissance, of sorts. The evidence is everywhere: professional paying markets for horror stories keep increasing. New horror anthologies pop up almost weekly. Even mass-market publishers are taking more chances on horror, even if the word isn’t usually seen on the spines of their paperbacks. And T. E. Grau published a great short-story collection.

What? Never heard of him? I hadn’t either. I subscribe to Nightmare and Fantasy and Science Fiction (and am a lifetime Cemetery Dance subscriber), read Datlow and Guran’s anthologies regularly, and peruse several horror blogs a week; nonetheless, I didn’t have any idea who Grau was. I came across his collection while browsing on Amazon, and was impressed by the blurbs for it–Paul Tremblay and Laird Barron both loved his work, and I definitely knew who they were. I decided to give it a try, convinced by the accolades that Grau was at least a serviceable writer.

Grau ably exceeded my expectations with the first story in Dark, “Tubby’s Big Swim.” Tubby is a miniature octopus in a pet aquarium who can make things disappear. Alden is a boy with bully problems and mom problems and mom’s dipshit boyfriend problems. Eventually these two characters come together in a perfectly realized 1970’s urban jungle, but Grau takes his time about it, really letting us get inside Alden’s head (a very close third person POV), seeing the world from his perspective. Grau does pre-teen boy as well as he does the ‘70’s, so when things finally get weird near the end of the story we accept it without question. Grau melds an interesting premise, a vivid setting and an irresistible character, penning one of my favorite stories published this year. Which again raises the question: where has this guy Grau been hiding?

 “Tubby’s Big Swim” is one of several stories in Dark that was previously unpublished; many of the others were published in relatively obscure anthologies. Most of Grau’s earliest stories were Lovecraftian in nature, with “The Screamer” being perhaps the best of them. Again, Grau’s fine depiction of setting impresses, this time a cold look at office life in Los Angeles. Like most of the stories in Dark, “The Screamer” is a novelette, giving Grau time to set up his characters and their world before piling on the strange. And this time, Grau really does pile it on, as a simple scream builds force until it is a weapon of apocalyptic force, transfiguring Los Angeles into a wasteland: “From Pico onto Century Park East, Boyd dodged debris: discarded clothing, a gutted snack cart. A long, broad streak of scarlet stained the pavement,as if someone hit a deer and dragged it under their drive train until it ground down to nothing.” Grau uses vivid imagery to bring his nightmarish tale to life, much like Laird Barron, one of my favorite writers. Indeed, a later Lovecraftian tale, “The Mission,” feels like Barron-lite, and another was published in a Barron tribute anthology. It makes sense that Grau spent the first few years of his career focusing on cosmic horror; he displayed a knack early on for melding the overheated language of Lovecraft with his own mastery of setting, a must for this kind of story.

Grau mentioned in a recent interview that he has been attempting to move away from cosmic horror, and “Expat” is a good example of that. Here, Grau opens with a man waking up in a strange apartment next to a naked corpse, then provides a nifty twist that I didn’t (entirely) see coming. The strong premise and the immediacy of the first-person narrative are the things that really work here, although Grau’s setting (Prague) is diverting enough. Another recent story, “Mr. Lupus,” is a cross between a Dickensian fairy tale and a werewolf story. Like most everything Grau writes, the backdrop here proves to be as arresting as the narrative.

I could go on. A few of the tales in the collection were ho-hum, but that was more due to my preferences than to anything wrong with the stories. Grau has managed quite a feat here: turning out a stunning collection comprised of the first group of stories he ever published. It is a testament to the breadth of quality work being done in the horror genre today that Grau has flown under the radar until now, but I believe that will change soon. This Is Horror is scheduled to publish two of Grau’s novellas next year, and I would be surprised if he isn’t nominated for some hardware (Shirley Jackson award, maybe?) next year. That’s a good thing; a writer as good as Grau should be benefiting from the current horror boom, not being hidden within it.  

I enjoy perusing reviews of whatever I’m planning on reading next–not always the wisest choice, as it sometimes ends up spoiling plot surprises–which is how I stumbled on a Strange Horizons review of John Langan’s collection. The review was brutal, including several lines like this one: “…as a work in its own right it isn’t worth a reader’s time and money.” The reviewer felt that Langan was not ready to publish a collection, even if his most recent work gave indications he was a writer to watch. After reading Langan’s collection, I feel like the Strange Horizons reviewer and I read two different books. While the stories in Mr Gaunt may reveal Langan was still growing as a writer, they also showcase his considerable strengths.

The first two stories in Mr Gaunt, “On Skua Island” and “Mr Gaunt,” are fairly traditional horror tales. What makes them stand out is Langan’s use of neglected monsters in these narratives. Instead of giving us yet another zombie or vampire tale (and Langan is more than capable of breathing life into a tired archetype like the vampire, as his “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” attests), he gives us stories about mummies and skeletons. Langan also manages to make these ho-hum members of the supernatural pantheon more than a little creepy, not an easy task (when you say skeletons and mummies, I think science class and Scooby Doo). Both stories accomplish this by balancing Gothic elements with gory bits, creating an enjoyable mix of the antiquarian and the contemporary. The Strange Horizons reviewer disliked both the “club story” frames Langan used for these tales and the gore he employs in their climaxes, but I thought the combination of the two made the stories more appealing. As a writer, I’m always looking for ways to employ familiar elements in an unfamiliar fashion. Langan does this well. Yes, there are some clunky snatches of dialogue and a little too much showing over telling (which actually makes me feel better, because it’s one of my problems, too), but the stories work for me.

“Tutorial” is a writer’s story. It’s about writing, the main character is a writer, it appeals to writers. Langan is catering to my prejudices here–I love stories about writers, music, art, and film, and have written a few myself. “Tutorial” is both smart and funny, and effectively skewers all of those writing teachers who don’t like non-mimetic fiction. I can understand why some people wouldn’t like it (even if it does feature both evil writing tutors and intimations of Lovecraft), but not all stories are supposed to have universal appeal. Niche stories aren’t a bad thing…just a limited thing.

“Episode Seven” is the only story in the collection the Strange Horizons reviewer liked. It’s an audacious story, which makes me happy; I like audacious stories, biting off as much as I can chew. “Episode Seven” is an apocalyptic story, which isn’t new. It’s also one of those stories where you don’t know exactly what the hell is going on, which, while intriguing, also isn’t new. But what is more unique is Langan’s style: “Episode Seven” is essentially one thirty-two page sentence. A story written in this fashion can easily become labored, but Langan manages to use his style almost as a poet would, to add a level of drama and intensity to an already tense narrative (as well as emphasize the disconnectedness the protagonists feel to their strange new world). I feel that fantastic fiction (encompassing all manners of speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, what have you) is particularly open to invention, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. I especially like writers who can use invention as well as Langan does.

The last story in the collection, “Laocoon, or The Singularity,” is my favorite story of the bunch. It’s long (82 pages), has lots of back story, and spills a lot of ink on mundane topics (our protagonist’s college lectures, his job at the video store). These were all reasons our naysayer reviewer disliked this story, but are all pluses for me. The attention to mundane events reminded me of Nate Ballingrud, and made the supernatural elements all the more distinctive. The back story touched heavily on Greek myth, aesthetics and the nature of art, which were essential to understanding both the main character and the otherworldly intrusion he experiences. And the length gave us time to get to know the characters and care about them. Langan did a nice job of moving between action and recollection, something I labor over while writing. The horrific imagery Langan uses in this story was particularly queasy, and shared some resemblance to Nate Ballingrud’s excellent novella The Visible Filth, which was published earlier this year. Both stories feature doomed protagonists who acquire items that transform them, a story frame I find of considerable interest.

Since this collection was published seven years ago, John Langan has gone on to better things. “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” is one of my all-time favorite stories, and other tales of his in recent collections have been almost equally as good. But Mr. Gaunt is not a collection of ugly baby photos. It presents the first work of a new writer, yes, but also a very talented writer, a very entertaining writer. I find nothing lackluster or embarrassing about this collection. And, considering his current web presence is named after this book, I don’t think John Langan does either.     

Four things you need to know about Paul Tremblay’s new novel:

• It moves. There are no subplots in Ghosts. No significant narrative convolution. Yes, there is a frame story (one of the main characters is being interviewed for a book about her experiences years after the main events of the novel), and a few chapters written as blog posts, but the biggest chunk of the book is about one series of events (a possibly possessed girl and her family “star” in a brief reality show) in one setting over a limited time period. There is only one viewpoint character (Meredith, who is eight years old). The adjective I would use to describe Ghosts is sleek, which is definitely a compliment. Too many novels become burdened with unnecessary bloat, diluting the power of the narrative. Ghosts says what it has to say and gets out, much like contemporary mystery novels. I appreciate that.

• It’s ambiguous. I know I sound like I’m beating a drum, but I really like ambiguous narratives. I think part of the reason is because the supernatural experiences you or I have in real life are probably not “I saw a unicorn in the garden” sort of encounters. It’s much hazier, vague, uncertain. In sum, ambiguous. Tremblay understands this, and does a nice job of presenting Marjorie (the central character of his book, although not his narrator) as possibly mentally ill or possibly possessed, or both. He never really tips his hand either way, which works.

• It’s twisty. I’m envious of anyone who can do a nifty twist at the end of their stories. The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects rank as favorite movies simply because of how their twist endings recontextualize everything that came before it (same with Dan Chaon’s marvelous novel, Await Your Reply). Ghosts doesn’t aspire to that momentous a twist, but he does have some significant surprises waiting at two crucial points in the novel, both stunners.

• It’s awesome. I’ve enjoyed Tremblay’s short fiction for quite a while, and have a few of his older novels on my “to read” list, but Ghosts will move anything he writes to the top of the pile. Tremblay has a lot to say about the pervasiveness of pop culture, celebrity, and old-time religion, and he says it well. I love his characters, love how he ably captures the psyches of children, love his pacing. The main thing I learned from reading this novel? I want to write something as good as this.

Back when I used to buy a lot of music (no longer, thanks to digital music services) I would sometimes purchase an album because of a hit single I enjoyed by the performer in question. That was always a risky proposition, because some of those albums turned out to have one great song (the hit single), a couple of passable tracks, and a lot of dreck. Unfortunately, that’s the model that comes to mind when my thoughts turn to The Lottery and Other Stories. You have “the hit,” (“The Lottery,” a deserved classic) a few worthwhile stories (more on those in a moment), and a lot of stories I struggled to finish. I really wanted to like this collection–after all, I love Shirley Jackson–but I really, really didn’t.

I think there are three reasons for this. The first is my own reading preferences and expectations about the collection. I admit I am much more forgiving of creative work that has fantastic elements or an aura of menace (I’m also a sucker for mysteries of all kinds). I am more willing to overlook stylistic flaws or even plot imperfections in a story if something weird or mysterious is going on. I knew from reviews of the collection that most of the stories were not horror or suspense stories, but I thought perhaps the reviews overstated things. They did not. There are twenty-five stories in this collection. “The Lottery” is the only out-and-out horror story; three more stories describe disintegrating psychological states that could be associated with horror. That’s it. Everything else is a Saturday Evening Post/New Yorker slice of life, although Jackson’s characters may be a bit more eccentric than your standard New Yorker protagonist was at the time (most of these stories were published in the 1940’s). I couldn’t help but be disappointed. I’ve always considered myself to have cosmopolitan tastes (I frequently enjoy The New Yorker fiction section, for instance), but here I am getting irritated because Shirley Jackson won’t write only weird stuff, dammit. I imagine many writers who enjoy writing across genre struggle with myopic attitudes like mine, and I think it’s more difficult to quickly establish a following if your creative work drifts across genres on a regular basis. Readers frequently want “the same, only different”–as Lawrence Block called it–and they are less enthusiastic about genres or stories that aren’t in their wheelhouse. Even me, although I’m working on it. Honest.

The second reason I didn’t care much for this collection was my impression that menace-free mimetic fiction is not Jackson’s strong suit. Besides “The Lottery,” my favorite stories in this collection had some relationship to the uncanny. “The Demon Lover” and “Pillar of Salt” both have the feel of waking nightmares, even though nothing explicitly fantastic is going on. In “The Demon Lover” a woman cannot find her husband-to-be on her wedding day. Jackson masterfully ratchets up the tension, from mild unease to panic, as we wonder if this woman is either crazy or the victim of a cruel ruse. “Pillar of Salt” describes a young woman’s journey to New York City for a vacation. The woman becomes increasingly apprehensive of the city and its inhabitants, until she is so paralysed with fear that she cannot cross the street. Like “The Lottery,” both of these stories start with almost no trace of oddness, then slowly move towards heightened states of emotion. I want to copy this technique in my own work, and will assuredly use these stories as a reference.

It’s quite disappointing then, that so many of the other stories in this collection don’t really go anywhere. A young girl doesn’t want to admit in front of a boy her age that she writes poetry. A lady feels uneasy around her brash housekeeper. A literary agent tries to keep her business partner (and boyfriend) from hiring a buxom secretary. And so on. Certain themes keep popping up–ethnic and racial prejudice, the violation of social boundaries–but everything is painted in very broad strokes, which makes them much less interesting to me. A few are almost devoid of narrative tension–they start, they meander for a bit, they end. I enjoy much mimetic fiction (I love Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, for instance), but these stories left me cold.

The final reason I didn’t care for this collection? These stories are not representative of Shirley Jackson’s best work. Most of these stories were written early in Jackson’s career, and like most writers, she got better. It is not surprising that the stories I enjoyed most in this collection were the last ones written. Much of the work we celebrate Jackson for– especially The Haunting of Hill House and  We Have Always Lived in the Castle— were many years from publication when this collection was released. Here, Jackson was still perfecting the techniques that would serve her so well in her longer works (and in her short story “The Summer People,” one of my personal favorites). It is comforting to know that Jackson didn’t emerge fully-formed as a writer, that she had a lot of growing to do when this collection was published. However, it makes these stories more than a little uneven.

After spending all this time bashing The Lottery and Other Stories,I must admit: I’m glad I read it. I was able to see how Jackson piles on similar environmental descriptors (images of city decay, in “Pillar of Salt”) to create an almost surreal atmosphere. I was able to watch Jackson use extraordinary subtlety (in “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” probably the only subtle mimetic story here) to effectively limn character. And, I got to re-read “The Lottery.” That’s enough for me.

Although I have had an abiding interest in horror and dark fantasy since I was a teenager, I have never read much cosmic horror. I have read more Lovecraft-inspired fiction than actual works by H.P. Lovecraft himself, and am probably not as well-versed in many of the conventions utilized by writers when they try their hands at cosmic horror.

Laird Barron has been characterised by many critics as being, essentially, the new Lovecraft. I don’t think this sort of pigeonhole assessment does justice to Barron’s work, as he is doing much more than updating the mythos of some dead writer. In The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Barron concocts a melange of old-school pulp fiction, insightful characterisation and supernatural dread that is both unique and profoundly enjoyable. If this is what cosmic horror is capable of, well…color me impressed.

I found myself immediately drawn to the stories in The Beautiful Thing… because Barron frequently peppers his sentences with colons, semicolons and dashes–especially dashes– as I do, and his work (like mine) is dialogue heavy. We also both enjoy mixing genres: I have been working on a weird detective novel (between short stories), and most of the stories in Barron’s collection are genre hybrids–”Hand of Glory,” “The Carrion Gods In Their Heaven,” and “Jaws of Saturn” have crime elements, while both “Blackwood’s Baby” and “Vastation” could be considered westerns. It’s somewhat validating when you discover a writer who does what you’re doing, only at a much more accomplished level, as it gives you hope that you could someday have success with your work.

As for what we do differently, and what I can learn from Barron’s work? Plenty. Barron knows that horror needs atmosphere to be successful, and he provides that–in spades. Almost every story in Barron’s collection is of novelette length or longer, and Barron uses those pages to slowly develop menace. Much of this is achieved through the utilization of setting in a manner almost as accomplished as someone like Elizabeth Hand (who I consider a master at creating evocative settings). Many of Barron’s stories have historical settings, centering especially on the period between the World Wars. Barron limns these settings expertly, weaving actual events and historical personages (albeit obscure–ever heard of Eadweard Muybridge?) into his fiction. Barron also uses language to make his settings come alive, choosing vocabulary that was popular in the early part of the twentieth century, but not in vogue now. I tend to look up words I don’t know while I’m reading (most e-readers have a dictionary function, thank God), and many of these words that Barron used were listed as “archaic,” or “informal” (the word git,when referring to a contemptible person, for example). This added to the otherness of the world of the story, made me believe in it.

Barron also uses the story-within-a-story technique to create atmosphere. In more than half of the stories in The Beautiful Thing…, a character tells a disturbing tale about the history of a place or a mysterious character. Some might consider this sort of device heavy-handed, but it works for me: it complements the pulp tradition Barron’s stories evoke and provides the layers of background that make the story more frightening.

Barron’s creation of atmosphere extends to the development of his characters. Like the locales he invents, Barron’s characters have histories. Both “Blackwood’s Baby” and “The Carrion Gods In Their Heaven” deploy protagonists with rich backstories that play into the denouement of those pieces, and the first half of “Hand of Glory” is all backstory (maybe a little too much backstory, in this case). And although Barron’s main characters are often hard men in harsh environments (as would befit his Alaskan upbringing), his protagonists also include a quartet of female high school teachers (“The Renfield Girls”), a lesbian couple (“The Carrion Gods In Their Heaven”) and a serial killer/spy/corporate shill (“The Siphon”). Barron’s use of varied protagonists helps distinguish the individual stories, so they don’t feel so samey. It also serves as a challenge to a writer like me, to be willing to breathe life into characters that really don’t resemble me.

Finally, Barron avoids over-explanation when developing the supernatural backdrops for his stories. He understands the importance of ambiguity in horror fiction, and patently refuses to explain away all his mysteries. Most of these stories deal with godlike forces impossible to totally comprehend or contain; seeing these forces only in glimpses actually makes them appear more powerful and more menacing.

Barron’s collection may be my first comprehensive exposure to cosmic horror, but it certainly won’t be my last. Not only am I excited about reading more of Barron’s work (and writers similar to him), I am excited about trying my hand at cosmic horror, creating my own darkened cosmology, my own personal mythos. That, I think, is the highest of praise.

I had an interesting reaction to many of the stories in Crackpot Palace. About half a dozen times, I would start a story and think, not a big fan of this one. Then about halfway through, I would find my assessment of the story change significantly. I ended up enjoying almost every story in this collection, So…why all the reservations, and why did my opinions change?  A few reasons:

1. Ford sort of strikes me as a New School Fantasist wallpapered over an Old School Fantasist. He often employs the old, hoary story elements of 50’s science fiction and fantasy: mad scientists, radioactive mutants, metal robots, magic swords. I tend to have about zero interest in those things–I don’t come to science fiction for adventure, I want a glimpse of the dark, glittering future. Fortunately (for me, anyway), Ford uses these elements as a springboard to something much more interesting. Ford possesses an imagination almost as fecund as Kelly Link, and his stories tend to grow more complex and original as they go along. The robot becomes a commentary on the insanity of war. The magic sword is only one element of a richly imagined fantasy world. The mutant symbolizes Cold War conspiracies and the apathy of governments. A Jeffrey Ford story always ends up being more than it initially appears–as long as one is patient.
2. Ford employs a tonal shift in many of these stories. They frequently get darker as they go along, sometimes quite dark. But they don’t start that way! They start in conversational tones or with fairy-tale voiceovers. Even a story with a horrible first line, like “Daddy Longlegs in the Evening,” doesn’t sound horrible. Listen: “It was said that when he was a small child asleep in his bed one end-of-summer night, a spider crawled into his ear, traversed a maze of canals, eating slowly through membrane and organ, to discover the cavern of the skull (Ford, 323). The opening three words lull us, along with the rhythm Ford employs and the use of distancing words like “traversed.” Yes, we think, he’s talking about a spider chewing his way through a child’s brain, but it’s all so lovely, isn’t it? I love the way these stories gradually grow darker, and realize that Ford is doing all of this on purpose–smile big, get ‘em in the door, then turn the lights out. It might make the beginning of some of these stories feel less than special, but that’s just a trick Ford is employing. And it works.

Other observations: I love the autobiographical elements Ford used in many of these stories, especially the ones where he and his wife were characters in the story. I have always enjoyed meta-narratives and self-referential material, as I also tend to use autobiographical elements in my work. Ford uses dreamlike elements in a couple of stories (“86 Deathdick Road,” “The Double of my Double Is Not My Double”) to excellent effect. Of all the other writers I have read recently, he most reminds me of John Crowley, probably because they are both such accomplished technicians (Ford’s story “Relic” is a master class in technique, for instance). However, I tend to enjoy Ford’s work more than Crowley. Emotional resonance, I suppose.

Reading a Kelly Link story is like riding a seesaw. I love seesaws, even though I’m forty-eight years old and haven’t ridden on a seesaw in like forever. It doesn’t matter–if I was at a park with my kids and I saw a seesaw, by God, I would ride it.

Anyway. There are definitely two sides to seesaw riding. When you’re up in the air, it is glorious. It’s like swinging without handholds. It’s free and slightly scary and exhilarating. When you’re on the bottom, though, it’s, well, it’s kind of odd. You know you’re going to get lifted up real soon, and that’s nice, but right now you’re scrunched over and your legs are at an uncomfortable angle. And you’re doing all the heavy lifting, pushing this other person into the air. They probably don’t have any idea how much work you’re doing right now. They probably don’t deserve to even be up there.

Kelly Link’s imagination is definitely top-of-the-seesaw material. It is hold-your-breath good. What do zombies buy in convenience stores? Kelly Link knows. She also know what happens when all of your stuff is suddenly haunted, or when you’re moving backwards through time while everyone else is still moving forward. She knows you should never go under a hill with a fairy or marry a dead woman. Kelly Link’s ideas are uniformly audacious and exciting (I bet Kelly never used the word “uniform” in a story before, because it’s not particularly audacious or exciting. Unless one of her characters was wearing a uniform. Perhaps we should just move on). Some critics might tell you ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is what really matters. I would contend that those critics have never read a Kelly Link story.

You might have thought I forgot about the bottom of the seesaw–after all, the paragraph above was relatively long and meandering. I didn’t forget, though. Sometimes, Kelly goes a little too much over the top for my tastes. Her characters become caricatures or grotesques (Brenner in “Lull” putting pepper on everything, Gordon Strangle Mars and his singing toilet), or things happen that I just found unrealistic (which is an odd thing to say, probably, because Kelly isn’t going for verisimilitude here). While reading these stories, I sometimes felt like I was watching a really good stand-up comic–I laughed and laughed, but a few jokes fell flat.

Okay, enough criticism, because I really wish I had written a lot of these stories. I wish I wrote “Lull” and “Magic for Beginners,” and I really wish I wrote “Stone Animals.” I just need to figure out how. I mean, I’m not the idea factory Kelly is (although I’m definitely going to push myself to think outside the box and not be content with received ideas) and I can’t replicate her style (although I’m trying-see?). I could break the fourth wall, more, I guess, which Kelly did in almost every story in this collection. Or I could have my characters search for love, or be driven by the need for love (again seen in almost every story). I think I should admit that Kelly Link is sui generis, and not try to copy her. Instead, I choose to be inspired by her. Kelly Link’s work nearly shouts a message to all writers: Be bold. Be brave. Take Chances. Don’t be afraid to get dirt on your clothes. So I’ll try that. I’m guessing it will serve me pretty well.

It’s simple, really: Of all of the writers I have read lately, Nathan Ballingrud writes the kind of stories that I would like to write. I might have enjoyed Kelly Link’s collection more, or found Laird Barron and Elizabeth Hand stories I had a greater appreciation for, but none of them speak to me the way Ballingrud does. I see him as both a kindred spirit and a guide, someone I both slightly resemble and hope to emulate.

I enjoy reading interviews with authors I am going to read, to get an idea of their intentions and obsessions. I read an interview with Ballingrud where he talked about genre, which he reported he had a love/hate relationship with. He says,”I think it can be an effective tool, but it’s important to remember that that’s all it is. A writer must serve the story, not the genre.” I talked about some of the same concerns in the cover letter to my application to Stonecoast–a desire to both utilize genre (especially horror), but not be beholden to it. I love including weird elements in my fiction, but I have always had other preoccupations in my work: dysfunctional relationships, fear of mortality, coping with loss, the struggle of raising children. So many of those same thematic concerns are present in the stories in Ballingrud’s collection, which really excited me. And so many of these stories were told the way I tell a story: dialogue-driven, with a strong focus on the emotional/internal state of the viewpoint character. I feel like the stories in Monsters are the type of stories I can aspire to write, stories I can both appreciate and have the skill set to someday execute.

The stories in Monsters don’t only feel familiar, however. They also feel instructive. Like he mentioned in the interview quoted above, Ballingrud doesn’t rely on the weird elements in his plots to motor his stories. “Wild Acre” is a good example of this. Although the story does include a werewolf attack, that is not the story’s focus. Instead, we a treated to a stunning meditation on grief and guilt, through the eyes of a man uncomfortable with articulating his emotions. There are no weird elements in the last twenty-six pages of the story, yet it is haunted by the earlier supernatural event. Ballingrud utilizes this oblique approach to the uncanny again and again–the dead animal on the beach in “North American Lake Monsters,” the angels in “The Monsters of Heaven,” the trunk of human skin in “You Go Where It Takes You”–never allowing the weird to overshadow the human heart of each of those stories. I remember someone once defined science fiction as a type of story where, if you took out the science, the story would fall apart. I would contened that you could replace the weird elements in most of Ballingrud’s stories with a realistic analogue and they wouldn’t fall apart. Some may find that to be a problem. I don’t–I like that Ballingrud uses horror to enhance, not overwhelm. It’s a tricky thing to do, but well worth the effort.

Another thing I took away from Monsters (and from the story I struggled to write over the last two months) was how much easier it is to use all of your narrative facilities when writing in the third person. Ballingrud writes every story in this collection in third person. He almost has to, as he goes out of his way to develop characters who are not like him. Most of his protagonists are not very self aware, and are far from as articulate as their author. It would be exceedingly difficult to rely on the narrative voices of these characters to carry their stories. Instead, Ballingrud is able to reveal their character through dialogue and action, while preserving a significant degree of lyricism. Indeed, there was an instance while reading “The Good Husband” where I marvelled at how eloquent a writer Ballingrud was without ever once appearing showy or pretentious. I realize now that when you write in first person you are hamstrung by the parameters of your character; you have to save the whole of your linguistic palette for your third person stories (unless, of course, all of your first-person narrators share your level of education and erudition, which probably makes them much less vibrant).

I have enjoyed, to one degree or another, just about everything I have read recently. I have learned from all of it, too. But this collection by Ballingrud? All I can say is that I’m glad that I read it. Very glad.