Author: sshaviro

I learned about Derek Raymond from Warren Ellis’ recommendation; The Devil’s Home on Leave is about as grim and downbeat a crime novel I have ever read. The detective narrator recounts a talk with the psychopathic murderer whom he wants to arrest: “He droned on, completely – and what was worse, unconsciously – absorbed in himself, and suddenly I realized what hell it meant, not only to be a killer, but a bore. You think nothing of taking life, but your own existence fascinates you, and that’s the imbalance that we mean by evil… This neat, dull man, crouched in a sort of mass over his own hands, that freaked me.” This book is all about the drab everydayness of horror, grotesque tortures perpetrated by unimaginative bores in a drab industrial setting where it’s always raining. Everyone is wounded, and everyone has their reasons (though these are usually foul ones). The narrator’s stoicism, and his determination to catch the killers even though he knows it won’t do any good, are the only things that keep him from killing himself – it’s that bleak.

Kelly Link‘s short stories, many of them collected in the volume Stranger Things Happen, are marvelous in ways that almost entirely defy description (well, at least they defy my powers of description). I could call these stories surreal, I could call them quirky; both adjectives are accurate, but they are both too bland, and have been overused too much, to give an accurate impression of the singularity of Link’s prose, and the acuteness of her vision. All her stories spell out compelling dreamlike scenarios, with absurdist frameworks, much humor in the details, and undercurrents of dread which nonetheless never gain the upper hand. They are disturbing and perverse in the ways that human desires are nearly always disturbing and perverse, if we look at them honestly and clearly enough; except that such phrases tend to suggest a kind of existential anguish and heaviness that is entirely absent from these stories; they have, instead, a childlike openness (they are in a certain way reminiscent of children’s literature, sort of like a Girl’s Own Adventure), which is also an almost inhuman, or superhuman, lightness, frivolity, and grace (I mean this as the highest possible compliment). Gender certainly has something to do with all this; I cannot imagine these stories, or anything like them, being written by a man, although there is nothing about them that is stereotypically “feminine.” But that is also an inadequate, although accurate, comment. The only comparison I can think of to Kelly Link is Jane Bowles. Actually, Link is not anything like Bowles at all, except for one thing: they both have a sense of humor that is somehow transcendental, that is to say, at the limits of possible understanding, not arising out of the situations being described, but somehow presupposed by those situations instead. I am not sure that I am making sense at all, but it is rare that a fiction writer, especially one I find so wonderful, leaves me so much at a loss for words.

John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.