The short stories in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown are eerie, and creepy, and sometimes strangely affecting. This is science fiction, set on another world, with many sentient species in addition to human beings; but with an emotional tone that is closer to horror. (The author’s note at the back of the book defines Thomas’ genre as “emotive dark fantasy”). Tone and feeling are more important than plot; the stories’ moods range from gentle melancholy to outright disgust and self-loathing on the part of the protagonists. Not all the stories in the volume are equally powerful, but the best ones are genuinely disturbing: such as “The Reflections of Ghosts,” about an artist whose medium consists of mentally crippled clones of himself that he sells to rich patrons to be tortured and killed, and “The Library of Shadows,” about a cop who has a chip in his brain that preserves all his memories in perfect and complete detail, so that he cannot stop remembering all the grotesque and sickening murders he has investigated. Strong stuff, all the more so in that Thomas does not revel in the horrors he invents, the way Poe and Lovecraft arguably did.
Punktown
The short stories in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown are eerie, and creepy, and sometimes strangely affecting. This is science fiction, set on another world, with many sentient species in addition to human beings; but with an emotional tone that is closer to horror. (The author’s note at the back of the book defines Thomas’ genre as “emotive dark fantasy”). Tone and feeling are more important than plot; the stories’ moods range from gentle melancholy to outright disgust and self-loathing on the part of the protagonists. Not all the stories in the volume are equally powerful, but the best ones are genuinely disturbing: such as “The Reflections of Ghosts,” about an artist whose medium consists of mentally crippled clones of himself that he sells to rich patrons to be tortured and killed, and “The Library of Shadows,” about a cop who has a chip in his brain that preserves all his memories in perfect and complete detail, so that he cannot stop remembering all the grotesque and sickening murders he has investigated. Strong stuff, all the more so in that Thomas does not revel in the horrors he invents, the way Poe and Lovecraft arguably did.