“This adventure will test the nature of the world.”

• Title: The Etched City
• Author: K. J. Bishop
• Genre: Fantasy/Surreal/New Weird
• Year: 2003

K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City is one of those books that are at once both obvious and perplexing when trying to assign to any one genre. It’s undeniably fantasy in the same way Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and China Mieville’s Bas-Lag series (two works that The Etched City has been compared to, a comparison that is perhaps useful and misleading in equal amounts) are fantasy, but it’s also very much unlike most traditional fantasy. Perhaps that’s why the distinction of New Weird has caught on as it has for, even if there isn’t some movement afoot to change the rules of how secondary world fantasy is written as there was in science fiction’s New Wave, the distinction between the traditional fantasy of the best-seller lists and a wave of newer fantasies with more literary and cross-genre elements is still a useful one to make.

Questions of genre aside, The Etched City is certainly fantastic fiction, in every sense of the term. Beautifully written, it evokes both the miraculous and the mundane with a lyricism never out of proportion to the mood or subject matter of the scene. And there is great subtly at work, too, in The Etched City; the sort of thing that gets under your skin and creates not only a sensation of dark strangeness, but also underlies the novel’s surreal trajectory as it steadily builds toward its climax. With this book, amazingly her first, Bishop demonstrates an ability to pursue both exuberance and restraint that shows a fine attention to craft and a mature sense of balance one might expect to find in a more seasoned writer.

The mercenary and shootist Gwynn and the surgeon Raule are the central characters of The Etched City, though it is Gwynn who truly takes center stage. We are introduced to the two in the Copper Country, a desolate landscape of scrub towns and nomads, when Raule discovers her old wartime companion Gwynn in a near-deserted settlement. The two served on the wrong side in a losing war and are now on the run. We get a few glimpses into their character in this opening sequence as they journey through the waste and flee their pursuers — Raule’s intellectual but dispassionate morality and her disapproval of Gwynn; Gwynn’s casual ruthlessness, his gentlemanly flare, and the strange luck that keeps him whole in the midst of danger. The two eventually escape to the Teleute Shelf, to the city of Ashamoil that Raule had learned about in a travel book she had carried with her all through her desert wanderings — a glimpse of a world she had never hoped to see for herself.

If one imagines from the title of the book that Ashamoil is some fantastic creation of etched glass, a stupendous landscape dictating the turns of the story like Gormenghast, then put that notion aside. Ashamoil is a vivid creation, a teeming city astride a river in the midst of unhealthy jungle, a place that serves up anarchy and squalor in equal measure. But The Etched City of Bishop’s title is instead a metaphor for the intersection of art and life, of perception and creation, and of the roles we choose to play. These themes are central to the strange journey Gwynn takes as he falls in love with the magnetically alluring Beth Constanzin.

Her call to him is a kind of summons, and Gwynn responds one evening when a weight of self-reflective angst triggers within him a sincere desire for change. The two compliment one another, are images of one another’s desire; the Sphinx and the Basilisk, reflections of the monsters featured in the etching that Beth extended to Gwynn as an almost magical invitation to seek her out. Beth is an artist, an etcher of strange fancies on glass, and a great deal more besides; and it is her formidable and half-understood presence around which Gwynn, and The Etched City as a whole, revolves. But to say much more about her, the most intriguing character of the book, would be to risk spoiling the pleasure of the reader in discovering her themselves, so I’ll go no further beyond including this quote from Beth:

“I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled toward a normality that can better accommodate us . . .”

But Beth is by no means alone is espousing (or representing) a personal philosophy in The Etched City, as a character who is perhaps her opposite number, the Rev, a besotted man of the cloth that works with Raule at a clinic for the poor, has equal time in trying to convince Gwynn of a more universalist theory of the divine. But interwoven in this heady mixture of theology and metaphysics, of visions, strange happenings, and oddities, there is the matter of Gwynn and Raule’s day-to-day existence. Gwynn, employed by a crime family, is involved in nefarious dealings, brutal acts, and a fair share of gunplay. Raule, laboring as a doctor in one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city, treats knife wounds and diseases and investigates a rash of monstrously misshapen stillbirths. Their worlds intersect again, as Gwynn involves Raule in doctoring his thuggish associates, much to her distaste.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of The Etched City is just how skillfully it moves from the ostensibly real to the surreal. There is a point in the book that had me sitting up in some amazement as a character performs what can only be described as a miracle. Which leads me to ask, when was the last time anyone was surprised by magic in a fantasy novel? The subtle shift from the concrete to the numinous at work in The Etched City is handled with a master’s touch, and this novel’s capacity for surprise and real sense of wonder is far in excess of anything written along more traditional lines I’ve read in a long time.

Thoughtful, ambiguous, fascinating, brutal, cynical, mythic, beautifully strange — all this and more, The Etched City is perhaps best and most easily summed-up as ‘indispensable.’

• The Etched City at Amazon
• K.J. Bishop’s homepage

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders — the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes like golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.

• Title: The Empire of Ice Cream
• Author: Jeffrey Ford
• Genre: Slipstream/Surreal/Fantasy
• Year: 2006

It only takes one story to turn someone into a fan of Jeffrey Ford. For me it was ‘Exo-Skeleton Town,’ in the first issue of Black Gate, that had me looking for more by him, and every story of his I’ve read since has only confirmed my initial appraisal — Jeffrey Ford is one of the finest short story writers working today. Tremendously imaginative but never vague or overblown, at once surreal and concrete, darkly poignant without ever resorting to sentimentality or cynicism, and always managing to achieve a real surprise without the use of cheap tricks, Ford grounds his sweeping fantastic visions in precise prose and real humanity.

The quotation at the top of this review is the first paragraph of this collection’s title story, ‘The Empire of Ice Cream’ (still available at Scifiction by following that link), which concerns a young man with synesthesia — a neurological condition in which sensory phenomena are abnormal to the point that sounds may evoke color, colors conjure scents, tastes create sounds, etc. The protagonist’s world of experience is immediately fascinating. His talent with music is apparent at a young age, and when William plays the piano he sees the composition explode before his eyes in colors and shapes. As a young man he studies to be a composer, and his method of composition is to create first a kind of abstract illustration in crayon. His life, and the strange phenomenon of synesthesia, is an immediate hook for the reader, but there is something even stranger going on. When William first tastes coffee ice cream — illicitly, for his parents didn’t allow him rich foods — he experiences a vision unlike anything else.

A girl, about his age, completely real and engaged in the humdrum everyday of her life. For a lonely young man such a vision is irresistible, and William does his best to obtain coffee ice cream whenever he can, eating the marvelous substance even as it makes him sick, until his doctor advises him that such fancies are best forgotten. And forget he does — until, years later, a weekend retreat to create his most important school project prompts him, for the first time, to drink coffee to stay awake. With the first taste the girl appears before him, real as anything, sipping coffee herself. They speak, two synesthetes who have watched each other over the years, both convinced the other is merely a product of their condition.

And the story becomes even more unexpected from that point on, but I think I’ve conveyed enough of the magic of this story to pique the interest. And the danger of overusing words like ‘unexpected’ and ‘magic’ when covering the other stories in this collection is all too real, for every one is a polished gem of the storyteller’s art. There’s the fairy-tale-like ‘The Annals of Eelin-Ok,’ the melancholy story of a being that inhabits sand castles, and lives only so long as the castle stands. ‘The Beautiful Gelreesh’ gives us a monster that uses its role as a kind of therapist to lure humans to their doom, and the surreal ‘Jupiter’s Skull’ has a man and woman reliving an experience of their dead acquaintance in a place just a little outside our own world.

One of the most striking ideas in the collection is central to ‘The Weight of Words,’ in which a man who describes himself as a Chemist of Printed Language has discovered a mathematical equation that governs the shape of a sentence. Merely by obscuring a single word in a certain sentence comprised of a certain font and point size, he can render words unseen by the conscious mind. The protagonist soon falls in with the ‘chemist,’ working as his proofreader in exchange for the inclusion of subliminal messages of reconciliation in the letters he writes to his estranged wife. But it isn’t long before the power of such subliminal messaging soon comes to the notice of those who would abuse it.

Several stories include rich autobiographical elements as well, achieving vivid portraits of nostalgia and loss. In ‘Botch Town,’ a long novella, Ford recreates the experience of growing up in small town New Jersey in the early sixties, at the time of life when the innocence of childhood is in its final bloom. This small town world is richly drawn, which makes the mysteries that plague it all the more perilous, and the synchronicity of events in the real world with a replica of the town in the protagonist’s basement all the stranger. And Ford’s experiences as a clamdigger come to life in ‘The Trentino Kid,’ where the death of one young man might just give meaning to the life of another.

Each piece is enhanced by Ford’s author notes, that give a great added insight into stories that are masterpieces of craftsmanship. Highly literate and boldly imaginative, Ford creates visionary speculative stories that never lose sight of the fundamentals of storytelling, or the humanity at the heart of fiction. For anyone seeking the best the field has to offer in the short form, The Empire of Ice Cream should be at the top of their list.

• Jeffrey Ford’s website
• The Empire of Ice Cream at Amazon

My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.

• Title: 20th Century Ghosts
• Author: Joe Hill
• Genre: Horror/Surreal/Literary
• Year: 2005

Either you know who Joe Hill’s father is, or you don’t. Once you do know, it’s hard to read his work without the comparison somewhere in the back of your mind . . . until of course you realize that Joe Hill is a writer with a voice and style all his own, and a damn fine one at that. So I won’t be talking about his dad in this review.

20th Century Ghosts is a collection of sixteen shorts loosely characterizable as horror, but with strong surreal, magical realist, and literary elements. But like the best fiction, these stories defy easy classification, they make that rare leap from being stories of a certain kind, to being stories of a certain mind. The stories in 20th Century Ghosts are best described as Joe Hill stories, and his distinctive voice comes through in each and every one.

The anthology opens with Best New Horror, a story that plays with genre tropes and cliches and the metafictional awareness of the elements of a horror story, and yet still manages to feel like what it’s deconstructing by the end. It’s a great preparation for what is to come, stories that are both self-aware yet unafraid to embrace the genre.

A surrealist thread is strong in Hill’s short fiction, and Pop Art, the first sentence of which is quoted above, is perhaps the best story in a collection of strong pieces. Pop Art concerns a boy and his best friend, Art, who is described as having a body like a pool toy — he is literally inflatable, and has to deal with the constant threat of punctures. Art doesn’t fit in, how could he?, but the abuse and resentment he suffers seems all to real. In the end, he proves too ephemeral, too lofty, for the world we live in. What Hill does well again and again is capture the feeling of the outcast, and many of his stories deal with children who do not fit in with their peers, and Pop Art is an amazing example of his ability to create genuine emotion from absurd or over-the-top situations. There is a great subtlety and sense of proportion at work in these stories, and a palpable care in their construction, and no matter how bizarre the situation (such as in the Kafkaesque You Will Hear the Locust Sing, which might be described as The Metamorphosis for a post-Columbine age), Hill evokes real feeling.

The relationship of fathers and sons is another Hill theme, my favorite example of which is Abraham’s Boys, about the two sons of Dracula’s Abraham Van Helsing growing up in turn of the century rural America. Van Helsing is an uncompromising patriarch, grim and ruthless, constantly on guard against the dangers of the night, and naturally such a father makes for strange sons. And like his biblical namesake, this Abraham is also ready to make sacrifices.

Hill loves to play with genre elements to create something new, and his work his full of references that will make a fellow fan smile. From Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead, a story about lost opportunities for love among zombie extras during the making of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; to The Cape, which takes every boy’s dream of superheroic flight and filters it through a bitter young man’s sense of failure; to the excellent Voluntary Committal, which uses a Lovecraftian framework to tell a story about an unusual boy (call him an expert it non-euclidean geometry) and his brother — Hill celebrates the genre with originality and real affection.

There are a few more or less straight-forward supernatural or horror tales here as well, such as 20th Century Ghost, from which the collection derives its name. But whether Hill is dealing in ghosts, killers, misfits, or children, he is never a sensationalist, never one to take a cheap shot or hold the reader’s hand. There is real mastery in Hill’s short fiction, and a tremendous sense of possibility. While I’ve read and enjoyed his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, I think it is in his short fiction that Hill shows his true gifts as a writer and storyteller. I highly recommend this collection for anyone that enjoys a dark tale.

• 20th Century Ghosts on Amazon
• Joe Hill’s home page