‘Sourdough and Other Stories’ by Angela Slatter

 

'Sourdough and Other Stories' by Angela Slatter, 238+viiipp, Tartarus Press, ISBN: 978-1-905784-25-7, £30 hb

 

Review by Simon Marshall-Jones

It’s very difficult not to be enthusiastic about this book – not just about the writer and her stories but also about the physical book itself. And, it has to be said that, from this particular bibliophile’s point of view, what Tartarus Press have put together here is nothing short of superb and fully justifies the asking price. Sourdough and Other Stories is a lushly-produced hardback, with clear printing and a silk ribbon marker, and includes a full-colour frontispiece and decorated boards and spine – just the perfect thing to display on a shelf. It’s the sort of thing to stroke and make a complete fetish of.

But it wouldn’t be a complete package without the quality of literature within – otherwise it would be nothing more than mere distraction. Luckily, there are gems hidden between those beautifully-gilded covers. I’ve reviewed Angela Slatter before for Beyond Fiction (The Girl with No Hands – Ticonderoga Publications) and I came away highly impressed, both with the way in which she tells her stories but also by her erudition. The sixteen stories contained within this collection attests to both Slatter’s storytelling and her consistency in creating entertaining tales with deep, almost primeval, resonances. And she does this time after time.

The traditional fairytale is her starting point or, rather, what we have come to think of as fairytales. As I observed in my previous review, many of the most famous tales that have been handed down to us, transmitted by the likes of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, were corrupted and sanitised by a Christian, Victorian and patriarchal-oriented agenda, where women were often portrayed as not only being fallen but the begetter of evil deeds. The dangers were still there, but they were meant to show the child their rightful place,  as well as to educate and prepare them for their roles in adult life, through moral instruction.

Here, Slatter tears those outdated notions apart, reaffirming and restoring the power of the feminine and the pagan. All her female characters display strength of one kind or another, whether it be a refusal to bow down to the dictates of the patriarchal stage on which these tales are played out (Gallowberries, for instance), or the willingness of a young girl to sacrifice herself to atone for a wrong or in a time of need (The Navigator, A Porcelain Soul), or the power of a woman to transform and renew (The Angel Wood, Little Radish). Conversely, the men in Slatter’s fictional locale of Lodellan are often portrayed as the epitome of stupidity: greedy (the Robber Bridegroom in The Story of Ink), cruel and warlike (the Duke and Dante Velatt in A Porcelain Soul), weak (the king in Sister, Sister) and ultimately afraid of the innate power of women, hence their need to subjugate them (the town council and judge in Gallowberries).

Before you imagine otherwise, not all the women are saintly, however – there’s Gwenllian, the rich mistress who asked Blodwen to heal her horrific burns, giving her young child away as payment for her services. Through Blodwen, we learn of the consequences of going against nature, of denying the bond every woman should have with her child and that doing so without thought can sometimes have dire consequences. Then we meet the cruel, spoilt little rich girl fiancée in Sourdough, who, through her arts with potions, causes her husband-to-be Peregrine’s true love to lose their child. That dead child then turns up in a later tale, Lavender & Lychgates, a wonderful story of the scheming ghost of the spoilt girl to bring him back to life, in order to exact revenge against Emmeline (his mother and the girl who did go on to marry Peregrine) and her daughter. Slatter’s women are also more than capable of a darker magic, too, as is evidenced in the bloody The Bones Remember Everything, a decidedly hallucinatory tale. Additionally, they can also be viciously poisonous, like Polly using malign whispers to usurp her sister Theodora’s place as the king’s wife in Sister, Sister.

Ultimately, however, the wrongs that are perpetrated by these bad apples are corrected by other, stronger (in the moral sense) females. Women are portrayed as the real runners of the show, the glue holding society together and the life-givers (and life-takers in dire need, too). They may be downtrodden, vilified, rejected and outcast, but each possesses an inner strength, an inner conviction to go on and do what’s absolutely necessary. Just like the fairy-tales we grew up with, the ones given to us by our Victorian forefathers, these stories deal in archetypes; however, the difference here is that Slatter’s characters are not the stiff, cardboard cut-outs created to make a moralistic point – they are eminently believable and well rounded, thus enabling us much more easily to identify with them and their plight(s).

On top of this, Slatter is also a master world-builder, but a very subtle one with it. The central conceit is that each of the stories is connected in some way to the story(ies) that have gone before – characters, places and events turn up or are reused in some way. The connections are fluid, however: several names turn up in different stories, for instance, but sometimes their link to the first instance is tenuous and yet the connection is most definitely there nonetheless. This fluidity creates a subtly strong weave that helps us build a picture of the world where the characters live their lives and have their being in. The language used to delineate and map it out it isn’t extraneous or richly detailed – it’s precise and economical, yet is highly effective for all that.

Despite the fact that it’s all set in a fairy-tale world, there is that about Slatter’s writing that ultimately connects it to the world we live in. These are real people, the kind of people we know ourselves: they’re just dressed up in the finery (or rags) of a world that’s just beyond this one. It just as surely reflects our reality as the original fairy-tales mirrored the times when Andersen and the Brothers Grimm collated the ones that have come down the years since. Slatter, then, isn’t so much reinventing these tales as realigning them, rearranging them in effect to better fit the 21^st century and the collective sensibilities we hold today. The world has moved on considerably since the triumphalist days of Queen Victoria’s Glorious Empire (of which Slatter’s native Australia was a part), but those Victorian retellings haven’t: Slatter is merely fitting them around today’s values. Another Angela (Angela Carter), as Jeff VanDermeer points out in his afterword, started that whole process of updating, re-envisioning and restoring the fairy-tale to its rightful place in our richly-embroidered cultural tapestry, and with something of its original earthy power. Slatter has confidently taken up that gentle torch and illuminated her own path through what, in lesser hands, may be considered something of a minefield – and, in this reviewer’s opinion, long may she continue to do so.

‘Wine and Rank Poison’ by Allyson Bird

'Wine and Rank Poison' by Allyson Bird, 164pp, Dark Regions Press, ISBN: 978-1-888993-89-9, $16.95 tpk

Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones

There are good ideas aplenty in this second collection of stories from Miss Bird (following on the heels of last year’s Bull Running for Girls). Tales of revenge enacted for wrongs committed are always guaranteed to have an audience, and this theme forms the core of all ten stories in this volume. In a little twist, there are references in each story to the one before, connecting each one in a loose kind of way. However, for me this collection was very much a book of two halves, and here’s why.

I found the stories in the first part of the collection hard to grapple with; unfocused, slightly scattershot and somewhat confusing in some instances. Take, for instance, Beauty and the Beast, a tale involving Cleopatra waking up to find herself marooned on an island, after her ship founders. On an exploration of said island she comes across the embodiments of ancient Greek archetypes, who lead her into a dreamlike subterranean palace (shades of the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, perhaps?), where she meets Pan and other creatures out of legend. Yes, there’s a hazy, insubstantial gauziness to the tale, but the ending wrenches you out of the dreamworld with the words “Then the dream changed and she saw that her empire was free of the plague, beautiful pyramids adorned the Cheshire plains and golden cities sparkled in the evening sunset”. That absolutely threw me. The excerpt from her debut novel, Isis Unbound, at the end of the book goes some way in explaining what’s going on – in isolation, however, it’s massively jolting.

Then, I was confused by one particular story – The Convent at Bazzano. The reason why the caretaker’s boys are followed by a shadow-pair is only partially explained – the very last sentence, however, confounded me completely and only left me wondering where it came from. Likewise, one or two other stories felt rushed, and the endings just appeared too suddenly (The Black Swan of Odessa and Atalanta spring to mind here). I reluctantly have to admit I felt a mite disappointed with one or two stories: the build-ups were good, but then everything just kind of deflated very quickly at the end and left me feeling bewildered.

I think part of the problem is to do with the short fiction form. Allyson’s ideas are there certainly, but I never felt that they worked up sufficient space or rhythm to enable her to tell the story properly. Compared to the novel excerpt at the end, where presumably she has allowed herself room to expand on her ideas and themes, the short stories just appear unfocused and staccato. The language is broken up into short sentences, which denied the stories a chance to flow naturally and fluently. Six of the stories here all fitted within ten pages each; the impression I got was that this was a deliberate restriction. For my part, I would much rather have seen fewer, fuller stories, where Allyson’s imagination could have been allowed more freedom in which to roam. To my mind that would have felt more satisfying.

It’s not all doom and gloom however; there are some great stories in here too, in particular Vulkodlak (a take on werewolves and much-deserved revenge), The Legacy (a truly horrific story, where the disjointed nature of the tale is served well by the narrative structure), The Last Supper (a claustrophobic riff on what happens after a family funeral brings up the grief-stricken past, as well as unearthing buried secrets in the process), Coney Island Green (a strange, macabrely sad fairytale-like outing) and, the highlight of the book, For You, Faustine (in some ways a continuation of the Coney Island Green theme). In each of these five tales, the themes are stripped back and laid out directly, exposed to the scrutiny of all. Simple, understandable motivations, with simple, equally understandable results run through each of the five – nothing complicated or obscuring, things we can all relate to.

For what it’s worth, then, here’s my overall take on the collection. The ideas, like I said above, are definitely there; I have no doubt about that and you can feel them wanting to burst through. What let some of the stories down was the way in which they were told. Allyson needs, I think, to step back and let the stories tell themselves, at their own pace and in their own time (granted many of the stories originally appeared in magazines and anthologies, so I get the space restriction thing). I also have a feeling that an outside editor would have been very useful here – I got the distinct feeling that Allyson knew what was happening, but that didn’t necessarily get telegraphed to the reader. The prose, I felt, needed to be tighter and more precise.

Don’t think for one minute that I consider Allyson Bird a bad writer: I don’t. I feel she just needs to take her time (and yes, I am also aware that Miss Bird was writing the Isis Unbound novel [which I am very much looking forward to reading] AND editing the Never Again anthology while this was being put together). I just found it a pity that, with this being my first experience of her writing, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting – however, I would rather be honest than otherwise.

‘The Beautiful Room’ by RB Russell

'The Beautiful Room' by RB Russell, 12pp, Nightjar Press, ISBN: 978-1-907341-04-5, £3.00

Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones

As in my previous review (of Mark Valentine’s A Revelation of Cormorants, also from Nightjar Press), this eight-page story is a masterpiece of understated and compact tale-weaving. Superficially, it’s about a dream becoming a nightmare, but there are layers and subtexts here that add up to a dissertation on the complex interactions implicit in any relationship – and being able to negotiate those complexities fluently (or otherwise) can either make or break that relationship.

It all starts innocently enough. A couple, John and Maria, are out property-hunting, and have found a beautiful room suffused with light filtered through muslin curtains. Maria wants to take the room, situated in a house in the country; John prefers the flat in the city. Naturally, in as fraught a pursuit as looking for somewhere to live, nerves get frayed and an argument bubbles up. Soon, however, the pair are distracted by scufflings and scrabblings coming from within the walls. Maria wants to rescue the birds she feels are trapped within the walls; John just wants to get out and get back to the city. It is at this point that the tensions, and the noise, are ramped up in volume.

A simple premise, but nothing more than a mask disguising some complex emotions and relationship dynamics. The tensions were already there to start with, of course: tiny hints are dropped that this is a way of life for the couple, that unresolved and simmering conflicts lie just below the surface. Here, at this intersection of time, the room and the events act as both a focal point and as a pivotal moment: choices need to be made, either through accident or by design.

The moment the birds start flapping about inside the walls is the moment when the fuse has been lit. Maria desperately wants to rescue the birds she thinks are there (and which can be seen as being symbolic of the relationship itself) but John is reluctant; in other words, John just wants things left to work themselves out whilst Maria wants to actively tackle the problems. In fact, one gets the feeling that John’s instinct is to run away and ignore the underlying problems. However, the noise multiplies as soon as John does try to help and the static between the two increases (in the form of an increase in noise and activity from the birds), in effect blocking (or at least garbling) communication between the two. The noise of the flapping increases to such a level that neither can hear the other and a point of no return has been reached, signalling that neither is prepared to listen to the other. Additionally, even when the pair separately yell out the window for help when their only exit gets stuck, there’s no-one out there to respond. The issues have to be faced and resolved by them, and them alone.

Revealing any more would spoil this beautiful story for any potential reader, but suffice to say that the ending is somehow inevitable. Russell has a deft, airy touch and the tale starts lightly and brightly; this is a young couple, forging ahead career-wise and grabbing every opportunity presented. It comes as something of a surprise, then, when we learn that a subtle darkness exists between them, a darkness that doesn’t need much to overwhelm and drive the pair apart. John is an angry and somewhat selfish man, pointing out that he expects Maria to support him in his new job and all that the move to the new country entails, and to put aside her needs and wants in the process. There is also the hint that the city represents order and security to his mind. Conversely, Maria is much more in tune with the freedom and spaciousness that the rural life symbolises – once more we are reminded that divisions, apparently irreparable ones, eat away at the heart of the relationship. Those divisions are only emphasised by the pandemonium created by the birds, both when trapped within the walls and when John eventually releases them. And, like I said, that situation only has only one ending.

The best writing works on many levels simultaneously, as The Beautiful Room does. As brightly as the story starts, it doesn’t take long for the rot at the core of John and Maria’s relationship to make itself known, albeit unfolding subtly and very gradually. And even when the chaos starts we’re not entirely sure whether the tensions are just the result of the present situation. However, it isn’t long before the reader realises that here is something a lot deeper than just two lovers having a disagreement – it becomes obvious that there’s something fundamentally fractured (and fracturing) between them. And that perhaps the widening chasm that has steadily been growing in their relationship has got to the point of being too big to be bridged.

But the thing that strikes most of all is Russell’s writing. It isn’t direct, in the way some writers are, but is oblique, effectively masking (in the case of this particular story) the deeper undercurrents that bubble just underneath the illusorily calm surface, which are only revealed very gradually and piecemeal. With a few deft strokes of the pen, Russell opens up the festering wounds that exist between John and Maria but without ever losing that lightness. It’s that sharp contrast that helps to underscore the horror of the situation, both in the pandemonium instigated by the birds and the state of the relations between the couple. We ARE horrified, once we realise just what is going on, that they have let things get this far without attempting anything like a form of reconciliation. However, learning about John also, paradoxically, leaves us with hope that maybe Maria will find her own path, and be allowed to soar on her own terms.

What more can I say? Simply that, in my opinion, this is a stunning little story, simply and understatedly, as well as artfully, told. I find myself wishing that I’d heard about these little Nightjar Press chapbook gems a lot earlier – admittedly they haven’t been around for very long, so far only releasing four others (Michael Marshall-Smith’s What Happens When you Wake up in the Night (which won a BfS Award this last weekend), Tom Fletcher’s The Safe Children, Alison Moore’s When the Door Closed, it Was Dark and Joel Lane’s Black Country – watch out for reviews of the last two very soon) and all issued in the same format and in signed limited editions of just 200. More importantly, it bodes extremely well for the future of genre writing in the UK, as well as the health of the independent presses. At just £3.00 apiece, this represents a very high quality bargain – and I would venture to say that you should miss them (and future releases) at your peril. So what are you waiting for?

‘A Revelation of Cormorants’ by Mark Valentine

'A Revelation of Cormorants' by Mark Valentine, 16pp, Nightjar Press, ISBN: 978-1-907341-05-2, £3.00

Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones

Fiction in the short form, in the mainstream at least, has of recent times seen very lean returns – a state of affairs that this reviewer finds somewhat of a mystery. Apparently, according to the big publishing houses, short story collections just aren’t profitable: novels are the thing. However, there’s one area where the short form is very much alive and kicking, and which is where I rediscovered my love of this type of fiction – the independent press. Presses such as Ash-Tree, PS Publishing, and Gray Friar, to name just a few, regularly put out quality books of collections and anthologies, by writers who understand the inherent advantage of the shorter story over the novel. Telling a tale in less than 5000 words, for instance, takes skill and art; unnecessary fluffing out is completely anathema and compactness is absolutely paramount.

Manchester’s Nightjar Press specialises in publishing short stories, but in an even more condensed and concise form still – the chapbook. Nicholas Royle and John Oakey, publisher and designer at Nightjar respectively, issue superb quality, single story pamphlets (for want of a better word), and amounting to less than 20 pages in length. This is my first encounter with their books, and I have to say I am highly impressed.

Mystery and a hidden yearning are at the heart of Mark Valentine’s A Revelation of Cormorants, one of the latest Nightjar releases. William Utter has isolated himself in Galloway, after being commissioned to compile a book of pithy and apposite quotations concerning the myths, legends and literature surrounding the native birds of Britain. Indeed, the very place where he has sequestered himself, in a little whitewashed cottage on the coast, is itself haunted by those most inscrutable of sea-birds, cormorants. While engaged in his (faux) literary endeavours, he decides to head off to the shore to watch the sea-birds in their natural environment, at the suggestion of the cottage’s caretaker.

It may only be a short tale, but even within its eleven pages of story there are meditations on time and nature, and how the cormorants themselves appear to embody the deeper mysteries to be found there and in nature itself. It’s a journey of discovery, of revelation at the very point of crisis, and along the way explores the relationships between natural, geologic timelessness and the finite culture of mankind (as represented through the written word, spanning the lost scripts of ancient civilisations, and right on up to his own collating of the quotes of literary worthies). The tale itself is timeless, its only grounding being the location, and even then there’s no specificity as to where the action is unfurling. Neither do you get any sense of when it all takes place, although, for whatever reason, I kept imagining sometime from early to mid-twentieth century, mainly I think because there was a certain hint of an archaic timelessness threading itself through the language (entirely in keeping with the nature of the story). The tension between the meditations on the time that nature experiences and the timelessness of the story drives it along.

The language of the story is full of references to birds and flight, a symbol perhaps of an unacknowledged yearning to be free. Utter is a compiler, not a writer; a gatherer-together of other people’s insights. That’s a restriction right there; maybe there’s a part of him that wishes otherwise. Going to watch the cormorants dipping and diving over the sea is almost a declaration of independence from the confines of the cottage. It’s that action that marks the beginning of the journey for our erstwhile compiler/narrator, in both a physical and metaphysical sense. There are also constant allusions to the written word (not surprising, given Utter’s chosen profession), tied in to concepts of both the unimaginably long epochs of geological timescales and the relatively shorter ones of mankind’s impact on the world. A deeper thread runs through even this: the idea that nature is itself still an inscrutable mystery despite all our investigation of the world and its phenomena. The cormorant itself is symbolic of that; its black feathers concealing a malachite green tint on its body covering (only seen in certain lights), and its eyes being deeply and unreadably black, almost void-like. Perhaps, then, it’s only at the end, when the narrator is facing death and danger, that the mystery allows itself to be unfolded.

All this exploration of deep themes and ideas, crammed into just eleven pages of tale. THAT’S the art of the short story writer. Mark Valentine manages to condense quite broad and, in some ways, complex, concepts in just that space. Moreover, these are exposited as subtle subtexts, rather than overt ruminations. The ideas contained herein tickle the mind as you’re reading it and automatically trip convoys of thoughts. It almost invites the reader to meditate on what’s been written. There’s no dense questioning, just finely-wrought prose.

This, in other words, is writing of the highest order and all wrapped in a beautifully designed and executed production.

‘The Places Between’ by Terry Grimwood

'The Places Between' by Terry Grimwood, 120pp, Pendragon Press, ISBN: 978-1-906864-2-00, £7.99

Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones

There are some writers who like to let the horror and suspense build slowly and gradually, emphasising the ordinary vs the phenomenal in the story they’re telling. Not so Terry Grimwood in The Places Between, his latest novella from Pendragon Press – right from the outset, we’re plunged into a world of extraordinary possibilities, dangerous otherwordly creatures from who knows where, exotic characters, blundering headlong flight and an unsuspected truth behind the reality we know. From the very first word the pace is relentless, breathless and breakneck, leaving us little time to ponder just what is happening and with no space to take a much needed breath – our only concern, as it is Rebecca Ann Samuels’, is to survive the mad drive to the forest to bury the body of her husband, Dr. David Samuels, who she has just recently beaten to death with a hammer.

And that’s how it starts, with a rollercoaster ride of a car journey, a dead body bouncing around in the boot and a panic-stricken wife driving through dark country lanes. And from here on in everything gets slippery, both plot- and character-wise, as explanations are presented and then snatched away, as paranoia starts to mount, madness beckons and distorted creatures from myth stride into her life. Rebecca knows she has claw-hammered her husband’s skull in, killing him in a welter of blood, knows she has driven pell-mell at night into the local woods, knows she has dug a shallow grave and then dumped his body in it; that is her version of how things are. Yet, she feels like she’s being watched. Also, that something isn’t quite right, that something wrong is happening and causing reality to shift. A feeling which is emphatically underlined when, just as she confides in her best friend Lynne to the killing of her husband, he walks through the door as if her world hadn’t gone disastrously wrong. So who is this Dr David Samuels? Is he the real one? Did she really kill him? Is he even human?

The beauty of this novella is that it keeps the reader constantly guessing as to what is going on; it’s a series of layered puzzles, enigmas that, even when solved, become nothing more than the most tenuous of mists and fogs. Through the semi-opacity you can sometimes catch glimpses of further secrets and mysteries awaiting, shifting and moving, and also hear the tinkling of laughter beckoning you in deeper. Ultimately, the novella is about that thin veil that exists between possibilities and other places, other times and other existences. How easily the human species ignores those very possibilities, or how we as a species have effectively pushed them away from us, simply because our worldview has been moulded in ways markedly different to that of our ancestors’ perceptions.

It’s also about the equally thin barrier between sanity and madness, at least in the early part of the book; that the reality Rebecca had cocooned herself in is slowly dissolving through the twin agencies of encroaching paranoia and insanity, as well as the physical existence of the police closing in on her. Suffocating claustrophobia is ever-present within the narrative, both when Rebecca’s attempting to deal with her guilt and its aftermath, and when she finally accepts the reality that’s been thrust upon her. Perhaps she has succumbed to madness, after all, and this is either her punishment or, at the very least, that it has skewed her relationship with the world that you and I live in.

It’s a difficult novella to pin down precisely, and not just because of the slipperiness of the narrative and plot. Elements of horror, contemporary fantasy and even a light touch of steampunk are mixed up with borrowings from traditional folklore. Perhaps my only criticism, a minor one at that, is the sheer rapidity and breathlessness of the telling of it. I read it in a single sitting, it being only 112 pages long, but I felt exhausted and drained after putting it down. There were dips in the pace, yes, but even so, I felt like I’d been whisked away by a whirlwind and summarily dumped when it was all over.

However, the ending is perfect – that despite all the horror and the dread, the potential for everything to repeat itself endlessly and uselessly, there are still choices to be made. Choices that very much shape the outcomes of what happens next, or whether that repetition occurs or not. That, perhaps, nothing is ever completely graven into stone, and that we all need to consider our choices carefully; VERY carefully, in fact. Because when all is said and done, unlike David and Rebecca, we very often don’t get second chances in this life.

The Places Between will be launched at FantasyCon 2010 and is available for pre-order at a special price from Pendragon Press.

‘The Girl with No Hands’ by Angela Slatter

'The Girl with No Hands' by Angela Slatter, 210pp, Ticonderoga Publications, ISBN: 978-0-9806288-7-6 (ltd. hc)/978-0-9806200-8-3 (pbk), $75AU/$25AU

[Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones]

Angela Slatter writes fairy-tales for adults, but not just any fairy-tales. They are not just ribald retellings, or tales which have been subverted merely for the sake of it. No, Ms Slatter delves much deeper than that, pile-driving her way to the core of the traditional fairy-tale, the type that we know so well courtesy of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. As Jack Dann notes in his introduction (Caressing with Razors), many of these ‘traditional’ tales were themselves subverted to fit a patriarchal agenda, to shape the gender roles so beloved of the society prevailing at the time. Times have changed, but more often than not those traditional tales haven’t, and they are retold countless times preserving the original intent of the ‘retellers’.

In The Girl with No Hands, Slatter hauls some familiar tropes, willingly or not, into the 21^st century. Her women, for instance, no longer bow to the patriarchal ‘head of the family’, the type of man who insists on carving the roast every Sunday and presiding at the top of the table. Instead, the females are liberated in every sense; mentally, psychologically and sexually. They know themselves and they know exactly what it is they want. Like the young girl in Red Skein, a riff on Little Red Riding Hood, who not only knows she’s different, but positively revels in that very difference from the others of her village. She isn’t afraid to show those around her exactly who she is, and also why her mother is wrong in attempting to stifle it. Then there’s the woman in The Little Match Girl, stoically unrepentant and in the end deciding her own fate, irrespective of the one handed down to her by male authority.

Power, and freedom, is vested in the hands of women to take control of their own lives, a point wonderfully made in the absolutely beautifully-wrought The Living Book. The female narrator is, quite literally, just that; a living book, with words flashing across her skin for all to read. She is made, ultimately, through nothing more than the pride of a male creator, (a point which can be read on so many different levels), and the denouément comes as the result of absorbing the ethics and ideas of the modern world. The female writer in Words knowingly has both power and freedom as well, a point she forcefully makes when her neighbours and compatriots cause her grief for expressing herself and wilfully defying the conventions and diktat of so-called ‘societal norms’.

Many of the men in Slatter’s stories appear weak, greedy and very flawed. Davide in Bluebeard is one such; he desires Lilly’s mother greatly, but there’s more than a hint he also desires the child’s flesh just as much as her mother’s. The same can be said of Master Justin De Freitas in Dresses, Three, inappropriately desiring above all else his beautiful niece Aurora. Then there’s the greedy, avaricious king looking to refill his impoverished coffers in Light as Mist, Heavy as Hope, a retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin tale, as well as the titular character being much nastier and sleazier than the original fairy-tale.

So far (and I put my hand up here willingly), what I have written appears to paint Ms. Slatter in a very heavy-handed feminist light. This is very far from the truth. There are good men here, as well as bad women. In The Girl with No Hands, although the girl’s father is depicted in a less than flattering way, the king is the very opposite, and is the epitome of the kindly, doting husband and father. Even the kingly character in the Rumpelstiltskin retelling becomes a model man once his fortunes have been restored. In Skin, the shortest and quite possibly the finest tale on offer here, the human husband of the Selkie girl is the most loving man that any woman can want. Slatter is also well aware that women are human, and therefore subject to the same species of frailties and evils as all people are. Not all of them are heroines; the mother in Frozen, who leaves her little son to freeze to death outside the bingo hall where she’s enjoying herself, is anything but. Neither is the Second Wife in The Juniper Tree, whose weakness is jealousy and whose subsequent companion is regret.

What I am trying to get at here, is the raw humanity of the panoply of people who live in Slatter’s tales. These are real people, with real emotions and real desires, real strengths and real weaknesses: a microcosm of the real world. Thus, whoever they are and however they behave, we empathise with them fully, both the good and the bad. Slatter has distilled that humanity into beautifully-written and brightly poetic tales, stories that sing out and resonate with our own experiences of the Big, Bad World. In the same fashion that the fairy-tales originally collected and reworked by Andersen and Joseph & Wilhelm Grimm closely mirrored the type of society and world they moved in, so do Slatter’s updated retellings reflect the world as it is now.

Above all, these stories sparkle and shine. It would have been far too easy to produce pastiches of traditional fairy-stories, just in order to put a point across. Slatter wants to redress the imbalances of the older iterations of the tales, and she succeeds in doing so by weaving her words with subtlety and finesse, rather than by being blunt. Just like, in fact, the originals defined the roles of children and gender without being explicit. This is what happens when these primal and powerful archetypes in prose are freed from the constraints of a world-view that no longer holds true. Their true power as purveyors of basic truths cannot be denied. More to the point here, Slatter has done so admirably, achieving a marriage that partners wonder with the prevailing zeitgeist of the early 21^st century. On that basis alone, I heartily recommend that this book be sought out and digested – Slatter’s star is surely rising and it would be a shame to miss out on the celestial spectacle.

‘Fungus of the Heart’ by Jeremy C. Shipp

'Fungus of the Heart' by Jeremy C. Shipp, 158pp, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 978-1-935738-00-8 (hc)/978-1-935738-01-5 (pbk), $24.95/$13.95

[Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones]

There are times when I can liken writing to the fine art of crafting a wine. There will be some writers who, in order to get their point across, will serve up a cheap commercial variety, with a blunt, unsubtle palette. Its purpose is simply to bludgeon, and isn’t afraid to show its true colours from the off. Then there are those writers who want their words to be appreciated and mulled over, and so consequently craft their stories exactingly and with attention to the minutest detail. Nuances are allowed to reveal themselves slowly, almost shyly. There are layers upon layers of ideas and images, and each time you reread them new ones show themselves. There are times when complexity disguises itself as simplicity, those very qualities concatenating unexpectedly into a sensation that is at once surprising and delightful. These stories are not meant to be read just the once or casually imbibed without regard; they have been lovingly created to be savoured.

So, if the metaphor holds, then Jeremy C. Shipp’s tales are amongst the finest of vintages indeed. Each of the thirteen stories contained within this collection are rich, exotic, and rare nectars, culled from all the far-flung corners of Shipp’s imagination. However, just like those long ago days of the Age of Exploration, as rich and exotic as those corners are, seen from the outside they’re dark and sometimes dimly lit, full of mystery and hidden dangers. The people, places and situations are as familiar to us as daylight, yet there is an edginess and darkness to them that warns us to keep ourselves at arm’s length. And this is the central core of Shipp’s art; that he is able to twist and subvert the stuff of the everyday and make it somehow menacing and threatening, whilst simultaneously emphasising just how extraordinary and wonderful it all is.

Superficially, like the best of the vintner’s artistry, the tales are delicately and minimally spun, slippery, elusive and fragile, brightly absurdist and dizzyingly surreal, transporting us to other places and other times. Don’t let that fool you, however, because running underneath the seeming fragility are hints of darkly delicious and sinister flavours of terror and malignancy. These tales are exactly like the delicately scented wine that, upon tasting, proves to have a surprisingly strong backbone and can more than hold its own.

Here, the fragility extends to the people who inhabit the tales; the fragility of relationships, how we see ourselves, how we see others and how we relate to each other, as well as the brittleness of ideas. Like the ‘war’ hero in The Escapist, where the idea of the heroic man (or Gnome, in this case) as a symbol of hope in a time of war is easily shattered by the onslaught of the realities of conflict, and the atrocities it inspires in otherwise ordinary folk. Or, perhaps, the eggshell thin psyche of the father in Kingdom Come, a man whose reality breaks when the truth intrudes on his seemingly idyllic life. Or how the ‘ghost’ in Haunted House is just as fragile and fractured as the girl he’s trying to help: in bringing suppressed memories to the surface it triggers some of his own. Or maybe we should ponder on the fragility of both love and memories, as exemplified in the eponymous story, Fungus of the Heart. Human frailty is found even in the midst of strength and purpose, and love lurks where it is least expected. And sometimes relationships, once strong, shatter and change irrevocably through simple words, as in the beautifully and strangely simplistic Just Another Vampire Story.

The strongest element of Shipp’s spare and minimalist writing is its deep humanity. Look beyond the strangeness and the fantastic, and you’ll find the entire panoply of human experience and emotion arrayed before you. Despite the weirdness you’ll meet people very much like the ones you know or have met. However, it’s those very elements of the outré and magical that draws the reader in, and enables them to hone in on the solid heart of the matter. They may delight, infuriate, frustrate and entertain, but they’re no mere baubles; look deeper and you’ll discover that here are parables for today. That, my friends, is the art and craft of the verbal vintner that is Jeremy C. Shipp.

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‘Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits and Other Curious Things’ by Cate Gardner

'Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits and Other Curious Things' by Cate Gardner, 188pp, Strange Publications, $11.99 US, ISBN: 978-0-98202-664-1

[Reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones]

There’s an absolutely wonderful line in one of the stories included in this collection (Trench Foot) which sums everything up about Cate Gardner’s stories, and which goes thusly: “Sometimes Amelia forgot she was living with people who existed on the wrong side of reality.”

All the characters peopling the 24 delightfully surreal and beautifully warped tales contained in this book do indeed exist on the wrong side of reality. However, it would be fair to say that the worlds in which these characters have their being are on the wrong side of reality, too. More to the point, these figures simply couldn’t exist anywhere else. From the shunned giant in Through the Warped Eye of Death, hating the brightness, colours and people surrounding him whilst in the midst of mourning his mother’s death, to the strange blue alien in The Man Who Climbed Out of a Suitcase, and from the cast-aside lover in The Forest of Discarded Hearts to the bearded lady haunted by a self-created curse in Reflective Curve of a Potion Bottle, these lost, lonely and displaced figures stand on the outside, looking in, trying to fit themselves into a world that for the most part doesn’t want them.

The tales span the surreal, the tragic, the pointed, the horrific, the magical and the comedic, all of them possessing a poetic, fairytale-like simplicity that emphasises rather than obscures their dreamlike qualities. Indeed, when one reads any one of Cate’s off-kilter tales, it’s easy to imagine being caught up in either a dream or a nightmare: their twisted and brazen illogicality is unsettling, yet everything is internally consistent and makes perfect sense, no matter how disturbing the scenario is. The imagery she employs is always startling, phantasmagorical, bright, and honed with a keen, steel sharp-edge. They are simultaneously hellish yet heavenly, fluffy yet prickly, bright yet malignly sinister, and full of corruption and cancerous danger; we must watch our step here.

The characters, both the good and the villainous, are technicolour archetypes who are themselves made of dream-stuff: feisty little girls like Molly in The Sulphurous Clouds of Lucifer Matches (complete with three classic Brothers Grimm-style wicked witches and an uncaring guardian) or the sinister twin ghouls of Black Heart Balloon, attempting to reach the moon. There are the lonely, too: the top-hatted and pinstripe-suited man of Opheliac, luring young girls down to his watery world in an effort to cure his loneliness; or the wished-away Ruby Ash looking for her heart in The Forest of Discarded Hearts. The wonder about Cate’s writing is that, no matter how unworldly these characters are or how far removed from real-life they may be, we care about them; she brings us effortlessly into their lives and dexterously stirs long-forgotten hopes in us.

Terror abides here, too, as instanced in the chillingly horrific Burying Sam, Cate’s take on the zombie trope. There’s also something eldritch and unwholesome about Manipulating Paper Birds, but then circuses and sideshows freak me out anyway. Cate’s range goes further, as she can also bring us the blackly humorous, as in Bob’s Spares and Repairs, a story about a robot seeking his fortune in the Big City but nearly ending up the victim of a serial-killing ’droid instead.

But let me tell you something else about Cate’s writing: it’s one of the most deeply affecting I’ve come across in a while. I’ve saved the best two stories for last. In a spell-binding tale of deeply true love, Other Side of Nowhere, a young girl decides to follow her dead husband to the ‘below-world’, against the wishes of both the law and her in-laws. The strength of the unbroken bond between the living and the deceased is more than apparent, as is the utter willingness of the young girl to follow her and her husband’s dream and the chilling calmness (and determination) with which she carries out her last wish.

However, for sheer, unadulterated spine-shivering beauty and sadness, then Empty Box Motel is the one. A dying girl’s father is distraught when she tells him that she’ll be allowed home: he knows his brittle daughter’s time is near.  However, both she and the fragile butterflies, pinned to displays in the cabinets in her doctor’s office, long for the place where they’ll be free from the cares of the world and the grip of death: the wind and cloud-laden sky. Ultimately, it is a bittersweet story, but beautifully told, and a tale both heart-wrenching and heartwarming.

This was my first encounter with Cate Gardner’s writing: let me assure you that she is in great company, for its invention and otherworldly qualities very much reminded me of some of Gene Wolfe’s short stories and Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. There’s that same sparkling level of dazzling imagination and originality, that same feeling that the universe running parallel to this one is ever so slightly weirder and considerably more unsettling, a place where all our dreams and nightmares not only have a physical reality but also where the fairies and monsters become our neighbours. It’s a place that we would all like to visit, or at the very least, in the darkest corners of our mind wish that this world was like.

Be warned, however: dreams these may only be, but they possess teeth, and sharp ones at that.

(Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits is available for pre-order. Secure your copy now!)