Fantastic Metropolis

2003 was a good year for reading. Two novels of immense power and grace were published, changing my understanding of how novels can be structured, revealing huge gaps in both emotional and meditative space that traditional novel structures seem perhaps incapable of traversing. These two book were Kevin Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia, and Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula Le Guin). Some might argue that these books are not novels, but I beg to differ. Although they feel more like books of stories, the stories create a novelistic space, flowing together, not bordered or boundaried by any sort of obvious stitching together of separate stories. Though they are told through stories, the stories are all of a piece, all originating from the same imaginative space, and because of this, I would call them novels.

Along with these two books, I also read Kelly Link’s anthology, Trampoline, which had some really beautiful and really creepy stories in it. My favorites were Shelley Jackson’s “Angel”, Karen Joy Fowler’s “King Rat”, and Alan DeNiro’s “Fuming Woman”, a story that would rival any of Kafka’s parables concerning the figure of unappreciated artists in a world of spectacle and commercialism. Both Richard Butner’s “Ash City Stomp” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Yellow Chamber” were quite good stories also. Butner’s has a lingering melancholy layered with humor, while Ford’s becomes something more of a cosmic joke.

Polyphony 3 held some extremely beautiful stories. One in particular to note is Vandana Singh’s “The Wife”. I have not felt so transported by a story in a long time, and it seems that, with each new story, Singh is finding mythic resonance in the most unlikely of scenarios. Along with Singh’s story, I enjoyed Heather Shaw’s “Restoration”, which placed alongside a previous publication in Strange Horizons (“Famishing”) begins to reveal a strange and scary worldview in which neuroses functions as a form of fantasy. Barth Anderson’s “Mysteries of Our Baraboo Lands” is quite charming also, witty and inventive and I especially liked that he has found the perfect story (a group mind story) in which the first person plural “we” is more necessary than any I’ve read using this same technique.

On the short story collection front, I fell in love with Glen Hirshberg’s collection, The Two Sams. These are ghost stories drawing from the deepest wells, with amazing evoked settings and careful incite into the nature of loss, sudden and violent or unexpected, which seems to be the reason why most of Hirshberg’s ghosts come into being.

A.S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories is a treat. New fairy tales, and new horror tales. No one lists like Byatt, and no one creates narrative textures the way Byatt does. She’s perhaps not at her best performance in these stories, but she’s close to it.

Red Ant House, by Ann Cummins, was simply wonderful. Smart and funny and sad. She publishes in places like McSweeney’s and the New Yorker and now Argosy. The first two stories in this collection are worth the price of admission.

Jenny and the Jaws of Life, by Jincy Willett, has been reprinted. It originally appeared in 1987, but alas I wasn’t reading too much fiction from the adult section back then, so this book was a great discovery for me. Her stories are funny and dark and sad all at once, and I’m eager to read her new novel, Winner of the National Book Award.

Two chapbooks were published by Small Beer Press this year as well. Christopher Rowe’s Bittersweet Creek, and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Other Cities. I can’t really say anything about these books except that they’re both generous and the writing in both is precise and beautiful. Rowe’s voice is best in his Kentucky fantasies. “Sally Harpe” and “Baptism on Bittersweet Creek” are two of his best stories ever. And Ben Rosenbaum shows Italo Calvino a thing or two with his fabulous miniature cities.

Also this year, I read Warchild, by Karin Lowachee. This is a novel that won the author the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, the contest which also pushed Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel into a spotlight. Lowachee’s novel is technically military science fiction, which I normally don’t have much interest in, but I was simply captivated by her keen characterizations, her sometimes lyrical descriptions of difficult emotional situations, and the brooding central protagonist. The structure isn’t off-putting, but it does do a few interesting backflips, which Lowachee pulls off brilliantly. I haven’t read the followup novel, Burndive, yet, but I’ll be reading that in 2004 definitely.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground was an eye-opener. I’d read his Cities of Saints and Madmen a year ago, and liked his style, but in this novel he’s really created such an inviting narrative that I wanted the book to go on longer than it did (and I hate when people say that, so for me to say that must mean something).

Amanda Davis produced a good first novel, Wonder When You’ll Miss Me. I enjoyed her previous short story collection, and the novel, a story of a troubled runaway girl who joins the circus, was a strong followup. Sadly the author died in a plane crash this year, during her book tour. We’ve lost a writer who, I think, had a lot more to say.

And lastly, I read Joy William’s The Quick and the Dead. This isn’t a new novel. It came out several years ago, but I read it last year, and it was simply mind-blowing. It made me go read everything else I could find by this author, who mainly published work in the eighties, it seems. It’s a dark comic work of genius, dealing with death and ghosts and our slowly disintegrating world.

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Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and Descant. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and teaches at Youngstown State University. Recently he has completed a novel, One For Sorrow, which continues the narrative begun in his story, “Dead Boy Found”, which originally appeared in the anthology Trampoline.