Fantastic Metropolis

The first two books on my list I’ll discuss together, since they share the virtues that make me love them. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville, and Homunculus, by James P. Blaylock, are the best fantasy stories I’ve read in recent memory. They are both aggressively imaginative, throwing together seemingly disparate fantasy and science fiction tropes and reconfiguring them in such a way that they are revitalized and exciting again. Reading these novels is like re-reading a pair of beloved books from your childhood, only to discover—with astonishment and joy—that the books have grown and matured along with you, speaking to you in the language of adults while retaining their sense of play. Perdido Street Station is a big, brawling fantasy, raw in places, and perhaps over-fond of the descriptive opportunities afforded by slimes and secretions; but I sat up hours into the night reading this book. I neglected health and hygiene, I missed work, I ignored the hungry cries of my two-year-old daughter and the angry remonstrations of my wife. I had to consume this book all at once! In the same fashion, Homunculus is a giddy joy to read, a wonderful stew of Victorian secret societies, treacherous hunchbacks, reanimated corpses, and mysterious dirigibles haunting the skies over London. Blaylock’s great virtue as a writer is that he has apparently never forgotten how much fun he had when he first read fantasy, and seeks to recreate it in his own work. This book is steeped in good humor, and the fun he must have had in writing it is evident on every page.

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Fred Chappell, was recommended to me nearly ten years ago, but I just couldn’t get past that title. It sounds like the worst sort of self-help book, with a good dose of Praise Jesus thrown in to really muck things up. I was wrong. It’s a beautiful little story steeped in Appalachian folklore, about a day in the life of a teacher in rural North Carolina whose adventures include teaching the value of uncertainty to a crop of children grown from the fertile soil of Baptist fundamentalism; engaging in a philosophical debate with a goat capering on the roof of the school; and stealing the moon from the sky. But the prose is what got me, and maybe it’ll get you too; these are the opening paragraphs of the book:

We walked along the crackling road. Those winter mornings are so cold that I felt I would ring like an anvil if my father touched me. A shining frost lay over everything, even the stones, so tough it seemed a knife could not pierce it, and the strands of barbwire were frosted so that the fence that bordered the road looked like guitar strings.

There was no moon and the constellations were caught in the top of the great walnut tree below the road like sparkling wisps of hay. As we passed beneath the trees, I watched these stars tangled in the bare black limbs; they were as unsteady and restless as fireflies.

As I page through the book for this little review, I come across a dozen other passages I want to quote, but since there’s insufficient room I’ll have to settle for reading them aloud to myself. It’s an easy consolation. Please, read this lovely book.

Unfortunately for me, I love a good horror story. This means I read all kinds of real garbage every year trying to find something written above the level of adolescent manifestos of sexual frustration. Volume after reeking volume of rape fantasies and gore-splashed idiot-protagonists (not to mention the kind of prose which leads me to believe that the first drafts were written in crayon) leave me more certain than ever that horror should not—despite the best efforts of marketers and the dearest hopes of bad writers everywhere—really be a genre unto itself. In light of this, I cannot adequately convey to you my excitement when I first read Jack Ketchum; specifically, The Girl Next Door. Make no mistake, there is violence in these pages, but it is controlled (by the writer, at least), and it is toward a purpose. Ketchum rarely resorts to the supernatural in his fiction, preferring to focus his attentions on the much more frightening horrors that bubble up out of our own crooked hearts; this book, which is quite possibly the most harrowing novel I have ever read, is no exception. The protagonist’s awareness of his own complicity in what transpires in this novel is what gives this novel its weight and drive (I give nothing away here; this is set up in the opening chapter). The prose is assured, quick, and muscular, like a brash young boxer, and some of the blows it delivers you will not see coming. I believe that Ketchum has been unfairly relegated to the horror genre, such as it is, and that his readership is much smaller than it should be as a result. He is scarier than King, less absurd than Barker, and nastier than anybody else on the block. He’s the real deal, and he deserves to be read.