Fantastic Metropolis

At the 1998 World Fantasy Convention in Monterey, my first con as a professional, I met Ellen Datlow. She introduced herself and asked if I’d like to try to write a story for her new webzine, Event Horizon. This would turn out to be a very important meeting for me, since in the intervening years I’ve written a number of stories for her and learned a great deal about writing short fiction in the process. This initial meeting was important for another reason as well, because standing next to Ellen was a seemingly shy young woman, whom she introduced as Kelly Link. I asked her if she was a writer and she just nodded. That was about it for that meeting. I filed her name away with all the names of other people I’d met for the first time that weekend. My mental filing system might as well just be a shredder, because even though I can remember all the words to the theme song of the cartoon show Tobor, The Eighth Man from when I was six, in the windy caverns behind my eyes, names usually have a half life of about ten minutes.

When I got back home to New Jersey from Monterey, I started working on a story. Some time passed and then it struck me that it might not be a bad idea to check out Event Horizon and see what Ellen was publishing there. The day I brought up the site, there was a new story, “The Specialist’s Hat.” Back then, I didn’t like to read on-line all that much (I’ve gotten better about it as the years have gone by), but I figured I’d give this story a couple of paragraphs and see what it was all about. I started reading, and a paragraph was all it took, because then I was hooked. When I got to the end, I shook my head and tried to retrace what had just happened in the fiction. The story was an elegant, enchanting creepshow. I mean that in only the best sense of each of those appellations. I read it again right away, and then a couple of days later I read it a third time. It was on this third reading that I thought to check who the author was, and I saw the name, Kelly Link. The name sounded familiar, and before the day was out, I remembered where I’d heard it.

For the next few days I tried to track down other stories by Link, but they were few and far between. The ones I found all had the same qualities of deceptive simplicity; an odd and affective alchemy in the straight forward sentences and style. The imagination in them was startlingly unconventional and the craftsmanship of the writing was remarkable. There was a palpable tension created in the byplay of the wild, idiosyncratic imagination and a judicious, editorial restraint. I wondered about an effect I noticed where even the digressions seemed vitally important to the story at large; in fact, the digressions were of the utmost importance. I tried to compile a complete bibliography of this writer, and then set about trying to acquire her other work.

It was a while before her collection, Stranger Things Happen, was finally published. I can’t think of another contemporary story collection I anticipated with as much readerly excitement as this one. I got a copy when it came out, opened it and started reading, and, man, the hits just kept on coming. “Louise’s Ghost,” “Travels with the Snow Queen,” “The Girl Detective,” etc. It was a field day. I got a chance to read some of the other ones I’d been unable to get a hold of before. One of the things I noted about the stories was that many of them had this kind of haunting quality, and I saw a connection between it and the fact that these stories did not mean to mean. They very often didn’t move toward any kind of definable or concrete resolution. As a reader, you entered into a real collaboration with the writer. Link was offering experience, and you as the reader were expected to bring the “meaning.” Only in the act of being read were these pieces completed, and it was evident that the results would vary with each individual who turned his or her attention to them. It’s not that the stories were unfinished, but that they were open.

Another aspect of the stories that struck me was that they were often driven by structure (“The Girl Detective” is a good example of what I mean). There was a noticeable architecture to them, and it wasn’t your old man’s story structure—a Fichtean curve with conflict, climax, resolution. When writers create “experimental” stories, the experiment part often shows up in the manner in which the piece is constructed. Nothing bores me more than novelty for its own sake in fiction. Readers of some of my own stories with wonky structures might cast the same criticism, and in some cases I’d be hard put to disagree. Link is a structuralist to an extent; her works are architectonic, but not in the sense that Henry Miller referred to Thomas Mann as a brick layer. In Link’s more successful pieces, which would be just about all of them, it’s as impossible to separate structure and story as it would be to separate conjoined twins sharing a heart. The structure informs the story as the story informs the structure. There’s a kind of vital geometry involved in the creation of these pieces.

This brings us around to the story, “Lull,” which is the object of my parlamblings in this installment of The Virtual Anthology. I’d heard this story read by Link before seeing it in the Conjunctions 39 anthology that Peter Straub edited. This volume contains a number of great stories by Andy Duncan, John Crowley, M. John Harrison, etc., but it’s Link’s piece that really stands out. In describing the plot, it doesn’t sound like much—a group of long-time, middle-aged friends have gotten together in the basement of one of their homes to play cards and drink beer. They discuss all manner of subjects, often coming back to the trials and tribulations of their own lives. They decide to call a service where a woman will tell a story to you over the phone. The woman, Starlight, tells the story of the devil and the cheerleader, a story about time running backwards. After this part, there’s a section entitled “Things Get Better” in which some weird stuff happens and then its over. It doesn’t seem like much until you begin to realize that the story is created from stories—stories beginning, trailing off, picking up again, intersecting, weaving together, generating from other stories. It is a story teeming with stories.

All throughout, the stories are peppered with images and mentions of the Devil and the directional flow of time. What the characters mainly discuss are the changes that have taken place in their lives. We learn about the hardships they’ve been through, their desires for the past and hopes for the future—relationships gone cold, dead relatives, unrequited dreams, the dissolution of talents. This is told in Link’s straightforward writing and is infused with a real world sense of humor, arising from the situations and characters, and also a real world sense of loss. I don’t want to make too much of my interpretation, you will have your own, but the Devil, the agent of change, is the Father of Time. In the Judeo-Christian Mythos, Satan’s ploy awakens humanity to self-consciousness and, in doing so, the passage of Time and ultimately Death. The Devil disrupts our lives and leads us down dark paths, but like all good tricksters, the changes he causes can also lead us to a place where “things get better.”

The story of the cheerleader and the devil, a truly ingenious piece of writing, appears at first as if it is going to be wholly ironic, but it comes off as being the most eerily affecting in focusing the sense of the loss of innocence and the struggle that Time’s change brings to our lives. Link has told me that “Lull” was written in response to the loss of a friend, and, considering the emotional response I took away from it, that fact makes perfect sense.

Now, back to structure, for this story of many stories is also driven by structure. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it is. To the contrary, it seems diffuse and completely digressive. The difference is that this piece has an organic structure, and I envision it as taking the shape of a spiral, like the curled arm of some sea creature or the twining of a plant’s tendril. What’s truly unique about it is that Link replaces the Euclidean geometry of the structure of a story like “Girl Detective” with a geometry that is capable, like Mandelbrot’s, of describing the chaotic shape of life. I’m imagining those wild, paisley computer designs based on the mathematics of chaos theory. The story is equally affecting as her other stories but it trades the usual energy of suspense, a measured drive toward an end, toward Death, for an ever decreasing orbit, or spiral, around the initial energy of creation, which can be both as energizing and as frightening as the former.

Thoreau had a theory of composition that the perfect form of a piece of writing would take shape at the behest of the writer’s emotional and intellectual commitment to the piece and not be applied beforehand. He desired a completely organic form. There’s a sense of this in Thoreau’s Walden, as if it is an extemporaneous nature journal being composed on the spot, but we know that he took great pains to revise that book over the course of twelve major revisions throughout a period of almost ten years. The clarity of “Lull” suggests that it has undergone the same process. So I suppose craft plays as great a part as initial desire and intent in achieving the “organic” in writing.

After reading all of this, it should become clear to you, if it hasn’t already, that my thoughts on this story are paltry in comparison to the experience of reading it. So go check it out, and don’t forget to try Link’s collection, Stranger Things Happen, too.

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Jeffrey Ford is the author of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Morrow, 2002) and The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2002). A new novel, The Girl in the Glass (preview), will be in bookshops this year.

Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife, Lynn, and two sons, Jack and Derek. He teaches Writing and Early American Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.