CERN ZOO

CONTINUED FROM HERE


Salustrade (1993)

Hmmm – actually, this over-long story is better than I remember it ... just! Perhaps Karl Edward Wagner did have a point after all when he chose it for ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’. I have great respect for him and his fiction and his editorial work. Therefore, I shall hold fire on this story. Make your own mind up. I’ll just itemise the high points (for me) then: an assisted suicide beneath a pyramid of second-hand books, some apocalyptic visions and the language used to describe them, a strange relationship between a pair of twins (perhaps, paradoxically, the ultimate tripartite war!), Salustrade as the highly-strung, imp-like ‘gladiator’, the steampunk SF scenario under a gothic city and the Padgett Weggs finale.

It’s perhaps that some of these high-points don’t make the grade as amenable jigsaw pieces! This story crams in so many DFL emblems it makes the task of this real-time review discovering the book’s audit trail of leit-motifs (leading to an eventual gestalt) either too difficult or too easy. Never in between.

“The books around her were nothing but memories, too – mere pages of live thoughts that were all but dead. How could the bone of one finger split into a ‘V’? For a book to live, though, must it not in fact become such a ‘V’?”  (27 May 09 - 2 hours later)

Scaredy and Whitemouth (1994)

This one seemed far better than I remembered. I remembered it as a pedestrian story of a blind girl called Aspen – and her two cats – and someone called David whom she visualised. It is about those things. But the ending came as a complete surprise and the innuendo of some people ‘seeing’ more things by feeling their way reminded me of various processes I’ve experienced when doing these real-time reviews. But that’s not the real reason. This was a story that genuinely touched me as if I’d never written it. The Narrator this time was not on a dimmer-switch, but I, imputed author become the unconnected reader, was dimming and brightening in a slow-motion strobe as if in some process that could only be envisioned by a real blind person. I almost could answer the question: who empathised with whom? Almost. 

[Perhaps one needs two people to try empathising mutually so as to allow a missing missing-wall to be found by a third party as a chink of light through which he or she can ‘read’ both parties far more clearly than they could even ‘read’ each other and themselves. A three-cornered dance ... or a tripartite war’s surrender or peace conference.]

“Aspen had dreams in her sleep. Blindness couldn’t prevent that. She saw the places she visited during the day in precise detail, down to the assistant at the underwear shop with pitted face, toothbrush moustache and tape measure round his shoulders.” (27 May 09 - another 4 hours later)

The Scar Museum (1996)

A somehow logical treatment of a protagonist who runs a Scar Museum and stays in hotels in Spa towns so as to cull as many potential exhibits as possible from the inhabitants – paralleled by a metaphor of life’s scars extending to real scars on the mind’s surface, a mind that can also be culled. It tells of his well-narrated encounter with two women and with a pig-like dog called Tussle. And there is a guest appearance by Padgett Weggs in his dosser role. It all makes eminent sense. And fits into a growing hypothesis that this collection is really a novel...

Read as a separate story, it works, too.

It makes unbelievability the new believability.

Some strange expressions like ‘unworld-famous museum’ and ‘undesigner-rip in the jeans’ take this concept of against-the-grain truth into a realm of even weaker tissues of lie. (28 May 09)

Season of Lost Will (1991)

“Freda often thought out loud after her memory started to go. If she could but know where it was going, that might have helped.”

This story has become devastating. When I first wrote it I was around 20 years younger than I am now, and it wasn’t quite so devastating to me then. It is a story of misunderstandings and memories as one grows older as a married couple. It cleverly centres round a mysterious Christmas Card that arrives every year. Time attenuates into a scar of its former condition. Which is best - to lose something or never to know you had it? Then slowly and unenthusiastically queuing behind crazy people for the emergency exit from life’s auditorium.

“The great miracle about it all, he thought, was that people lived as if they were immortal, but knowing at the back of their mind all the time that one day, one unexpected day, they would pass on. That was God’s con trick. What made it more absurd God would never put in an appearance to have the last laugh.” (28 May 09 - 4 hours later)

Second Best (1993)

A densely word-packed flash fiction about Simple Simon and the Pieman and Jack the Giantkiller in a tripartite dream. A ‘bony-meat haven’ or a ‘slight ghost in the night hutch’ or ‘wishbone substance of shadow’?

A question of philosophical identity. And just another piece to fit into the jiggery-pokery that is this book.

“‘The only giants left to kill are ourselves.’ – Rachel Mildeyes.” (29 May 09)

'WEIRMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE.