Imagination at work
Not long ago, during the Bangalore launch of a short story collection, someone got up and asked about the significance of its title. Did every story in the book adhere to the dictates of the book’s title?
The editor (whose story had the same name as the book) replied, and some other writers present added a few words; but finally it was as if they were trying to conjure up an answer for the questioner. With the tag-line “and other stories,” no one would have asked questions. Now they tried to fit every story into the title’s mould.
Which brings us to the brotherhood of stories in any anthology. Should they conform to certain criteria, embrace a genre?
In the anthology under review, Neil Gaiman admits in his introduction that the editors were “frustrated with the boundaries of genre”.
Both editors being partial to fantasy (“I love the word fantasy….for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play”), that’s what becomes the germ of belonging, and each story in the collection (within its infinitely different textures and scope) keeps that in mind. Gaiman adds: “It seems to us…the fantastic can be…much more than its detractors assume; it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it.”
And they do all that, these stories. Though, ultimately, as he says, the bottom-line for any story is the four words that nail the reader: “and then what happened?” The story has to take you forward, keep you turning the page, eyes screwed up as you peer through the mist.
27 acclaimed authors weave their spell, and you discover — in moments of slight unease, eerie silence or slow realisation — why they’ve been brought together between the covers of this book.
Because, even though they inhabit different worlds and follow the graphs of varied lives, there’s a deviation, a perversion, a darkness that make these stories shiver away from normalcy. The fantastic may be just a hint, or in your face, it may shock you finally, or freeze you during a particularly delectable description. Nothing, we realise, is as it seems!
The wonderful thing about a book like this is that each reader comes away with a set of perceptions, a set of favourites.
The celebrated Joyce Carol Oates has a story about twins, one weak, the other strong; one confined, the other renowned; and suffice it to say this is Cain and Abel with a twist. Peter Straub, author of the landmark Ghost Story, is here with his tale of an American guru visiting a yogi in a Himalayan village, leaving “disorder” in his wake.
Among the stories that remain vividly with us is The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains by editor Neil Gaiman. Richly described and page-turningly narrated, it tells of a dwarf’s painstaking journey to fulfilment, a treasure hunt with a difference. His editorial partner, Al Sarrantonio, isn’t far behind in weirdness, inhabiting a shadowy world with wearers of the Nose, the protagonist giving hot chase.
Jodi Picoult proves why she’s a best-selling writer with her Weights and Measures, a story that successfully pulls acute personal tragedy into a realm where even an absurd turn of events is perceived with poignant wonder. So does Jeffery Deaver in The Therapist that takes you on a memorable roller-coaster of suspense.
There are vampires and assassins, aliens and mythical icons, passing casually through typical American cities, invading the normal with their own brand of normalcy. Their difference shimmers subtly, ensnaring us. It’s perhaps coincidence, but there are a few sibling stories, largely based on unhealthy rivalry.
There’s a man who literally writes his girl into his stories; mysterious deaths in outer space; and a true-blue literary outing that discusses genres — pulp, pop, literary fiction — before getting embroiled in drunken, fighting writers.
Some of the stories are the stuff of legend and myth. Juvenal Nyx is about the loneliness of a vampire, a bizarre Mr Fix-it, who’s a link in a bloody relay run. Goblin Lake tells a 17th century tale of an enchanted lake, a marvellous underwater land that offers desperate life choices. Samantha’s Diary is one of its kind, where the ordinary is multiplied until it becomes unbearably claustrophobic — hence, completely insane. It tells the story of an over - the - top admirer who piles on his zoological gifts until the recipient has to run.
The violence in both The Stars are Falling and The Devil on the Staircase is tragic, an indication of lives gone wrong. The latter, by Joe Hill, is a fine marriage of form and content, visually climbing, dropping, joining and suggesting.
Gaiman is right. It’s the imagination at work, taking us deeper and deeper into malleable worlds, even as we keep repeating “what next?”
Stories
Neil Gamon & Al Sarrantonio
Hachette, 2010, 432pp
595
