Locus, March 2014

by Locus Publications

  •

  Allen Steele’s V-S Day fiddles with time in a more familiar manner. This is (if I’m counting correctly) Steele’s fifth take on his ‘‘Alternate-Space’’ story-family, in which the space race begins a couple decades early thanks to a German decision to abandon the V-1 in favor of the Silbervögel, a suborbital transcontinental bomber, which sets off a corresponding US project to build a Silbervögel killer. Steele has been working with this material for a quarter-century: the first bite of the apple was a 1988 short story, ‘‘Operation Blue Horizon’’, followed by the better-known ‘‘Goddard’s People’’ (1991), ‘‘John Harper Wilson’’ (1989), and the novel The Tranquility Alternative (1996). Twenty years ago I found ‘‘Goddard’s People’’ to read like minimally fictionalized journalism, but V-S Day is a fully formed historical-procedural WWII drama – if it were a movie, the book’s date-stamp chapter headers would be superimposed on establishing shots: ‘‘June 1, 1943, Somewhere over the Pacific,’’ ‘‘December 21, 1941, Peenemünde.’’

  But there’s more. In a framing narrative set in 2013, a reporter attends the annual reunion of the survivors of the 390 Group to record for the first time the full story of how the American rocket plane was conceived, designed, and built. This 2013 feels remarkably like ours – Toyotas, iPads, digital recorders – which raises questions about why there are still secrets and what differences this 2013 might harbor beyond the obvious one of including suborbital spaceplanes in 1943.

  The body of the novel alternates between the German and American projects, with occasional interludes in which the reporter and the old men add comments on the story so far. The viewpoint character for most of the German chapters is Wernher von Braun, with cutaways to events he could not have known about, such as the activities of the spies who uncover and continue to monitor the project. Von Braun gets about as sympathetic portrait as is possible: his dream of a technology that will eventually lead to space travel causes him to turn aside from the realities of what he is building and who he is building it for (Goering and Himmler have bit parts, and a distracted Hitler makes a cameo appearance) and from its direct costs in human suffering and death. The other crucial historical figure, Robert Goddard, remains a bit remote, seen through the eyes of other characters: shabbily dressed, persistent, focused, systematic, brilliant, and cannily able to wrangle the authorities and build his team, the ‘‘Goddard’s People’’ of the earlier short story.

  But this is not a book about character or characters (however convincingly portrayed) but about the rival programs, and accordingly its focus is on the enormous challenges of conceiving, designing, building, and testing whole new technologies, nearly from the ground up: rocket engines (which tend to reveal their weaknesses by blowing up), airframes, launch systems, pressure suits, pilot training. There is a good bit of attention to the non-engineering parts of both projects: not only the extraordinary levels of secrecy and misdirection required (a significant challenge on the American side, given the culture from which the project team comes) but, for the German team, the constant danger of interference by members of Hitler’s inner circle. And since the framing 2013 chapters suggest how the contest must play out, there is no real suspense, and even the inevitable suborbital confrontation and a final-page revelation are not really surprises. As the Afterword’s acknowledgments and the extensive small-print list of research sources suggests, the real hero of the novel is the dream-driven process of getting into space. The title’s V-for-victory is not only for the war but for the triumph of that dream.

  –Russell Letson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ

  Flowers of the Sea, Reggie Oliver (Tartarus Press 978-1-905784-58-5, £37.50, 388pp, hc) November 2013. [Order from Tartarus Press, Coverley House, Carlton, Leyburn North Yorkshire DL8 4AY, United Kingdom; .]

  Bleeding Shadows, Joe R. Lansdale (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-599-4, $40.00, 488pp, hc) November 2013. Cover by Vincent Chong. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .]

  The Waking That Kills, Stephen Gregory (Solaris 978-1-78108-152-5, $8.99, 224pp, tp) November 2013.

  The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing 978-1-848636-17-0, £11.99, 137pp, hc) June 2013. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England; .]

  It Sustains, Mark Morris (Earthling Publications 978-0-9838071-3-1, $35.00, 134pp, hc) May 2013. [Order from Earthling Publications, PO Box 413, Northborough MA 01532; .]

  In ‘‘The Posthumous Messiah’’, one of 15 tales in Reggie Oliver’s new collection Flowers of the Sea, a writer collaborating with a woman who claims to be channeling the unwritten third act of the last play written by her dead husband is told,

  There are some people who belong to the land of the dead and some who belong to the land of the living. And there are some who stand between the two, keeping open the door. These are the artists, the dreamers, philosophers and mystics. They are strange people who tell of strange things.

  This is, of course, a perfect description of Oliver and his own craft. As a writer whose specialty is the ghost story, he regularly props open the door that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead, so that those who have passed on can occasionally slip back for a return engagement.

  And those visitors from the other side of the door manifest in a surprising variety of forms. In the moving title tale, a husband and wife share the mild psychic bond so common to spouses comfortably familiar with one another. When the wife begins showing the first signs of encroaching Alzheimer’s disease, the husband’s mind is invaded by confused images and a sense of disordered reality whose origins soon become obvious. ‘‘Patterns, however grim’’ he informs us at the beginning of the story, ‘‘console us; the one truly hateful thing is chaos.’’ At the story’s end, in the wake of his wife’s death, the husband endures a series of surreal experiences that suggest the pattern of his life has been permanently disrupted – or worse, perhaps, that the couple’s telepathic bond has not ended with the wife’s death. This story is one of several in the book to feature aging persons just entering the fog of senile dementia and beginning to experience disorientations in thought and memory that give events an added aura of strangeness. In ‘‘Waving to the Boats’’, a man accompanies his wife and a group of her fellow patients from an elder care home on a recreational boating trip. Given the altered realities they all seem to be operating from, it comes as no surprise that the husband begins seeing a succession of increasingly bizarre vessels passing them on the river – harbingers, it turns out, of his own mortality.

  Oliver’s tales are extensions of the classic ghost story tradition. Some are genuine antiquarian ghost tales, modeled on the stories of M.R. James – ‘‘Between Four Yews’’ was written as an actual ‘‘prequel’’ to James’s ‘‘A School Story’’ – and featuring scholars who delve incautiously into the past and find horrors awaiting them there. But even his modern stories feature those elements that we associate with works from the Golden Age of ghost fiction: a mixing of incident and atmosphere to build an intensifying mood of dread, horrors that are slow to manifest and that sometimes never take a distinct form, and characters and settings with histories that are unpacked over the length of the story to provide a context for the horrors as they unfold. In ‘‘The Spooks of Shellborough’’, for example, we know fairly early in the story that there is great enmity between two men who have retired to a quiet town in Suffolk, and that it is related to their past occupations, in which one served subordinate to the other. We also know that the former subordinate’s paranoia that he is under the other’s surveillance contributes the story’s cumulative sense of menace. But we don’t find out until several pages from the story’s end that the two served in MI5 – they are the titular ‘‘spooks’
’ – during the ‘‘troubles’’ in Ireland, and that a single tragic event ties them inextricably to one another, as well as to a spook of another sort who is keeping close tabs on them.

  Oliver evokes the ghostly with great style and subtlety. In ‘‘Charm’’, a married couple discover that a house they have rented was the site of a suicide. This knowledge imbues their otherwise ordinary surroundings with an unsettling sense of the sinister. ‘‘Whenever one of us entered a room in the house alone,’’ says the husband, ‘‘we became conscious of its emptiness. It is a little hard to explain. Yes, if we had been aware of an ‘unseen presence’ in a room, that might have been more obviously unnerving, but it was the opposite. It was the unseen absence that we disliked. It was no more than a fleeting impression and very nebulous, but sometimes it was as if, when we entered a room – in particular the library and the drawing room on the ground floor – someone or something had just left it.’’ For all their insubstantiality, however, the ghosts in these tales have a formidable presence. A number are avenging specters who are bent on redressing past wrongs in particularly horrifying fashion. In ‘‘A Child’s Problem’’, a young boy’s investigation of the history of his uncle’s estate uncovers a sordid crime of passion whose victims are waiting to strike back from beyond the grave. ‘‘Striding Edge’’ tells of a young man who disappears on a fog-bound mountainside, and of the grim, but poetically just fate that later befalls the person who sent him to his death.

  Though all of the stories in Flowers of the Sea are excellent, ‘‘Lord of the Fleas’’ merits singling out. As Oliver explains in his notes for the story, he wrote this novella-length work as an origin story for the mosaic novel that Stephen Jones published as The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse. Set during the late-18th and early-19th centuries, it is an account of Thomas Moreby, a student of the great architect Nicholas Hawskmoor and a master of dark arts that have made him one of the most feared men in England. Oliver has written the story as a pastiche of Restoration Era literature, replete with a manuscript fragment supposedly omitted from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, news reports published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, dedicatory verses written in perfect iambic pentameter, and an epistolary chronicle of a heroine who would have done justice to a Jane Austen novel. The story is a seamless blend of the historically factual and the imaginatively embellished that makes the outrageous tale of Moreby and his zombie servants seem entirely believable within the context of the narrative. It’s proof of Oliver’s ability to stretch creatively and, in doing so, raise the bar for other stories of its type.

  •

  Like the pulpsmiths of yore, Joe R. Lansdale writes in a wide variety of genres. Unlike the pulpsmiths of yore, there is nothing at all generic about his writing. He’s the perfect example of the writer whose work is sui generis. Whether you read a story of his in a crime fiction magazine, a horror anthology, or a collection of western tales, you don’t think of it in terms of the market – you think of it as a Joe Lansdale story.

  Lansdale’s latest collection, Bleeding Shadows, features 21 stories and nine poems. It’s the biggest collection of his work produced to date and his most creatively varied. Only about half of its selections are weird or fantastic in nature, but anyone who likes that side of Lansdale’s writing will enjoy the others. Especially notable is ‘‘The Stars Are Falling’’, a tale that has been reprinted in dark fantasy and mystery story anthologies, even though it doesn’t really fit either genre. It’s a beautifully understated tale about a soldier returning home from World War I and trying to reconnect with his wife and child whom, he is pained to realize, he doesn’t really know anymore. There are surprises at the end, but not the kind that you find in a work of genre fiction. This story would not have been at all out of place in the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly.

  Lansdale has written period westerns, notably the novel The Magic Wagon, and he can write wild west shoot-’em-ups with the best of them. Two stories in this volume, ‘‘Soldierin’’’ and ‘‘Hide and Horns’’, are episodes in the life of a nameless black cavalry soldier who gave rise to the legends that fueled dime novels about The Black Rider and Deadwood Dick. Though Lansdale describes them as warm-ups for a western historical novel he hopes to write, their occasionally raunchy banter and frank handling of racial themes will remind readers of his mystery novels featuring contemporary crime-solvers Hap and Leonard.

  Lansdale is as well known for his crime fiction as his weird writing and there are several prime examples of it on display here: ‘‘Six Finger Jack’’, a brutal hard-boiled tale; ‘‘Old Man in the Motorized Chair’’, a gentle spoof of the armchair detection techniques of Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, and company; ‘‘Santa at the Café’’, a biter-bit tale of escalating double-crosses and betrayals; and ‘‘Shooting Pool’’, a slice of grim Texas noir. The latter features a passage that’s a fine example of how Lansdale is able to convey powerful emotion through his economic, plainspoken prose. Near the story’s end a young man is forced at gunpoint to haul up the corpse of a man who has just been shot through the head, and he notes,

  Ross’s eyes were wide open, and I saw then that everything he had been or might have been, all of his plans and memories, dreams and schemes, they had fled, out through the hole in the back of his skull, across the floor in a puddle of blood and brain fragments, a piece of his skull…. Looking at him, in that moment, I knew there was nothing beyond our time on earth, that dead was dead, and I had never wanted to live more than I did at that moment with my eyes locked on Ross’s face.

  Given his facility with both crime and horror fiction, Lansdale also is good at splicing the two together. ‘‘Dead Sister’’ begins as a conventional detective tale but quickly takes a turn for the weird when the detective discovers that the suspicious character he has been asked to keep under surveillance is a grave-robbing ghoul. In the title tale, a guitarist modeled somewhat on blues great Robert Johnson, and an unorthodox detective, sent by his sister to protect him, struggle to outwit and outrun a Lovecraftian hellhound on his trail.

  The remaining fantastic fiction is a real potpourri ranging from the absurdist fantasy of ‘‘Mr. Bear’’, about the unwanted friendship that develops between a man and Smokey the Bear (who proves to be a little more unsavory than his public image would suggest); to ‘‘What Happened to Me’’, an excellent haunted house tale whose haunt proves to be not just your average ghost; and ‘‘The Folding Man’’, which begins like a comic tall tale before detouring sharply into hardcore horror. ‘‘Torn Away’’, a Twilight Zone-type tale about a reanimated dead man being stalked by his shadow, and ‘‘Quarry’’, a tribute to Richard Matheson’s classic ‘‘Prey’’, both feature characters trying to outrun supernatural pursuers, a theme that pops up frequently in Lansdale’s fiction. There’s a pair of zombie stories better than most – ‘‘A Visit with Friends’’ and ‘‘Christmas with the Dead’’ – and a quasi-science fiction story, ‘‘Star Light, Eyes Bright’’. ‘‘Metal Men of Mars’’, a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series, captures the spirit of Burroughs’ interplanetary swashbucklers and sends John Carter on an adventure a little more extreme that Burroughs could have imagined. (It would make a much better movie than was made from A Princess of Mars.)

  Nobody does weird mash-ups like Lansdale does and the book’s closing tale, ‘‘Dread Island’’, is a conflation of ideas and themes from Mark Twain, Lovecraft, and Uncle Remus (the ‘‘Song of the South’’ version), with nods to Peter Pan and the legend of Amelia Earhart. In this continuation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Huck is still grousing about the writer who wrote up his life and made money off of it), Huck and Jim boat out to a legend-haunted island that appears magically in the Mississippi on the first night of the full moon to rescue Tom Sawyer and a friend. The island is home to the animal characters from the Uncle Remus stories, and it turns out that Br’er Fox has gotten ahold of the Necrnomicon and is summoning Cthulhu (here written as ‘‘Cut Thro
ugh You’’). Lansdale perfectly captures the cadences of Twain’s homespun storytelling style, and it’s amazing how well it suits the story’s outrageous plot. (Of Cthulhu, Huck says, ‘‘It had its head poking all the way through, and that head was so big you can’t imagine, and it was lumpy and such, like a bunch of melons had been put in a tow sack and banged on with a boat paddle.’’) It’s as though, having shown the reader his versatility as a writer in the 29 selections that precede it, Lansdale tried to condense every genre he’s written for into a single story that is remarkable for its comical audacity.

  •

  Stephen Gregory’s novel The Waking That Kills (the title is from Virginia Woolf) is subtitled ‘‘A Dark Novel of Possession’’. Given the expectations that the word ‘‘possession’’ raises in macabre fiction, that’s a little misleading. There are no Exorcist-type demons or intrusive consciousnesses to be found in its pages. There is the suggestion of a ghostly returner, but more than anything else, there are people in the grip of emotions and obsessions so powerful that it forces their reality to the verge of supernatural experience.

  The story is narrated by 28-year-old Christopher Beal, who has just returned to England after teaching for six years in Borneo to take over affairs for his stroke-felled father. In search of gainful employment he responds to a personal ad for a tutor and companion to Lawrence Lundy, a 15-year-old boy who lives with his mother, Juliet, at Chalke House in rural Lincolnshire. Lawrence’s beloved father, a pilot with the RAF, has been missing for months, his plane presumed downed in the ocean, and this has only exacerbated the boy’s proclivity for the violent outbursts that have played a role in his removal from school.