I thought I was wired, but I was just weird

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, fiction, fantasy, horror

Almost half of The New Weird is taken up by the section titled Evidence, containing nine selections. The last of these, "The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines" by Alistair Rennie, opens ugly, and a bit of hopscotch convinced me it gets uglier, so I didn't read much of it. There is enough ugly in my soul already; I don't wish to add to it.

"Immolation" by Jeffrey Thomas could have got quite ugly, but instead ennobles the unloved, producing a story of friendship upon a background of betrayal. The idea that clones become n^th-class citizens is not new, but is freshly portrayed.

"Jack" by China Miéville balances a rather horrifying portrayal of novel bio-engineered "punishments" with a tale of the regard an enforcement officer has for his quarry, based on the maxim, "If we didn't have such enemies, we'd be forced to invent them."

"The Lizard of Ooze" by Jay Lake seems to have begun as a riff on "The Wizard of Oz", that ran away with the writer's imagination. Stripped of its weird and speculative elements, it is a story of deception and conflict, with a typically against-all-odds success for the (almost) good guy.

"Watson's Boy" by Brian Evenson and "The Art of Dying" by K.J. Bishop both manage to go nowhere artfully. The first narrows the characters' world down to nearly featureless corridors to explore the resulting obsessions, and the second puts a story of unwitting sacrifice upon a backdrop of professional assassins' territory.

It took a while to think through "At Reparata" by Jeffrey Ford. Reparata is a kingdom built on caprice, supplied by unearned wealth, which is ravaged and eliminated by a magical moth made of the king's grief. It's an odd combination of lyrical and pulpish narrative styles.

Letters from Tainaron by Leena Krohn is pure description, and a part of a larger work. It almost stands alone, but makes more sense as a descriptive sideshow for the novel. The letter-writer describes interacting with "men" and "women" who are really insects, millipedes and other invertebrates. But all this is by implication; nowhere is a certain beetle-man, for example, called so, though his antennae and jointed limbs are depicted. This is a showcase of descriptive text, which I understand is a defining characteristic of New Weird.

"The Ride of the Gabbleratchet" seems also to be a part of something larger, though it seems the rest of the work is as yet unproduced. "Ratchet" is an old word for bloodhound, because of the hounds' voices, and "Gabble" is a corruption of Gabriel, whose trumpet knells the end of the world. So these are the Hounds of Hell, though in this instance they are space/time/dimension-hopping horses and riders a bit more ghastly than "the Devil's Herd" from "Ghost Riders in the Sky" (the song). The story line is successive escapes with the aid of a collective being called the Vermiform, also a dimension-hopper.

This ends the explicitly fictional sections of the book. The two smaller sections that follow are (1) essays and (2) experimental excerpts…or so it seems.