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Stories that are indeed strange
Aug. 18th, 2023 06:04 pmThis year’s Readercon I picked up an uncorrected proof of Elizabeth Hand’s short story collection Errantry: Strange Stories, for free, and therefore not in violation of my policy not to buy any more short story collections until I read the ones I have. On the urging of a friend I then actually read in record time for my Readercon acquisitions.
The stories in this volume are mostly surreal little hidden-world type stories, tales of normal people in what is ostensibly our world stumbling upon something uncanny. The rural and exurban landscapes of New England feature prominently in many of them, making it a better choice than I had realized to read while squirreled away in a lakeside camp in the woods in Maine, but there are also ones that take place elsewhere, in cities or in Europe or, in exactly one instance, in a fantastical world intimated to be some kind of post-apocalyptic Earth.
Most of the viewpoint characters are aggressively ordinary-by-litfic-conventions everymen–middle-aged sad sacks with drinking problems, largely, although a few are approaching elderly, and one or two don’t have drinking problems–which I do have to admit works pretty well for the types of stories being told here. The first and longest story, the novella The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, sees a former museum security guard catching up with his old colleagues during a downswing in his life and finding himself and his teenage son part of an inexplicable project. Probably the best story in the whole thing is Near Zennor, about a American man’s uncanny trip to Cornwall to follow up on a small mystery from his dead wife’s early teens that he found in her stuff. Some of the stories fell a little flat, but those were mostly the very short ones. I got a real kick out of The Return of the Fire Witch, the only foray into not-hidden-world fantasy of the bunch, which was funny and full of a sort of whimsical Mervyn Peake-like tangle of archaic and off-kilter vocabulary.
Overall this was a good short story collection, and Elizabeth Hand has been added to my list of authors whose novels I should check out one of these days!
The stories in this volume are mostly surreal little hidden-world type stories, tales of normal people in what is ostensibly our world stumbling upon something uncanny. The rural and exurban landscapes of New England feature prominently in many of them, making it a better choice than I had realized to read while squirreled away in a lakeside camp in the woods in Maine, but there are also ones that take place elsewhere, in cities or in Europe or, in exactly one instance, in a fantastical world intimated to be some kind of post-apocalyptic Earth.
Most of the viewpoint characters are aggressively ordinary-by-litfic-conventions everymen–middle-aged sad sacks with drinking problems, largely, although a few are approaching elderly, and one or two don’t have drinking problems–which I do have to admit works pretty well for the types of stories being told here. The first and longest story, the novella The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, sees a former museum security guard catching up with his old colleagues during a downswing in his life and finding himself and his teenage son part of an inexplicable project. Probably the best story in the whole thing is Near Zennor, about a American man’s uncanny trip to Cornwall to follow up on a small mystery from his dead wife’s early teens that he found in her stuff. Some of the stories fell a little flat, but those were mostly the very short ones. I got a real kick out of The Return of the Fire Witch, the only foray into not-hidden-world fantasy of the bunch, which was funny and full of a sort of whimsical Mervyn Peake-like tangle of archaic and off-kilter vocabulary.
Overall this was a good short story collection, and Elizabeth Hand has been added to my list of authors whose novels I should check out one of these days!