The Weirdness Between the Lines

I don't actually remember what the first short story I read by Alan* was. I know the first thing I read by him -- it was his wonderful poetry chapbook The Black Hare, purchased in the dealer's room at Wiscon. Here's an excerpt of that from the publisher's site (at that link, where I highly recommend you go):

1.

Long away, shed in the woods,
the black hare strung
from the rafters by the feet.
A bolt of twine
and swill of kerosene below.
He opens his left eye.
Dozens of other hares hang,
all salt-white,
drinking the little cup
of moon through an open window.
They sleep and glint.
Silence dyes the shed.
He is dead but refuses to die.
Seven days unravel.
Until she comes, a ragged fog,
with flint to cut the cord.
Fierce squall with arms and legs.
And a whisper staggers out of the woods.

I was hooked pretty much from then, but how was I to know that this is actually tame stuff where Alan's work is concerned? I soon found out that his stories are even richer with strangeness and humor and a sideways view of the world that only intersects with other people's sometimes. Another fabulous short story writer, Maureen McHugh, just called for less mundanity in fiction and more strangeness. Says she:

SF/Fantasy as a genre is, as much as anything about rocket ships and magic, about the tension between strangeness and the knowable about human nature. (Hey, a new definition of sf! Equally bad as the others, but useful for discussion.) Conventions allow readers to navigate the strange. Okay, this story may have dragons that speak telepathically, but it's also a coming of age story, and I know what that means. (Or a romance. Or a revenge story, although real revenge stories are not a strong part of our cultural baggage and so we tend to write really simple wish-fulfillment versions of them involving vigilante justice, probably because our stories are more about the restrictions a pretty functional social system of justice places on the need for personal satisfaction, rather than the ramifications of revenge in the more classic sense. But I digress.) Our appetite for strangeness is a little more jaded, probably because we've exposed so much that lots of things that used to be strange, like sexual subcultures, or postpartum depression, or the complex social life of meercats.  (All of which are on television these days.)

Alan's work evokes this prized sense of strangeness for me. Stories like "Our Byzantium," "Child Assassin," "The Centaur," "Home of the," and, well, pretty much all of them, are so playfully odd, so seriously strange that I can only wish the world had more stories like them in it.

And, of course, they're all very different stories as well -- which I'm sure you'll pick up on as other members post of them individually this week. If there's one thing Alan's stories have, it's range. Just look at the list of places where they were originally published -- Fence, One Story, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, etcetera. Some well-respected literary venues, some teeny tiny SF genre zines. When I first heard that Small Beer was doing this collection, one of the first happy thoughts I had was that all these readers spread out over all these different venues would finally have a chance to discover more of Alan's work. I hope y'all do so, if you haven't already.

*Alan and I go way back, so I'm not going to pretend at being strangers by using his last name.

Comments

[John Klima]

I was very proud to get the chance to publish Alan's story "A Keeper" in Electric Velocipede. I think of that story, and the issue it was in, as a turning point for what people thought of the zine.

And I have Alan to thank for that.

John Klima

[Inversiones en petroleo]

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