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A review by fredsphere
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 by Laird Barron
4.0
I'm not sure I've ever read a satisfying anthology. Maybe I'd make an exception for Harlan Ellison's [b: Dangerous Visions|600349|Dangerous Visions|Harlan Ellison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1176167292s/600349.jpg|2758790]; I can't think of another one. Anthologies, in my experience, mix too many duds in with the winners.
This book is no exception. I'd say about a third of the stories left me scratching my head--and it wasn't so much of the "what did that story mean" scratching, although there was plenty of that, but more of the "what the heck was the editor thinking, selecting this piece of crap?" scratching.
I hate to blame industry politics, but that's where the evidence takes me. If an author was someone I've already heard of, or had an especially impressive bio, you could (usually) count on a story that felt like a dusty old trunk story or something dashed-off. In most cases, these stories suffer from meandering endlessness; you get to the last page and wonder how on earth it's going to get wrapped up, and then you find out: oh, there is no wrap-up.
And yet, I have to give this collection 4 stars, to honor the several stories I really loved. Paul Tremblay's "Swim Wants to Know if it's as Bad as Swim Thinks" gets inside the head of a madwoman, a tricky thing, which Tremblay pulls off with aplomb. John Langan's "Bor Urus" tells of glimpsing an alternate, numinous world through a storm. I loved this story, with its inscrutible Greek monster-gods; it would be perfect for the weird-numinous podcast I keep threatening to start. Richard Gavin's "A Cavern of Redbrick" was the mirror image of Langan's, a young boy's glimpse of the numinous realm's demonic side, and the evil it tempts him to unleash, unwittingly. Jeffery Thomas shares a dark vision of a man spiraling downward into isolated, uncombed and unshaven despair in a grim story called "In Limbo" that turns shockingly hopeful and tender in the very last sentence. Kristi Demeester's "Like Feather, Like Bone" disgusted me, with its opening paragraph of a little girl retreating underneath a porch to eat a dead bird, but I have to admit it achieved, in just three pages, exactly the effect its author manifestly intended. In a similar vein, I felt like I was left out of the target audience of Karin Tidbeck's "Moonstruck," about a girl's first period and it's power to move the moon off its course (or was the moon acting on her?), but I can't deny the story's impact.
Jeffrey Ford pulls together details from the life of Emily Dickinson and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" in an almost-too- but not-quite-too-clever, mashup he calls "A Terror." By the end, it had convinced me of its genius. This contrasts with another lit-referenced story by Sophia Samatar, which didn't work for me. Was it because I wasn't in on the inside joke? I've actually read the referenced sandman story by Hoffmann, so I'm not sure how I was left out.
I would also like to single out for rebuke the story "A Quest of Dream" by the Lovecraftian dandy W.H. Pugmire. Based on the story's decadent content, for example the author describing a boy's "tender kiss upon my eyes" and his fingers combing through the author's hair, I'm guessing the attraction of the dreamworld described, from the author's point of view, is its lax enforcement of statutory rape laws.
For my money, the masterpiece of the collection comes right near the end. It's "The Key to your Heart Is Made of Brass" by John R. Fultz. The title is quite literal; the protagonist is a clockwork man desperate to find his stolen key before he winds down and dies. He's one of a creepy race of people who discarded their fleshly bodies (except their brains), exchanging them for exquisitely beautiful mechanical ones. This is weird fiction operating at its highest level.
This book is no exception. I'd say about a third of the stories left me scratching my head--and it wasn't so much of the "what did that story mean" scratching, although there was plenty of that, but more of the "what the heck was the editor thinking, selecting this piece of crap?" scratching.
I hate to blame industry politics, but that's where the evidence takes me. If an author was someone I've already heard of, or had an especially impressive bio, you could (usually) count on a story that felt like a dusty old trunk story or something dashed-off. In most cases, these stories suffer from meandering endlessness; you get to the last page and wonder how on earth it's going to get wrapped up, and then you find out: oh, there is no wrap-up.
And yet, I have to give this collection 4 stars, to honor the several stories I really loved. Paul Tremblay's "Swim Wants to Know if it's as Bad as Swim Thinks" gets inside the head of a madwoman, a tricky thing, which Tremblay pulls off with aplomb. John Langan's "Bor Urus" tells of glimpsing an alternate, numinous world through a storm. I loved this story, with its inscrutible Greek monster-gods; it would be perfect for the weird-numinous podcast I keep threatening to start. Richard Gavin's "A Cavern of Redbrick" was the mirror image of Langan's, a young boy's glimpse of the numinous realm's demonic side, and the evil it tempts him to unleash, unwittingly. Jeffery Thomas shares a dark vision of a man spiraling downward into isolated, uncombed and unshaven despair in a grim story called "In Limbo" that turns shockingly hopeful and tender in the very last sentence. Kristi Demeester's "Like Feather, Like Bone" disgusted me, with its opening paragraph of a little girl retreating underneath a porch to eat a dead bird, but I have to admit it achieved, in just three pages, exactly the effect its author manifestly intended. In a similar vein, I felt like I was left out of the target audience of Karin Tidbeck's "Moonstruck," about a girl's first period and it's power to move the moon off its course (or was the moon acting on her?), but I can't deny the story's impact.
Jeffrey Ford pulls together details from the life of Emily Dickinson and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" in an almost-too- but not-quite-too-clever, mashup he calls "A Terror." By the end, it had convinced me of its genius. This contrasts with another lit-referenced story by Sophia Samatar, which didn't work for me. Was it because I wasn't in on the inside joke? I've actually read the referenced sandman story by Hoffmann, so I'm not sure how I was left out.
I would also like to single out for rebuke the story "A Quest of Dream" by the Lovecraftian dandy W.H. Pugmire. Based on the story's decadent content, for example the author describing a boy's "tender kiss upon my eyes" and his fingers combing through the author's hair, I'm guessing the attraction of the dreamworld described, from the author's point of view, is its lax enforcement of statutory rape laws.
For my money, the masterpiece of the collection comes right near the end. It's "The Key to your Heart Is Made of Brass" by John R. Fultz. The title is quite literal; the protagonist is a clockwork man desperate to find his stolen key before he winds down and dies. He's one of a creepy race of people who discarded their fleshly bodies (except their brains), exchanging them for exquisitely beautiful mechanical ones. This is weird fiction operating at its highest level.