Readers who are unfamiliar with Not A Speck of Light may wish read my note below after reading the collection.
N. B. If you're a recovering drinker, don't buy this book. It's radioactive if you're due for a slip. And if someone gifts it to you, they are not your friend. They are your nemesis. Call your sponsor. -- Jay
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1. Blood Red Samaritans as a section title for a short story collection suggests there is mortal danger in helping others in peril.
"In a Cavern, in a Canyon" flashes back and back and then forth as the grandma narrator revisits the night in 1977 when her dad vanished as they hunted their runaway dog in the Alaskan bush. They hear a voice in the night.
Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amidst the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs.
“Help me,” he whispered.
"Girls Without Their Faces On" features no cries for help and no roles for good Samaritans. In fact, let's use some of the story's generalizations and summations to map Delia's growing suspicions about her boyfriend J.
[....] “What’s a Flat Affect Man?”
[....] Memory is an acceptable day-to-day substitute for intellect.
[....] A starfield pulsed through ragged holes in the canopy. She knew jack about stars except the vague notion that mostly they radiated old, old light.
[....] By some trick of the dark, his eyes flared dull-bright crimson. His lambent gaze pulsed for several heartbeats, then faded, and he became a silhouette again.
“No?” he said in his regular voice. “Be that way. I hope you brought mad money, because you’re stranded on a lee shore. Should Icruise by your apartment instead? Would your roomies and your dog be pleased to meet me while I’m in this mood? Fuck it, sweetheart. I’ll surprise you.” He laughed, got into the car, and sped away. The red taillights seemed to hang forever; unblinking predatory eyes.
[....] Which was to say, how could a woman ever know what squirmed in the brains of men?
Is J really a greeter for the galactic shockwave due to collide with earth in forty-five seconds? Or a jerk who just happens to reveal himself as an unknown compelling force perpetrated an extinction level event?
"Mobility" recounts the ouroborosian fate of Bryan, a prick employed as professor of Pawhunk Community College Nonfiction Writing department. Every just dessert turns out toake cosmic sense.
“My grandfather trapped wolves along the Yukon. Leg-hold traps with nasty teeth. Those wolves, ah my. Rebellious critters chomped their own legs to get free. Humans really are animals with a fancy operating system, aren’t you?”
"The Glorification of Custer Poe" summons up a homicidal voice of the old frontier thesis that explained U.S. exceptionalism to itself in the old days before the Maine and the gorey birth of U.S. imperialism. It's nothing compared to Steve Duffy's "The Clay Party" or “What God Hath Wrought?" by Adam Nevill. But "The Glorification of Custer Poe" has a deadly hypnotic sidewinder prose style best not ignored.
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2. Wandering Stars is a series of fevered, mannerist tales from Alaska in which style might also be a hot lobotomizing wire that promises the protagonist relief from memories of treasured dogs and monster parents.
"Jōren Falls" is a warning story. Don't steal and take home momentos from business trips. One day in retirement, intead of resting in the attic...
Vonda listened to his panicky account, which he related through gulps of cold water. By the time he finished the glass, exhaustion drained him as well. Already, his description felt like snatches of a receding nightmare. He waited for her reaction.
She selected a copy of Fortean Times from a stack of magazines at her end of the table and regarded it. Her fleeting, sardonic smile cooled almost instantly. “I always knew you’d bring something back from one of your business trips.” Before he could speak, she amplified her thought. “I was thinking of STDs.”
“Sweetheart—”
“You’ve got a wandering eye.”
“Vonny, I’ve never been unfaithful.” His protestation sound desperate and tinny in his own ears. An actor reciting lines from a script.
“That’s not quite the same as devotion, is it?”
Larry couldn’t formulate a direct response. He set his hat on the table and absently massaged his skull. “We should call…someone.” He almost said “Roger” by force of habit.
Her expression suggested she might be considering a call to a divorce lawyer or the boys in white coats. Instead, she tossed the magazine aside and stared into the distance. “I watched Roger stroll out the door,” she said. “Whistling. Haven’t heard him whistle since…”
“Since Lucy.”
“Since Lucy.”
"The Blood in My Mouth" is epic-scale weird fiction and Bildungsroman. You know it's Laird Barron when the boy-girl meet-cute is a bare knuckle contest behind an Alaskan cannery. It's a tale of geological timescale sadness shaded with Fortean grace-notes.
I told Mom the next day, that I was going to die on [Lake] Iliamna when I got old. Mom laughed her nervous laugh and said not to be silly. Wasn’t until much later as we were hanging around after Dad’s funeral and she got plastered on scotch and confessed to having the same recurring nightmare during her own youth.
“You dreamed you were going to drown in Lake Illiamna?” I said, also pretty goddamned drunk.
“No, I dreamed my son would.” She slugged another double and collapsed in the bathroom. We had to take the door off its hinges to get her out of there.
"Nemesis" is about all the levels of nemesis humans confront: Drinking. Disfigurement. Cancer. Planetary finis. Barron wraps the reader in that sidewinder prose until suicide seems like the smart option.
"Soul of Me" is an uber-weepy dog story. Barron does it superbly, as did Jack London. A relief from the iron heel of weird and cosmic anomie.
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3. Alan Smithee Is Dead. Smithee once got credit for movies professional filmmakers were ashamed of producing and releasing under their own names. (Now those film types are all we get.)
"Fear Sun" is a nicely orchestrated William S. Burroughs/Art Bell goulash. Until, in true half-assed Alan Smithee style, the reader is jarred awake by the name-checking. It's equivalent of human voices waking us: and we drown.
His organization (I never did learn its name) had, sometime during the winter of 1975, allegedly established contact with an intelligence residing in a trench off the Atlantic shelf. As in an extraterrestrial intelligence that burrowed into the sediment around the time trilobites were the voting majority.
He laughed when I, unabashed Lovecraft enthusiast, blurted Dagon! Mother Hydra! and told me not to be stupid, this verged on Clark Ashton Smith weirdness. His associate in the deep requested some Grand Guignol theater in return for certain considerations that only an immortal terror of unconscionable power can offer.
"Swift to Chase" is a short story not contained in the collection Swift to Chase. Typical Smithee-scale continuity error. The story is full of unearned jargony pseudo-hardboiled narration, plus copious double-entry moral arithmetic that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. "Where in the world is Jessica Mace?"
"Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form" features a Tarantino-esque group of female mercs. One of whom is dispatched on her tyro mission alone, retrieving a Poe marionette from an abandoned mine facility in Alaska along the way. Plenty of blades go snicker-snack before the end.
"American Remake of a Japanese Ghost Story" is a Jessica Mace adventure, where she visits the Catskills "Jōren Falls" house, consulting with its new owners.
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4. Lake Terror
"Lake Terron, or Lake Terror as we affectionately called it, gleamed at the edge of bona fide wilderness. Why Lake Terror? Some joker had altered the N on the road sign into an R with spray-paint and it just stuck. Nights were pitch-black five paces beyond the porch. The dark was full of insect noises and the coughs of deer lurching around in the brush."
"Strident Caller" is a report by inadvertent midnight cowboy Jesse Craven concerning his time in the Catskills house from "Jōren Falls." He decides on new living arrangements just ahead of a cult.
"Not a Speck of Light" touches base with upstanding third couple to own the "Jōren Falls" house and property. Their neighbor is not an collegial as they hoped: she demands their dog for a sacrifice. Fortunately, while the husband is a tabletop gaming company grandees, the wife is second level Black belt and a katana blade pro. And their best friend is a Feng Shui expert.
[....] He spent two seconds on a ladder with his head stuck through the opening into the empty attic before retreating. Don’t go up there, he said. I asked why not. Bad feng shui.
"Tiptoe" is a Family Romance. With Mom, Dad, brothers, sister, and auntie as the Addams Family.
[....] He removed a photo from his wallet and pushed it across the table. Mom and Dad in our old yard. The sun was in Dad’s glasses. Hard to know what to make of man’s smile when you can’t see his eyes. I pushed it back. He waved me off. “Hang onto that.”
"(You Won’t Be) Saved by the Ghost of Your Old Dog" recalls some of the vignettes Hemingway included between the stories in In Our Time (1925): a man in extremis, the narrative free of any start or stop in traditional terms.
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Jay
14 October 2024
I own this paperback,, but I'm saving it for my winter reading, so I will be back.