Butler (ed.) Triangulation: Dark Glass (2009)

Pete Butler (ed.), Triangulation: Dark Glass. PARSEC Ink, 2009. Pp. 156. ISBN 9780578031033. $12.00 h/c; $1.99 PDF.

Reviewed by Louisa Thompson

Triangulation: Dark Glass is PARSEC Ink’s latest anthology of short speculative fiction based around the collective theme of ‘dark glass’. This core theme is loose enough to allow a broad range of style and ability but tight enough to ensure a cohesive body of work within sixteen distinct tales. The collection’s front cover artwork by Vincent Chong is well-suited to the subject matter and the inner pages are pleasingly printed with an absolute minimum of errors.

However, things don’t start well. Please don’t go thinking I didn’t try, because I did—three times over—but our opening story, ‘The Milton Feinhoff Problem’, utterly baffles me. The back of the book picks out this Milton business as a highlight, but the disappointing reality is a few pages of oddly arch facts about a multiplying man called Milton Feinhoff. And why should I care about Milton Feinhoff? I know nothing about him except his preferred pizza toppings. We never find out why new Miltons appear or why they eventually die out, and we most certainly never get a reason to care. As a reader I need more than the facts to give me that emotional connection with a short story. I need a visceral, immediate hook on which to hang an idea if it’s to be recognised by my own frame of reference. The words in front of me have to become my story, with my cast and my horizon otherwise they’re nothing more than the prose version of someone else’s dream; enormously important to them but pointless to anyone else. This tale reads like a synopsis of the story we never see. The facts are all in place but the intrigue and the heart are missing. It’s a nice idea and one worth exploring but unless I’ve entirely missed the point this is a dig still waiting to be excavated. Forster urges us to ‘always connect’, and I agree. Please help us. Let us in.

Miltons aside now. Let’s move on to happier thoughts. ‘Saint Darwin’s Spirituals’ is a fascinating gallop through a ghostly London of corsets and cobblestones shrouded in spectral shadows. Here, in stark contrast to the blank presentation of Milton Feinhoff, love and pain hide in every shadow. D K Thompson’s ‘ghostgasms’ (“all the pleasures of intimacy without the messy clean-up”) are a tremendous concept full of phantasmal potential surrounded by a provocative cast of unusual characters. His writing flows with an easy confidence that inspires trust in the story and the rich descriptions draw the reader straight into the heart of things, keeping us locked and sharing Lucy’s agonizing search for lost love until the last line. ‘Saint Darwin’s Spirituals’ has the mark of a great tale: and leaving it behind was a wrench.

The wrench feels even keener as I launch into ‘Imaginal Friend’. This is a perfectly fine, if slightly insipid SF tale of humans trying to solve clues of vengeance and battle left behind by a long-extinct alien race. It gets a ‘could do better’ for its blinkered, us-against-the-aliens focus, so please beware of the following spoiler of sorts. There’s a pantomime quality surrounding the plot, rather to the exclusion of all other literary possibilities. We’re carefully led by the hand through every page to ensure we don’t miss the supposed dénouement, but have been shouting ‘HE’S the alien! It’s behind you!’ for so many pages that Chiacchia’s final taa-daa is nothing but a whimper. This makes for gently absorbing reading but I fear you’ll finish the last page sitting exactly where you were when you began. The journey is slight, the emotional impact imperceptible.

I offer this same criticism of ‘Souls on Display’, which tells of fake souls being forged out of glass to replace those broken by careless owners or, in this case, rowdy road-hockey kids. Perhaps I’m too cold and jaded to appreciate the subtlety of the sentiment but I was struggling to suspend my disbelief for Kurt Kirchmeier’s story. Too many questions were clouding my enjoyment. When does this physical manifestation of someone’s soul appear? Is it full-size at birth which raises other, more biological issues, or is a baby born holding a tiny speck of glass? I didn’t sense much ‘story’ behind the words, except the mental image of a writer sucking on the end of a pen and thinking to himself ‘what if our souls existed for all to see?’—which is a great idea. But this story reads like the first attempt to answer that pondering thought rather than a literary pleasure honed and worked for a reader’s mind to tumble over.

However, David Seigler’s ‘One Touch To Remember’ very clearly meets the collection’s brief. Jennifer finds a gallery where Roy is storing memories of powerful emotions behind dark glass and proclaiming it as art of a sensory nature. “Sight is the crudest of the senses. I deal in emotion.” But Roy’s own memories are soon to make a devastating reappearance. This is polished fiction with everything in its proper place—full background check on our main characters, a clearly defined arc in the plot—but the polish has slightly rubbed off any sheen of freshness or sharp surprise. The story is strong and colourful but somehow not the absorbing barn-burner it could have been with a few more risks taken.

‘Audition For Evil’ is a unique and thought-provoking tableau, well-constructed and satisfying in its pace. The darkness is again within the mirrored glass but also reflected in the wickedness of its mistress. And ‘Broken Things’ is one of those stories that makes me glad this collection found me. Ellen is trying to save her dead mother’s genie, Vimm, from the horrors of impending mortality after accidentally smashing his bottle. Dark glass indeed. The story is warm and honest and occasionally heart-breaking with a rare (and welcome) focus on the subtleties of a mother/daughter relationship. It brings human fears into play and touches delicately on pain, loneliness and the complexities of grief without too much lazy drear. The ending is touching and unexpected to the point of chills.

Triangulation: Dark Glass is a nicely paced adventure with lesser works sitting patiently amongst some true beauties. Others worthy of mention here include the scorching, soul-searching of ‘Deadglass’, and ‘On The Path’s soul-powered plow fraught with ancestral angst and moral dilemma. But the collection saves its finest two for last. The anthology’s penultimate adventure finds the sorcerer DuHarren unhappily passing the cursed moniker of Devil’s Disciple down the line in Loretta Sylvestre’s ‘A More Beautiful Monster’. This full, lush tale reaches maximum thrill in a matter of paragraphs, its potent language of blood, sweetness and fear exposing the duality of a priest and the razor-sharp line between the seductive longings of good and evil. Sylvestre writes through the darkness with a quiet grace and a careful touch, never letting this moving tale flop into the cliches of fiery damnation and screaming vicars.

‘Seeing Is’ renders a polaroid snapshot of hot summer childhood with precision and poetry as our final story. The imaginative detail is superb and confidently veers off-plot far enough to offer those little extras that make it truly sing. Our hero, Jody, is the sort of kid who scratches his initials in wet cement with a twig. He’s a kid we understand, even if he’s also a kid who finds a talking eye in the pavement. Craig Wolf’s writing has strong SF credentials but hasn’t forgotten what makes a human heart beat faster. He follows an untrodden path to illuminate some well-worn truths about those difficult tricklings of adult consciousness into childish naivety. Those awful moments when the grown-ups first reveal themselves to be fallible—and decisions must be faced as to whether you choose to accept and see or push it all away and remain in the blind bubble of childish simplicity. Jody makes his own choice and it’s not without pain.

This is a nicely balanced, thoughtful collection of short stories presenting an intriguingly varied translation of the ‘dark glass’ theme. The diversity of these interpretations adds a layer of interest above and beyond the sixteen actual plots and I found myself occasionally contemplating the nature of individuality and personal discrimination. Triangulation’s contributor guidelines for entry called for ‘entertaining and literate stories’, and these winning picks have, on the whole, met the brief brilliantly.

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Grimwood, Exaggerated Man (2008)

Terry Grimwood, The Exaggerated Man and other stories. Exaggerated Press, 2008. Pp. 237. 9780955852206. £6.95 / $12.61.

Reviewed by Louisa Thomson

Terry Grimwood’s self-published, powerful collection of nineteen short stories (all previously published elsewhere) blazes with confidence. Guilt, retribution, sex and money are all magnified under Grimwood’s lens and evil—both ancient and new—glints in his darkness. A wallet holds the key to our soul’s secrets, a pastor’s journey to heaven becomes the gory reality of life after death and a nightmarish ruling, mired in political correctness finds Death Doctors stealing bodies from the LiveScum so the immortal dead can feast on the vulnerable living. These are dystopian predictions and cautionary tales of moral and social ineptitude where technological advancements have forgotten the innate instincts of human nature and money has become a currency of greed and fear rather than pounds, shillings and pence.

A thread of perceived weakness links Grimwood’s main cast; often unable to speak their truth before it’s too late, incapable of stepping up to their responsibilities honestly, and powerless to resist the women of their downfall. But they provide strong foils for the underlying messages even if they themselves don’t always feel sustainable as stand-alone characters. The language is taut, generally well-edited and captures a variety of colloquial accent—from New Yawk drawl (in ‘The Friends of Mike Santini’) to the extraordinary half Dickens, half Alex DeLarge diction of London’s Bull Poor in ‘Nobody Walks In London’.

‘Breathe’ is a gem of a tale, calling to mind shades of Zamyatin’s We. The relentless march of progress over nature is removing all human biological functions and prostitutes are earning their crust by breathing into artificially modified clients. Social divide is represented by the choice to be a Breather (to live the old-fashioned way, sucking oxygen into human lungs) or a FullPerson (artificially respiring)—and the choice presented to Marko Denna is blurred by love, pressure and instinct. I defy anyone to read ‘Breathe’ and not find themselves dragging in delicious gulps of lovely, polluted air with a secret pang of relief. But oh, I wanted a novel of this, not a short story! There’s so much juice to unearth, so many interesting layers to investigate.

And beauty shines out of the titular story, ‘The Exaggerated Man’ (although I don’t want to tell you about it, I want you to read it for yourself). Something in the easy flow of Grimwood’s language, the clarity of his descriptions and the strong emotional tug suggest a vision closer to the author than fiction. I kept wondering what it could have been… a dream, or maybe shades of a private truth? This and ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ are two stories that, despite the pain of their subjects, truly stir the heart. ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ infers an ambiguous evil of our own choosing, never defined beyond recollections of words and moments and thus inflated to even more terrifying proportions when you realize the narrator himself is too scared to directly verbalize the image. We’re left to draw our conclusions, thus ensuring we’ll employ our own, individual perception of horror to fill the shoes of the dreaded Uncle Sidney with his seemingly innocuous stance and words.

Sadly, a couple of the shorter pieces failed to catch my imagination with the same force of ‘Breathe’. In contrast to the depth and texture elsewhere, ‘Dirty Stop-Out’ reads as no more than a wisp of an idea based on a punchline. I was left similarly cold by ‘Freedom’.

The disparate locations in both time and place across the breadth of the collection should feel unsettling but are saved by the consistency of Grimwood’s themes. Greed, suffocation and loss provide a strong heart beat. Suffocation comes in the form of mounting debts, social pressure and the more literal inability to breathe naturally. Men are confronting the systems that control them but losing out every time to the monster wielding ultimate power. These monsters are often lurking on the breeze or far off in dark shadows. They’re hiding beneath a veneer of public respectability or perhaps in the minds of their victim.

While I never tired of the book I would suggest a careful approach. Grimwood chivvies us from Mars to London, the seaside and back like a demented sight-seeing bus behind schedule. Such pulls are occasionally jarring—mental leaping requires a flexible imagination—so these are stories to be taken as individual treats. Lose yourself in the torment of the youth-slaughtering flu in ‘Coffin Road’ or the horrific bargain on offer in ‘Atoner’, but then step away, enjoy the lingering sensation for as long as your imagination will sustain the trip, then dive back in for a totally different experience.

My enjoyment of The Exaggerated Man and Other Stories urges me to leave the review at that—enjoyment. But Terry Grimwood doesn’t write stories without a sting in the tail so I must also be tempered by my less-pleasing thoughts...

Grimwood’s boundless imagination paints future worlds with prescient, disturbing skill but the most disturbing element is his inability to see women as much more than sirens, whores or weaklings. And this lazy gender stereotyping of the SF audience is as out of date as the ‘geeky’ perception of the genre as a whole.

The representation of women within this collection reveals an embarrassingly simplistic view of the roles of the sexes. Prostitutes are girls, winos are men. Men fall for foxy young mistresses with husky voices and beer-drinking ways while their dry, sneering wives read dull novels, and keep the house too clean. Women need trinkets to make them happy and men have to provide, even if that means selling their souls in the bargain.

In ‘The Exaggerated Man’, having touched death, Atwood begins to see life in horrifying, exaggerated detail. But it’s the women he encounters that become the most grotesque: ‘She was...dirty. Scraps of make-up clung to her face, her pores leaked fluids, her flesh was ingrained with muck of all kinds. She stank of sweat, semen, of other juices and excretions.’

Then it’s Avril’s intoxicating lure that leads Paul Wilde into trouble with the tough and demonic Mike Santini. In ‘Coffin Dream’ it’s Sarah’s breakdown that drags Tony into his life-threatening debts. In ‘Breathe’, Marko Denna endures the effects of surgical reformation to appease his nagging, violent wife, Karryann. In ‘John’, Cathy can’t resist the charms of her now-dead husband despite his violent and abusive history. In fact, she’s so weak-willed, even the realization that he’s become the devil isn’t enough: ‘She felt her selfsame pussy grow warm, despite the numbing shock. Despite disappointment which bordered on despair.’

Fat women are outcasts (Melissa) or cackling clowns (Diana), wives nag their long-suffering husbands, and beauty wreaks hellish, murderous havoc when a woman’s jealousy comes to town. Bosses’ daughters can be handy tickets to promotion and, in the rare case of being a ‘very powerful Erasman lady’ this lady in question is represented by the black mass of an enormous, hideous spider living for nothing but to breed and kill.

This veiled misogyny didn’t stop me enjoying the book but I certainly felt a tinge of detachment. It’s hard to engage when you’re clearly not the chosen audience—and that’s a shame. I’m not looking for a PC whitewash—just a writer as willing to flex his muscles against stereotypes as he is against the laws of earthly physics.

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