Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Read online

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction

  VOLUME FOUR

  Guest Editor

  HELEN MARSHALL

  Series Editor

  MICHAEL KELLY

  Also by Helen Marshall

  Skeleton Leaves

  The Sex Lives of Monsters

  Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Gifts For the One Who Comes After

  Everything That is Born (forthcoming)

  Also by Michael Kelly

  Songs From Dead Singers

  Scratching the Surface

  Ouroboros (With Carol Weekes)

  Apparitions

  Undertow & Other Laments

  Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell, Lewd I Did Live

  Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I

  Shadows & Tall Trees (Vols. 1–7)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (With Laird Barron)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 (With Kathe Koja)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3 (With Simon Strantzas)

  Assistant Editors

  Jenny Cattier

  Ginger Lee Thomason

  Michelle Foster

  Christine Tomioka

  Sophie Harnett

  Claire Vatinel

  Sarah Kendle

  Marian Womack

  Christopher Owen

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, VOL. 4

  copyright © 2017 Helen Marshall & Michael Kelly

  Foreword © 2017 Michael Kelly

  Introduction © 2017 Helen Marshall

  Cover Art copyright © 2017 Alex Andreev

  Cover Design copyright © 2017 Vince Haig (barquing.com)

  “Beating the Bounds” © 2016 Aki Schilz

  “Red” © 2016 Katie Knoll

  “The Blameless” © 2016 Jeffrey Ford

  “Outtakes” © 2016 Irenosen Okojie

  “The Dancer on the Stairs” © 2016 Sarah Tolmie

  “I Was A Teenage Werewolf” © 2016 Dale Bailey

  “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” © 2016 Usman T. Malik

  “A Heavy Devotion” © 2016 Daisy Johnson

  “The Signal Birds” © 2016 Octavia Cade

  “Angel, Monster, Man” © 2016 Sam J. Miller

  “Breaking Water” © 2016 Indrapramit Das

  “The Kings With No Hands” © 2016 Johanna Sinisalo

  (Translation © 2016 J. Robert Tupasela)

  “Waxy” © 2016 Camilla Grudova

  “Breakdown” © 2016 Gary Budden

  “The End Of Hope Street” © 2016 Malcolm Devlin

  Interior design and layout Alligator Tree Graphics

  First Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons—living, dead, or undead—is entirely coincidental.

  Undertow Publications, Pickering, ON Canada

  [email protected] / www.undertowbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  MICHAEL KELLY | Foreword

  HELEN MARSHALL | Introduction

  AKI SCHILZ | Beating the Bounds

  KATIE KNOLL | Red

  JEFFREY FORD | The Blameless

  IRENOSEN OKOJIE | Outtakes

  SARAH TOLMIE | The Dancer on the Stairs

  DALE BAILEY | I Was a Teenage Werewolf

  USMAN T. MALIK | In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro

  DAISY JOHNSON | A Heavy Devotion

  OCTAVIA CADE | The Signal Birds

  SAM J. MILLER | Angel, Monster, Man

  INDRAPRAMIT DAS | Breaking Water

  JOHANNA SINISALO | The Kings With No Hands

  CAMILLA GRUDOVA | Waxy

  GARY BUDDEN | Breakdown

  MALCOLM DEVLIN | The End of Hope Street

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

  MICHAEL KELLY

  Foreword

  Welcome to the fourth volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction!

  I am just back from attending Necronomicon 2017, the international convention of weird fiction, art, and academia, in Providence, Rhode Island. That there is a convention of the scope of Necronomicon dedicated to weird fiction is, I think, proof that there was a need for this annual volume. Earlier in the year, in Atlanta, there was a one-day immersive conference on weird fiction—The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird. And WorldCon 75, in Helsinki, featured a number of panels dedicated to weird fiction. All ample evidence that what we are doing is, I hope, vital, important, and even necessary. As much as any of this is really necessary, that is, in these trying times. But art, and especially fiction, can help by showing us vistas of strangeness and beauty that enable us to view things in a different light; a different perspective.

  I am still asked to define ‘weird fiction.’ I’ve argued that it is undefinable, and that I know it when I see it. That’s a bit of a cop-out, to be sure, but is essentially true to my way of thinking. I like to think of weird fiction as an unceasing distortion and buckling of ambient space and time; where plot, theme, atmosphere and voice coalesce. Hence, the lens from which you view the world is askew and occluded. A feeling. A mood. A sense of dislocation.

  In truth, it doesn’t matter what I think weird fiction is anyway. Each volume is redefined by the Guest Editor. The very slippery nature of trying to define weird fiction was a big impetus to the decision to employ guest editors. Each editor brings their viewpoint and perspective to the series.

  This volume is helmed by the remarkable Dr. Helen Marshall. I’ve known Helen for a number of years. We came up in the incredibly vibrant genre scene in Toronto, a hotbed for speculative and weird fiction. Helen is a tremendously gifted writer, editor, and historian. Her academic work has investigated codicology and palaeography in late medieval manuscripts, among other research. This volume is testimony to her acute editorial stewardship. Quite aside from Helen’s obvious literary street cred, she’s a genuinely warm and generous spirit and was always in the forefront of my thoughts when thinking about future guest editors for the series. I’m so very grateful to her for agreeing to edit this volume, and for her efforts.

  Casting a bit further ahead, volume 5 of this series will be guest-edited by Robert Shearman. We are busily compiling that volume now. The work never ends. But it isn’t work, really, if you take pleasure in it. As I do. And I do hope you enjoy our efforts.

  Stay weird!

  —Michael Kelly

  Pickering, Canada

  August, 2017

  HELEN MARSHALL

  Introduction

  I come to this introduction from a somewhat strange perspective. I was one of the people who woke up on November 9, 2016—as a Canadian living in England, whose eyes were still fixed south of the border, across the pond—in what seemed to be an alternate reality.

  The morning of the General Election, I remember logging on and experiencing almost a doubling of vision, as if the universe had split into two tracks that were radically diverging from one another. There was a hallucinatory space of about a week where I still felt as if I could see another world layered underneath mine. There was shock and disorientation, not a little fear—but also bewilderment at how fragile the norms and traditions which formed the bedrocks of reality—my reality, as it turned out—had proven to be.

  I don’t mean to rehash politics. The tumultuous events of the last twelve months have been a shock to the system as one by one our certainties about the way things are have been cast aside. New futures have been dreamed up and rapidly discarded. Tiny bubbles of consensual realities have surfaced and burst, or gained power, grown, come to englobe more and more people. The speed of change has been rapid, disorienting. But in the wake of all this I’ve begun to think about my own e
xperiences critically as a way of examining what literature is and what it ought to do.

  I grew up in a little town in Ontario, on the border with Port Michigan, and so I’m used to border crossings. I have two passports, and this means I can pass easily, more easily than most, choosing whichever identity is most likely to be granted access. I know that liminal spaces are dangerous, and multiple identities can be useful—but they are also cause for suspicion. If you are two things—or three things, or many things—then you are not easily one thing; you can pass but you still present a risk. And increasingly, as I’ve crossed borders over the last year I’ve registered a radical sense of difference, as the cultures of three countries I’ve felt as familiar as breathing, have shifted and re-aligned.

  Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary between science fiction and horror—perhaps—or between literary fiction and horror—perhaps—or between Lovecraft and whatever happens to be floating close to hand at any given moment—perhaps!

  In 1933, in the lull between two world wars, a year which included the death of President Calvin Coolidge, an assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, the beginning of the Great Depression and the premiere of the original film version of King Kong at Radio City Music Hall, a middle-aged pulp writer by the name of H. P. Lovecraft began work on an article addressing weird fiction which would later be published in the June 1937 issue of the Amateur Correspondent. “I choose weird stories,” he wrote, “because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” In this article Lovecraft sketched out the parameters of a kind of story interested in using the language of dreams and fragments, vague impressions, snatches of scientific discourse, in order to interrogate the nature of reality. This work, whatever we may think of the man himself and his influence on the field now, both of which have deservedly (in my opinion) required re-evaluation, is still ongoing—and still necessary.

  In fact, it would seem that in our moment this work is more necessary than ever.

  *

  Recently, another short story writer interested in the nature of reality had something to say about a different moment of catastrophic change. In 2011, Dominican author Junot Díaz interrogated the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in an article entitled “Apocalypses: What They Reveal” in The Boston Review. He wrote of the etymology of the word “apocalypse”, which means “to uncover and unveil.” There are three kinds of apocalypses, he argues: there are those that follow the actual imagined end of the world; there are those that comprise catastrophes which resemble the imagined end; and there are those disruptive events that provoke revelation. The apocalypse, he says, quoting James Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.”

  We are, by all accounts, no matter where you might fit yourself in the political spectrum, in an apocalyptic moment. We are witnessing the end of something, or an event that resembles it; we are searching for an account that can explain that end.

  On the day following the announcement of the results of the American election I was teaching a group of writers at Anglia Ruskin University. It was an evening class. The students had always been a lively bunch, eager, full of questions and comments and jokes and affection for one another. But that day I didn’t know how to address them. One colleague had told me not to talk about Trump, to just leave it out of the room, but that seemed impossible. Politics, whatever we believe, is at the heart of writing; it is a vital part of living and participating in society.

  I did the best thing I could think of in the situation. I cribbed something I’d heard from Ben Markovits, a lecturer at Royal Holloway: that the purpose of teaching creative writing is, on the one hand, to help students to become published (in the best cases)—but in all cases, regardless of the quality of the writing, it is to help students to become better witnesses to the world. I have thought hard on that maxim since I first heard it. We are all witnesses of the world. The tools of storytelling can help us, in this respect: they help us to understand our world, to observe it, to process it. This is a fundamentally imaginative act and it is an act with great power—the power to witness.

  We are living in an apocalyptic moment and we have a duty to be witnesses. We have a duty to observe, to imagine, to speculate, and to create.

  *

  Weird fiction is a genre that knows about the apocalypse.

  It is a genre used to dismantling the status quo and exploring what lies beyond the margins of what is known in the world. It is genre obsessed with bringing to light what wishes to remain hidden and dealing with the consequences of that revelation.

  The rules of reality have changed. This is an age in which it seems impossible to count on shared assumptions. Gary Dunion on Twitter cleverly captured the zeitgeist by pulling together a number of headlines he had read recently:

  Suspect in North Korea killing “thought she was taking part in TV prank”

  Robert Mugabe could contest election as corpse, wife says

  German parents told to destroy doll that can spy on children

  His caption? Season 4 of Black Mirror is coming along nicely …

  Indeed.

  The Twitter account for Black Mirror states: “Our job is to explain what’s happening to you as best we can.” As we have seen, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. I can only imagine the problem is going to get worse.

  When Lovecraft talked about his short stories he imagined fear to be at the heart of the process of discovery and revelation. He said:

  ‘These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.’

  In this respect, weird fiction seems a perfect vehicle for exploring our present moment. For it does seem to us, I think, to many of us, anyway, that time is out of joint; are we moving back to the happy utopia of the 1950s? Are we moving toward the dystopia of 1984? Are we returning or progressing? We do not know. We cannot decide. And the possibilities are not so much divergent as layered overtop of one another. We are existing in multiple moments at most, in multiple times at once.

  And it is scary.

  Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, in their introduction to The Weird compendium recognize the murky taxonomy of weird fiction writing:

  ‘Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions.’

  Weird fiction then is used to this strange overlapping, this occupation of simultaneous moments at once. It is a revelatory mode of writing, an apocalyptic mode of writing.

  *

  This volume was edited with the assistance of a group of students from my university who read through the solicited stories, made recommendations, debat
ed the value of individual pieces and applied—and often questioned—the definition of weird fiction to them. Though the final selections were my own, our conversations shaped my thinking. One particular definition resonated strongly with me. It came from Marian Womack, a specular Spanish short story writer and translator whose work has appeared in a previous volume of this series.

  She said:

  ‘We have a long tradition of [the Weird] in Spain, and this only increased during the dictatorship as new symbolic ways of communicating ideas were rehearsed in narratives (cinematic and literary). This kind of fantasy, in which “something is not quite right”, lends itself very well to Gothic sensibility, with its convoluted use of language and its tormented heroes. And then there is an element of irrationality built into the rational and, coming from a Spanish background, I interpret this as surrealism, for me this is a major element I recognize in weird writing, and one that is present in my own understanding of the weird.’

  Her response pointed away from, not toward, Lovecraft; it sketched out other directions for inquiry, other crises, other narratives, other points of view than those in which weird fiction has been traditionally grounded. Yet her definition struck me as capturing the essence of the weird tale, the embedding of irrationality within the rational: a way of writing which uses the one to expose the other, to make the reader realize that all supposedly rational systems are inherently irrational.

  In thinking about the state of the genre, I’m reminded of an article written by a provocative critic, Jonathan McCalmont, who traced the history of the resurgence of weird fiction in the twentieth century. In particular, he focused on several months in 2003 in Britain when the TTA Press message boards were alive with a great discussion about the nature of the “New Weird”. The discussion was prompted in part by the success of Miéville who published The Scar in 2002 and received critical acclaim in the British Fantasy Award and Locus Awards of 2013.