Reviewed by Jetse de Vries in The Fix #6 (April 2003)
This is actually Wordcraft of Oregon Speculative Writers series #26. Or BBR #24. Co-edited by the respective publishers: David Memmott and Chris Reed. Anyway, no matter how you choose to see it: this is a damn fine anthology. First of all: it looks great, combining understated presentation with excellent readability, both inside and out. Three interior illustrations, six poems, a kind of collage and a "poem without words" but most of all: fiction (seventeen stories). Fiction that's out of the norm, that tries to do something different. Speculative fiction that's aiming for the experiment, the innovation while trying to remain relatively transparant and readable. No easy task, and it also means that what I think is a success might be considered a failure by others and vice versa. That's the (knowing) risk these editors take by publishing such a broad range of daring and intangible fiction. So, is this worth your time and money?
 Thomas E. Kennedy tells about a kind of skeleton in the closet avant la lettre. The eponymous 'Angel Body' is no skeleton yet, but not for long if Lauren has to listen to her Angel sing much more. And those smelly feet don't help either. Though sporadically funny it's ultimately no more than a dressed-up version of 'Be careful what you wish for...' Let's not consider this a start but a warmup because the real fireworks come next.
'Afterward' might be one of the very best stories Don Webb has written, if not the best. That's saying quite a lot but read it and I think you'll agree. Barbara is a witch, but not quite the conventional kind. She makes a difference by fighting the good fight but while the people around her like and use the benefits she brings they don't like her methods and the idea that she's really different. Still, the precarious status quo could have held longer if she didn't make one little mistake, a very human one that takes the whole cardhouse of prejudice and hypocrisy down. This one is an as razor-sharp observation of man's folly as you'll likely to read in a long time. It left me breathless and in awe. This book is worth its price for this story alone.
Andrew Darlington takes us to a 'Metamorphosis at the End of Time'. This one is a potent mix of extrapolation, weirdness and irony. In a very strange, yet also somewhat familiar future society windows to the far future are literally opened and used both to transport unwanted individuals and to watch their adventures for mass entertainment. In 2001984 the Suave New World is not looking for truth, but for ratings: the higher the better. No matter if they have to enslave the whole society they need to keep amused. "Catch 22" the snake said as it began chewing on its own tail. Still, there are those that look for an escape hatch, and even those that may find a very strange way out indeed. This one succeeds in being both evocative and shrewd, eerie and incisive: another winner.
Mia and Murphy are 'Moving': not only geographically, but out of the way of contemporary society as well. Lance Olsen's tale of – literally and figuratively – looking for a different niche was effective but not that moving to me.
'Lupe Varga, Deceased' by Brian Evenson has an uncanny resemblance to Julian West's James White Award winning story 'Vita Breva, Ars Longs', published in Interzone #185. Both are about artists that literally kill for their art and the way society interacts with that. Both hold mirrors to the world of art and the world itself, and both up the ante in witticism. And in both, the artists end up as artworks themselves. Life is brief, art endures. While Julian West's story takes the same premise to more outré heights, Brian Evenson's perspective is broader, more outlandish and his hints a lot more subtle (just translate some of the French in there, I mean a place called Labaise?). Can life endure this brevity of art?
Two short-shorts back to back and still wasting space. 'Tell Me I'm Wrong' is the kind of self-righteous argument that makes me sigh in exasparation. "You're right," I'd say to the protagonist – never to be mistaken for the writer, Thomas Wiloch in this case – "that's why we'll kill you as well." Argument over. His other tale has the questionable honor to be the first short-short still containing enough hot air to go 'Floating' around. Not short enough.
Ernst Hogan turns up the heat and considerably more in 'Burrito Meltdown'. This is a rich, hot stew, very spicy, exotic and plain crazy at times. This tale of Chicano bioterrorists plotting a takeover of a very red-and-stiff-necked USA begins weird and wild to go completely off the scale. Enjoy the ride on this hot-rodded, ripping yarn as it slides over the edge of sanity. This is how cult is defined, magnificent.
'Sewing Shut My Eyes' by Andi & Lance Olsen is the type of collage, you know cut and pasted photographs, reworked with text in all different typographs that acts as art making a statement (in this case about society's preoccupation with looks). Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid as these 'ready-mades' have all been done before in the sixties or thereabouts. Yesterday's experiments, unfortunately, can turn into today's clichs.
Helga, locked in a drab existence and an empty marriage, is confronted with her way of life during her volunteer work for a charity organisation. More and more she faces the impact of the things she choose not to do. Then she gets a sort of second chance. 'Choosing Time' is Scott Edelman's jab at making fiction more interactive but personally I think it rather proofs the contrary: namely that good fiction doesn't need this trick. Actually – as arguably the sole exception in this collection – I suspect the story would have worked better in a more conventional mode, without the multiple choices at the end of each chapter.
I don't know if there is a term for the kind of story that goes full circle, the one that ends as its own beginning. Feel free to enlighten me in the message board on the TTA website (www.ttapress.com/message.html). Anyway, Brooks walks the streets of a derelict town with lead in his feet. Like a masochistic Atlas he carries all the pain in the world and would rather be a 'Sufferer' in silence, but these metal shoes on cobblestones won't let him. Then a strange woman calls out to him and – bit by bit – explains his predicament only to restart it for him again. Maybe the point of W. Gregory Stewart's tale full of messianic overtones is that people should learn to bear their own grief, but Mark Rich makes that one with much more aplomb in the next story.
Pasi has lost a dearly beloved and hopes to catch a glimpse of her again during the 'Festival of the River'. He boards the ferry Serenity and finds a way to make peace with his loss. A parable rife with symbolism, where the meaning of living on is an undercurrent that only shortly shows its true face before disappearing under the surface once more. But just a glimpse may be all you need... The undertow of this superficially calm narrative evoked emotional surges in me long after I finished reading it and marks it as another topnotch tale.
It seems that the life of the deep dcollet aficionados – the ones that like to sink their teeth into it – is not quite as glamorous as popular belief has it. 'Concerning the Vampire' by Tom Whalen offers a more realistic view concerning the case these mythical creatures really existed, not unlike Steve Mohn's 'Kolorado' in On Spec #24. Bloodsuckers by the wayside: a new trend in vampire tales? Or is it already old hat?
Talking about coincidence and different viewpoints: I read Lorraine Schein's 'Frida Kahlo, Pierced by Time' before I saw Frida, the movie starring the delectable Salma Hayek and I must say that finding out about this Mexican artist – whose life makes W. Gregory Stewart's 'Sufferer' look like a mild teatime distraction – did greatly improve my esteem of the story. (OK, so call me a cultural barbarian. I do try to make amends.) However, to equate Frida's accident with the birth of the Universe simultaneously offering Frida's soul a portal to a place without pain is taking an already stressed metaphor into too many dimensions, an alchemic overdose if you ask me. File under: 'ambitious attempt, spectacular failure' and change nouns to antonyms according to taste.
'The Carnelian Cat' by Misha Nogha forms a prose counterpoint to Mark Bilokur's 'Poem Without Words #3'. While Mark's cat is black and seems to contain a whole Universe, Misha's pussy is red, translucent and a portal to the multiverse of the dreamtime. The key phrase here is "Be patient," says the carnelian cat. "Life is only a matter of time" (Nogha): compare Bilokur's drawn black cat's square speech balloon containing an hourglass. Life as an intersection between the fundamental forces and thermodynamics, an emergent property of evolving interactions, a process imbued by entropy, a matter of time. Quite possibly I'm seeing things that were not intended, but that – to me – is the real interaction between reader and text: a different look may open up unsuspected, hidden depths. When something (prose, poetry, images, anything) can give me this kind of insight, this vertigo of meaning, I cry in delight. My idea of art. Breathtaking and awe-inspiring.
Norah has visions: intoxicating windows to a more colorful world and goes to great lengths to achieve this way of looking permanently. While Denise Dumars's writing is quite competent the story didn't grab me. I guess I missed the point here but the only things I see are the be-careful-what-you-wish-for routine and an elaborate way of demonstrating the double meaning of 'Stained Glass'.
'The Man Who Adopted Dead Children' is a story with that willful, evocative quality, one that set me thinking while it fiercely resists my attempts at analysis. After the dead bodies of a wrecked ship wash on the shores of his island, Lucian Davison becomes obsessed with death. This obsession leads the young landlord to obtain cadavers of young orphans, under the guise of providing them a burial on his land, but collecting them as objects of desire in reality. Conger Beasly, Jr. hauntingly leaves the cause for Davison's behavior unclear and unexplained: a strange mix of restrained necrophilia, silent awe and nepenthean escapism. The compulsive dedication of a lotus-eater's soul that unconsciously knows he cannot fathom the mystery of death but still cannot help but try. A bit like the reviewer's plight with this story: both fascinated and appalled that it evades my critical grip. So I can only bow down to its enigmatic power.
Bruce Boston applies the literary technique of drawing the reader deeper into the story by writing it in the second person, present verb tense. A risky method that easily backfires. Now while 'By the Dawn's Early Light' evades becoming its own boomerang, this existential view of a city in the deepest of night, this recapitulating of the meaning of life as the dawn of another working day inexorable approaches somehow misses the melancholic lyricism to really reel me in.
Keeping in mind that not all stories are original – seven are reprints, my only real complaint – I still consider Angel Body the best anthology of 2002: a feast of experimentation, a celebration of diversity and a triumph of innovation. Not every part is perfect, but I like it this way: better kick out the jams with no restrictions than be too bland, and I'll gladly take the failures with the successes. If you love your speculative fiction to take risks and – mostly – get away with it then buy this book! How much more recommendation do you need? In his foreword, BBR masterbrain Chris Reed marks this anthology as "the completion of BBR's transformation from magazine to book format." Therefore I'm already eagerly anticipating BBR #25 as it has to follow in the footsteps of giants.
Reproduced by kind permission of Jetse de Vries and The Fix.
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