OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
By Claude Lalumière
MONSTROUS AFFECTIONS
By David Nickle
THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING
By Robert J. Wiersema
Fantasy and horror are popular niches that recent start-up
ChiZine Publications, under the editorship of Toronto-based Brett Alexander
Savory and Sandra Kasturi, has quickly filled with its own compelling brand of
"weird, surreal, and disturbing dark fiction." In their first wave of
offerings certain recurrent themes, including a penchant for alternative
mythologies and relationships gone perilously sour, are already starting to
define a ChiZine sensibility. Most impressive, however, is just how good these
books all are.
Genre fans won't be surprised. Two of these new volumes are
story collections by experienced practitioners and represent some of their best
work. David Nickle's Monstrous Affections begins with a story, "The
Sloan Men," first published fifteen years ago. Perhaps the strongest piece
as well, it introduces the reader to Nickle's "Canadian gothic"
terrain, and in particular the landscape around Fenlan, his own imagining of a
town somewhere deep within a perverted version of Alice Munro country. It's a
monster story - the twisted cover art by Erik Mohr (who did a great job on all
three of these books) might be one take on a Sloan man - but also a kind of
allegory for the motif of love as a dangerous trap, one that frequently ends in
sinister codependency. People do such terrible things for the tenderest of
motives. In particular, what makes our affections monstrous are the ties that
bind: a family learns what it means to stick together in "Night of the Tar
Baby;" a witch holds an entire town in amber, with predictable results; a
footloose young man is made to feel "The Inevitability of Earth" when
he tries to walk away from his wife. And there's no leaving those endearing
Sloan men.
The stories work so well in part because Nickle knows the
language of the place. He is comfortable writing in different voices, even a
nearly illiterate young woman in the excellent "Janie and the Wind,"
and also knows the idiom of his semi-rural environment, where a house might
stand "miles outside town, on an ugly flat scratch of land where the grass
grew too high and you saw the neighbours by the smoke from their woodstoves in
the winter." Such properties might be "free and clear," but not
their residents.
In addition to writing his own fiction, Claude Lalumière has
edited eight anthologies and does the Fantastic Fiction column for the Montreal
Gazette. In the dozen stories collected in Objects of Worship much of
the emphasis is on strange gods and weird new religious orders presiding over
"wondrous worlds - alternate realities where every fancy could be
true." The influence of H. P. Lovecraft, dean of this school of writing,
can be discerned in figures like Yameth-Lot, the dark lord of nightmares, and
the use of an eldritch word like "eldritch" (the definitive Lovecraft
adjective, and one that could be applied to Nickle's Fenlan as well). But
Lalumière's fiction is also of a place and that place is, in terms of its faith,
Montreal. The reader senses it not just in the transformed cross on Mount Royal
that becomes the symbol of a post-apocalyptic cult in "This Is the Ice
Age," but in what is made of the sacrament of communion. There's a whole
lot of eating going on in these stories, both of and by gods and monsters. And
while the overall tone of the book is lighter than Nickle's, borrowing heavily
from pop fare like zombie movies and comic books, it's not without a sharp
satiric edge. What good are gods for anyway, if not for munching on?
If Lalumière's main literary influence, at least within the
fantasy genre, is Lovecraft (with some assistance from Jack Kirby), then Robert
J. Weirsema's is Stephen King. The World More Full of Weeping is a
novella very much in the King mode, from its subject matter - family breakdown,
a plucky kid on his own in the woods - to its style - layers of keenly observed
domestic detail rendered in an everyday, generalized vernacular that doesn't
draw attention to itself. But while the presentation is perfectly controlled and
fluid, building suspense nicely as it moves back-and-forth between the little
boy lost and the search-and-rescue mission to find him, the premise is a bit
conventional and the book doesn't have the same crooked bite that Nickle, for
example, gives much the same theme of crossing the shadow line from youth to
experience in one of his stories.
Like Nickle and Lalumière, Weirsema is a writer whose fantasy is
grounded in a place, in his case a small town in southwestern British Columbia
named Henderson which is (as a fine essay attached as an afterword discusses)
modeled after his own hometown of Agassiz. By grounding his fiction in a
"personal geography" Weirsema gives it a physical and psychological
presence - one made out of the history, culture, and geography of a real place - that the fantastic elements play off against. Or, as Michael Rowe puts it in
his introduction to Monstrous Affections, "It is impossible to
experience horror - which is a destination, not a departure point - without
first experiencing the security of a place, literal or conceptual, from which
the ground will fall away, revealing a vast, awful blackness of terrible
possibility; a cold lightless country of sharp teeth and claws." In each of
these three books an archetypal Canadian literary setting - the forests of BC's
interior, Montreal, the small towns of Ontario - becomes "an eternally
rediscovered country" transformed by the imagination.
In other words: Yes it's Canadian literature. And it's
fantastic.
Notes:
Review first published in Quill & Quire, November 2009. Monstrous
Affections was the first "starred review" I had run in Quill & Quire.
I have been very impressed with the quality of stuff coming out of ChiZine.
Other reviews I've done of their books include Brent Hayward's Filaria
and Robert Boyczuk's Horror
Story and Other Horror Stories.
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