Imagine Borges and Dali hanging out at Pee Wee Herman's playhouse, and you have a brief inkling of what Rosenbaum's fiction is like. The Ant King and Other Stories is Rosenbaum’s debut collection of short fiction, which features pieces have been that have nominated for genre awards, and have appeared in a slew of venues, from Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and McSweeney’s. The content ranges from postmodern fables, flash fiction, pulp fiction, all told in precise and distinctive, if not exactly poetic, prose. The imagery—which is what propels the stories as much as plot—is always startling and surrealistic. Rosenbaum mixes literary forms and narrative styles like a DJ.

The Ant King. A California Fairytale. An absurdist piece about a dot com company owner in modern Silicon Valley searching for his girlfriend, who ahs been abducted by a hacker/being called The Ant King. As interesting as the plot machinations are (straight out of the Orpheus myth), the humorous Simpsons-like details are what make it a pleasure to read. Especially the character called Corpse.

Biographical Notes To ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air Planes,’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Metafiction meets swashbuckling highjinks in a world of zeppelins. Philosophical speculation and the energy of boy’s adventure fiction clash and join in inventive ways.

Valley of the Giants. A widowed woman goes search for This has a fable-like feel, with the magical language being a perfect match for the mysterious events. (This story is available here, on this site.)

Start the Clock. Golden Age style science fiction, where childhood can last forever. The humor is still in the story, with its kids who wear business suits, but there’s a note of seriousness that creeps in.

Embracing-the-New. A high fantasy piece that could have been written by one of the pulp masters, like Clark Ashton Smith. An apprentice makes a new god that espouses a heretical philosophy. This story was unputdownable.

Falling. A flash fiction piece set in a nanotech future that has the depth and complexity of a novella. Romantic and beautiful.

The Book of Jashar. A vampire story set in biblical times, it uses biblical narrative techniques pitch perfectly.

The House Beyond Your Sky. A mosaic slipstream story that mashes together a tale of an abused girl with the story of a mythical being who watches over her. It’s a metaphysical heartbreaking story that avoids mawkishness. Rosenbaum captures the wonder and terror of children

Other Cities. A travelogue full of miniature descriptions of fantastical cities, seemingly inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. From fantasy to allegory to science fiction, this travelogue features the best prose in the collection, with each word carefully chosen and placed. Rosenbaum is more like a jeweler here, than a DJ.

A Siege of Cranes. A mesmerizing fantasy horror story about a man who finds his village destroyed by an evil sorceress and his quest to avenge his family. The plot is truly unpredictable and like a rollercoaster ride.

Not all of the pieces in the collection worked for me. I found some pieces, like ‘The Orange’ too clever and the pastiche of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’ went on for too long. But even these stories infectious, loopy wit and carefully crafted prose. The Ant King is highly recommended for fans of Kelly Link and M. Rickert.

What makes certain writings "interstitial" is largely a matter of expectations, say Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, editors of Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. How, then, to set expectations for the anthology itself? For reader expectations may either highlight or camouflage that this is a good if somewhat homogeneous assemblage of literate, fantastic short stories.

To start with, interstitial fiction is not itself a genre or movement in the conventional sense: it has few inherent characteristics or identifiers. Ignore the back cover braggadocio that interstitial writing is "a new type of fiction"; it has been with us, contradict the editors, since at least Shakespeare. Ignore the frequent refrain that interstitial writing "crosses borders," as this is neither intrinsic nor exclusive to interstitial writing. Concentrate instead on the back cover's suggestion that interstitial writing "falls in the interstices of recognized commercial genres" -- and bear in mind Heinz Insu Fenkl's comments from his Introduction to the anthology, that "an interstice is not an intersection. [...] Literally it means to 'stand between' or 'stand in the middle.'" Not stand between separate genres, necessarily (a semantic issue that plagues many attempted explanations of interstitiality), but as the cover blurb hints, between the commercial aspect of a genre and its wider potential.

Interstitial fiction is a label for fiction in the space between the broadest theoretical basis of a genre or movement and the more narrow marketing category of what is easily sellable in that genre. Envision what we know, or think we know, about the world as a core; envision genres as mechanisms to sample this core, that group and emphasize, add and subtract to bring different aspects of our experience of the world into focus. Fantasy in the broadest sense, for example, can encompass any story that contradicts what we know, or think we know, about possibility in our world. Publishing being a business, publishers tend to favor those combinations of impossibilities that are proven sellers: imaginary worlds; magic; monsters. It is commercially difficult to find a publisher for a story set in our world where something impossible happens that is not in any way magical, or a story where magic exists but never directly does anything, or a story set in a place that may or may not be imaginary. These are some of the interstitial spaces of fantasy. (Genre hybrids -- Star Wars is a classic example -- may cross genre borders, but most are not interstitial because their genre elements are solidly in the commercial areas of their component genres, not these interstitial spaces.) Sometimes however a fiction in an interstitial space will become successful; sometimes such a story will even spawn a movement, a subgenre. At that point both story and space cease being interstitial. Borges's early work was interstitial until the success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late 1960s brought "magical realism" into a full-blown marketing category in English-speaking markets -- at which point Borges was retroactively reclassified. Delany's Dhalgren was interstitial before Sterling coined the term "slipstream." Interstitiality is thus potentially a transitory label, although not necessarily: works such as Peake's Gormenghast remain unique, interstitial. These stories fulfill something of the remit of a genre, without adhering closely to its commercially recognizable tropes and forms.

That definition made, it is easier to set expectations for Interfictions. The book, published by the Interstitial Arts Foundation and distributed by Small Beer Press, contains 19 original stories as well as the introductory essay by Fenkl and a concluding Q&A with the editors, Sherman and Goss. Each story is focused on the gray area between fantastic fiction in a broadly theoretical, non-mimetic sense and one of the common marketing categories of fantastic fiction: fantasy and fabulism; science fiction; horror. Of these the fantasy-fabulism set dominates.

Works that are interstitial with respect to a genre will reflect something of what that genre is -- and is not -- at the time they are created. They are the pieces of the puzzle that fit around the puzzle pieces of genre. In the fantasy stories of Interfictions there is an absence of the violent external conflicts, magical powers, immediacy of presence, and quests to change the authority structures of the world that characterize contemporary commercial fantasy. Instead, there are internal conflicts focused on absence and anxiety; magic that does things to people rather than being used by people, that poses questions rather than solving problems; there is the treatment of Old Testament-based religions as sources of fantasy just as Greek, Norse, etc. often are in commercial fantasy; there is a bringing of modern sensibilities to old stories and old sensibilities to new stories. Considering the broad territory available for interstitial writing you wouldn't expect overarching themes in the volume, but there is one, which proves problematic. There is, in nearly all of these stories, a "post-slipstream" sense of the need, the inevitability, of coming to terms with the often very strange anxieties of place (in a broad sense, not merely geographic) that characterize the modern world. Of accommodating, rather than conquering, the weird.

Christopher Barzak's "What We Know About the Lost Families of ----- House," the first story in the volume, takes this theme almost literally. A haunted house tale told from the collective voice of the small town that the house is part of, there is no protagonist in the traditional sense. Instead, the "we" of the town chronicles the history of ----- House, and the victims who have lived in it, with a parochial yet matter-of-fact tone; the town regards the house's presence as a regrettable but now inseparable part of itself. "If you know how to hear what those walls [of the house] are saying, you will hear unbearable stories, stories you would never imagine possible, stories we would rather turn away from. But we cannot turn away, for they will only follow us."

Other stories in Interfictions present more benign formulations of finding a home in the weird. In Leslie What's "Post Hoc," a pregnant woman tries to mail herself to her ex-boyfriend in hope of reconciliation; when he refuses to sign for her, she finds herself a resident of the post office. This, she discovers, is a better home than any of the more normal houses she might have chosen. It's an absurdist story, an impossible premise joined to realistic details of stamps and forms and labels. Matthew Cheney's "A Map of the Everywhere" is more wholly surreal, a man who wanders from job to job, place to place, before discovering a place for himself -- and love -- off the map of the expected. K. Tempest Bradford's "Black Feather" revolves around a similar sense of finding one's true place, a contemporary woman frustrated by an unrequited crush, who dreams of ravens and family and flying home. It evokes the Grimm fairy tales of the Six Swans/Seven Ravens, with a dash of Native American myth, the raven as a transformative figure. Joy Marchand's "Pallas at Noon" similarly uses myth to evoke a repressed sense of self, in this case the myth of Pallas daughter of Triton, who was accidentally slain by her friend Athena goddess of discipline and craft (and war). It is the story of a seemingly troubled woman struggling to keep herself in place, grounded in the expectations of a stereotypical housewife, at the cost of repressing her complex inner self.

Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, was a troubled woman not known for repressing herself; Veronica Schanoes's story "Rats" presents a "fairy tale" version of Spungen's life, an ode to both the power of story (in giving us a sense of understanding the inner selves of others, of how even those people we find reprehensible may be driven by some need to accommodate the weird) and the essential falseness of story (the lie that people's lives are coherent stories, that end with resolution and have external meaning). Brutal and powerful, it is a story that eats itself alive -- one of the best I've read this year.

"Alternate Anxieties" by Karen Jordan Allen and Holly Phillips's "Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom" resemble each other, both featuring writers struggling with writer's block who are trying to come to terms with the current sources of their anxieties (in the former a geographically distant mother diagnosed with cancer, in the latter a husband taken captive during a diplomatic mission in a foreign land). In both cases a familiarity with the fantastic -- science fictional concepts in Allen's story, fantasy in Phillips's -- is not an escape from the world, but a way of conceptualizing the ambiguities of the world that must be accommodated. "Which world is the real world" is a question both stories ask, with the only possible answer being the world we live in. Vandana Singh's "Hunger" emphasizes this; it is a thoroughly realistic and tragically earnest story of a dinner party, of modern Indian culture, and of how alien the contemporary world can seem when given an external perspective. "Hunger" is a story you might share with someone should you ever wish to convince them of why the fantastic perspective is important:

In a reversal from most other stories in the anthology, Catherynne Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" is a tale told from the perspective of the utter strangeness of the world, of a land that never was, its fantastic residents, and the human man who they take in. Valente is scrupulous in depicting the kingdom of Prester John as though it were a real land, just as (and yet not as) John's letter described it -- griffins, pygmies, the phoenix, the marvelous waterless river, and the Basilica with a ceiling of stars. Description, particularly visual description, dominates "Dirge": the use of simile and metaphor that Valente is often associated with is muted here, to good strategic effect. Simile is a way of putting the strangeness of the world into our own words and concepts; while it is used at the beginning of the tale, in Prester John's arrival, it is soon replaced by detailed description, the lists and tallies of Prester John's letter, as the man becomes acclimated to and accommodated by the land and its people. In this transition "Dirge" highlights the author's skill with deft moments of showing-not-telling that tell so much: "[John the Priest], ever the good teacher, tried to make eye contact with each of us in turn, but he could not look at my eyes" captures the so well the inner conflict of a man stranded in a land of the strange -- and the strangely beautiful -- who stridently lectures others to affirm his own fading belief, before gradually succumbing to wonder, becoming a student, making a home and family. (As in the other top stories of the collection, though, the character's initial anxiety never entirely dissipates.) The section headings of Valente's story correspond to the spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos that had been adopted by Christianity in the middle ages; the ending section, however -- "The Spindle of Necessity" -- reverts to the earlier, pagan cosmology of Plato, indicating a sense of deeper truth, a deeper, non-divine judgment to be made on a person's life choices.

Taken as individual stories those in Interfictions are at the very least uniformly good: taken as "an anthology of interstitial writing," as an argument for interstitiality, their uniformity starts to work against the goals of the collection. The stories individually work as interstitial writing because their pathos stems largely from a thoughtful, adult sense of anxiety of place not often seen in typical genre fantasy, and because the characters generally do not triumph over their anxieties so much as learn to work within them. One starts to wonder, though, reading story after story with this theme, this journey: is this type of story all that commercial genres are missing; is this idea all that interstitial writing has to offer? The self-referentiality -- interstitial fiction about anxiety of place -- is pleasingly clever at first, but wanes on repetition, particularly in the stories that do not offer enough else. The summary of Leslie What's "Post Hoc" -- a woman mails herself to her boyfriend, finds herself living in the post office, and discovers it to be a good home -- more or less is the story. Csilla Kleinheincz's "A Drop of Raspberry" is a beautifully written story (translated by Noémi Szelényi) of a man who has a rebound friendship with a lake after being left by his fiancé...and again, that's it: the "lake" might have well been a human woman given how the story plays out, how there's not enough lakeness to add insight into quintessential humanity. Colin Greenland's "Timothy" is a shapeshifter romance without the romance, just the sex: the raw and instinctive versus the civilized and expected. It's a clever concept but all that remains after reading it is the concept, none of the story. In terms of fantastic stories made memorable by characterization, settings or themes stemming from diverse ideas thoroughly explored, multiple good ideas, or ideas that feel dangerous, the uniformity of the original stories of Interfictions suffers somewhat in comparison to the variety offered by other recent anthologies that also take a broad view of fantasy, such as Best American Fantasy and The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. And despite the broad potential scope of interstitiality, there are no stories here that play off non-fantastic genres such as crime fiction, thrillers, chick lit, etc.; despite the multidisciplinary, multimedia aspirations of interstitiality, there are only one or two stories here that challenge the basic forms of prose storytelling. Instead, the highlights of the anthology -- "Dirge" and "Hunger" among them -- tend to be the most conventional stories ("Rats" being a notable exception), that hew closest to established genres.

There is, within the established genres of the fantastic at least, the feeling that we've entered something of a feedback loop: that change has come to beget change, faster and faster. The transmission speed of ideas facilitated by the Internet combined with the slowness of traditional publishing mean that many movements are defined and codified before standard-bearing stories appear (such as Mundane SF); subgenres like cyberpunk and the New Weird spring fully formed from single works and end before they are fully understood. Our capacity to focus on narrower subgenres has increased ("steampunk" begets "clockpunk"; readers don't just read "fantasy," they read "epic fantasy" and "gritty epic fantasy") as has our ability to process genre hybrids (paranormal romance, paranormal mystery). On one hand this may mean that there are even more (if smaller) "spaces between," more need for interstitial fiction (Sherman and Goss report that an Interfictions 2 is in the planning stages). On the other hand, electronic cataloging systems increasingly are pushing us from a categorizing world to a tagging and linking world, and in this world the concept of commercial genres as immense gravity wells for fiction -- and thus the utility of the interstitial concept -- may become historical relics. Genre readers familiar with Small Beer Press, the distributor of Interfictions, and the authors it has published (among them Kelly Link, Alan DeNiro, and indeed Theodora Goss) will already have a fairly broad definition of the fantastic, fairly relaxed expectations. Fantastic fiction is also increasingly finding a home in mainstream bookshelves, and the mainstream so far seems able to accommodate marketing novels such as Never Let Me Go, The Road and Blindness (to say nothing of the fantastic short fiction published in magazines ranging from The New Yorker to McSweeney's) without needing to further divide and categorize by any standard other than reading enjoyment.

Pragmatically, however -- and interstitiality is first and foremost a movement born of pragmatism -- right now there are gaps in genre categories, gaps in how people understand the difference between genres and marketing categories. Interstitial fiction is important because it can both point out and fill in these gaps. While the somewhat limited thematic scope of this initial Interfictions volume works against it as a manifesto, celebration or sampler of interstitiality -- in some ways even as a collection of fiction -- readers willing to savour the stories of Interfictions individually will find their expectations largely met, and likely at times exceeded.

-- Matt Denault

Theodora Goss only began publishing her short fiction and poetry in 2002 but already her work has appeared in some of the genre’s most respected publications (including “Realms of Fantasy”, “Strange Horizons”, “Polyphony” and “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet”). No less than 6 of her published stories, out of only 11 to date, have appeared in “best of” collections (along with a good deal of her poetry) and in 2004 Small Beer Press collected four of these, together with some unpublished material, into a perfectly formed collection - “The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories” – as part of their occasional chapbook series. Those in the know have confidently proclaimed her One-To-Watch and linked her name with that of rising star Kelly Link (who, as you all well know, co-founded Small Beer). Such high praise warrants investigation, and thus...

At only 59 pages long “The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories” is a slim volume; indeed, I’m almost tempted to call it a pamphlet (although “chapbook” has a delicious 19th century ring to it that seems to warrant my $6). I sat down with it at 9am this morning, meaning to read one story before embarking on another novel. I finished it at 11.30am (note-taking and breaks between each piece included), by which time I had been thoroughly converted to the growing cult of this Hungarian-born, American-raised storyteller. Put simply: Goss is a true word-alchemist, a mistress of the transformative short story that I’m in the process of discovering on the borders of genre fiction. She writes stories (and poems) which are located in half a dozen networks of fantastical literature - enmeshed in fairytale, folklore and myth, invoking late 18th century Gothic and mid 19th century Medievalism - but remakes and reorients them for her own lyrical purposes.

The opening title story, first published in “Realms of Fantasy” in 2002, is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in twelve different voices. The subject matter might sound ubiquitous – certainly alternate versions of fairytales are dime a dozen these days – but it is anything but. Firstly, it subtly posits an alternate history of Britain (or “Britannia”), one in which Elizabeth I married the Earl of Essex and bore a son, in which the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s never happened and in which Communism flourished in the 1930s. Thereby the story of Sleeping Beauty is also the story of a transformed nation, in which all of our own values and political norms are alien and virtually unthinkable. And secondly, it thrusts aside the unifying vision of the fairytale narrator and replaces it with a dozen voices. We see the dynamics of the story through the eyes of the Witch, the Magician, the Queen, the King, the King’s Mother, the Princess, the Spinning Wheel, a Gardener, the Tower, a Dog, the Prince and the Rose itself: animate and inanimate things, active and passive players perceive the situation from their own unique viewpoint, interweaving a number of secondary narratives. We learn, for example, how the Witch (who was once the King’s mistress) comes by the central curse; we share in the pregnant Queen’s loneliness, isolation and Arthurian idealisms; we are presented with King’s innumerable political dilemmas; we are even made party to the “birth” and sympathies of the spinning wheel that will prick the finger that will bring about the curse. What emerges is a very full exploration of the archetypes of fairytale, each broken down, made new and given voice – the many conflicts and motives of such a simple story’s participants are made clear. But in the end, Goss refuses to give us an ending. Instead she tells us how she would tell it (the communist Prince would be obliterated, and an alliance between the Witch and the Woken Princess she once cursed would blossom) but leaves us to make our own decisions about what should and shouldn’t happen in a fairytale.

By far my favourite story in the collection was “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow”, a Hungarian anti-fairytale in which Goss posits an apathetic student’s revolution. Eventually everything is reduced, bleached and made symmetrical, all in pursuit of a beauty which is also a kind of death. Fundamentalism and psychological control are at the centre of the story, and, indeed, it becomes clear throughout, that Goss is politically inclined. Not to say that she has a specific agenda, but that she envisions a series of worlds in which difference and choice are negated or ignored and seems to ask: are we anymore awake to what is happening in our own world? Sensory loss and numbness are recurrent themes (silence and sleep in “The Rose in…”, blindness and coldness in “The Rapid Advance…”), as is an inability to respond correctly to stimulus or ask the right questions (as in “Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold”). This last, which also lambastes the claustrophobia, doubts and pressures of academia perfectly, is the most surreal and disorientating of the stories. Alistair Berkowitz, a failing English professor obsessed with the fragmentary poems of a French recluse, finds himself in a dream-like world and is offered the chance to cross the “Threshold”, die to our world (the “inner islands”) and “progress on to the outer islands”. Haunted by his innumerable failings and the academic success of his ex-girlfriend, he struggles to interpret the new world about him and tap into the profound.

In “Lily, With Clouds” Eleanor Tolliver, southern Belle and rich socialite, visits her dying sister Lily in a run-down house packed with her husband’s portraits of her, and in “Her Mother’s Ghosts” a little girl is haunted by images from her mother’s past and the legacies of communism. Both are deeply concerned with the relationships between women (as is the title story itself), and also with the myriad interweaving of reality, dream, memory and emotion that pervades the selection.

Finally, the nine poems neatly corralled in the final pages reflect and represent aspects of the stories and highlight the diversity of the collection. “What Her Mother Said”, which uses a wickedly arranged and disconcerting rhyming scheme, imagines Red Riding Hood’s advice to her own daughter, while “The Ophelia Cantos” commingles Shakespearean poetry and Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Both “By the Tidal Pools” and “Helen of Sparta” envision some of classical mythologies most famous women in their old age, and two bear themed poems confront us with possibilities of hybridised sexuality and experience.

Which, as you can imagine, is a hell of a lot to get through in just 59 pages; the very reason the chapbook idea works in this case is because Goss’s work is so thematically and thoughtfully dense. Her work is crystalline, visual and properly challenging, capturing the surreal wonder and horror of fantastical terror with a lyrical simplicity. And it seems to me that chapbooks like this one are perfectly formed troves of boundary-breaking fantasy for savouring between the tome-like books we genre-ites love to devour. However, if you’d like to wait for a bigger slice of Goss-goodness, her first full collection “In the Forest of Forgetting”, is due from Prime Books sometime in 2006. ‘Tis definitely on my wishlist I assure you.

_{Fantasybookspot - fantasy book reviews and fantasy book author interviews}

I can safely say that I’ve never met a Kelly Link story that I didn’t like, and, after re-reading her alchemical debut collection “Stranger Things Happen”, I’m just about ready to tell you why. First, a little recap…

“Stranger Things…” burst onto the shorter fiction scene in 2001, published by Small Beer Press (who also put out my favourite ‘zine – “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet” - and which Link co-founded). It was immediately seized upon by some big names, both in-genre and out of it. Andrew O’Hehir of The New York Times Book Review wrote that: “She embraces fantasy in its fullest sense and in doing so transcends all considerations of genre”, and Neil Gaiman called her “the best short story writer currently out there…” Ellen Datlow, John Clute and Sean Stewart all added their own respected voices in praise.

And what you get for your $16 (£8) is this: not only an enigmatic splash of cover-art reminiscent (for me at least) of Scooby-Do cartoons (!) but also 11 pieces of delicious and wickedly subterranean short fiction. These stories are, by turns, funny and dark, horrifying and charming…and, more often than not, all of the above together. They come in the guise of the contemporary Gothic - not urban or weird or New as such – but packed with the unforeseen and unexpected of everyday. They play on our modern fears…the horrors of the modern environment, of contemporary Western culture.

“Ruthless” is a good word for Link’s authorial approach – in many of her stories she represents the family, the domestic environment, love, sex and the parental bond with a glassy, sardonic grin. She re-brands the happy family, distorting, revealing and galvinising the buried truths of our modern, often pre-packaged lives.

For example, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, which opens the collection is, in many ways, a muted, but haunting taste of what is to come. It is the story of a mind in posthumous disintegration, of a dead man striving to write “home” to his wife (whose name he can no longer remember) from the deserted beach and hotel where he finds himself stranded. As the world fractures around him, a dozen signs revealing the insecurities of his living years, he is increasingly troubled by silent, spectrous “Loolies”. The “Loolies” were, for me, the most daunting of all Link’s creations. They were reminiscent of an abused, voyeuristic image of our televisual times: the bloated and bald child, pumped with chemo and pale with leukaemia seen on a whole glut of reality TV hospital shows. Thereby we are confronted with the ultimate taboo – the stigma of child death – within a psychological study of adult death. It was definitely enough to make me feel discomforted and emotionally tested (dare I say: excited?).

The pieces that follow range from the delicious horror of “The Specialist’s Hat” and the black magical realism of “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back” to alternative fairy stories like my favourite “Travels with the Snow Queen”. I was particularly fascinated by the contemporary mythologizing of “Flying Lessons”, which transposed Gods into my very own habitat of St. Andrews in Scotland (a dazzling, disconcerting coincidence). Not to forget the humour is there too: blond aliens invade New York in “Most of My Friends are Two Thirds Water” and a girl detective takes a trip to the Underworld to solve a case involving tap-dancing bank-robbers in “The Girl Detective.”

Still, utterly compelling as her writing is, I find I have to ask myself: Is Link’s work really fantasy? Well, yes and no and yes. She identifies herself as a fantasist, and her stories plumb the depths of the possibilities of the genre. But, as is probably clear, she also dips her hand into horror and crime fiction, literary fiction and science fiction. Her storytelling crosses and re-crosses boundaries, making for an exhilarating kind of disorientation and creating the fertile liminality in which the best fantasists of recent years – Vandermeer, Mieville, Gaiman and Ford – are currently thriving. Link’s work won’t be to everyone’s taste: there are no “traditional” stories here, no classic high fantasy scenarios and escapist comfort is decidedly thin on the ground (let me be honest: some of this stuff is just downright creepy). You’ll have to willing to take a series of very odd outings.

But, if you’re willing to take the plunge with it, Link’s work promises to eat at you indefinitely (and this is what marks it as outstanding rather than just momentarily compelling). You’ll finish one story only to find that you’re not ready to move onto the next; that last one just won’t let your mind rest. Like all the best shorter fiction writers Link opens doors in our psyches, but steps back quietly as you go through them. She allows *you* the fullest rein, the greatest creative potential, in her skewed worlds. I think it is here, more than anywhere in contemporary fantasy, that we become co-creators, co-authors.

So…read the stories, but read them slow…give yourself time to chew on them …deliberate…let them become their own strange things, happening.

'On the Spot' Interview 12/14/2005 with Kelly Link by Jay

_{Fantasybookspot - fantasy book reviews and fantasy book author interviews}

As you may know, I’m a big fan of small press publications (there really are lots of fantastical-fiction-diamonds to be mined in unexpected places); you may not know, however, that I’m particularly fond of the Small Beer Press, an enterprise jointly founded by Gavin J. Grant and the much-lauded short fiction writer Kelly Link. Why do I love them so? Well, because Small Beer are making it their business to publish some of the uncanniest and disturbing fantastical fiction around and there’s nothing I like better. Jennifer Stevenson’s dream-like white-trash earth-magic erotica – Trash Sex Magic - pressed all the usual small press buttons and a few that I wasn’t expecting pushed. Written in a liquid prose that mirrors the natural magic of Stevenson’s sensuous environment and populated by mysteriously sexualised protagonists, this is a book that combines the dynamics of magical realism with those of romance and fantasy.

The Somershoe women have a gift for seduction. Gelia Somershoe, aged 60 and still weaving sexual magic in bright pink hotpants and plunging necklines, plays her cat and mouse games with 20-something students, while her young daughter Raedawn likes men and they like her. They live together in a small, poor trailer park community on the boggy banks of the Fox River, acting as guardians to the orphaned Gowdy boys – King, Willy and Davy – and supporting the drunkard “Uncle Cracker” and his two imp-children (very literally) Ink and Mink. They live to strange rhythms that rock through the earth, surviving on a heady mix of river water and dream and responding physically to the sexualised energy of the great tree that stands across the US 31 road. Raedawn has been “crossing the road” to the tree since she was 14, making love to it in a strange, disturbing ritual of fecundity and passion. Her life is tied to tree and to the surrounding land, as well as to the extraordinary misfits that constitute her family; she is literally rooted to the place.

But developers come. They tear down the old tree; rip its deep roots from the ground, engaged in bringing suburbia to the Fox River bank. With them comes Alexander Caebeau, a lonely exile from his native Bahamas, and a bucket-loader for a construction company. He is tired of cutting down trees and putting up ugly buildings, while Raedawn has just lost her inhuman lover. It seems like her way of life is rapidly collapsing. Her mother knows more about the power of the tree than she ever did and is keeping old secrets from her. The riverfront developers want her and her family gone. She may just be finding new love with Alexander Caebeau (who is, quite literally, putting down new roots of his own). And the Fox River, finally freed of the constraints that have anchored it in place, is beginning to rise: something magical and inexplicable is about to happen…

First a warning: Trash Sex Magic is most definitely X-Rated and if you are easily offended or disturbed by sexual content I’d turn back now. Stevenson’s eroticism is explicit and all facets of sexuality and sexual life are vividly and visually explored; we are confronted with same-sex love, self-love, promiscuity, rape, and paedophilia. Almost uniquely, Stephenson is not afraid of making us square up to this question: What is the basis of the continuation of life? Once we’re dug past the socio-cultural patina, once we’ve cracked the glaze of family idylls and plunged headfirst into nature’s reality…isn’t it just all about bodies moving in rhythms in fertile places? And if so, is sex so simple…is it so transparent in its motives and products? What does it do to us? Does it degrade or empower, enrich or impoverish? Jennifer Stevenson’s debut novel asks all these questions and it does it with an admirable subtlety.

It’s not every author who could make intercourse with a tree a sympathetic act, or reveal the strengths and weakness of society in the lives of impoverished trailer trash. But Stevenson’s prose is wholly suited: it is electric with description, especially when the subject at hand is nature. The Fox River bank explodes into life, is rarefied by magic (the birds nesting in the tree that is no longer there, the Somershoe women walking through hillsides) and is animated by the spirit of magical realism. Ecologically, this is moralistic tract, a fictional revenge of the land, which swallows up its enemies and protects its allies.

Stevenson’s sexual politics are also on display. My favourite character after Alexander was Suzy Wohnberg, assistant to the executive overseeing the Fox River project. She has been brought along on a site visit to act as eye-candy for investors and to pleasure John Fowier; she believes that by acting in this way she can achieve respect and promotion in her career. The rising Fox River teaches her otherwise, luring her out of her hotel window and enticing her to experience her body as a powerful vessel and not as a hollow bargaining chip. The scenes of Suzy in the river are some of the most thought-provoking and liberating of the novel.

But, saying this is a book all about sex is a little unfair. It is also a novel about interpersonal relationships and the bonds of family, friendship and place. Both Raedawn and Alexander are searching for their true “homes”, and possessions and profit are disavowed in the name of belonging. Nor is everyone content on the riverbank – King Gowdy has only recently returned after escaping into the army. He despises the squalor and the apathy of his adopted family, misunderstanding their rooted-ness for laziness; he considers the dangerous fecundity of the environment as a menace and rejects the magic. Others, like the mysterious imp-like Ink and Mink, are overwhelmed and overcome by the power of the riverbank and succumb to its call with disturbing consequences.

There are some general flaws in the novel’s construction – some elements of the story are touched upon and then passed over later, while other interesting magical events are unexplained or only momentary. But in general these are minor problems, noticeable but far from inhibiting the flow of the narrative or the prose.

Ellen Kushner called this novel “phantasmagorical” in her review and I’d be tempted to agree, adding my own adjectives: sexy, disturbing, liberating, haunting. Trash Sex Magic is a rare modern tour-de-force of magical realism and erotica combined, putting me in mind of Angela Carter’s great classic The Magic Toyshop, and accomplishing the blend without descending into either pornography or shallow cliché.

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