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Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction
edited by Alan Bissett
(Polygon, £9.99, 222 pages, April 2001; ISBN: 0748662847)
It began in 1981, with Alasdair Gray's first novel, Lanark: A Life
in Four Books, a massive and dauntingly dense tome of  Kafkaesque
and Joycean ambitions imbued with a peculiarly dark sense of humour.
Then, in 1984, Iain Banks stirred things up with his controversial and
disturbingly funny The Wasp Factory. In the late 1980s, Ian Rankin
and Philip Kerr fed the fire with their respective twists on the suspense
tale. And, when, in 1993, Irvine Welsh joined the party with Trainspotting,
the new wave of strange and macabre Scottish fiction became impossible
to ignore.
These writers explore the outré, spanning the range from dystopian
science fiction to junkie hallucinations and from Nazi atrocities to
ritual mutilations. In that spirit, Damage Land celebrates Scottish
fiction's predilection for the bizarre, with new and recent weird tales
of millennial theme parks, sexual politics, obsessed stalkers, people
growing extra heads, and transformative encounters between the human
and the nonhuman.
In an impassioned introduction and an idiosyncratic bibliography, editor
Alan Bissett traces the roots of this penchant all the way back to the
eighteenth century and Robert Burns and works his way to the present,
noting along the way authors such as Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Robert Buchan, and Muriel Spark.
None of the literati mentioned so far are among the contributors to
Damage Land. Instead, Bissett anthologizes the very latest generation
of emerging writers. These authors, true to Bissett's intention, take
the gothic out of its cliché environments and relate it to contemporary
concerns, as have Gray, Banks, and Welsh.
Damage Land is a treasure chest of creepy and quirky treats
showcasing the diversity of gothic fiction and 20 of its newest voices.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 13 October 2001.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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