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Black Juice
by Margo Lanagan
(Orion, £8.99, 227 pages, hardback, first published 2004, this
edition published 16 February 2006. Gollancz, £7.99, 227 pages,
paperback, first published 2007, 8 February 2007.)
Review by Gary Couzens
 In
2004, Margo Lanagan was known primarily as a writer of children's and
young-adult fiction in her native Australia. Black Juice, a short-story
collection, was another book for the same market. But, as is the way
of these things, it attracted attention and word spread. In 2005, it
won the World Fantasy Award, proving - as if I didn't know already -
that I shouldn't make predictions in print, even online print. (On this
very site, I said that Lucius Shepard's Trujillo was a surefire
winner.)
Anyone who still thinks that YA fiction is a light, unchallenging read,
will be quickly disabused when they pick up this book. In the opening
story, "Singing My Sister Down" (a World Fantasy Award winner
and Hugo and Nebula nominee, though it's neither SF nor fantasy -- it
is arguably horror) Ikky has killed her husband. Her punishment is to
be sunk in a tar pit, and the story is that farewell-ceremony-cum-execution,
narrated by Ikky's brother. Also in this book we have two men assassinating
clowns at a convention in revenge for childhood abuse. In "The
Point of Roses", a story added to the British edition, a boy's
psychic powers bring about a reconciliation of an adult couple. These
are frequently dark stories, not necessarily comforting, with a distinctive
Australian flavour.
Short fiction covers a wide field, from short-shorts (or vignettes,
or flash fiction) at one extreme to novellas at the other, and most
writers have a story length which generally suits them best. To take
examples that I have reviewed here, Lucius Shepard specializes in novellas
and longer novelettes, rarely going below 10,000 words; likewise Elizabeth
Hand. Joe Hill's stories frequently come in around the 7-10,000 word
mark. The first thing to notice about Lanagan's stories is that they
are short stories. "Singing My Sister Down" comes in
at 3000 words, and all but one of the eleven in this book are under
5000. Yet all of these stories seem to contain much more than their
short length would suggest: Lanagan's style is very compressed. Exposition
in the normal sense is all but absent: we are plunged into the middle
of a situation, of a world, of a viewpoint (not always a human one --
"Sweet Pippit" involves a herd of elephants) and it is up
to us to piece it all together from what we pick up as the smallest
detail or inference. These stories gain on second readings, where our
greater familiarity with the events of the stories enables us to appreciate
the richness of Lanagan's striking use of language. Not always an easy
read, nor comfortable, but certainly a rewarding one, Black Juice
is one of the major collections of the last few years. It's also good
to see a major publisher issuing a book of short stories, a rare thing
these days.
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