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Gathering the Bones
edited by Jack Dann, Ramsey
Campbell, and Dennis Etchison
(HarperCollins Voyager (Australia), AU$29.95, trade paperback, March
2003, 466 pages; Tor Books (USA), US$27.95, hardcover, August 2003,
448 pages.)
The relative goodness of a science fiction  or
fantasy story is perennially debateable and therefore largely user-defined
('user' here taking in writer, reader, and the holy ghost that their
book-locked interaction conjures up) -- the idea is most important,
no wait, it's the characters, originality of secondary world is the
prime directive ... Horror's abiding obligation is to induce fear --
pure and simple. Whether it's a slowly creeping dread, the tip of an
icepick down your spine, or a hot liquid twist in your gut, horror's
inherently promised payoff is to scare the reader witless, and still
be doing so long after they've put the book down.
By this reckoning, then, how good, how fear-inducing, are the thirty-four
stories that flesh out Gathering The Bones? For one thing, it's
a pleasant surprise that yet another doorstop 'original' anthology in
a field that relies to a large extent on its readers' knowledge of standard
tropes does actually show some marked seams of originality in its contents.
As well, the tri-continental flavouring of Gathering The Bones
is refreshing, the editors giving equal space to talent from their respective
chunks of rock (Dann from Australia, Campbell from the UK -- well, Britain
thinks it's a continent, doesn't it? --  and
Etchison from the US). Inevitably there is a clutch of non-starters
and no-hopers (thus obeying the anthology version of the 'there's-always-one'
rule), but there's also surprisingly little that is middle-of-the-road,
and a large handful of the good stuff, including at least one tale that,
if the world were a fine and just place, would be winning awards all
over it.
In the interests of, well, interest, I'll pass over the bad and the
ordinary, mentioning only that the bad are mostly (though not exclusively)
perpetrated by first-timers and the ordinary by, um, well, the ordinary.
The former have some potentially rewarding ideas that they manage to
execute, period. From the latter, you can just choose your own favourites
and chew on their various gobbets of mildly diverting brain-candy at
your leisure. With so much work of a similar quality out there, sardined
onto the shelves and into the remainder bins, I'm increasingly declined
to bother reviewing any of it. So I'll just concentrate on the good
stuff.
A fair portion of the better offerings are prime examples of what can
be done by taking established tropes, stripping them down to their bare
essentials, and then reconfiguring them in startling and innovative
ways -- not a new writing technique, by any means, but if it works,
so what? Steve Nagy's 'The Hanged Man of Oz', for instance, is an atmospheric
and witty recombination of Ringu and L Frank Baum, which pretty
much tells you all you need to know but certainly shouldn't stop you
reading it. Christmas telly will never be quite the same. Kim Newman's
'The Intervention' is The Trial for the Dilbert generation, with
every shuddering tic of Kafka's 250 pages of fractured paranoia crammed
gasping into a mere 18. And the protagonist is even called Keith. Lisa
Tuttle's '"The Mezzotint"' is simultaneously a frank homage and a revivifying
palimpsest of M R James's story of almost the same name (yes, those
extra quote marks are deliberate). It is a hall of very dark mirrors,
and very worrying screensavers.
Gahan Wilson's 'The Big Green Grin' is a neat little urban fairy tale
about sibling rivalry that'll have you warning your kids about vacant
lots and paying newfound respect to Mother Nature. Scott Emerson Bull's
'Mr Sly Stops For A Cup Of Joe' is short, fierce, and very funny, a
set-piece encapsulation of the broader, darker absurdities of the world
and all its egos. Mr Sly is one of the most potent and distressingly
likeable übermonsters I've ever met (not that you would ever want to
actually meet him).
And then there is Isobelle Carmody, a writer of the most consistently
evocative and sensuous prose, with 'The Dove Game', a characteristically
shadowed tale of twisted love and fractured time and the beautiful,
painful signs we create to try (and usually fail) to tell other people
the stories we live by, the stories we make our lives out of. Carmody
is always worth reading, and for sheer virtuosity of style and plot,
'The Dove Game' is worth the purchase of the whole book.
For me, though, the most disturbing tales, the ones that still give
me the existential creeps several weeks after reading them -- and therefore,
by my initial measure, the best -- are Chris Lawson and Simon Brown's
'No Man's Land', Mike O'Driscoll's 'Sounds Like', and Robert Devereaux's
'Li'l Miss Ultrasound'. Aptly enough (and entirely unplanned, I assure
you), that's one from each continent (Oz, the UK, and the US respectively).
And oddly enough, the source of much of the horror in all three is sound.
Lawson and Brown's 'No Man's Land' is set in the trenches of WWI France,
with a rapidly dwindling squad of Tommies telling each other ghost stories
between aborted forays over the wire. The stories they tell focus on
the carrion-craving ghouls that are thought to roam the eponymous field
of mud and bones between their own trenches and the Hun. The narrator
finds the line between story and reality blurring as more of his comrades
are lost in pointless attacks, until he discovers for himself exactly
what it is that lurks in the lethal non-space between the lines. This
story is soaked in a constant and remorseless sense of contrast. The
first words plunge us into the endless din of battle, and we veer from
that to the sibilant quiet of night and whispered ghosts and back to
the brain-shattering noise until we wonder, much like the grunts in
the trenches, what is really being heard, and what is the very last
thing they might hear.
Tellingly, 'No Man's Land' is also marked by a contrast-that-isn't:
this is a horror story, and a scary one at that, but it's not as scary
as some of the others in Gathering The Bones. The real horror
here is the war itself, something that actually happened, that was real.
The fact of it, the fact of what war makes men do to survive it, washes
into and through the imagined horror, so that the fiction -- the monster,
the bogeyman, the dreaded thing itself -- becomes the filtered, manageable
aspect of the reality. The imagined thing is still, always, terrifying,
incapacitating, not of this world and therefore beyond understanding
-- and so, finally, almost a relief. It is the end result of something
we made, though we did not ourselves make it; so all we have to understand
is that we are frightened of it. War, on the other hand, we are too
frightened of to understand. 'No Man's Land' is neither the best written
story in the collection, nor the out-and-out scariest (though it's in
the top third on both counts). But it tells us to be frightened of something
that matters. It compels us to see that horror is always, finally, real.
O'Driscoll's 'Sounds Like' is psychological horror delivered at a peak
of accomplishment. It is the story of Larry, a thoroughly average man,
and his gradual mental disintegration as he loses first his child and
then his wife. Sounds ordinary enough. But as each catastrophe befalls
him Larry finds that his hearing becomes more and more acute, to the
point where he is hearing sounds that he cannot possibly hear:
... beads of sweat rolling down his chest; a dry crack like
snapped twigs, which are the spasms of his facial muscles ... the creeping
of insects in the walls; the scuttle of a spider across the ceiling;
the babble of microscopic bedbugs in the sheets.
While these may be sounds that we all imagine, or try not to imagine,
we can hear, for Larry they are absolutely real, and he has no choice
but to hear them. Somehow, he has lost one of the filters that keep
the world at bay. At work, as a monitor in a call centre (a nice touch),
he starts cutting the volume on his headset so that he is listening
to hours of dead air, just for some relief. But with every attempt to
block the aural offensive, it only renews and reinforces itself, so
that Larry's methods of defence become ever more desperate and extreme.
The end result is inevitable but nonetheless shocking, and is nothing
even remotely like a relief.
Devereaux's 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' is almost indescribable. It is,
in all the right ways, disgusting, appalling, repulsive -- quite literally
horrifying. It takes two current, persistent, and already disturbing
human propensities -- the sexual commodification of childhood in the
name of some spurious higher abstract like beauty or innocence or truth;
and our dumb willingness to be led by rather than to constructively
control the capabilities of technology -- and pushes them to their hideously
logical limits. Basically, advanced digital imaging techniques allow
pregnant women to airbrush and animate ultrasound renderings of their
unborn children in ever more provocative intrauterine wardrobes and
catwalk poses in order for said women and their ultrasonographers and
their managers to win national foetal beauty pageants.
Now, even the most jadedly cynical of moral relativists ought to find
their stomach rebelling at such a scenario. And that's basically the
point. 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' could easily have been a sensationalist
shocker-for-the-hell-of-it, a Daily Star-style headline grabber
with literary pretensions. What Devereaux has produced, however, is
a sensitively handled, sharply characterised, and utterly riveting story
with a deeply and seriously satirical sensibility threading through
every sentence. Everyone in this story is a monster, one way or another.
Everyone who reads it will hate it. Everyone who reads it and hates
it and bothers to stop and think why they hate it will find that they
love it in the same breath. There won't be that many that bother, though
(the editors obviously did, to their credit). That's why it's such a
good story -- it knows that.
'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' ought to win everything. But it won't.
Review by Robert
Guy Cook.
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