I need one more book to review for my Spooky Books month. Oo, 23 stories and poems by Mike Allen, in a collection that includes weird fiction, high fantasy, and body-horror? Thanks, don’t mind if I do! Click the jump for a review of Aftermath of an Industrial Accident.
It would be nice to include a detailed review of each and every story in this collection, but that would easily make this review longer than most of the stories themselves. (Not kidding, these are skillfully compact snippets of fiction, especially the poems, like Allen’s ruminations of the myriad ways to die in “Six Waking Nightmares Poe Gave Me”, or the strip-mining of his own nightmares in “The Night Watchman Dreams His Rounds at the REM Sleep Factory”.) Here instead are some of the stories that, heh, jumped out at me.
Several of these stories are connected to each other and to stories in Allen’s previous collection Unseeming, so a little homework might be in order if you want to get the full effect. “Follow The Wounded One” is actually a sequel to a previous story “The Hiker’s Tale”, and it’s part of the same world as another story in this collection, “The Cruelest Team Will Win”. They’re both hallucinatory urban fantasies, in a version of reality where some people have access to magic and two bodies, one in our world and an animal-form in the spirit world. The ability to turn into, say, a gigantic bluejay with a taste for venomous demon-ghost-spiders sounds irresistible. In fact the main character of “The Cruelest Team Will Win” has to fight the impulse to fly away from the petty concerns of this world, like jerk bosses and student loans. The animal form isn’t a protection though, in fact in both stories it’s pretty much the opposite of that.
“…our world of meat, metal and bone is a dangerous place, but the spirit world is a hundred times worse.”
Both stories are also excellent examples of the kind of pacing that the author uses, where backstory and mythology is delivered in a flash, but the scene of a monster stalking wounded prey through the forest crawls by agonizingly slowly. “Follow The Wounded One” is also the best example of the abrupt ending that some of these have. I was a lot happier when I found out that this is part of a series, because my initial reaction was WAIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME THAT’S THE END?
“Longsleeves” and “The Ivy Smothered Palisade” are two other connected stories, taking place in (or very near) the city of Calcharra (different time periods though). “Longsleeves” features a woman rescued from a horrific death and transformed into a fox-headed servant of the witch who rescued her. This is high fantasy with the kind of flowing prose that’s almost poetry, with lovely, haunting fantasy elements mixed with shocking violence and a very dark history of women being tortured and murdered for generations. But oh my, the details of the rooms in the hollow tree (trees? something very strange with the physics going on) where the witch lives are just endlessly fascinating.
In one, dried leaves spun forever in a slow cyclone. In another, glass windows honeycombed the walls, but Merav could make no sense of the roiling chaos of color outside the panes.
In “The Ivy Smothered Palisade” the author so effectively drops the reader into the middle of the plot that I honestly thought this was a continuation from another story, or possibly the first draft of novel that’s missing the first chapter. We spend so much time in the backstory of the main character (lost her parents to a failed revolution, then escaped from an orphanage into a castle that is NOT A GOOD PLACE TO BE ) that just when we catch up to the present day (and the realization of just who has been slaughtering entire families and under who’s authority) boom, the action ends. I was left wondering what’s going to happen next and is there a chance that this can be expanded into a book?
It’s odd to think that horror stories can be primarily character studies, but that’s what Allen has done with most of these, if not all of them. The violence and the madness and creeping terror of something waiting for you just around the corner are all amazingly effective, but it’s what we see inside the character’s head that come across the most clearly. The writer Haley in “Burn the Kool Kids at the Stake” should have had the perfect life: a successful author in a book-filled dreamhome, everything built to her exact specifications right down to the hand-carved wooden console for her computer and the fantastical decorations on ever surface. The problem is that someone has written a story involving her works and put her name on it, and she’s finding that in the internet age a denial is no match for a fantasy that everyone wants to believe.
Also, someone’s breaking into her house.
Meanwhile the Korean war veteran in “The Sun Saw” has to deal with a Lovecraftian cult that bleeds and disfigures its victims in order to feed their rituals, but also with something much worse: the everyday racism and violence against black Americans in the 1950’s South. Okay, well maybe being turned into some kind of living battery for a horror beyond the stars is worse, but I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a story that digs down into the hopelessness of knowing that even if you escape an unkillable horror you still have to deal with a world where lynching is just one of those things that happens…
“Tardigrade” is another example of the author drawing out the tension to an amazing degree. It’s an interesting format, narrated by someone spying on woman who’s being terrorized by computer videos being sent to her by…well it isn’t exactly clear who is sending her the videos. This is definitely a story where the not knowing is the entire point, and it’s somehow made even more chilling by the way the victim’s dialogue is in italics instead of quotes, which gives the impression that her voice is coming from a long way away, or screaming behind glass. And it seems to be two stories here: what the woman thinks is happening, and then what’s actually happening.
And then there’s “Binding”. This one is a classic Scary Story Told Late At Night, with the long drawn-out details and the calculated pauses as the teller gradually hypnotizes a group of young college students who only think they’re too worldly to believe a word of it.
Now we get to my favorites, like “Tick Flick”. I liked this one a lot. It’s a heartwarming tale of that painful middle ground between childhood and adulthood, where you don’t know what your place is supposed to be in the universe but whatever it is you’re pretty sure you’re doing it wrong. But it’s also about those times when one simple act of almost offhand kindness can absolutely turn every bit of that around.
Aaand it’s set in the world where people have more than one set of shoulders, where civic duty involves blood, and movie snacks scream for mercy when you’re eating them.
“Drift From The Windrows” made me think this was a character’s last will and testament, or at the very least an “in case of my brutal death by creatures from another dimension the plans can be found…”. But it isn’t. It’s an apology.
Oh boy, “Puppet Show”. It’s epic. A delicious, horrifying, beautiful rock band performance that’s all high-tech puppets and special effects. Grisly. Gorgeous. I’m stunned at how the author has managed to pack an entire world, and rock lyrics, and a gruesome type of “medical” technology, and a soul-shudderingly awful business model in just over a dozen pages, but by god it WORKS as a standalone story. This one comes with a giant accusing finger pointed at our insatiable need for a spectacle, especially if it has a moral attached so we can all act like we’ve actually accomplished any damn thing at all because someone is raising awareness.
The book’s title story “Aftermath of an Industrial Accident” is another nice bit of misdirection, along with full on body-horror. We start mid-massacre, with two hapless scientists hiding in a storage room as…things…that have somehow broken out of a research lab are killing everyone else in the building. The research lab however is on an alien world, and most of the scientists are not human, (notably the two women that the main character has been enjoying a frienemies-with-benefits relationship with). It’s interesting to be inside the main character’s head to find out, in all the insane transformations and wholesale slaughter, what it is that really frightens him, and who the actual villain is.
This is my first foray into Mike Allen’s writing, and I’ll definitely be checking out more. This was an excellent way to spend the last week before Halloween. The price is right too; there’s a deal going on for the ebook copy this week, and it comes with four bonus stories, just in case 23 bits of frightening fiction isn’t enough for you already.