NO Press 2023
Edited by John WM Thompson
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Stories written by Briar Ripley Page, Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí, Janalyn Guo, Brian Evenson, Jaime Corbacho, Lisa Tuttle, L. Marie Wood, Adam Golaski, Chelsea Sutton, Meghan Lamb, Christi Nogle, Glen Hirshberg, J.A.W. McCarthy, Sasha Geffen, Mark G. Meyer, Thomas Mavroudis, Daniel M. Lavery, Nathan Breakenridge, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeff Wood, Elwin Cotman, Sofia Samatar, and Jaime Corbacho.
I have been attracted to this book, not only because it has a few of my favourite writers included, but also because of its title. Since first coming across, as a young student, the word in Shakespeare’s Tempest, I have teased friends and family with the accusation of their opinions currently being like those of mooncalves and, so, I didn’t want to waste more time until they improved their intellects! Thankfully, nobody, I believe, took me seriously as they could see the glint in my eye.
December Story by Briar Ripley Page
“It’s just edges. Celestial blankness, corpse fingers, frozen lake. I search a long time for the final piece that will finish the border and close it off, but nothing ever quite fits. None of the shapes fall into place.”
Well, anyone who knows me, will know I would most certainly like any sort of blankness, let alone a celestial version of it. And thus the story around this jigsaw stays with me powerfully, a jigsaw, above, that describes my gestalt real-time reviewing to such a Kafkaesque perfection of imperfection, that it is almost worth dying for, let alone trying and possibly failing to scry its tale of epistles, some sent, some unsent, and attempted meetings between two boyfriends, one K, the other Gene, with hints of trans-surgery for one of them in a sort of Evenson Warren, and one of them sleep-walking into a version of Golaski’s Refrigerator-Drome, and a woman with too many teeth. And all of us screaming through a ‘flesh radio’. And much more, from Snow Queen to Looking-Glass.
“Even wild animals can become attached to their cages,…”
The Tomato by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí
“What if the tomato started bleeding?”
Having just yesterday finished reading and reviewing the stories of Leonora Carrington (HERE), I think I can safely say that this story competes with such classics and in most cases wins out. The story of a woman’s young son being turned into a tomato by the recriminatory magic of another woman, and her efforts to regain him by all manner of means and her own potential self-abasement, travelling all the byways of her own backstory and of her feminine body, eventually reaching a shocking but inspiring climax that one can hardly forget.
“Why is the past tense of broadcast broadcast and not broadcasted?”
Why is a tomato sometimes called a love apple, I ask, as I cutted it.
Night Fragrance by Janalyn Guo
This is an engaging story of a young girl with metal back brace and a troubled mother (estranged from the girl’s father) moving to a house and community circumscribed by tall trees and fragrances, some of the latter meaty, some of her school friends involving her in games like Hungry Woods, in swimming wild and more, with mushrooms, orchids and meat-eating flowers, and, as an inspiringly inadvertent theme and variations, 18 variations in total perhaps, upon the tomato immediately preceding this story, we learn more about the metabolism of femininity in interface with the mines, if not minds, of earth and a transformative growth towards where life is more fulfilling.
It Does Not Do What You Think It Does
Brian Evenson
“And then I waited, elbows balanced on the countertop, fingers laced gently together, for my food to arrive.”
An elbow trigger that does what the title says, time and time again, as if you cannot believe in such a literal refrain. A trigger that immediately preceded one man travelling all night meeting by chance another such man in a motel eatery, the latter tugging at the former’s sleeve, more than once. With mention in their ensuing conversation of sounds detached from objects stalking a travelling person and smells migrated from places to a travelling person, too. As if white noise is a medium for such processes. The ending is important but maybe it is not important, but what is truly important was the journey there, a journey that transcended omniscience itself. Important only, though, in the sense of things being imported or fostered out. This story does do what you initially thought it did.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-evenson/
Butterfly Kisses
Jaime Corbacho
This is an amazing flutter-peridot of a story, the prose textured and deep yet pellucid and limpid, not that I understood the plot consciously, but part of me certainly did by osmosis, as the journey into death is deployed more tantalisingly real than ever before in literature with coffin-sharing bifurcated by ocean burial. Each word tickled my cheek before entering my eyes.
The First Wife
Lisa Tuttle
“…his online footprint was nearly as faint as my own.”
This story seemed at first merely plainly workmanlike with Halloween themes for mooncalf readers involving an old lady’s backstory of husbands, a backstory shared with another old lady and the former’s erstwhile yearning to own the nearby mansion, but it becomes staggeringly surprising at the chutzpah of its quite unexpected mask and painting theme of one of her ex-husband’s wives, including herself, and how we are left eventually in a limbo of frighteningly bottomless bathos.
My previous reviews of Lisa Tuttle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/black-static-55/#comment-8530 and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/never-again/
and the book that found me: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/aickmans-heirs/#comment-4605 and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/15/best-british-short-stories-2018/#comment-13326
And replacements: https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/45-2/
Beyond the Chain
L. Marie Wood
A nicely oblique vignette about what happened beyond the chain and the perpetrator of an abominable crime sheltering in their own shadow while beckoning for their ghostly victims so as to reenact the crime. Or that is not what is about at all!
Even I (or especially me) could not see clearly beyond the chain. Perhaps Shirley Jackson could.
Edge of the Forest
Jeff Wood
“No one peered curiously from behind the shades.”
Sometimes in dreams one can get an added letter here, or even a missing one. A story of man’s fight against the coyotes using his own urine, towards the end directly peeing at them, rather than peer at a distant circle of their keening rituals. He has just moved to the edge of the city where the coyotes roam, gradually subsumed by their danger and of who he actually was in the eyes of wife and daughter as well as his neighbour, maybe just a few coyotes pretending to be more than they were or making beautiful gestures in fabricating their own dead as eruptions from the pattern of the pack. But are they this book’s mooncalves as diminished volcanoes, if you add the missing letter M as representative of the essential me? Or as representative of a moondog lynchpin in the fabrication of such coyotes not now in dream but the reality of nightmare? Are we more than we ever were?
Distant Signals
Adam Golaski
“gauche — but why?”
This is a truly disturbing story, a potential classic story of its kind, and its seemingly abrupt ending is not abrupt at all but meaningful in our own aftermath of the recent pandemic, the resultant circumstances of which event is handled with stunningly clear reminders of it, as the male protagonist, his parents dead from covid, returns to their house, where he once spent his boyhood, now to while away lockdown going through the videos and other analog equipment from the last century, and a lack of wifi even today. He has a phone that vibrates, though, a customary ‘cutting’ image in Golaski. He now has time and opportunity to compare his parents’s directed VHS videos of adverts for local concerns with common factors such as actors and props in a TV serial called Distant Signals that frightened him when induced by his parents to watch it as a boy. It seems that nobody else seems to remember it, though, judging by his ex’s phone call. Just having the serial’s events described here in this story will now make at least every reader remember it.
“What is gauche is the relief he feels now that his parents are dead.”
***
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/adam-golaski/ (and here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/cinnabars-gnosis/)
The Stars Have Eaten the CostCo Parking Lot
Chelsea Sutton
“What makes you think the stars want anything in particular?”
This story is what is written on its tin. The ‘Endless Empty’, gradual and purposeless. Unless you ask a purposeful question as to what really the label says on the tin! Read all about it in Weekly Weird News. This is no ordinary story; it tells, with a straight face, of deliveries still scheduled and queues still forming at fixed opening and closing times of supermarkets amid such apocalypse; it is as if its own question is simultaneously its own answer, while the readers themselves are subsumed by the deadpan eating piecemeal by the stars of the community, of the whole world and universe where such readers live, but the stars are not standard stars the description of which is strikingly nevertheless attempted by the shifting quicksands of otherwise plain text. Mom’s chickens and all. At the very last mo, nix.
“It happened on the yellow couch in the darkest part of the house.”
Mirror Translation
Meghan Lamb
“…she looks up at the balconies, the windows of the strangers looking down at her.”
This is an extremely powerful work, no mistake. Unless you wished you’d never seen yourself as this woman sees herself on a metro stairway in an indeterminate eastern Europe place with a Genocide Museum and Communism in its history that I suspect may have more pest in it than buda. Although the text may have disorientated me deliberately. She meets Anna, as paid companion or girl friend, a name that seems to go with a mirror. And Kafkaesque is not even an adjective at all, let alone one I can apply here; there is something far more oblique and insidious working through these words, foreign versus foreign, a text full of verse-like sentences and refrains, leading to an incantatory metamorphosis, perhaps Joel Lane in apotheosis if he had lived. I dare not delve you deeper into it unless you give me permission to do so.
“A pair of sickly tits, like shriveled elbows.”
From one mirror translation to another…
Night, When Windows Turn To Mirror
Christi Nogle
“She walked more slowly now; a figure moving so quickly could not be Father, and it was beginning to seem as though the movement might be a trick of the carpet pattern.”
A story of Maxine, who, when called by her father, has a name with a second syllable that could be mistaken for her brother’s name. Her father who has abondoned his wheelchair and, being half-mobile, is somewhere in the house, a house that Maxine, with incremental amnesia, gradually finds is a vast Tardis of different rooms and facilities … and does she ever find her father in this attritionally suspenseful narrative? A mixture of speeds like Zeno’s Paradox and potential mirrors, a gluey Italian meal with mock parmesan cheese or an appetising al dente feast?
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/christi-nogle/
DestinationLand
Glen Hirshberg
My review is here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/08/16/untitled/
My many previous reviews of this author’s work: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/glen-hirshberg/
I note now that the above story mentions THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE, a serendipitous moment coinciding with the whole chapter that I reviewed here on Rev. W Awdry here just 3 days ago: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/shadow-lines-by-nicholas-royle/#comment-28244
I did not know or had forgotten that these books had already migrated across the Atlantic.
Seldom Place
J.A.W. McCarthy
“…an L swinging to lick the 1, but there was no denying she had the right address.”
2714 Seldom Place, a four digit number, and I am glad I was at the right address of this story despite the stock F words that it sported, coming home to leave gangrene on my brain. A lingering triptych, of three people, Camille, Travis and Nancy, with elements of guilt to be transcended and having a green growth of decay and entropy as such guilt’s removal methods. Each with an elbow trigger. Camille (“Her elbow bumped a pillar as she turned to go down the steps”) reaching such inverse transcendence of her sex drive and sexless marriage via the catalytic auspices of no. 2714 in the neighbourhood, even spreading the decay architecture to architecture. Travis (“He turned on the faucet with his elbow and scrubbed his hands”) for the cats and dogs he rescued from no. 2714. And “Her elbows planted on her knees, the woman watched Nancy make her way up the walk”, for Nancy failing to call her girl friend ‘wife’. Having visited Seldom Place, here’s hoping its red scarf helps as buffer against the self of skin being mescallopedin green sauce.
“…they’d eat chicken wings with their fingers in bed after.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/j-a-w-mccarthy/
Pastiche
Sasha Geffen
I won’t bother you with an exact itemisation of what eventually happened in this story; even I don’t know. But I am convinced in my heart this is a wrenching sort of classic story within both genre and general literature, and should be anthologised along with others that I reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/some-of-my-serial-reviews-indexed/ Or it will be thus anthologised when it has time to season and have its umbilical snapped. In short, though, it is about a single school boy with three separate and differing bodies, a fact that, miraculously, one soon takes for granted, and about his life and sexuality and thoughts. It is a revelation. One never gets to know which body of his is Bowen’s ‘shadowy third’.
“There’s no phantom third,….”
Three Prepositions
Mark G. Mayer
TILL OUTSIDE BEHIND
“But as an immortal, he spent even more hours online.”
This seems to be the ultimate NULL IMMORTALIS in three poetically symphonic prose movements
Between their elbows
the tallest tower
a ghost with slim calves
Death as the new Mooncalf?
Even my brief tale HERE from the 1980s takes on a new timbre.
Sundered
Thomas Mavroudis
“She gained a little weight divided between her breasts and buttocks.”
…and the above double entendre sticks! A disturbing, adroitly written tale about a man widowed by losing half his wife. The half left dead. The story somehow has a preternaturally inadvertent connection with the novel I am simultaneously reading and reviewing by Shirley Jackson HERE, the splitting, the migraine, the leaning museum building, and the left handed Betsy. The satisfying but somewhat shocking ending in SUNDERED I cannot give away here, but my process of story reviewing is all about clinching the gestalt in real-time! But what was that I didn’t understand about the swim club?
Remittance Man
Daniel M. Lavery
“…drawing up her husband’s shirtsleeve until it revealed a sort of balloon fixed awkwardly to his inner arm by a plastic yellow tube just above the elbow.”
This story, incredibly, is another for the literary canon I once reviewed HERE. It is honestly that great. And any attempts to make its central character Servius Johnson smaller, even non-surgically, will fail, I fear. It is couched with miraculously accessible and stylishly tentacular prose clarity — thus outdoing great works by such as Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and Swift. Including “an accumulation of household greases and personal oils as would have scarcely seemed possible upon arrival, with so little visible mess.” All told by another great character as narrator, escaping from the co-vivid fits of his co-workers, drawn into Johnson’s now infamous locked-down net by subtly wicked default, drawn in by all manner of angles of confusion and false friendships to which I cannot do justice here. Johnson’s Swiftian tinies et al. Mooncalves, all. Drunk permanently without hangovers. A defensive structure built only to collapse perhaps before our very eyes. Or not, I fear.
“…so pleased did they seem with their party games,… […] and cannot shake the sense of his hand weighing heavily in the balance of my life—“
A Good Thing
Nathan Breakenridge
“We are born fumbling, and it is in the good we do that we find what has slipped from our hands in the dark.”
This short short with its tall man and the narrator he recruits for digging up something in a forest is a journey-coded case in point.
Privacy
Steve Rasnic Tem
“It wasn’t that he disliked people. He simply believed they lied about everything.”
A world falling silent. A story of an elderly widower’s solitude and anxiety replaced by the tantrums of a child with new orange toys. Tinged with the due diligence of age. Via a dust storm and a vista of last balconies. A diaspora of half-naked peoples described by words worthy of this author’s narrator who also found another old man outside his lifelong house. Before he reaches the orange metaphors with which this inner-Wellsian story began as jumpsuits.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/steve-rasnic-tem/
The Debauch
Elwin Cotman
“Tuba warred with violin. Flute strangled drum.”
At first, I thought above quote was a hint of Azathoth. But, throughout, it was more real than just that, with a thirty year old American man in his car, robbed in the once Soviet controlled Germany arriving in Prague, a highly well-written tour de force to the point of being overwritten, but not quite, a deliberate effect, though, as part of the coming curse I saw hinted at the beginning, of dreams of a wild circus and a massive atmosphere of place and time and young people in sex between and within genders. And it is sheerly what the story title says. Couldn’t shake it off when I went to my ordinary kitchen to get a cup of tea, and return here to re-immerse myself in it, by writing this about it! Love wins out? You will see. But the hints were right. Once I reached the words ‘rusted flute’ I then knew this was not simply Bacchic but Azathothian. And, oh yes, that only a bitten tongue could follow on from….
“There was tenderness in the way he stroked her arms from elbow to shoulder.”
Contact Light
Sofia Samatar
“For the stars went long, all the way down to the horizon, and very deep. If you looked, you could see your soul shooting out to join them.”
From the previous story’s ‘rusted flute’ to this prose-poetic one’s “Rust everywhere, and the forests of my childhood turned to craters.”, as a new innocent abroad wonders whether the eponymous words were the first words spoken on the moon, the place where the protagonist now lives amongst other men as bunkmates, only men, all hollow men like Eliot’s, as hollow as the moonrocks amidst which they work, in a habitable pod with a hell of greenery cultivated below, or did I get my hell and heaven topsy turvy in this context, as disorientated as them while they glimpse a giant fire upon mother earth as well as the rust? And what of the Mystic, was he merely just another clock-freak, or a further version of Azathoth sitting in darkness masquerading as something else? I will wonder this for endlessly foreseeable moments of earth time.
My previous reviews of this authors TENDER collection of stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/tender-stories-by-sofia-samatar/
The origin of mooncalves, other than Shakespeare and Dickens?
Honeymoon
Jaime Corbacho
“under some hollowed-out moon”
Well, who can tell what coincidence is coming next? And I only find out for certain the true name and probable gender of the narrator as part of when the mother addresses her offspring by a name that I omit below…
“There was little my mother could do beyond keeping her elbows off the table and offering, ‘It’s nice to have you home,…’”
And the narrator tells us much more of community as a closeted world, of Gran Iris and other members of the family’s backstory, and the narrator’s own perceived backstory as a definite truth today, the dreams and realities of a highly characterised dog pack and its leader, the narrator having cast self to the feral wilds in sight of them, even touch of them, following a fox incident, ending with possible fraternisation by a mountain lion, all in a tour-de-force prose style actually to die for.
“The ice cubes made the blades of grass beneath them look bigger than they were.”
But I am still confused who lost a hand with now “an arm ended in a shiny bulb, like a doorknob”
This anthology of strange stories is a landmark one, the rare sort that I ever seem to have an instinctive knack to stumble upon. Thank the dogs, for the great god synchronicity.