Rare Promise

An amazing serendipity:

An extract from my real-time review of the 'UNBECOMING' collection HERE in March 2009;  the bold is placed on the old text today in March 2012.

(18/3/09 – 4 hours later) Rare Promise - Mike O'Driscoll
Indeed this story holds a rare promise that, even if one tries to surrender its words, they will keep coming back. It is a deeply word-textured Lawrencian symphony of non-urban emotions revealing a bottomless melting-pot of adolescent friendships altered by sex and jealousy, raw or religious guilt and shame, dark almost mythic memories of the “susurrations that slip between sounds”, self versus self through time, the secrecy of imperious fate … and this story does not surrender you the reader not only as a fiction-force-in-itself but because of what has gone before it in this book. In this story, a Confessional that is almost an answering-machine where the demon answerer eventually jumps out at the caller when the ‘conversation’ is abruptly slammed down! The sanctity of silence. The almost Modern Art that this story becomes as a series of blended cuttings of self ‘copy’. The losing of innocence by paradoxically gaining it. Becoming and Unbecoming. I cannot of course do justice to something I fail to absorb completely in one sitting. It may one day teach me to understand when I’m dragged back to it. It will never surrender me finally to the ‘call’ of other books, I’m sure. But – who knows? – it may be the passion of a moment. Only time will tell. The story’s author may jump out of it and drag me back. Not its real head-lease author named on the spine but the story’s demon second-rung author-as-reader calling me to read it all over again so that I can make final penance for not hurting enough the first time. Hurt is only real hurt when it happens time and time again for eternity.
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Extract from my real-time review of 'Wild Justice' edited by Ellen Datlow HERE (March 2012):

Rare Promise – M. M. O’Driscoll

“…sketching in the blanks…” — “His turn to enter the box…” — “Truth hides in a secret place…” — “…but there’s no escape in imagination.” — “engine-foaming sea…”

[This is the only story in 'Wild Justice' that I have read before. Above is my quite lengthy real-time review of this story in March 2009 when I reviewed the whole of Mike O'Driscoll's collection 'Unbecoming' (2006). Mike also has a story in 'Nemonymous One' (2001): arguably about Stephen King's 'accident'. And he has a story in 'The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies' (2011), a story that actually mentions the editor of 'Wild Justice' by name, which I real-time review here.]

My old review of this story above still stands. But I have just re-read ‘Rare Promise’: as well as being a poetic tale of awakening youthful passion and its stifling of earlier memories as yet beyond regression, it echoes the hearing of voices from the previous story. Hearing voices, seeing “voids” or vacuums, ancient leaf-carpeted woodland beds, I infer: a “consecrated ground” where you can’t bury suicides: where memories still fester… It is the coming and going of young Greta, cf: Ings’ Alice. It does indeed sketch in Michael Marshall Smith’s ’blanks’, and other stories’ burials (figurative or literal): another Clegg “flower woman” here close to confessional, the wild justice or catharsis needed for past memories or “a long-forgotten fear”, essentially ‘unforgotten’: the lies of ‘dark spaces’, ‘tight spaces’, the lie of the Cadigan Eye again where you try to hide lies by aphasia or by Oatesian diaspora especially if those lies once started as stated promises: “undermines his few remaining certainties” – a ‘mine’ (belonging to me), for me, as I mentioned in another real-time review recently, being a form of burial of self: and, meanwhile, this story is this book’s lethally ”epiphanic moment”.

Foreign Bodies

Extract from my real-time review HERE.

Foreign Bodies – Michael Marshall Smith
“But half-buried is not enough.”
A lengthy extrapolation on sexual politics between young couples in the mid-nineties – a fascinating period piece in itself when objects were objects, letters letters, books books, and what you did on the computer was word-processing with folders. (I wonder how this story would have panned out with emails.) It also has sharp observations on cigarettes, ladies’ public toilet habits, the default oiling by white lies (cf lies in the Cadigan), manipulators and those manipulated often interchangeable as in Schow and Lethem. But really this story is much much more: adding to this book its own often disturbing and page-turning “ingredients“. A memory’s splinter of glass or ‘diamond dust’, I infer, entering the body’s soul, thus being buried, a life of spasmodic denial. The story’s ”blanking” as another form of burial or denial akin to the earlier relic room, meat safe, burial under sand or garden or (incredibly in the explicit lethal finale of this story) under an actual ”ragged patch of carpet” … and Clegg’s flowers, again explicit as ”dried out flowers“. And Ings’ protagonist’s laconic ‘keeping’ of Alice becomes David’s desperately seeking … who? (14 Mar 12 – two hours later)

A Punch in the Doughnut

Extract from my real-time review HERE.

A Punch in the Doughnut – David J. Schow

“It is said that the first impulse is to share good news; the second, to bludgeon someone with it.”

…and that reminds me of the quote from the Cadigan earlier: “‘Some things won’t go away and some things won’t come back.’ [...] ‘If there were any justice in the world, the two would cancel each other out, or at least balance.’” And those lies again, and whether an Oates marking on a cup is to mark that cup or to mark the other cup that has no marking. This story is so politically incorrect, I hesitate to even review it. I expect the publishers of this book will have been incarcerated since 1996 for publishing this story in the first place. But, taking my life in my hands, here goes… The prose style is a pack of synaptic racers racing inside a just-fired diamond bullet. So much more dead-eyed than a golden one. The two protagonists – I thought perhaps they are wrestlers or prize-fighters who depend on their abiding friendship as a collaborative backdrop to keeping their ‘business’ partnership-as-deadly-enemies in multilple dollars and ‘euro-market crotch grinds’ – but I’m not sure. But one of them gets a bit ’nancy-boy’ and starts yearning after a new friend with a huge dong to be lethally kissed or absorbed elsewhere. But the thing that will always stay with me about this never-to-be-forgotten story is “the Great Despair“: not a sudden shaft of revelation as we might have expected in our respective heydays of youth and aspiration but, rather, a slow-motion jumble in the jungle that accurately predicts – from when it was coined in this 1996 published story - the 2012 world today, with the downward sluggish accretive kindlefest entropy from the Millenium Bug onwards where each of us in our billions will now be needed to extract each apportioned particle of pixellated “diamond dust” that carpets the infinite retina of Cadigan’s aphasic eye: the bloodshot eye with spinning iris that is the internet. Or if not extract, implant. All depends which cup of wild justice you’ve got: marked by bluff or double bluff or neither. (12 Mar 12 – another 2 hours later)