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Book Reviews

Objects of Worship

by Claude Lalumière

The World More Full of Weeping

by Robert J. Wiersema

Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

In the year since its inception, small press ChiZine Publications has filled the homegrown horror and fantasy genres with its own compelling brand of what its website calls “weird, surreal, and disturbing dark fiction.” In its first wave of offerings certain recurrent themes – including a penchant for alternative mythologies and relationships gone perilously sour – have already started to define a ChiZine sensibility. Most impressive, however, is how good the books have been.

Two of three new fall titles are story collections by experienced genre practitioners, and represent some of their best work. The third is a novella from a writer whose debut novel, 2006’s Before I Wake, incorporated elements of the fantastic.

David Nickle’s Monstrous Affections begins with a story, “The Sloan Men,” first published 15 years ago. It introduces the reader to Nickle’s “Canadian Gothic” terrain; in particular, the landscape around Fenlan, a town somewhere deep within a perverted version of Alice Munro country. It’s a monster story, but it’s also a kind of allegory about love as a dangerous trap, one that ends in sinister codependency. People in these stories do terrible things out of the most tender motives. What make their affections monstrous are the ties that bind: a family learns what it means to stick together; a witch holds an entire town in amber; a footloose young man suffers when he tries to walk away from his wife.

The stories work so well in part because of Nickle’s facility with the language of the place he’s created. He is comfortable writing in different voices, including that of a nearly illiterate young woman in the excellent “Janie and the Wind,” and he knows the idiom of his semi-rural environment, where a house might stand “miles outside town, on an ugly flat scratch of land where the grass grew too high and you saw the neighbours by the smoke from their woodstoves in the winter.”

If Nickle writes a kind of dark Canadian Gothic, Claude Lalumière looks beyond our borders for inspiration. In the dozen stories collected in Objects of Worship, Lalumière, who has edited eight anthologies and writes the Fantastic Fiction column for Montreal’s The Gazette, places emphasis on strange gods and weird new religious orders presiding over “wondrous worlds – alternate realities where every fancy could be true.” The influence of H.P. Lovecraft, dean of this school of writing, can be discerned in figures like Yameth-Lot, the dark lord of nightmares, and in the use of words like “eldritch” (the definitive Lovecraftian adjective, one that could also be applied to Nickle’s Fenlan).

Like Nickle, Lalumière grounds his fiction in a particular place: Montreal. In “This Is the Ice Age,” the transformed cross on Mount Royal becomes the symbol of a post-apocalyptic cult. Montreal’s Catholic heritage is also invoked in the way Lalumière treats the sacrament of communion. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of eating going on in these stories, both of and by gods and monsters. While the overall tone of the book is lighter than Nickle’s, borrowing heavily from pop fare like zombie movies and comic books, the volume is not devoid of a sharp satiric edge. What good are gods for, the author implies, if not for munching on?

Whereas Lalumière’s main literary influence is Lovecraft (with some assistance from Jack Kirby), Robert J. Wiersema’s is Stephen King. The World More Full of Weeping is a novella very much in the King mode, from its subject matter (family breakdown, a plucky kid on his own in the woods) to its style (layers of keenly observed domestic detail rendered in an everyday, generalized vernacular that doesn’t draw attention to itself). But while the presentation is perfectly controlled and fluid, building suspense nicely as it moves back and forth between the little boy lost and the search-and-rescue mission to find him, the premise is a bit conventional. The book doesn’t have the same crooked bite that Nickle gives to the theme of crossing the shadow line from innocence to experience.

Like Nickle and Lalumière, Wiersema (a frequent Q&Q reviewer) is a writer whose fantasy is grounded in a place, in this case a small town in southwestern B.C. named Henderson, which (as discussed in a fine afterword) is modelled on the author’s own hometown of Agassiz. By grounding his fiction in a “personal geography,” Wiersema gives it a physical and psychological presence – made up of the history, culture, and geography of a real place – for the fantastic elements to play off.

As Michael Rowe writes in his introduction to Monstrous Affections: “It is impossible to experience horror – which is a destination, not a departure point – without first experiencing the security of a place, literal or conceptual, from which the ground will fall away, revealing a vast, awful blackness.” In each of these three books, an archetypal Canadian literary setting becomes “an eternally rediscovered country” transformed by the imagination. In other words: yes, it’s Canadian literature. And it’s fantastic.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: ChiZine Publications

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 274 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-98129-782-8

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2009-11

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: ChiZine Publications

DETAILS

Price: $12.95

Page Count: 104 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-98094-109-8

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: November 1, 2009

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: ChiZine Publications

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 292 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-98129-783-5

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: November 1, 2009

Categories: Fiction: Novels