Post by Calenture on Nov 22, 2008 19:42:34 GMT
A journal of parthenogenetic fiction and late labelling
Note: the links on this page need correcting if possible; perhaps the pages they went to no longer exist?
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I ordered some copies of Nemonymous. Editorial eccentricity perhaps? Arty layout and design? General weirdness? Yes, yes and of course yes.
But sixteen authors had agreed to have their work published without an identifying by-line. Work submitted anonymously, sent from anonymous email boxes, by-lines only to appear in the next volume.
A landscape-format book seems odd until you actually have it in front of you. And then I started thinking, “Why not?” At the moment the book is lying open on the table in front of me while I type. If it was a traditional format book, I’d have had to weigh down the pages to keep it open.
The cover and title page designs are attractive and throughout the book are thoughtfully placed quotes from Lovecraft, Samuel Becket, Patrick White, Strindberg, Poe, Larkin and others. The paper is high quality.
So what about the written content?
So far – and I’ve read half of this volume and several stories in others – the standard of writing is high and I’ve actually gone back to re-read some stories. Some are horror, some are not, but they usually have that offbeat touch. I’ll use a lot of quotes; that seems the best way to do this.
Whether I'll add the authors names later, I'm not sure. I haven't looked in the next book yet.
A Smile in the Sky: When he was a little boy, his father had lifted him on his shoulders to look up at the sky. His was a childhood away from the crush of city light and noise, a childhood of birdsong and clear, star-encrusted nights.
Look, said his father. Look there. There’s the Plough and there’s the Pole Star and there’s Cassiopeia...
But he wasn’t listening to his father, nor looking where he pointed. What he saw, for the first time, was this...
There was a smile in the sky.
Over the years it grows brighter. But what does it mean? Is the smile just for him? And does it approve or disapprove of him?
The Friends of Mike Santini: Former movie star Paul Wilde is sitting at a bar telling his life story to anyone who will listen. He remembers a night in 1959 partying with Mike Santini. At the end of the evening, Wilde is surprised when Santini corners him and warns him to stay away from Santini's girl Avril. Santini is a crooner with the voice of an angel. But when Mike Santini sings, all the demons in Hell come running to do his bidding.
This is a strong story which evokes a good sense of period as it follows the lovers flight.
"Something’s been following me around.”
My flesh crawls. “You’re imagining things. Nothing’s following---”
“You know what I’m talking about, Paul.”
Suddenly the dark isn’t so cosy. Suddenly the clang-clang-clang of raindrops into that bucket is ringing through my skull and those car beams are grinding into my eyes. And there are too many shadows and I hear whispering.
The Quiet House: I think it is now a week since I last left the house. Even then I ventured only as far as the garden. The high wall blocks the first light of morning and only leaves us with half a sunset. The forest of fairy tale encroaches upon our quiet castle. Had I more than the strength of a white dove, I might set about the vegetation with a sharpened axe, but...
Jemima and Dorothea are twins and since the death of their mother their concern for trivial household matters has lessened considerably. The house and garden mark the beginning and end of their universe.
Since Mother departed, our home environs have become all and the world beyond has vanished into anti-matter.
As the house reverts to jungle, Dorothea hunts for her sister. But the behaviour of the nannies and nursemaids is strange.
They make me wonder – but briefly – if I have somehow created my own alter ego. Occasionally I wonder if I myself am the alter ego.
One of my favourites, this one reminds me strongly of Angela Carter’s writing.
With Arms Outstretched: Mort Fleischer’s wife Mabel is upset when he comes home from work and uses her outstretched arms for a coat rack. She had been reaching out to embrace him. But Mort doesn’t want the loving embrace of his morbidly obese wife. He can get all the embraces he wants from Darlene or the other fun-loving girls from the Hip Flask. The only contact he enjoys with Mabel is when he sits on her.
The gyrations she performed against his hips proved relaxing, like an intense little back massage... It made them both feel better before thingytails and TV.
Read this story to learn how Mabel explores previously undreamed depths to prove her selfless love for Mort. Will Mort achieve his aim of blissfully shallow satisfaction. A lesson for us all. Possibly.
Breaking Rules:"The woman who breaks the most plates within ten minutes stays with him,” Jenny had suggested. She had let me into her Victorian house when I showed up at her door that night.
I looked at her cheap figure. Her dyed hair sparkled more than her bright pink robe. “You’re mad!” I declared.
“If he can’t make up his mind, we’ll do it for him,” she said.
“Isn’t breaking plates supposed to bring good luck?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
A desperate woman will do anything. I agreed.
But who will really win?
The Gravedigger: “As I worked I looked neither at the corpse nor the trees of the forest edge. Instead, I concentrated on another forest, the one below, the thousand-year-old-forest crushed and preserved in the peat. Red-raw wood, peeling sheets of birch bark, the gelatinous grasses of bygone glades, my spade sliced through them all, releasing a gentle stink. And as I turned up a block of moist peat the viridescent husk of an insect was revealed, miniature polished armour, perhaps the ancient remains of a long dead breed...
I am the gravedigger, and a woman.
Intensely atmospheric, this one spares no detail exploring the work and private life of its solitary protagonist. As grim as hell but very absorbing.
Alone: Garret Munroe is alone on Paradise. A hermit, he has spent the past thirty-eight years running before the spread of civilisation as it swept through the galaxy, until at last he arrived on Paradise where seven human beings were spread across six million acres.
But this morning, when Monroe arrived at Martin’s Rock for the annual Meet, he was greeted by seven corpses.
Monroe was somewhat miffed by this turn of events. He had come to the Meet this year to trade for new hoses for his irrigation system, but now, as he studied the bodies lying in the Rock’s shade, he knew he would be carrying water in buckets for the rest of his life. The bodies were laid out side by side in a long row. Their throats were slashed open so deeply that the vertebrae were visible.
At first he thinks that at last his dream of complete solitude has come true.
Then he spotted the flaw. Someone had slit their throats and laid them out in a neat line. Someone else was here.
The Idiot Whistled Dead: He wanted out of the beatings, the buggerings, the girl with donkey smiles and the cold fingered priest.
So the idiot walked along the street. He whistled for the dead.
Into the churchyard he limped. Gravestones blue-blacked the sod like mussel shells on a safe harbour wall. The idiot touched the headstones. He whistled for the dead. He wanted his life to change.
Naturally, a change does come in the form of a horrible army: In they surged, milk-white and glorious with silvery mould, their faces slack as last month’s carrier bags, yet eyes burning with a post-mortem fire.
The fat wife screamed at the sight of them as they poured along the hallway, their coffins like beetle shells on their backs, faces peering from beneath, eyes bright and hungry. This marvellous cartoon-style description reminds me very strongly of Adam L G Nevill’s Where Angels Come In, in Best New Horror 17. So far, I’ve resisted the temptation to look at the authors names in the next book.
The dead moved differently now. The coffins split long ways from top to bottom into equal halves. These moved up and down, catching the blood rays of what was left of a thumbnail sun on the horizon.
Harder now. Harder, harder, harder the dead flapped their pine casket wings.
Marvellous stuff. That makes eight of sixteen write-ups from the first volume.
Some copies of Nemonymous are available here.
The Unmiraculous Life of Jackie Mendoza: He was a prince in his own palace. That was what I thought the first time I went to see him, in the old colonial style mansion, deep in the heart of the garden district, where he lived.
We are not told anything about the narrator, but my guess would be that the story is told by a female social worker or psychiatrist attempting to penetrate the world of Jackie Mendoza – a man younger than his years who remains isolated from the world, absorbed in the mystery of his own being.
I would walk away from those meetings angry and disturbed, disturbed at Mrs Mendoza’s detachment, angry at myself, for failing once again to convey the seriousness of my concern. For it would be almost certain he was not eating again, or not getting out of bed, or on the other hand not sleeping, but sitting up all night staring at the moon. That is why they call it lunacy, the maid once had the insolence to tell me. He is not mad, I very sternly replied. She shrugged her shoulders. It did not matter to her whether he was mad or not; she had her own opinion. But she would pass me on the stairs sometimes, carrying a mess of slops, and when I asked to examine it would answer: I am not supposed to talk to you about that. So that I became convinced there was some kind of conspiracy I was not allowed to enter, which prevented my ever truly helping him.
But the reason he could not eat was that he was filled with something so uncontainable he was ready to choke on it: the terrible feeling he had always known and which he could only describe to me as homesickness.
Across the Hills: After the rains, he made his way to the ruined forest.
This vignette had a vaguely futuristic feel; the forests are falling before the advance of the machines, and the traveller finds his way to a shed where some children welcome him in and show him some two-week old birds that they’ve rescued. Exquisitely written, it conjures in just a few pages a lasting sense of ‘wrongness’ of the time and of the traveller.
All For Nothing: When her husband had vanished, Marcia decided to buy a new pet. She chose a small dog. It was larger than her husband, because he had shrivelled away, doing nothing on his chair until he was gone. It was an old piece of furniture and she suspected he might have dropped into one of the holes drilled from within by a loose spring.
Marcia loses her dog in the Moorish quarter, but after advertising for its return finds herself in possession of something else which is clearly not a dog but is a great improvement on her husband.
I’ve toyed with quoting other passages of this story here, but in the end decided that I was doing it a disservice. It was already obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to make any sort of mundane sense of this exotic mystery and its author would probably be intensely amused had I attempted to do so.
Double Zero For Emptiness:’You can’t dry up on us now,’ they would tell him, unconsciously giving voice to the fear he’d been carrying inside his head ever since he’d handed in the manuscript. For twenty-five years he’d treated the events that made up his life as a kind of first draft, a palimpsest to be overwritten. Acting like he had some God-given right to change the way things were, and all for the sake of, when it boiled down to it, entertainment. Had he never once considered that maybe the past wasn’t something he could just resurrect and change at will? That it was, after all, immutable?
The writer has journeyed into the past many times and plundered it for spoils to reshape into stories until now it seems there is nothing left. Nothing left except to change course into the future and find something new.
Strobe: He awoke in the blinding white toilets, one of the bouncers from the door standing over him. Lang’s eyes were watering and his mouth was dry. Then Adele and Denver were there with him, arguing, Adele crying also, bending down to kiss him again... And suddenly he was in an ambulance, being whisked off to A & E.
Lang doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, “apart from being eighteen until he dies.” But then the strobe lights at the night club transport him to another place. He can’t tell anyone about it, only that he must go there again, so he persuaded Denver to help him set up a strobe that will trigger the epileptic seizure again.
’Let there be light,’ he said, and smiled.
Balafer de Vie:Thus I set my foot shod in tight patent leather on the first rung of my ascension. The staircase up which she led me was carpeted in rose wool, which swallowed our footsteps. My unwilling Cerebus spoke no word, until at last she stopped before a much carved door. “She is fatigued. Do not stay long.” Then perhaps remembering who I might be, she said, “Of your love, I ask this.”
The dancer’s visitor has tricked his way into her presence, come to bring her a gift. His is a love which will not see her “old with bent bones.” Richly textured Gothic prose.
The Mansions of the Moon (A Cautionary Tale): Muddled with wine, Murak escapes his birthday party in his palatial home and climbs the statue of himself in the gardens to gaze out across the hills. He almost faints with shock when he see “...the mansions of the afterlife – ghostly gilded palaces and filigreed balconies, and pale tall towers and winding staircases, all of such intense beauty, and built at – twisted into – such odd and gravity-defying angles that my heart quickens even now to think upon it.
From this point on his life is ruled by a driving obsession to create a city like the one that he glimpsed in his vision. His dream is doomed to failure, because although he employs an army of architects and artisans, their buildings will never match those of the dream, and the Mansions have been built on uncertain ground. A hint of Clark Ashton Smith touches this parable.
Gamblingay Churchyard: Walking in a somewhat arid graveyard excessively mowed and pruned like the esplanade of a fashionable seaside resort, the man reads an inscription on the headstone of a woman and her short-lived child, which sets him to speculating a number of possible hypotheses about her. Was the child one of many fathered by soldiers on leave from trenches in the Great War? Was it the illicit offspring of a sordid encounter between a married businessman and a woman who, at her age, should have known better than to have been tricked by her body? Was she ostracised by her acquaintances? Had the child seemed like a last chance or a miracle?
Then in another churchyard, he sees another headstone...
Reading the first Nemonymous was a rich and intense experience. By now, of course, I’ve turned to the second volume and been reading the authors own feelings about that experience. I’ve also stumbled on a few sites which actually list the stories and the authors’ names for the first few volumes. I don’t feel inclined to name those names here, but you might be interested in a few random comments. One of the authors wrote: As a literary writer who never employs other genres, I was thrilled and surprised to find myself in the midst of fantasy and horror writers and readers. I suppose they were just as surprised... The experience gave me much joy.
Ellen Datlow selected three stories from this book for an ‘honourable mention’ in Years Best Fantasy and Horror.
Various authors here – and this list is incomplete - have had other work published in Best New Horror, Zoetrope, People’s Friend, Legend, Peeping Tom, Roadworks, The Dream Zone, Unhinged, The Third Alternative, Interzone, Stand, London Magazine, The Rivals of Frankenstein and broadcast on Radio 4.
Personal favourites of mine here include The Idiot Whistled Dead (I loved the cartoon imagery) , The Gravedigger (which struck me as something Ingmar Bergman might have wanted to film had he read it), The Quiet House, Balafer de Vie (both intensely rich), and Breaking Rules (energetic and funny) – but this list too is incomplete as I keep seeing stories that I want to go back to and re-read.
I'm changing my original plan of putting all the Nemonymous write-ups on one thread. At the moment I'm reading Zencore, the 7th volume, and that will be next.
Meanwhile, here's the link again to Des Lewis's eBay page where you might be lucky enough to find this volume and other delights for sale.