Is it true? Can Life really be stranger than fiction? It is a question that has been asked many times and one I am going to have to leave unanswered. It's enough to say that Haunting Columns went on a hiatus, a trip into the wilderness for a while, but to sighs of thinly disguised distain, it returns. So where to begin.
1999 really has been a strange year, though not through any strange occurances in reality, more for what it represents. A year that has been painted in so many ways, by so many artists with so many agendas, and here we are, almost half way through, and it drifts past with barely a whimper. To so many in the past it was an important year, the crux of the century, the dawn of a new era. It had become a purely fictional event. But, here we are, in the harsh light of day, sitting in the midst of 1999 wondering where the hell all the invading aliens, circling spacecraft and plunging meteors. A Utopia or Distopia, you decide, I certainly can't, expect perhaps by casting a wry eye over it all and saying neither one nor t'other.
Predicting the future has always been a wonderful game where getting things utterly wrong is half the game. Perhaps part of the role of visionary fiction is to ensure that none of these things ever take place, to keep us from the brink of either annihilation or enlightenment. Perhaps the most impressive visionary fiction is that which looks not at the external world, with its physical stylings, but the inner landscape of the mind. Books like Moorcock's The Black Corridor, an incredible claustraphobic novel about a journey through space, or the countless examples that can be found amongst Iain M. Bank's Culture novels, where he has painted small complex stories on a vast canvas.
The future as distopia, both bleak and barbaric, has perhaps been covered more than any other, often quite badly, often hiding a thinly veiled digust for an aspect of contemporary life. Fortunately, there are occasions when it is done well. I won't try and cover all these, rather just two books I read recently, which might loosely fit under that heading. The first was an excellent novel called The Pastel City by M. John Harrison, and author whose recent work Signs of Life was mentioned a few columns back. It is something quite fascinating, set against the familiar dying earth style backdrop, most famously done by authors like Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith. Harrison's prose is both smooth and dark, he guides you through the story yet never really gives you the opportunity to relax. There are no real feel good moments, from the beginning you are plunged into a battle which has seemingly devoured the known world. It is a battle in futility, with one side gaining the upperhand and threatening to decimate the other, with at its centre a man struggling through the maelstrom in search of a quest. I'm reluctant to use the word hero, as it is easy to claim that the word has been all but denegrated through the years, and the central character wouldn't fit in the confines of what the term has come to mean. This is no clear cut novel of good and evil, more an attempt to show the absurdity and hopelessness of these battles which are being fought almost to the brink of human extinction. Horror is almost certainly an aspect, there are scenes which are filled with terror as well as those which inspire it, plus death and betrayal in equal measures. A wonderful book, self-contained yet first of a trilogy. Harrison's novels are more than worth the time, and this with its 1971 vintage, is no exception. A book which could almost be classed at fantasy yet clocks in at a mere 144 pages, a breath of fresh air in this era of over-written trilogies.
Another book, with a completely different tone, was Brian Aldiss' Cryptozoic, whose title comes from a very early period in Earth's history. It is an excellent spin on the idea of time travel, with a central character whose shifting through time has been via a unique drug which allows people to mind travel. Sent back as an artist to represent what he sees, he finds his vision clouded and is able to do little more than experience. Eventually he is overtaken by events, both within the streams of time travel and within his own era, where a military dictatorship has taken over in his absence. All the while he is looked over by the mysterious figure of a woman, perhaps a ghost of another age, whose presence holds the key to the truth the novel is building towards. Perhaps one of Aldiss' more experimental works, though without the unconventional structure, which is more about the human mind than the mechanics of time travel.
Moving for a moment onto more horrific territory, I have to mention an excellent work by John Pritchard called Angels of Mourning. This is the sequel to another novel, which I have yet to read, but works perfectly as a standalone book. It centres around a Nurse, working in a city hospital, whose past comes back to haunt her. She finds herself caught between a group of Irish Republican terrorists and a military style police unit who are hunting both her and them down. At first glance it appears much like a thriller, though as the novel progresses it comes clear that far more is going on than how it first appears, and it quickly mutates into a incredibly compelling horror novel. Much like the best of Graham Masterton's fiction it combines demonic horror seemlessly with the more mundane terror that opens the book, and like Masterton, the violence that occurs is rarely gratuitous and is instead used to carry the plot forwards towards its brilliant conclusion. A wonderful novel which should slot easily into any horror connosieur's shelf.
Yet another novelist whose work I have come to love is Jonathan Carroll, whose work is as impressive as it is difficult to classify, fitting neatly into none of the gatherings of genres that it touches. From the Teeth of Angels is a book about death, not just the concept of death, but the living, breathing personification of death. In it there are characters who have had to face up to death, whether through their own mortality or the death of someone close to them, and via these experiences they come into contact with death himself. He offers truths with painful consequences should they fail to understand their portent, and once drawn into a game with death, the characters rarely find themselves able to escape. This is no horror book, yet comes closer often to what horror represents than those books dripping with gore, Carroll is a very subtle author, and this book is no exception. He quietly unravels a plot before your eyes and you can't help but be drawn into it, presenting a novel that, as with most of his others, defies you to categorise it. Carroll's voice is one uniquely his own and one always worth listening to.
A few recent (or forthcoming) releases that may be of interest: