Greg van Eekhout, Show and Tell and Other Stories (Tropism Press, 2006)
I feel I should preface this review with an explanation. It's October here in New England and, as I keep telling people, Halloween is my Christmas, so I like to draw it out just a bit. For thirty-one days I get to show off my extensive collection of Halloween socks, watch almost as many horror movies as my dark little heart desires, and generally spend the month viewing the world with my Halloween goggles on.
So maybe it is just me, but Greg van Eekhout's new chapbook Show and Tell and Other Stories offers more than its fair share of tricks and treats. My favorite trick is the way he manages to get both horror and humor in his science fiction.
While all six of the short stories included in this chapbook possess elements of horror, the first story, "In the Late December," is creepy enough that it manages to singlehandedly reclaim the traditional Christmas ghost story. Set in a post-Apocalyptic future, the story follows Santa on his annual Christmas Eve odyssey. The night before Christmas soon becomes one long dark night of the soul for Kris Kringle and his little reindeer too, who travel the universe looking for a handful of mutant boys and girls whose virtue lies not in being good, but in having managed to survive. The trip becomes a matter of belief versus hopelessness, keeping it together versus falling apart, as Santa is forced to decide what he is willing to sacrifice in order to survive.
"Anywhere There's a Game" plays like one of those classic B horror movies that show up on television around Halloween -- movies like "The Monster Club" or "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" -- where the main character relates a series of campy vignettes which are both funny and scary. The main character here is a NBA veteran who lists the five most remarkable players he's ever played with, "the dirt workers and edge cases and oddballs and sideshow escapees." The characters in this sequence of flash fictions reminded me of some of the darker Theodore Sturgeon short stories where ordinary guys come face-to-face with the dark side, only to find that it is the human experiences of lost dreams and broken relationships that haunt humans more than any ghost or zombie. Of particular note is the flash fiction "The Small Forward," in which a female basketball player is denied her big break one time too many, but just can't give up the ghost until she gets one more shot (this would make a great read-aloud story).
The standout story in this collection is "Native Aliens," a story with a double plotline linking the experiences of colonialism shared by a Dutch-Indonesian boy who comes to California in the 1940's , and a twenty-fourth-century child from a distant planet undergoing "Preparation" to return to an Earth left so long ago as to be completely unrecognizable. The subject of immigration and forced repatriation reminded me of Jeffrey Ford's The Girl In the Glass, which also raised questions about what "home" means, particularly in regard to places of origin versus places of residence, and the price "fitting in" takes upon identity and the body itself. "Home" provides, after all, a literal location for our identity, as mused upon by the twenty-fourth century man as he stares at himself in a mirror: "Sometimes I stand and look at myself as I am now, and then I try to imagine myself as I was. Neither body seems quite right. My new body is alien to me, and my old body is alien to this world . . . an out of-place object that has no place.
Van Eekhout claims that the title story came about from his attempt to imitate a Kelly Link story, but I think it's what you would get if you wrote a script for "The Outer Limits" about an alien grammar school show and tell. Maybe it's the first two lines:
Teacher is an old-fashioned bug with a blue carapace and eyes like two domes of gold beads. She is very pretty and smells like follow, but when she flutters her wings you better look smart or you'll get her stinger in your belly.
Don't ask me why so many of the stories in this collection played inside my head like classic television sci-fi and B horror movies, but I sense the author consumes a lot of sugary kid cereal along with his coffee. Nothing psychic going on there, really: the author's notes at the back pretty much support this theory. Another thing about the author's notes: they're sometimes scarier than the stories which they are about. I had never thought of Frosty the Snowman as a "snow golem" before, but now I don't think I'll be able to forget it. I find myself thinking that maybe I can draw out my favorite holiday straight through New Year's.
You can order the Show and Tell and Other Stories chapbook from the Tropism Press Web site You can also read some of Greg van Eekhout's stories from his Web site, or read some of his thoughts on writing, teaching, and martial arts at his blog.
