Jeffrey Ford, The Drowned Life (Harper Perennial, 2008)
If one's first encounter with Jeffrey Ford (author of The Girl in the Glass and The Empire of Ice Cream) is with his latest anthology, The Drowned Life, one might be hard-pressed to pinpoint what Ford's genre leanings exactly are. He's not quite fantasy, he's not quite sci-fi. He's not exactly horror, either. Rather, Jeffrey Ford's latest collection makes the most abundant use of the uncanny -- the vague, ephemeral quality of otherworldly wrongness that can be blasted full strength (in such stories as "The Drowned Life" and "The Night Whiskey," which are more strongly fantasy and horror) or slowed to a subtle trickle (the gentle "What's Sure to Come" and "A Few Things About Ants").
The collection opens with the story that gives the anthology its name. In "The Drowned Life" (which I also reviewed in the Best American Fantasy 2008), popular metaphors are brought to vivid, painful life, as a man plagued by troubles decides to "go under," and actually ends up in a ghoulish underwater town of lost souls who've also given up. After that comes "Ariadne's Mother," a puzzlingly brief tale of a woman who is (supposedly) helping her severely handicapped daughter compose stories for a class. Most of the strangeness of this story comes from Ford's unsettling description of the daughter.
Ford follows this up with "The Night Whiskey," an excellent tale of a teen raised in an isolated small town whose culture revolves around the distillation of the titular beverage. Those who imbibe the whiskey are thrown into a drunken trance state in which they can commune with the dead. However, that's not the scary part of "The Night Whiskey." To say more would be spoiling a truly engaging story, my favourite in the collection.
"A Few Things About Ants" is a little less straightforward, although the title is certainly accurate. A man driving through the rain suddenly starts to think about ants -- or rather, random anecdotes about ants and the cool things they can do. Baffling and seemingly pointless, it's one of the weaker entries in the collection.
After comes the twisty "Under the Bottom of the Lake," a story that's apparently being made up on the spot as one reads it, about a girl, a boy, a story trapped in a pink glass bubble, and a tasty pretzel of past secrets. If you can keep up with the temporal inconsistency and the narrator's direct intrusion into the plot line, this tale is surprisingly rewarding.
"Present from the Past" is a meandering and unfocused tale of a man and his family dealing with the recent death of the family matriarch. While disorganized, this relatively simple tale (no tricks, no magic) deals with the ordinary upheavals of family dynamics with sensitivity and warmth.
"The Manticore Spell" follows this and brings the collection back around to a more or less conventional fantasy plotline: in this case, a wizard and his apprentice are commissioned to eliminate a mischievous manticore. While the wizard insists the creature can only be killed by old age, he continues to teach his apprentice the ways of this magic and immortal creature.
"The Fat One," is a prime example of the subtle ways Jeffrey Ford's grasp of the uncanny can influence an otherwise unremarkable story. A man turns to hotdogs to overcome his addiction to cigarettes, and quickly becomes dependent upon unsavoury processed meats instead of nicotine, all unknowing of his new danger until his frustrated but talented son starts sending him coded messages and pictures using mustard.
"The Dismantled Invention of Fate" ventures into sci-fi, but not that far. A famous astronaut marries a young alien girl, but when their fates are driven apart -- presumably by malfunctioning technology -- a mysterious creature hunts them through the years in an attempt to rectify a reality that should never have been. Like many of Ford's stories in this collection, "The Dismantled Invention of Fate" requires some thought and concentration to unravel its knots, but in the end, it's worth it.
"What's Sure to Come" plays with the low-key fantasy idea of a grandmother capable of picking winning horses at the racetrack every time thanks to prophetic dreams, a development that both frustrates and pleases her husband, who's relied on more conventional means to choose the perfect racehorse.
Meanwhile, "The Scribble Mind," ironically, is one of the more straightforward stories of the collection, despite the fact that it's based on a worldwide conspiracy of people capable of remembering their experiences in the womb, who can all identify themselves by reproducing the same seemingly random scribble at whim.
After this comes "The Bedroom Light," which is another story of Ford's that focuses so deeply on meandering dialogue and anecdotes that it slides completely off the rails and forgets to have a plot entirely. While the protagonists discuss a variety of topics while in bed, they never land on one particularly interesting eough to focus a story around.
Next up is "In the House of Four Seasons," an establishment that caters to healing, in one way or another, four troubled individuals. This is another one of Ford's Rubik's Cube stories, as not only does he shuffle the timeline like a deck of cards, but he also changes the protagonists' names from scene to scene. Unlike "Under the Bottom of the Lake," however, this puzzle is more frustrating than fun.
Thankfully, "The Dreaming Wind" cleanses the palate with a gentle and loving tale of magic taken for granted. The protagonist belongs to a town that, once a year, becomes subject to the Dreaming Wind -- an inexplicable natural phenomenon that sweeps through, eliminating all pretences at conventional reality for a brief time. While everything returns to normal (usually) once the wind passes on, the town's inhabitants regard the occasion with fear and trepidation -- that is, until one year the Dreaming Wind doesn't come.
The final story, "The Golden Dragon," is another directionless tale about a man who befriends a group of recovering drug addicts. While he enjoys their company, he's helpless to stop them as one by one they fall off the wagon.
Throughout this collection, Jeffrey Ford exercises the sense of the uncanny, the strange. Most of his stories meander, wander, drift, the narratives as slippery and supple as silk thread. Sometimes they hover close to reality, and at other times they completely miss it. In many cases, these stories wander, seemingly by accident, into startling expanses of wonder, mystery, and magic. However, in a few instances ("A Few Things About Ants" and "The House of Four Seasons," for example), they drift too far away from understanding. Thankfully, judging from the majority of these stories, Jeffrey Ford's uniquely chaotic writing style hits its target more often than not.
