2013 read #4: Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer.

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer
292 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 6 to January 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so that Tad Williams book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I couldn't even get through two pages. I love Tad Williams, I really do -- I've read eight of his books, which places him (in raw numerical terms) among my all-time favorite authors. But Dirty Streets was godawful. For whatever reason Williams chose to write it in that self-consciously hip and "self-aware" too-cool-for-school voice that sophomore creative writing students favor, at least when they're 19 year old boys who think they're going to set the literary world on fire and then piss on its ashes. One of the first stories I ever rejected from Scareship was written in that same painfully uninteresting voice. I don't author worship, so I'm not subjecting myself to that trash for Williams' sake.

Instead, I started on this book here after letting it sit in the pile for two months. It's a short story anthology. I always say I need to read more short fiction, and lately I've wanted to write more dark fantasy, so finding this on the shelf was a stroke of fortune... or so I thought. As it proved, the stories were rather subpar, ranging from godawful to actually pretty good. Most of them closer to godawful, sadly.

Since this is my first short story collection of the year, I shook things up and snarked on each contribution as I read them.

"Wolverton Station" by Joe Hill. This was a middling, unremarkable story told in middling, unremarkable prose. Michael Swanwick went down similar tracks in 1998 with his story "Midnight Express," albeit with significantly more originality, style, and delicious perversion. Plus Swanwick didn't drag in a soapbox and repeat stale gibes at American economic imperialism and vulture capitalism. In fact, seriously just go check out Swanwick's Tales of Old Earth right now, if you don't mind a hefty helping of male gaze in your literary SF.

"The Passion of Mother Vajpai" by Jay Lake and Shannon Page. Scope this opening line: "The scent of sandalwood cut through the hot, humid Kalimpuri night like a knife through a disgraced courtesan's wrists." Seriously? With an opening like that I assumed this would be a tongue-in-cheek parody of some kind, but unless my satire sense is failing, I'm afraid this was written in all seriousness by not one but two published, paid, professional authors. No wonder I get so many luridly overwritten submissions at Scareship, if this is the sort of shit getting published these days. At one point someone's vagina is referred to as a "sweetpocket." Oh lord. Prose issues aside, this was a forgettable bit of Orientalist assassin guild fluff. I'm not sure what makes it "dark" fantasy; fumbling attempts at sexuality and romance aside, it would have fit right in with Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s.

"Chivalrous" by Kelley Armstrong. Another lycanthropy story? Really? Okay, so maybe "Wolverton Station" was technically an anthropomorphic animal story, but still. Booooring. This one's also doing the tired old forbidden romance angle, so I'm doubly sick of it. The big "twist" was obvious not even halfway through. I'm having serious thoughts of ditching this book already, but damn it, I'm almost a third done with it now, I may as well struggle on. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.

Snarking as I go is fun and keeping up my motivation.

"Smelling Danger: A Black Company Story" by Glen Cook. Oh lord, a short story with a subtitle. One type of submission I'm guaranteed to reject at Scareship is the serial short, where the author writes a string of sequential short stories about the same characters in the same universe and tries to publish them separately instead of just writing a novel already. Some people like serial shorts. Not me. This story, of course, is military fantasy. I'd rather read supernatural romance than military SF. Military SF is possibly the most derivative of SF subgenres, a collection of monochromatic cliches where men's men gamble, whore, and fight, where the prose is as graceful as hammers falling in mud, where the emotional compass points only to anxiety, duty, hate, and lust. Don't get me started on the nicknames. The narrator is named Croaker because he's the doctor. Get it? Boy howdy, that's clever, that is.

Yawn.

"The Dappled Thing" by William Browning Spencer. A standard-issue Ancient Horror story with standard-issue steampunk stage dressing. But I don't dislike steampunk entirely, not yet, so I found this one merely mediocre instead of terrible.

"Not Last Night but the Night Before" by Steven R. Boyett. Holy shit, this one's actually pretty good. This is the first story in this collection that I would accept for my own magazine without a second thought, and the first one I can actually recommend you should read. It's nothing original, but it's the sort of intimate, human-scale story that gets me every time, told with delightfully bleak humor. Even if the second half of the book is as terrible as the first half, this one story makes the entire read worthwhile.

"Hydraguros" by Caitlín R. Kiernan. I think I've seen the term "crustpunk" tossed around for stories like this: ambitious young street toughs narrating in stupid "futuristic" slang and doing odd jobs for drug-fueled criminal syndicates. That shit bores me. It reminds me of sophomore creative writing students. This story crams that together with tired old Invasion of the Body Snatchers cliches and contrail conspiracies into a completely underwhelming amalgam. It also ends abruptly, leaving half the story untold, but I'm not complaining.

"The Parthenopean Scalpel" by Bruce Sterling. Wait, the Bruce Sterling? What's he doing slumming with this crowd? Granted, I haven't read any of his stories so far as I know, but he's won like awards and shit. He's the first one of these clowns I've heard of. This story was satisfyingly entertaining. I still like the Boyett story better, but this one was pretty decent.

"A Pulp Called Joe" by David Prill. I found the magical-realism conceit here charming. Another pretty good one.

"Vampire Lake" by Norman Partridge. The title made my heart sink as soon as I turned the page. That and the fact that it's the longest damn story in this collection. How are there that many words left to write about vampires? But hey, at least it begins with this hardboiled pulp Western thing going on. I can get down with that. Fantasy western is kind of my bag -- that fact can override even the presence of vampires. This story got a little wordy and dull in spots, but otherwise it was surprisingly fine -- a lot of fun, even. They really backloaded this collection, didn't they?

"A Room with a View" by K. J. Parker. The last half of Subterranean 2 has been worlds better than the first, but here we are at the last story and I must admit, I'm about ready to be done with this book. This one appears to be (or is trying to be) a wry tale of bureaucratic wizardry. It was occasionally amusing in a wry way, I guess I'm just disappointed that there wasn't a mindblowingly creative and original story in this mix. I'm realizing there are only so many ways you can introduce variety into a story about wizards, really. You play with the setting, you play with the rules of magic, and of course you go the "funny" route and make magic as humdrum and regulated as plumbing work. Still, I liked this one too.

I was going to give this book an abysmal score, but the string of solid stories in the last half convinced me to bump it up at least a little bit. I can't recommend this book, but not all the stories were bad, so take from that whatever you like.