t would be good to begin by saying thank you to Jim Turner, who
is dead but whose books (Neal Barrett's new collection is one) live on.
From 1971 until its family owners fired him in 1996, Turner was the
publisher of Arkham House, concentrating on collections, mostly by live
writers (Arkham had been founded in 1943 to publish H.P. Lovecraft and his
generation, many of them already dead; by 1970 that job had been done to a
turn). He was fired (it was rumored) because Arkham's owners wanted to
concentrate more on "classic" writers.
Canon fire got him.
In 1996 he founded his own house, Golden Gryphon Press, where he
continued his life work: publishing the short fiction of the best science
fiction and fantasy and horror writers of the latter years of the 20th
century in editions attractive enough to read in public without being
arrested. Jim Turner died in 1999. Neal Barrett dedicates Perpetuity
Blues to him; we can express our own gratitude by buying a Golden Gryphon
title or two.
Few of them ever get into paperback; but the original editions
average 3,000 copies (more than a lot of trade publications) and they can
be found. One of them (Robert Reed's The Dragons of Springplace) has
been reviewed here. Other titles
include Tony Daniel's The Robot's Twilight Companion, James Patrick
Kelly's Think Like a Dinosaur and R. Garcia y Robertson's The Moon
Maid.
But start here.
Barrett's great decade
The stories assembled in Perpetuity Blues date mostly from the
1980s (three were published as late as 1993); it was Barrett's great
decade. It was when he also wrote his two greatest novels, Through
Darkest America (1987) and The Hereafter Gang (1991), and it
looked for a time as though he might burst through into the fame he
deserved then and deserves now.
But the first was released by a firm (Congdon & Weed) that almost
immediately washed its hands of sf, and the second by an sf specialty
house (Mark V. Ziesing) in an edition which was neat (but tiny). And Jim
Turner is dead. But the collection he "conceived" (Barrett's own term) is
a stunner. Find it and buy it.
Barrett is funny, Texas-funny, funny like Larry McMurtry,
deadpan, tall-tale, side-of-the-mouth, scatty, fleering. And he knows all
the moves of modern sf, though he does not go down all the trails he
might. And he loves sex. And he writes with a vertiginous, onrushing,
superbly controlled, stomping intensity. And he is utterly ruthless in his
understanding that the world we are now entering is downwards from
America.
The stories allow no escape from any of this. In "Perpetuity
Blues" (1987), a Texas teenager is helped by an alien trapped in the hell
of Earth to make a life in New York; but the epiphanies of good luck and
reunion which close the tale are so artfully contrived they tear the
heart: the way all great counterfactuals about our world (like Oz, like P.G. Wodehouse, like Middle-Earth) tear the heart. "Diner" (1987) is a slice
of life of Texas under Chinese rule. "Sallie C" (1986) and "Winter on the
Belle Fourche" (1989) are fantasies of alternate history, very similar in
tone and technique to a couple dozen tales by Howard Waldrop (USA) and Kim
Newman (UK); and just as good. The depiction of Emily Dickinson in the
second is blusteringly, savagely hilarious.
Bone-deep intuition of gap
Several tales depict tough gamy heterosexual women and tough gamy
heterosexual men (Barrett's work throughout is shaped by a peculiar
heterosexual flavor, which might be described as an bone-deep intuition
of gap: the absence and the gap between one sex and another, between now
and then, here and nowhere, yes and death). In stories like "Highbrow"
(1987), which occupies Lucius Shepard country, or "Ginny Sweethips' Flying
Circus" (1988), which Jonathan Lethem might well have read before writing
Amnesia Moon (1995), the gap is teased, caressed. In landscapes
almost intolerably grotesque, sex is redeemingly had, or is about
redeemingly to be had. But, in the end, men and women remain essentially
alone, tossed to and fro in the winds.
Though it is set in Georgia, and is immersed in grotesque
landscapes of the self and world, too much of a wind of story blows
through "Cush" (1993) for it to read simply as a set piece of Southern
Gothic. It is an sf tale; it is religious allegory; it is satire; it is a
lot of things. A terribly deformed child named Cush (after one of the few
Biblical characters who lives under a curse) is born to a poor white
teenager. As he grows up (losing limbs and other body parts as he
matures), it slowly dawns on the reader (and the cast) that he is a Sin
Eater; a white hole; that his awfulness draws all the awfulness of the
world to him, where it turns to bliss. In the end, "Cush" is not an sf
story at all, but a counterfactual, as ultimately devastating a
counterfactual take on modern life as Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988), that great American movie in which the West (where the
American Dream ends) is won back for us, not lost for ever.
Barrett is a great carnival barker of loss. He shills us hope and
cheer, great jokes, wiseacre women who like men, and genuinely tough men
who do not rape women, but in the end there is nothing for anyone to win
but a smaller tomorrow. The story of sex is loss. The story of work
(almost everyone in these stories has a job, but one that is under threat)
is loss. The story of America (several times seen here under foreign or
alien occupation) is loss.
What is gained is the joy of listening to the guy.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
