young Catholic boy fascinated with the act of creation goes into the woods and builds himself a man out of weeds. Animating the creature, whom he names Cavenaugh, with a smoky cigarette exhalation of his father's, the boy watches as the man of sticks and moss wanders to and fro as lost as any man forsaken by his God.
A young woman becomes a research assistant for Ashmolean, the eccentric writer of numerous sword-and-sorcery fantasies about a mighty barbarian named Glandar. Ashmolean needs her help keeping the tangled continuity of his epics consistent from book to book ... but when he loses his inspiration, she soon enters the story itself to discover that Glandar is sick and tired of the life Ashmolean has dreamed for him.
A man named Honis Sikes ("The Far Oasis") lives in the celestial city of Aldebaran, where he has achieved a modest fame as a master of a local game called Maize. Seduced and abandoned by a beautiful woman named Methina, who was only after his secret game-playing strategies, he murders her, and is exiled for his crime ... only to find that his imprisonment, in the oasis of an otherwise inhospitable world, gives him the chance to rebuild his imagined lost love with the forces of evolution itself.
A suburbanite on his way home picks up a pair of hitchhikers who just happen to be Jesus Christ and the Devil. Taking a side trip to Florida to visit a woman Jesus supports for canonization, they observe unseen while the old woman watches television ... then flee for their lives when she also develops blue skin and fangs.
The collection includes these and 12 other tales, none of which takes a normal route along fantasy's well-traveled roads.
Dreams
of unexpected depth
Jeffrey Ford, one of the more unusual writers in the twin fields of fantasy and science fiction, eschews easy categorization. He's a wordsmith whose works feature a fine command of descriptive poetry. He's also a humanist whose strange tales are less about the fantastic gimmicks that drive them than the souls of the characters who inhabit them.
Some of the stories, like "Pansolopia," defy easy categorization, almost daring the reader to figure out what they signify. Others, like "Malthusian's Zombie," a tale that at first seems to be about a mad scientist with a mind-controlled government experiment in his basement, begin with both feet planted in familiar genre territory, only to wander off into unpredictable pathways all the more surprising for their sneaky humanity. Few are predictable. Many are haunting. Most are memorable.
The most unusual tale here is "Exo-Skeleton Town," which starts on a bizarre note and builds the blocks of contrivance so high that only bravado keeps them from toppling. It's about an alien planet inhabited by intelligent insects whose excretions are prized by humans as powerful aphrodisiacs. As they're willing to exchange the valuable substance for terrestrial motion pictures, which they adore, many human beings with old movies on hand rush there to make a killing; but they must go in life-support exoskeletons, which are built to resemble the forms of old-time movie stars. Narrated by a man in the body of old-time actor Joseph Cotten, whose dreams of riches went awry after he lost his inherited copy of Night of the Living Dead, the tale seems just the wild goof of a writer intent on hanging a tale on the most bizarre circumstances possible ... until circumstances present the doomed "Cotten" with the equally doomed figure of a woman wearing an exoskeleton based on an obscure B-movie actress named Gloriette Moss.
At that point it picks up unexpected depth as it becomes an examination of scars hidden beneath the masks we show the world. The story sneaks up on you ... and so do many of the other tales that make up this terrific retrospective.
