n Visitations, his most recent collection of short fiction, Jack Dann takes his readers to places as different and as removed from one another in space and time as late 20th-century Florida, a near-future Cannes in decay, a Jewish ghetto in a far-future city and 15th-century Florence, while offering stories in a wide variety of genres. Included here are science fiction ("The Dybbuk Dolls," "I'm With You in Rockland"), modern fantasy ("Between the Windows of the Sea") and what might be called unclassifiable slices of life glimpsed through a warped prism ("Night Visions").
In "The Glass Casket," a deliberate evocation of the familiar fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, the Neo-Platonist philosopher Pico Della Mirandola flees his war-torn city of Florence to find himself in a dreamlike landscape, "a world cloaked in vapor. Or rather a world unformed, unfinished." In "Timetipping," Paley Litwak remains in the same place while everyone and everything around him slips and slides into other times and alternative realities: "...old men were replaced by ancient monsters and fears; but dinosaurs occupied too much space, always slipped, and could enter the present world only in torn pieces—a great ornithischian wing, a stegosaurian tail with two pairs of bony spikes, or, perhaps, a four-foot-long tyrannosaurus head."
In "Amnesia," Raymond Mantle, searching for his dead wife and with no memory of how she died, decides to plug his mind into that of a dying man in the hope of reaching beyond death to find her again. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe go for a drive in "Ting-a-Ling," Pico Della Mirandola reappears in "Vapors" to perform an exorcism on Botticelli as Leonardo da Vinci looks on, while in "Counting Coup," an old man named Charlie is on a cross-country bender in late 20th-century America with John, another geezer who might be an Indian medicine man or just another old drunk. And in "Reunion," Stephen Neshoma decides to attend his own funeral. "At least I could afford to die properly," he tells himself while driving behind the procession, but finds himself forced to confront his failures as he visits with his mourning family.
In his introduction to this collection, Barry N. Malzberg pays an affectionate and admiring tribute to Dann's various gifts and his range: "Overall a writer on the bridge, the writer AS bridge: like so many of his influences and contemporaries not so much a science fiction writer as that paradigm unclassifiable, unadjectival 'writer.'"
Rich fiction that bridges genre boundaries
Jack Dann's imagined worlds are so rich in detail as to become hallucinatory; a reader doesn't so much peruse a Dann story as experience it. "Visitors," a story about a hospitalized boy struggling to recover from surgery while being visited by patients who have died, uses its sharply observed details to reveal how close the boy is to death; as the dead people take on more solidity and reality, those who are still alive—his mother, his nurses—gradually become more insubstantial. In "The Dybbuk Dolls," we willingly follow Chaim Lewis, inhabitant of a Jewish ghetto and owner of a sex shop in a future city, through a maze of complicated, confusing, and often hilarious events involving Chaim, his customers, a political feud, and alien "dolls" capable of tormenting Chaim with his most titillating desires.
A richly textured story like "Vapors," in which the artist Botticelli is finally exorcised of a nearly fatal obsession with the Renaissance beauty Simonetta Vespucci, reminds us that Botticelli was never truly free of Simonetta, who became the model for the blond female figure who appears in many of his most famous paintings; this story imaginatively persists even after the last page is read. Even the slighter stories, such as "A Cold Day in the Mesozoic," in which a small boy has a passing encounter with a brontosaurus, are well worth reading for their sharply observed details.
All of these stories show off Dann's ability to draw the reader completely into his settings and into the minds of his central characters; even when we're not sure of where we're going, we're compelled to go along for the ride. This technique, which gets readers so far into the perceptions of a story's central character that they can feel surrounded and even closed in by the wealth of detail at the beginning, until the story opens up, also serves to underline the theme many of Dann's otherwise diverse works have in common, namely the struggle of an evolving consciousness to confront, understand and apprehend its surroundings and the universe. This is a superior collection that shows off the great talents of a writer who has managed to transcend genre limits while still being rooted, with the wonder and curiosity with which he approaches his art, in science fiction.
