I read this edition of Interzone when it was published back in February, but my thoughts on the issue were dominated by the weird brilliance of the opening story, Ashley Stokes’ ‘Orange Slab’. A few weeks passed, which were busy at work (and I was driving myself crazy working on Seaforth stories) and it was the only story I could really remember well enough to write about. I remembered the others as worthy – some excellent, but the titular orange slab (depicted in the cover art by Emma Howitt) dominated my thoughts and I needed to take some time to read them again, free from its tangerine malevolence. All of a sudden, months have passed and Interzone #302 just dropped, so here are my belated thoughts on the previous issue.
I’m glad I did, because, actually, Corey Jae White’s ‘Mirrored’ — the last piece in this issue — is just as interesting, just as invaluable, so let’s work backwards for once!
‘Mirrored’ is a striking piece about an influencer/model whose social media seems to have been taken over by a doppelgänger. And the doppelgänger is better at it. It’s very on point, very relevant to today’s terrifying social media dystopia. Omar joylessly sculpts his appearance and curates his feeds, only to realise that his followers are liking posts by the other Omar. The story is brilliant on the superficial nature of our online presence, spending hours “just trying to appear like a normal person”. But it also is a metaphor for everyone “trying to appear like a normal person” and that’s a powerful thing. The doppelgänger — Ramo — seems impossibly perfect, and this is shown in contrast to all of the flaws that Omar imagines in himself, that he works to obscure and negate. Ramo is Omar freed of self-loathing. When they eventually meet, Ramo oozes confidence and certainty and really does embody everything that Omar has been faking, and this breaks him. Corey blogs powerfully about this story and her essay is worth reading after you’ve read ‘Mirrored’.
‘Learning to Fall’ by David Cleden is a climbing story. This is set in a fantasy-like world with an impossibly high ‘tether’ which people climb to the ‘bauble’ – a ruined old space elevator cable with a car stuck somewhere high up. Our hero wants to follow in his father’s footsteps but is scared of falling. His partner in climb — despite never really speaking to him — understands and knows his fears. A standard bullying rich kid is mean to the “peasant boy” but also causes an accident, and the elevator ‘bauble’ begins to fall… This is competent and thrilling fiction, an age old confrontation-of-one’s-fears story. What’s interesting is that it stops at the moment of the character’s transformation, which is a lovely choice.
‘Dawnie’s How the World Is (Dictated)’ is the latest in Rachael Cupp’s Year of Blue sequence, and it is another fine addition. Written in the voice of five-year-old Dawn it shows a child’s eye view of life after the end of the world, a world of death and monsters, but also kindness and resilience. Cupp shows us the small things that matter through the eyes of Dawnie and her ‘translator’, eleven-year-old Grace.
Philip Fracassi’s ‘The Astral Key’ is a novelette about a capricious rich man’s murderous personal reality show. One of those house-based contests where the hapless contestants are transported to a mysterious location and forced to compete against each other for the prize of survival, but for an audience of one… It’s… fine. Well-written and engaging, with a little hint in the final paragraph that more is going on and not everything is wrapped up as neatly as it appears. This one just left me wanting it to be even weirder, or feeling that perhaps I’ve missed something.
“About the size of a large ironing board and thick as a bouncer’s fist, there was nothing cheerful about its orange colour. It was the orange of slugs or the dirtiest fake tan in the world.
While thinking about ‘Orange Slab’ I was trying to remember that quote about the new weird, probably something M.John Harrison said, about the why not being the point, and sure enough I probably couldn’t tell you (or I’m not smart enough to explain) what the titular orange slab means in this story.
But it doesn’t matter. The story is about two old friends, the narrator and Kalvin. On the cusp of some kind of pandemic lockdown, Kalvin has become obsessed with conspiracies, represented by the slab, which has to be moved to the home of the local clearance man – Smuts – who is also Kalvin’s nemesis. So far, so straightforward, right? Except the conspiracies might be coming true, the pandemic and the fear has thrown everything off its axis, all certainties are breaking down, meaning is suspect, Smuts might be an ancient being “made from the nightmares of Vikings”.
Woven throughout this is the story of the friendship between the men. It began at school, and the story really captures the way old friends banter with each other, as well as the petty rifts and frustrations of your oldest friends. In the middle of Kalvin’s weirdness and some kind of apocalypse, Stokes tells a story of friendship that feels true.
What I’m struggling to tell you about is how well the strangeness works in the story – on a personal level through Kalvin it becomes deep and almost metafictional, and on the public level of the pandemic it captures that strange liminal feeling of terror that we all shared in isolation during that first lockdown of 2020.
(On rereading the story for this review, I was reminded how much I liked it, and I immediately hopped online and found a second-hand copy of Stokes’ novel, Gigantic – now sadly out of print – which arrived yesterday. Can’t wait to get into it.)
Buy this issue. Get it for “Mirrored” and “The Orange Slab,” and then stay to enjoy the other stories. I’ve got to move on to the new issue to catch up with my reviews AND finish my own newstories. Occasional reader, I will see you soon.
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