On Books

Small Press Roundup

by Paul Di Filippo

The small—or “indie”—press that specializes in fantastika is basically as old as the genre itself. The entry on this topic from The Science Fiction Encyclopedia charts the origin of such enterprises back to the1920s, even before Hugo Gernsback birthed Amazing. The importance of these firms in pioneering good work that might otherwise go unpublished by larger houses—big enterprises that keep their eyes too firmly fixed on the empyrean of bestsellers to be aware of what’s happening right underfoot—cannot be overstated.

Today, the indie press scene is vibrant and flourishing, offering something for all tastes and all budgets. Thanks to print-on-demand technologies and unprecedented platforms and distribution systems, anyone with a decent computer and sufficient ambition can become a publisher. But business savvy and an eye for literary talent are obviously crucial factors in success, just as they were a century ago.

Let’s take a look at seven recent offerings from this scene.

Aqueduct Press was founded in 2004 by L. Timmel Duchamp, and over the subsequent decades has brought forth a couple of hundred volumes, a remarkable record. And they show no signs of slowing down. With an emphasis on feminist and progressive authors and works, they still manage to delineate a wide spectrum of fiction and nonfiction.

Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air (paperback, $12.00, 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1-61976-276-3) presents four of Duchamp’s own stories. Three hail from the nineties, while one is original to this volume. The older ones are just as fresh and captivating as the newest. Duchamp is a writer of marvelous inventive abilities and a brave intensity. But if there is one adjective not assignable to her writing, it’s probably “sprightly.” The gravitas of her themes and plots carries and conveys a certain solemn weightiness. Perhaps a partial exception is the last story here.

The first tale is “Motherhood, Etc.” Our young protagonist, Pat, has fallen into the hands of government agents and scientists who are concerned that her boyfriend, Joshua, is an interstellar alien with strange effects on humans with whom he has intimate relations or other close proximity. Of course this description fits Pat, and she has to acknowledge that she is indeed experiencing anomalous bodily changes of a, um, pelvic nature. Pat’s perspective on her life is both wistful and cynical, naïve and knowing, passive and outraged. Eventually, this paradoxical worldview brings her victory over the forces of conformity.

Next up is the brand-new piece, “The Last Nostalgia.” (What a great title, by the way.) It’s reminiscent of China Miéville’s The City & the City, in that it deals with two urban nodes that exist in a kind of tortured but inescapable relationship to each other. Our heroine, Daisy Q, moves effortlessly between realms, but not without some psychological discomfort. Her travels highlight the pluses and minuses of each realm. Duchamp is careful not to endorse such stale dichotomies as “good vs. bad,” but her authorial heart is plainly with the zone that offers more freedom, even at the price of instability.

“Welcome, Kid, to the Real World” traverses a kind of Moderan-esque territory: i.e., a world where life is overdetermined by semi-mechanical rituals and overly logical practices. Our protagonist, J.L., is a youngster with a neutral gender profile, as are all the children of this place. The youth’s parents are continuously pushing the kid to choose an imminent transition to either male or female, and the burden is heavy. The generation gap tensions are mirrored by disagreements with one of J.L.’s peers, a best friend. The story ultimately accepts the sad necessity of making a choice that ends one era and opens up new vistas of the unknown.

“When Joy Came to the World” is the final tale, the one I deemed to be somewhat Dionysian, as opposed to Duchamp’s general Apollonian take on life and fiction. It’s told in epistolary form, as we eavesdrop on letters from one Denise Loreau, who lives and works in Florence, Italy. Her voice is lively and idiosyncratic, and reminds me of one of Kit Reed’s slightly manic, about-to-blow characters. Denise experiences a strange “snowfall” over her city (shades of a triffid invasion), and amidst her marvelous detailing of her quotidian life, we start to get hints of much anomalous, snow-caused behavior. By story’s end, we are dealing with a globally transformative situation that seems to reconcile Emma Goldman’s famous quote: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

With flavors of Tiptree, Wilhelm, and Emshwiller, L. Timmel Duchamp brings us stirring reports from worlds inverted and reconfigured “nearer to the heart’s desire.”

In When Mothers Dream (Fairwood Press, paperback, $18.99, 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1-958880-35-7), Brenda Cooper, celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary as a writer, has assembled a superior story collection that illustrates her facility in a number of genres, yet which is unified by its focus on female protagonists, contemporary problems (often cleverly rejiggered and extrapolated), and, to a lesser degree, orcas, those enigmatic, gift-bearing whales. As Cooper explains in her inviting foreword, she lives in a region where these impressive and abused creatures are a daily sight, and she finds them a potent symbol of both our hope and despair.

Nearly two dozen stories and poems (some having their first appearance here) make for a generous volume too stuffed for me to cover each entry. So let’s have a look at some standouts.

The first tale, “Solastalgia Meets the Alps,” features a literal mother-daughter theme. Our narrator is a reporter and a futurist with a teenage daughter who is suffering from apocalyptic angst. Can the older woman imbue her progeny with any hope and faith? A trip to Switzerland and its changing glaciers, live-streamed home to the daughter, proves to be the ticket.

“Callme and Mink,” the names of two dogs being raised by a sentient robot named Julie, is a tale with a Simakian air. In a post-collapse environment, dogs revert to their ancestral hunter-gatherer utility, if properly trained. But how does one make sure any potential human owners are equally trained as partners? Sometimes only a robot’s programming can unriddle the human heart.

A decidedly cyberpunk story is “Elephant Angels.” In a future where poaching of wildlife continues apace, on-site drones helmed virtually by remote humans can serve as guardians. An older woman named Francine wants to perform such a role, but the job is not as easy as it looks. Cooper does a neat thing when she makes the narrative perspective into a chain of links, each link a different person, finally rounding back to Francine, with a great closing sentence: “Bits of summer sun from Africa kissed the cold Northwest.”

A kind of Clarkean Deep Range verisimilitude inheres in “Southern Residents.” Dr. Julie Pol runs ORIAS, a cutting-edge oceanic curation and research facility. But as with all such projects that demand lots of public cash, people object to such “fruitless” frippery. Can Dr. Pol bring around the public? Sometimes a kind of Zen let-it-be approach proves best.

“Biology at the End of the World”—which lucky Asimov’s readers saw in these pages in 2015—has a distinct Stablefordian flavor—I’m thinking of his Emortality series. Narrator Paulette Rain is a kind of cop, tasked with enforcing genetic purity among various orbital biomes. A true believer in a hands-off approach to genetic engineering, she uncovers signs of “dangerous” experimentation, and attempts to bag the culprits and shutdown their project. But perhaps it is her creed that will shatter instead.

Headlines lately are full of talk of the human population crashing, as couples refuse to reproduce. This timely theme animates “Her Granddaughter’s Teachers,” one of the pieces original to this collection. A grandmother named Anya, invested in perpetuating life on Earth, despite all hurdles, is dismayed by her granddaughter Hsu’s fascination with what appears to Anya to be a sterile robotic investigation of space. Can Anya impart some of her sense of the necessary cycle of human life to her granddaughter? Much as in “Solastalgia Meets the Alps,” the ending is left indeterminate but hopeful.

Finally, in “Blackstart,” another mother-daughter pair deal with the results of “. . . a hack. Eco-idiots of some kind. Whole damned Western grid. Texas to California.” Innovating on the fly in a race to restore services before harsh consequences, they discover qualities in each other not heretofore appreciated.

Cooper’s work is grounded intimately in two planes: the mysterious, worshipable material cosmos, and the equally strange and cherished terrain of the human heart and soul. With deft plotting, neat ideas, insightful characterization and engagingly clarified prose, she bops back and forth between these realms and their intersections, a keen-eyed pilgrim.

I last dipped into Lois McMasterBujold’s World of the Five Gods saga when I reviewed her 2021 Penric novella, Knot of Shadows. I missed the subsequent volume, Demon Daughter, but have now made good by picking up Penric and the Bandit (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $45.00, 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1-64524-272-7). Previously, I said that each Penric book, despite trailing a long backstory, encouraged easy access by newcomers. This remains true. Also true is my concluding observation: “Bujold’s easygoing and accomplished prose and her honed storytelling chops ensure that her World of the Five Gods will continue to entice and entertain, some twenty years into its unfolding.”

Penric is on the road in this outing, away from his home city of Vilnoc. This necessarily excludes the familiar cast of subsidiary characters, from his charming wife on down. Of course, always with him, embedded in his soul, is the friendly, helpful, and communicative demon Desdemona, source of much of Penric’s magical powers. (It occurs to me for the first time that Desdemona is the functional antithesis of Elric’s Stormbringer. Elric, Penric . . . hmmm.) This venue displacement is an engaging authorial maneuver to mix things up and not go stale. Additionally, Bujold splits the narrative’s POV between Penric and a new character. In fact, the book opens with the musing of a male bandit named Roz. Provided with an interesting and humanizing biography—early abuse, military brutality, etc.—Roz is on the lam from his fellow brigands, having stolen all their communal donkeys and sold them. It was an attempt to burn his bridges with the crude and cruel gang, but hasn’t really succeeded. So when he spots a young blond lad in a country inn, studying what appears to be a treasure map, he decides to attach his wagon to this “gullible” star.

The dupe, or “gull,” is of course Penric, and he and Desdemona are quite aware of what Roz intends when he introduces himself and makes to tag along. But Penric could use a second pair of hands in his quest; he’s in search of a deserted monastery and the treasure reputed to lie there. But he also has another motive: reformation and rescue. Penric after all is a holy man of sorts, and he senses in Roz the potential for redemption, the saving of a soul. And so the dual-purposed quest begins.

The quest, as these things go, is a relatively uneventful one until the end. This is not to say it’s unengaging. Far from it. Roz’s gang catches up with him one dark night, and, to save his own life, he tells of Penric’s treasure hunt and assures them there will be booty for all. So with the ruffians shadowing Penric, he and Roz saunter blithely on. The dramatic interplay occurs between Penric’s knowledge and state of grace and Roz’s (reversible) damnation and ignorance. Of course, Desdemona, being a loquacious third party, contributes much humor and interplay, too.

Bujold has a talent for evoking landscapes and weather and manmade environments, so the quest occurs in a nicely tangible milieu. Eventually, Penric gets his treasure, but it’s of value only to him, not to barbarians. Does this spell curtains for him and Roz, trapped halfway up a cliff face, brigands above and below? Not very likely, although suspense about their escape is still inherent.

Bujold expertly delivers on the moral dimensions of the quest as well, having depicted the coming to greater awareness of a benighted person. The moral shines brightly: many who seem spiritually lost are recoverable, if only they receive a helping hand. The optimism never becomes Pollyannaish, and a little kicker at the end, when Roz, thanks to a conversation with a border guard, realizes the magnitude of the man who befriended him, amplifies the lesson: a hand reaching downward has to be matched by a hand reaching up.

Author Mike Allen deserves—twice over—to be included in any discussion of the contemporary small-press scene. Not only does his own fine fiction appear from various indie firms, but he—along with wife Anita—runs Mythic Delirium Books and Mythic Delirium magazine. Since its founding in 2006, that firm has brought forth scores of books and journals, and shows no sign of stopping.

Allen’s own new novel, however, issues from the newish Broken Eye Books, which itself already has a sizable string of notable titles, most prominently a couple from Gwendolyn Kiste. Trail of Shadows (paperback, $21.99, 276 pages, ISBN: 978-1940372723) is a propulsive dark fantasy thriller. It achieves its merits by latching onto a classic trope of the field, modernizing it, rejiggering the parameters a bit, and installing an engaging protagonist at the center of it. What trope is this? I guess it could be expressed as “unwitting heir discovers they belong to a nonhuman lineage, somewhere between good and evil.”

If that sounds like a nebulous mouthful, let me use a classic example for clarity: Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think. Our hero, Will Barbee, learns of the existence among humanity of a subspecies of shapechangers and, much to his horror, finds out he is one himself—but for good or ill? This is the same basic plot engine of Allen’s newest. But there is no sense of staleness or retreading plowed ground.

The book is set in 1991—partially, I think, to avoid all the suspense-cancelers inherent in a modern internet-slash-cell phone environment—and the cultural trappings of that era, insofar as they figure, are nicely laid out. Our hero, Nathan Mullins, is not yet twenty-one, a college student who has been experiencing disturbing waking visions. He impulsively flees college and family, setting out to hike the Appalachian Trail in the hopes that Nature might be a restorative. Along the way, he contemplates for the nth time certain obscure mysteries that his grandmother—Mamaw—began to teach him before her untimely death. Then one day on the trail he hears the voice of an invisible juvenile boy crying out for help. As a result of this occurrence, he is put into proximity with a strange couple named Gertrude and Herman Crabbe. Their company proves uncongenial, and he next seeks refuge with an older cousin named Phyllis. But en route, he experiences weird bodily transformations into a huge black panther, and engages in a fight with hostile creatures similar to himself. Phyllis’s home and town prove likewise dangerous, and Nathan hits the road again. In a diner he meets a waitress named Kori, who exerts an uncommon attraction. She proves to have knowledge of Nathan’s nature and condition, a heritage that she shares. Together, they fall under attack by a monster dubbed a “piasa.”

I think this is enough synopsis of a complicated plot to convey Allen’s strategy. Nathan is going to be driven from pillar to post, fighting for knowledge and for his life every step of the way. He will meet more players of the game as he goes on—including the alluring Queen of the Night, Lilith, the kind of Dark Femme Fatale that Williamson also adored—until they are all assembled, and the final battle(s) for supremacy takes place.

One sophistication over Williamson’s novel that Allen introduces is an alternate dimension, the Silver Lands, the home territory of Nathan and his kind. This surreal Doctor Strange-cum-George MacDonald landscape is vividly conveyed; a segment involving ghosts and a ritual cave is quite eerie. I found Allen’s spooky depiction and usage of this device equal to that of Lev Grossman in his The Magicians series.

Allen also adds thrills to the headlong narrative by having it span a mere seven days, quite believably. Nathan’s first-person account allows for a fair bit of poetic language, adding color to the telling.

I dreamt of chaos. All around me, rows and rows of black pine trees scrabbled toward the sky, their rings of nude branches curling to all sides like petrified spider legs. Their fallen needles pricked the soles of my bare feet. An immense creature moved in the distance, fragmented from view through the tree trunks, muscles rippling beneath metallic blue hide.

The book’s ending, totally complete and satisfying, nonetheless conjures up thoughts of a sequel. Let’s hope Nathan unleashes his inner kitty-cat again soon.

Although the title of Samuel “Chip” Delany’s new book—Last Tales: Twenty Stories (Coffee House Press, paperback, $22.00, pages, ISBN: 978-1914953958)—bears a melancholy air of finality, in contradiction to Delany’s ongoing lively internet presence, the stories within do not suffer from any kind of end-game lassitude or enervation. Quite the opposite: they show Delany, at age eighty-three, doing what he’s always done best: blending precise and poetic language with a hard look at emotions and relationships, along with the cultural effects of new technologies, steeped in his patented transgressiveness. Not every piece here is fantastika, but they are all plainly Delany, a voice unto himself.

The collection is divided into three parts: “Last Tales,” which features uncollected work from recent years (barring one way-older item from 1984); “Early Tales,” which offers some revelatory juvenilia; and “Emended Tales,” two better-known stories that have received a makeover.

We open with “The Wyrm,” one of Delany’s rare excursions into pure horror, and a tribute to his hero, Ted Sturgeon—specifically, Sturgeon’s classic “It!” Delany starts with a portrait of his monster.

[T]he wyrm, a nematode-like life-form whose spore had come to this mountainous stretch in a meteor shower almost 770 years ago, underwent the second of three metamorphoses that had been programmed into its cellular development on an entirely different landscape and in a far more violent biosphere. . . . It knew an interested indifference—and it knew rage more total that any creature on earth. Nor could it explain why it went from one to the other or back . . .

From here, we focus on humans and a dog, and their encounter with the creature. Delany takes time to show the quotidian as well as the fantastical, and he provides twists and surprises aplenty.

Next up is a story that constitutes, without quibble, Delany’s major work from this late period, “The Hermit of Houston.” It bears all the sophisticated hallmarks of his heyday, from a narrator undergoing tricks of memory and slow-blooming epiphanies, to radical transformations of society. Our protagonist, a young boy when first met, lives with some peers in a strange Hermitage, “in the shell of what [the Hermit’s] assistant explained had been a suburban supermarket, though she said that even earlier it had been an urban cathedral, when this had briefly been the site of the city of Tulum on the eastern Yucatán coast, before the Texans came.” Eventually leaving this refuge, the boy wanders, grows up, and takes root in a small bricolaged urban conglomeration, partnering with an older man he calls Cellibrex. Our hero’s worldview is contoured by his travels and the flood of fragmentary information and misinformation prevalent. The feel of this future is very much like that of Bellona in Dhalgren, and the vibe of confused nostalgia and ardent seeking resonates with the work of Crowley and Wolfe. A major instance of Delany’s world—and character—construction.

One of my favorite stories in Delany’s classic collection, Driftglass, is “Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo.” “The Real Joe Dicostanzo” elucidates the man who inspired the story, and limns the portrait of a lost soul. “The Atheist in the Attic” is a long historical tale of the seventeenth century, involving the philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz in an epistemological and ontological tug of war. And “First Trip to Brewster” pulls off a remarkable trick. The story starts with Delany recounting a barebones, enigmatic anecdote he heard once, but then the narrative spirals outward into a hypothetical yet vivid account of a plausible backstory that could have led to the anecdote, a backstory that illustrates important matters of class and race.

The juvenile output of Delany’s questing mind and talents reveals a sensitive adolescent whose voluminous reading in mainstream literature and fantastika provided the seedbed for what was to come. And lastly, the chance to read an enhanced version of the milestone tale “Driftglass” is always welcome.

Whatever stage of Delany’s writing that this collection might represent—a true terminus, or some penultimate card in a long literary game—it holds delights, insights, and invites to one of the most seminal and essential canons in the history of our genre.

Tachyon Publications just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary, and they certainly rank among the top tier of indie presses, thanks to the hard work and perspicacious tastes of founders Jacob and Rina Weisman. Their current season’s offerings, as usual, represent a variety of stellar books for all tastes. But it would be hard to select a more enjoyable one than Theodora Goss’s sixth story collection, Letters from an Imaginary Country (trade paperback, $18.95, 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1-61696-440-5).

In this volume, Goss steps out as a true mistress of fantastika, providing stories that are all over the genre map, yet which all share her distinctive voice. She never places a foot wrong as she journeys across many literary terrains, and, without intruding herself (the exception being some deliberately metafictional tales), she serves as an unflappable guide amongst dreams and nightmares, pleasures and horrors, the mundane and the outrageous. These stories are paradoxically as light as mist from a fairyland fountain, yet as weighted with gravitas and meaning as a time-buried prophecy.

It’s not feasible to cite all of them in this space, so we’ll pick and choose some highlights.

The book opens with “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” wherein Goss does Alan Moore one better. Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has nothing on the house in London that offers shelter to this crew: Miss Justine Frankenstein; Miss Catherine Moreau; Miss Beatrice Rappaccini; Miss Mary Jekyll; Miss Diana Hyde; and Mrs. Arthur Meyrinck (née Helen Raymond). The story is not plot-heavy, but more of a “sketch” that instead revels in portraiture of the women. Goss has been expanding this universe into a series of novels about each of the women depicted here.

Those two autofictional tales, which lovingly yet objectively invoke Goss’s own personal history, are “Dora/Dóra: An Autobiography” and “To Budapest, With Love.” They inscribe Borgesian runes over intimately depicted Hungarian reality. And, inf act, Borges figures largely elsewhere in the main engine of this book, which is the instantiation of countries that cannot be found on any current consensus map. In “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology,” three college students meticulously hallucinate a whole realm into existence. It’s quite a lark, until guns and revolutionaries appear. A very similar scenario occurs in “Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Except this time, the godlings are even younger students, and the tale has a Madeleine L’Engle vibe. And lastly, the title story features a certain “Professor Theodora Goss” in conversation with the citizens of Thüle, a most nebulous place. One might recall Jan Morris’s Hav, or Le Guin’s Orsinia or Aldiss’s Malacia.

“Where did she come from? Some say she came from the stars, that she is an alien life-form. Some say she is an ancient goddess reborn. Some say she is an ordinary woman, and that such women have always lived in the north: witches who command the snows.” This is the description of the malevolent Empress at the heart of “England Under the White Witch.” Narrated by a young woman who initially gets onboard the conqueror’s chilly train, the story brings a grim and gritty version of frozen Narnia alive.

Christopher Priest would have been proud to write “Come See the Living Dryad.” Two teratological wonders in a Victorian sideshow receive a posthumous accounting that is also a tragic murder mystery. A Tiptreean mordancy informs “Beautiful Boys,” which illuminates the alien incubi among us, whose hypnotic charms undo the female of our species. “Estella Saves the Village” features a kind of awesome conceptual-breakthrough trope, as we follow a young woman’s average days in a strangely deteriorating universe.

And finally, “Child-Empress of Mars” takes the classic Burroughsian-Bradburyian mystique of Mars and puts it through a filter of Clark Ashton-Smith strangeness that inverts the human privileging of yore. Instead of mating with Dejah Thoris, our Terran visitor experiences things like this:

Once, the citizens came out of a town to offer him welcome, placing a garland of pink Gondal flowers around his neck and giving him cups of the intoxicating liquor that westerners make from an iridescent fungus they call Ghram, which grows on the roots of the Gondal tree. Once, he was placed in a cage at the center of the town, and the citizens came to see him, until he said a word that was the name, they told him, of an ancient god who was still secretly reverenced.

It’s Dunsany does John Carter. Goss’s fiction, as showcased in this sterling collection, ascends to the top of the mountain of fantastika, and this book should be on many award ballots in days to come.

Simply stated, Geoff Ryman’s newest, Animals (NewCon Press, trade paperback, $16.49, 246 pages, ISBN: 978-1914953958), is a masterpiece. It’s the most affecting, potent, clearly rendered, and distinctly non-cozy catastrophe since The Day of the Triffids. In its opening chapters it builds a solid, heftable emulation of our world, delivered from a unique point of view, then resolutely shatters that model in a series of inevitable, inexplicable, incredible blows. It has the ultimate conviction of its doomsday premise: there will be no last-minute reprieves. The Universe will have its way, issuing the final word on humanity’s fate.

The book also raises a question that exists outside the margins of its own art, which I will save for the end of this review.

The year is 2025, and our narrator hero—and hero he proves to be—is ten-year-old Teddy Spaulding. (Is it mere coincidence that he shares the surname of the boy in Dandelion Wine? I think not; for that comforting classic can stand as the antithesis of Ryman’s tale.) Teddy lives alone with his mom in a small British village. His dad, Mike, is absent, because he came out as gay, and now resides in London with his new partner Ken. But Mike still tries to play a substantive role in the life of his ex-family, despite Teddy’s resentments. Also vital to the household is a local older woman named Faith, who helps with cooking, cleaning, etc.

Mike’s occupation is veterinary researcher at a London institute. This places him favorably to stumble upon a horrible phenomenon centered in the very county where Teddy lives: a sourceless plague is killing every kind of animal under the sun—save for birds and fish.

Of course this worries Teddy, who has a beloved cat named Little One, as well as several dogs, ducks, chickens, a pig, and so forth. Teddy is already nervous and “highly imaginative,” and also a bit of a prodigy. He can’t stop thinking of the harm that might come to his loved ones, furred and otherwise.

But even Teddy’s imagination can’t conceive of the reality ahead.

I will not spoil the reader’s stepwise excitement as horrible revelations unfold. I will merely state that an unknown spreading micro-organism eventually dubbed “marsupia” by scientists turns animals into zombie-like beings, impervious to ordinary damage, and maddened for flesh—and brains! Now, instantly I must also aver that these zombie animals are the least clichéd of their kind you have ever encountered. Ryman has worked out a plausible science for all of this, making this book not generic horror or terror, but rather the purest of science fiction, with a horror overlay. He extrapolates logically from his suppositions, thus deriving bizarre effects that mere splatterpunks will never achieve.

Oh, yes, there’s one more fallout from the marsupia: they infect humans, too, producing only fever and aches, not death. Or so it is initially thought. But then is discovered the fact that the marsupia are overwriting the human genome with animal DNA.

Hear Teddy bark. See family run.

Soon Teddy, his mom, and Faith are besieged in their cottage by the undead. This section and other such assaults are rendered with the most precise details and thrills, evoking unstoppable page-turning. The family eventually has to flee. Mike goes missing. Now comes a torturous hegira that takes forever, but in the end delivers the people to a refuge barely half-an-hour’s drive from their cottage. The small scale of this odyssey is offset by radio broadcasts and phone calls giving us news of the outer world. 

Ryman appears to bring the plague to a close, we and the characters all heave a sigh of relief—and then Ryman pulls the rug out from under us once more.

Ryman’s depiction of Teddy evokes that of Rush in Crowley’s Engine Summer, producing the same elegiac vibe. Both are semi-naïve beings trying to understand a lost world. At times the dialogue assumes a Ballardian tone, reminding us of Ballard’s start as a writer of disaster novels. And finally, the scientific atmosphere calls up the classic Blood Music.

Ryman’s prose is the same beautiful tool seen in all his other books, buttoned down in sophistication. Even though the frametale features an adult Teddy writing this manuscript many years onward, the narration is kept consistent with ten-year-old Teddy’s intelligence and manner.

This is a novel that transcends mere literary pleasures, haunting the reader with new perspectives and contemplations and experiences long after the cover is closed.

Now, what of the question connected with this book?

Why did no large house take it on? As magnificent as NewCon Press and its amazing owner, Ian Whates, are, one can be pretty sure that it was not the first place Ryman would have turned with his manuscript. All authors want the largest possible paycheck and widest exposure that a big firm can deliver. So why did no “major” editor snap this gem up? It’s ten times better than Station Eleven, and might have met similar acclaim. Could it be that the people running the Big Five are . . . oh, I don’t know. Dimwitted, biased, short-sighted, oblivious, or fill-in-the-blank.

Thank God for the small presses!