The Passage by Justin Cronin

In my recent post about M.J. Engh's Arslan, I noted how much of its time--the mid-70s--the novel seemed, most particularly in its conviction that America, still reeling from the cultural clashes of the 60s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, was on the verge of collapse.  A few days later, Keith Phipps, writing for the AV Club, made the same observation about Stephen King's The Stand.  Even defaced by King's ill-considered 1990 expansion of the novel, which moved its setting from 1980 to 1990, Phipps writes, The Stand is unmistakably "a product of the '70s," suffused with that decade's sense of disintegration and impending doom.

I enjoyed The Stand from start to finish, but never as much as in its first third, when the fast-acting "superflu" known as Captain Trips destroys an America that was already destroying itself. The government—the same one that recently lied to the American people about Watergate and the origins and scale of the war in Vietnam—uses terrifying violence to enforce an official story. Television broadcasts get overrun by black militants who perform public executions for a dying populace, getting in some last licks in a race war that's about to become irrelevant. The superflu is a poison, but it's also a catalyst, exacerbating and speeding up the conflicts already in play. It's less a new development than the last chapter in the story of an ongoing American apocalypse.

Justin Cronin's The Passage has received more than a few comparisons to The Stand.  Before reading the book, I chalked this up to marketing--the first in a projected trilogy, The Passage was sold for a fantastic seven figure sum, to which add yet another seven figures for the film rights, purchased by Ridley Scott, and its publishers are presumably eager to associate it with a known bestseller--or to superficial similarities between the two books' plots, both of which revolve around an event that rapidly depopulates the US--in The Passage, the escape, from the military base where they were being held, of a group of prisoners who had been exposed to an experimental longevity drug which causes them to transform into, essentially, vampires--and around a group of survivors that bands together in its aftermath.  It was only once I started reading The Passage that I realized just how accurate, how perfectly descriptive, the comparison was.  The Passage truly is The Stand for the 21st century.  The similarities in plot turn out to be anything but superficial--in both novels, the boss villain congregates his followers in Las Vegas, while the characters' sole hope of salvation lies in Colorado; both feature a wise, spiritual black woman who provides the characters with moral and practical guidance (in The Passage there are two such characters); both culminate in a nuclear explosion that destroys the main antagonist; both overlay the struggle for humanity's survival with a struggle between cosmic forces of light and dark, who recruit the heroes and villains to their war.  Even more surprising is how much Cronin sounds like King--that same stream of clichés and stereotypes, skillfully strung together into an engaging, effortlessly readable narrative by a voice whose folksiness is as deliberate as its erudition.  Or rather, how much more King-ish than King he sounds, King himself having hit on this voice only intermittently and imperfectly in the last fifteen years.

Most crucially, The Passage is a novel of its moment in exactly the same way, and with almost exactly the same concerns, as The Stand.  Like the 1970s, our present moment is one of turmoil and uncertainty, suffused with that Yeatsian sense of things falling apart (one suspects that the only reason The Passage fails to include, among its many epigraphs, any reference to "The Second Coming" is that the poem has been made slightly trite by its overuse in works of popular culture, including of course The Stand).  The US is once again reeling from a costly and ill-advised war, a contentious and divisive presidency, and cultural clashes that expose the deep rifts in its society and the issues of race and class that are at their core.  Its citizens are once again eying their government with distrust and even fear.  Just like The Stand, The Passage roots its story in these fears and divisions, which it intensifies in order to make its point.  The opening chapters, set in 2018, depict an America in which the drive towards militarization and the security state has run amok.  The Iraq war was followed by one in Iran.  9/11, by a terrorist attack on the Mall of America.  Jenna Bush is governor of Texas (and, rather improbably given the timeframe, former first lady).  Hurricane Katrina's devastation has been dwarfed by its sister Vanessa, which demolished New Orleans, reducing it to a toxic swamp, and the area around it to a corporate-run, crime-ridden reclamation zone and tourist attraction.  Gas prices have skyrocketed, a federal database keeps track of citizens' movements, and military checkpoints impede travel between states.  It's in this atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and unchecked government power that Project Noah, whose actual purpose is not longevity but using its super-strong, near-immortal test subjects as bunker busters, is allowed to come into existence and, like the bioweapons project that dooms humanity in The Stand, to create a weapon so powerful that not even its creators can control it.

As in The Stand, the cultural commentary of The Passage is concentrated in its long opening segment, which depicts the events leading up to the escape of the original twelve vampires and the immediate aftermath of that escape.  Once human civilization fades away, the pop culture references do as well, but even the most glaring difference between the two novels' plots--the fact that The Passage, rather than continuing its story immediately after the apocalypse, flashes forward nearly a century and is set among characters who have had no experience of the old world or its annihilation--isn't enough to obscure their similar preoccupations.  As the characters set about building a new civilization, they are also figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid the same mistakes, thus continuing the callbacks to the novels' respective eras in a more subdued manner.  The Passage resumes its story in California, in a former refugee camp that now styles itself First Colony, whose inhabitants have created a tiny heaven in hell.  Not only are they kept safe from the "virals" by high walls and lights that make day of night, but, governed by their constitution, which assures "an Equal Share" to all citizens and safe haven to "Walkers" who emerge from the wilderness, they've managed to create, in the midst of terrible danger and hardship, a mostly-just, benevolent, and even post-racial and sexually equal society.  Nevertheless, after 90 years, the colony's numbers are dwindling and its life-saving lights are starting to fail, so when Amy, the last test subject of Project Noah and the only one to receive its life-extending benefits without losing her humanity, arrives in camp and reveals that someone in Project Noah's former headquarters in Colorado is looking for her, an expedition of young people sets out there with her in the hopes of finding a cure.

The bulk of the novel is concerned with this passage across a vampire-infested wasteland.  There are several tense set pieces, including a narrow escape from First Colony, whose inhabitants fall under the boss villain's sway, and an interlude in that same villain's feeding colony outside Las Vegas.  There is also a slow revelation of the villain's history and the means by which he compels humans to do his bidding, and some very good action scenes.  For all this, The Passage is not a particularly taut novel--is, in fact, positively flabby.  There's a very strong sense that, again following in King's footsteps, Cronin indulged himself, wandering down alleyways of story and character before getting back to the main narrative thread.  The 2018 segment includes several chapters told from the point of view of Anthony Carter, a death row inmate recruited into Project Noah, which delve into his past, eventually revealing that he was innocent of the crime he was sentenced to die for.  But in the future chapters Carter is entirely absent, and though it's obvious that The Passage's sequels will return to him there's little justification for his presence in this novel.  There are no such narrative dead ends in the future-set portions of the novel, but there are a lot of characters, each with their own plotline and point of view.  One would expect the author of a horror novel to start with a large cast in order to kill several of them off, but Cronin is surprisingly timid on this front, and even as the novel converges on its finale in Colorado there is no corresponding convergence of its cast, and the narrative frequently cuts away from the action to catch us up on what all the characters are doing.  Nor is the denouement much to write home about--Cronin tries to hang a lantern on this, but the solution the characters discover to the vampire problem is such a classic bit of vampire lore that most readers will have considered, and dismissed it for being too obvious, hundreds of pages before it's revealed, and in fact much of the novel is concerned with the characters learning things about Project Noah that we had already found out in the opening segment.  That The Passage works is mainly down to Cronin's facility with the King-ish voice, and more than that, to its soapy elements--a melange of star-crossed lovers, sibling rivalry, and difficult parent-child relationships that underpins the novel much more strongly than the vampire plot, and at just the right level to give the narrative shape and urgency without overwhelming it.  Quality-wise, there's not much between The Passage and The Stand (though like a lot of modern retreads of 70s and 80s stories I find The Passage a little too polished, and think it could have stood a bit of The Stand's messiness and rudeness), and if you've already read, and didn't fall absolutely in love with, King's novel I think it's probably safe to give Cronin's a pass.  But I also think that The Passage's message is more positive and more palatable than The Stand's.

Both The Stand and The Passage are religious novels, in the sense that they are stories about characters trying to figure out how to live their lives in a context that includes supernatural, world-governing forces (though The Passage's villain is more mundane than The Stand's Flagg, there is clearly a force for good--identified by several characters as God--guiding many of the characters' actions and acting towards humanity's restoration).  But the fundamental difference between Cronin and King's novels is that while in The Stand the central religious struggle was between good and evil (or, more faintly, between industrialization and the warlike impulse, and a more modest, more natural way of life), in The Passage it is between hope and despair.  As much as vampires, it is with despair that the novel's characters and the remnants of humanity they encounter struggle with.  First Colony, whose inhabitants have lived under constant threat of annihilation for 90 years, constantly loses members who "let it go," committing suicide in the face of their life's hopelessness.  As the novel opens, several characters have discovered that the colony's batteries are about to die and that the lights are going to go out, and are struggling to decide how, and if, to live with that knowledge.  The vampires' psychic attacks take advantage of despair, which ultimately leads to First Colony's destruction.  Each of the characters' storylines could be described as an examination of the relative advantages of hope and hopelessness (a troop of soldiers encountered in Colorado, whom one of the characters joins up with, view hope as an encumbrance, and espouse a philosophy of "giving it up"--letting go of all hope of survival--before engaging in battle) and a choice between them.

The Stand ends on a dark and somewhat hopeless note, with survivors Harold and Frannie abandoning the fledgling human colony in Colorado because it's gotten too big, and begun evincing some of the qualities of territorial, warlike thinking that they associate with humanity's demise, and both fear that the cycle is merely starting itself up again (the extended edition ends even more grimly, with Flagg surviving his alleged destruction and starting up his corruption of humanity in a different location).  The implication is that while a handful of people can form a just and decent society, once their numbers swell to the point of requiring government and organization, the rot sets in and destruction is an inevitable outcome.  Though it's possible that The Passage's sequels will reach the same conclusion--as the novel ends several of the main characters are poised to encounter large-scale human civilization for the first time in their lives--the novel itself not only ends hopefully but proceeds with hope throughout.  It is never stated with certainty that vampires have reached beyond the Americas, and the narrative is interspersed with documents presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period at the University of New South Wales, which takes place a thousand years after the vampire outbreak.  Cronin is assuring us that humanity will not only survive but that civilization itself will reemerge, that the events of The Passage will come to be thought of as merely a chapter, however grisly and significant, in human history.

This is, to my mind, part and parcel of The Passage being a novel of its time.  The Stand was written in a time in which fear of one's government and fellow citizens were running high, and it can thus be read as a screed against the very notion of human civilization.  The Passage's era, for all its similarities to the 70s, has different preoccupations--chief among them the fear of outside enemies, which has legitimized the erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law.  First Colony survives as a just, peaceful society because its members manage to hold on to hope.  When they surrender to fear and despair, the colony devolve into martial law and civil war.  The rest of the novel treats hope, and the impulses towards justice and kindness that it encourages, as a survival strategy, in a very definite rebuke to the present-day attitude that our times are so difficult and so unusual that we can no longer afford the luxury of civilized behavior.  So, for all their similarities, The Passage seems to be aiming at a message that is the exact opposite of The Stand's--not that civilization will doom humanity but that it is the source of our salvation.  It's been thirty years since Stephen King treated "The Second Coming" as prophecy, and 90 years since the poem was written about an entirely different period of turmoil and seemingly imminent catastrophe.  In all that time there have been catastrophes, but humanity has recovered from them, and artists have gone on to repurpose Yeats to express the hopelessness of their moment in time.  The Passage is not a particularly good novel, but it possesses an awareness of that fact that I find refreshing and worth applauding.

Review: Under the Dome by Stephen King

My review of Stephen King's latest opus, Under the Dome, appears today in Strange Horizons.  It's a strange book--definitely not up to the standard of King's heyday, but suggesting so many new directions he might have gone in, and then failing to follow through, that I ended up finding it simultaneously invigorating and depressing.

Recent Reading Roundup 23

It's been a long time since I did one of these, so long that some of the books I read in the interim have already faded so much in my memory that I can't comment meaningfully on them.  Here are my thoughts on the ones that have lingered.

1. Sunnyside by Glen David Gold - Gold's long-awaited follow-up to the enormously enjoyable Carter Beats the Devil features the same careful attention to period detail, and the same seemingly effortless evocation of early 20th century Americana, but it is also so shapeless, so caught up in the desire to make Meaningful Statements, that it becomes the exact opposite of Carter--a genuine chore to read.  Like Carter, Sunnyside is a When It Changed novel, this time focusing on film, and particularly film star celebrity, rather than television.  But whereas Carter made a relatively modest statement--that the invention of television changed the face of public entertainment, in the process putting acts like the superstar magician out of business--Sunnyside tries to tie the growth of Hollywood and the celebrity culture into just about every major event of the beginning of the twentieth century, including World War I, arguing that the emergence of people who are famous simply for being famous was also the death knell of the old, aristocratic world order.  At best, it's an oversimplified argument, and when Gold uses it draw connections between Charlie Chaplin's early film career and World War I, the novel--which starts out with the same verve and sense of fun that made Carter Beats the Devil such a joy to read--collapses in on itself.  It certainly doesn't help that the characters are uniformly unpleasant, most especially Chaplin, the heart of the novel, whom Gold portrays as a narcissistic user.
   


2. Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory - Gregory's debut novel, after several years as a well-respected short story writer (his "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" was one of my favorite short stories from 2008), takes place in a world in which spirit possession is a fact of life.  With seemingly no rhyme or reason, random people are possessed, not by demons, but by archetypes--The Truth, who punishes liars, The Kamikaze, who possesses Japanese men and compels them to crash planes, The Captain, who appears on battlefields to lead troops to victory.  What's best about this novel is its worldbuilding--Gregory's fashioning of an alternate history influenced by possessions (Eisenhower is killed by The Kamikaze, O.J. Simpson doesn't live to be acquitted) and of the ways in which human society has changed to accommodate the possibility of possession, deal with those who have been possessed, and try to explain the nature and cause of possession.
   
   Less successful is the novel's plot, which centers around and is narrated by Del Pierce, a thirtyish man still struggling to recover from his possession as a child by The Hellion, a trickster spirit which takes young boys and forces them to commit dangerous and destructive mischief.  After years of shaky mental health, aimless wandering, and a haphazard job history, Del begins to feel genuinely unbalanced, and fears that he has somehow trapped the Hellion, and that the demon is trying to get out and take over him again.  The novel's focus on a mentally unstable main character whose exposure to the supernatural has led to a lifetime of inadequacies and disappointments brings to mind Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle, but Pandemonium lacks that novel's admirable resistance to settling into the thriller plot, and soon introduces a paramilitary group convinced that the possessing entities are aliens, and a secret society trying to understand the demons by studying Jung's Red Book, both of which tend to obscure Del himself.  Not helping matters is the fact that Del's journey throughout the novel consists mainly of learning the truth about his possession as a child, but as I had guessed that truth very early in the novel I quickly grew impatient with the characters and how long they were taking to realize it.  I was much more interested in the questions it raised about personality and personhood and the nature of the possessing demons, which Gregory, by delaying the novel's main revelation, left himself very little time to explore.  This is, obviously, to blame Pandemonium for not being the novel I wanted to read, but that's a risk an author takes when they hinge their entire plot on a single revelation, and in my case that risk didn't pan out.
   


3. Warlock by Oakley Hall - Perhaps the simplest way to describe Hall's 1958 Western is that it is Deadwood in book form--a sprawling, beautifully written, unflinching examination of the myths and realities of the American West.  The town of Warlock has been plagued by outlaws and ruffians, who have repeatedly driven out or killed the representatives of the law provided by a distant and uncaring territorial government.  The town's merchants and prominent citizens decide to hire a gunslinger, Clay Blaisedell, to act as Marshall and bring order to Warlock.  From this simple and familiar premise Hall crafts an enormous and complicated tapestry of characters and points of view, all chewing on and providing different perspective on the novel's central question--what, if anything, gives Blaisedell the right to kill?  It would be a vast oversimplification to say that good and evil are not clearly delineated in Warlock.  Rather, Hall turns a searching but sympathetic eye on each and every one of his characters--Blaisedell, the town's deputy John Gannon, a former member of the gang menacing the town, the merchants who hired Blaisedell in an attempt to bring Warlock into the civilized world, the local judge, who rants and raves that Blaisedell's presence represents a refutation of civilization and the rule of law, and yet has no effective law to offer in his stead, Blaisedell's friend, the cynical, dangerous saloon owner Tom Morgan, Kate Dollar, a former prostitute who blames Morgan for pitting Blaisedell against her lover, the local miners, who are striking for safer conditions (and whose leaders the merchants try to persuade Blaisedell to run out of town), and even the outlaws themselves.  Warlock is about many things, but perhaps most importantly, it is about the allure and horror of violence and bloodshed, the way that the gunslinger, be he Marshall or outlaw, is simultaneously a hero and a villain, and the near impossible complexity of the attempt to craft a peaceful, lawful society through force of arms.  But this is only one of its many themes and pleasures.  If you're feeling Deadwood withdrawal, or just in the market for an engrossing read, I highly recommend Warlock.
   


4. Just After Sunset by Stephen King - In the introduction to his most recent short story collection, King talks about falling out of the habit of writing short fiction, and becoming reacquainted with the form during his stint as guest editor for Best American Short Stories, in the wake of which he decided to try his hand at writing them again.  Which leaves me with two possible explanations for how disappointed I was by Just After Sunset, despite being a fan of King's, and particularly of his short fiction, for many years: either King still hasn't gotten back into the short story groove (and is still so famous and bankable that no one is willing to force him back into it) or I've outgrown his writerly ticks.  Most of the stories in this collection are slow and familiar, but what manages to obscure even the occasional successful moment in an otherwise failed story--the central romance in "Willa," in which the main characters have been waiting for what seems like forever for a train to replace their stalled one; the apocalyptics ending of the vignette "Graduation Afternoon," in which a townie girl grits her teeth through her upper class boyfriend's graduation party--is King's reliance on folksy speech patterns.  It used to be that, if nothing else, you could count on a Stephen King story to sound real, as if an actual person was talking to you (or to someone else), their every word choice a reflection of their personality and a reason to keep reading.  In Just After Sunset, King seems to have lost his voice(s).  His narrators and protagonists sound contrived, even fake--aiming at the folksiness of his previous novels and short stories, and failing so badly at the attempt that they sound ridiculous.  Only two stories manage to survive this failure of voice--"Mute," which veers away from the something-nasty-in-the-woodshed template that seems to underly most of the stories in the collection, and delivers a magnificently nasty punch in its final revelation, and "A Very Tight Place," in which King gets, quite literally, down in the dirt when he traps his protagonist inside an abandoned port-a-potty and describes, with obvious relish, the visceral horror of his attempts to escape.
   


5. Eclipse 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan - The third installment in the controversy-ridden original story anthology series represents a departure from the previous two volumes on almost every level--the tenor of the stories, the authors, even the (quite lovely) cover design.  In his introduction, Strahan explains the shift, in a rather roundabout way, by describing Eclipse 2 as science fiction oriented.  The implication, one takes it, is that Eclipse 3 is fantasy oriented, but both characterizations strike me as inaccurate.  There are science fiction stories in Eclipse 3 just as there were fantasy stories in Eclipse 2, and the difference between the two volumes seems to have more to do with the type of genre story they feature.  If Eclipse 2 leaned towards the purely generic, pulp-inspired end of both genres, the stories in Eclipse 3 are more literary (the significance of the fact that Eclipse 2 was dominated by male writers whereas 3's table of contents is dominated by women is left as an exercise for the reader).  I was underwhelmed by Eclipse 2, and Eclipse 3 reveals that it's not the type of stories that was my problem so much as Strahan's editorial taste.  My reaction to both volumes is, in fact, almost identical--there are a few stories I like very much, one or two decent ones, and a whole mass of pieces I genuinely disliked.  The standouts are Karen Joy Fowler's "The Pelican Bar," which very nearly outdoes "What I Didn't See" for flimsy generic connections, but is nevertheless quite harrowing in its descriptions of the protagonist's hellish experiences in a reeducation camp for wayward teens, and Maureen F. McHugh's "Useless Things," a stately, plotless but evocative piece about life in the wake of economic and environmental collapse.  The best story in the anthology is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," in which a female executive for a high tech company struggling to overcome the boys' club atmosphere in her profession ends up hacking her brain to get ahead in business.  Despite a shaky premise, "It Takes Two" is a meaty story that comments intelligently on several thorny issues.  The remaining stories, however, are so disappointing, veering too often towards tweeness and sentimentalism, that I'm genuinely torn about whether to continue with this series, which for the second time around has delivered much too low a ratio of good stories to bad ones, but also includes what I suspect will be a couple of my favorite stories of the year.  I guess we'll have to see how the Eclipse 4 table of contents shapes up.
   


6. The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt - We end as we began, with a historical novel about America the first half of the twentieth century.  Hunt's slim, dreamy novel about the last days in the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla seems like the polar opposite of Gold's Sunnyside.  Instead of a sprawling cast and huge stakes this is a very intimate story, with only a few characters--Tesla himself, Louisa, a young chambermaid in his hotel, and her immediate family--and hardly a plot in sight.  Instead, Hunt moves back and forth between the major events of Tesla's life--his arrival in America, his adversarial relationship with Thomas Edison, fading into obscurity even as his greatest invention, alternating current, becomes the industry standard, consumed with obsessions both fantastical and merely too forward-thinking for their time--and intersperses them with Louisa's personal crises.  For all their differences, however, The Invention of Everything Else is ultimately as shapeless and unsatisfying as Sunnyside.  Hunt seems to have done her research, but her overwhelming focus on her characters' interiority leaves her with hardly any space to develop a sense of period--1943 reads just like 1893, and given the non-linearity of Tesla's narrative I was often at a loss to guess when a particular scene was set.  This might not have been a problem if the characters themselves weren't so unbelievable, but I struggled to accept any of them--not just Tesla, who in Hunt's hands is literally a mad scientist who concocts plans to talk to Mars and resurrect the dead, but also Louisa--as actual people rather than mouthpieces for a rather stultifying melange of cod-philosophy and surrealist images.  There are a few moments of genuine emotion in the novel--a short interlude describing Louisa's parents' courtship and her father's experiences during World War I, a trip to the beach Louisa takes with a suitor--but for the most part The Invention of Everything Else gave me nothing to grab onto.
   

Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2008

Following a similar experiment a couple of years ago, the folks at Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine offered a copy of their most recent issue to anyone willing to blog about it, and, after taking a look at the issue's table of contents, I happily took them up on their offer. With stories by Geoff Ryman, Stephen King, M. Rickert, Robert Reed and several others, this seemed like a not-to-be-missed entry in the magazine's history, and I was looking forward to writing an exuberant piece about some top-notch short fiction. Sadly, the further I got into the October/November issue, the less I found to be excited about. The big names have turned up, to be sure, but only one of them has delivered on the level I'd expected.

Last time I wrote about a F&SF giveaway issue, I complained about the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically its datedness. What was the point, I asked, of reviewing Ian McDonald's River of Gods months after it had been nominated for the Hugo as if the magazine's readers had never heard of it? It was pointed out to me, however, that there is a contingent of subscribers who are not online, and for whom F&SF is their only source of genre criticism. These people might very well have been hearing about River of Gods for the first time, as it had only recently been published in the US.

Fair enough, though for the sake of these readers I wish the magazine's book reviews were a little more interesting and thoughtful, but what is to be made of Lucius Shepard's film column? In an issue sent out in August, to be sold in bookstores in the fall, Shepard turns his focus to the summer phenomenon of comic book films, and decides to write about... Iron Man, which he derides for being silly and incoherent. I realize that there are probably lead time issues here that I'm not privy to, but you can't talk about comic book films at the end of the summer of 2008 without talking about The Dark Knight--a fact which is powerfully brought home by Shepard's numerous unfavorable comparisons between Iron Man and The Dark Knight's prequel, Batman Begins. Shepard has nothing to say about Iron Man that hasn't been said countless times already, including in many venues which even offline F&SF readers will have been likely to see, and in addition his review is mean-spirited, trotting out a fanboy caricature who lobs low-ball arguments--you don't get it man, you're out of touch!--about Iron Man's merits for Shepard to knock aside, so that even I, who didn't think much of the film, found myself wishing him off my side. Given F&SF's long lead time I simply don't understand why the magazine bothers to write about current films, especially if its reviewer has so little to add to the discussion.

Still, nonfiction isn't the reason for F&SF's existence, and once I was done puzzling over Shepard's movie column I happily turned to the stories in the October/November issue, only to be puzzled once again. A few of the stories here are exercises in tone, effective but ephemeral. Carol Emshwiller's "Whoever" is narrated by a woman who wakes up with no memory, and spins a story to explain her circumstances, venturing further and further into the realm of the fantastic as she does so. Steven Utley's "Sleepless Years" is narrated by a suicide who is being used as a test subject in experiments in reanimation. Terry Bisson's "Private Eye" is an erotic piece extrapolating from the webcam phenomenon to a world in which one can, for a fee, see through another person's eyes. All are well-written and successfully put us in their characters' heads, but that's really all they amount to. Less impressive are the two humorous pieces in the magazine, Albert E. Cowdrey's "Inside Story" and Scott Bradfield's "Dazzle Joins the Scriptwriter's Guild" (a third piece, a short-short by Laurel Winter titled "Going Back in Time," is probably intended as humorous but doesn't really come close). Both rely on stereotypes and clichés for their humor--the soullessness of the Hollywood filmmaking apparatus in Bradfield's story, the funny accents and love of greasy food of lower-middle and working class New Orleans residents in Cowdrey's--but neither crackles on the page. Cowdrey, at least, is trying to do something more than just entertain, as the supernatural occurrences in his story take place among FEMA trailers and in dilapidated and abandoned neighborhoods still patrolled by the National Guard, but he tells us nothing that we don't already know.

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan are almost unique in the issue for trying to tell actual stories rather than striking a single emotional tone, the former with the short story "The Scarecrow's Boy" and the latter with the novelette "Planetesimal Dawn." Sullivan's story is good old fashioned SF, taking place in a mining colony on an asteroid, and paying great attention to the realities of survival in space. The story kicks off when a scientist and security officer on routine patrol become stranded when their vehicle malfunctions, and have to scramble to avoid the boiling dawn, then complicates when the two fall through a temporal anomaly. I feel a little guilty saying this, since stories of this ilk are, allegedly, not only the meat and potatoes of science fiction its bricks and mortar, the kind of hardcore, scientifically oriented stories that are at the foundation of the genre, but "Planetesimal Dawn" is boring. The characters are crudely drawn--the defeated scientist, the plucky security officer--and Sullivan's focus on mechanics (of the temporal anomaly, of the alien mining facility the characters find once they traverse it, of the alien spacecraft one of them visits) drowns out any urgency or sense of wonder his story might have elicited. It comes off like a mission report rather than a story. Swanwick's story, in which obsolete robot servers put out to pasture rally to save the life of a lost child, might have gone to the other extreme, and been slathered in sentiment, but, perhaps because it's such a short piece and perhaps because the title character is enjoyably down to Earth, he pulls it off, and even makes us care for his characters, who are trying to make moral decisions within the imposed framework of their programming.

I was interested in the October/November issue of F&SF, however, because of four names--King, Reed, Rickert and Ryman. The first is something of a surprise on a F&SF cover. If you look at the publication credits in King's upcoming short story collection, you'll find high-paying, prestigious mainstream markets like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. According to the introduction to King's story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates," he was inspired to submit to the magazine after reading it regularly as part of his duties as guest editor of Best American Short Stories 2007 and being impressed with its content, but were I feeling uncharitable I might wonder if he didn't realize that he had a throwaway piece on his hands which Esquire wouldn't bother with. "Bargain Rates" is, as its introduction calls it, a Twilight Zone piece--something weird happens, the end. It's not bad, but not nearly as good as King's short stories can be (and in recent years I've grown more and more convinced that he is at his best in the short form), and in its language in particular feels almost lazy--as if someone were imitating King's folksy, conversational style and falling a little short of the real thing.

More disappointing is M. Rickert's "Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter's Personal Account," but then I expect a great deal from Rickert, who has a knack for combining present day events with SFnal speculation and a possibly unhealthy dollop of cynicism about human nature. She does all that here, imagining a world in which abortion has been made retroactively punishable by death, and in which women are rounded up by the hundreds and thousands to pay for abortions performed years or even decades ago. As the title indicates, the story is narrated by the daughter of one of these condemned women, who has fled rather than face her punishment, to her family's everlasting shame. It's an effective piece, as, indeed, how could it help being? Mass executions! Gross miscarriages of justice! Institutionalized misogyny! Young women brainwashed into a Handmaid's Tale-esque attitude of seeing themselves as nothing but walking wombs! It is also, however, shamelessly manipulative and unsubtle, a piece aimed only at people who agree with its politics, and one which encourages them to sneer rather than think.

Robert Reed has been churning out short stories at the rate of several per year for some time now (which leads me to wonder whether it isn't time for a single-author collection). He's a consistent presence on Hugo and Nebula shortlists, and justifiably so--his novella "A Billion Eves" was one of my favorite short stories last year--but with the sheer bulk of material he produces it stands to reason that there are also plenty of also-rans in the mix. The novelette "Visionaries" is, sadly, one of these. It's also an oddly metafictional piece, narrate by a science fiction author who occasionally produces pieces which don't even seem to be properly stories, but glimpses into the life of a wholly unremarkable man who happens to live several decades in the future. In short order, the writer is contacted by a shadowy group within the SFWA, who pay top dollar for what they believe to be a genuine glimpse of the future. "Visionaries" touches on many of the hot-button topics that regularly crop up in the SF blogosphere--the declining fortunes of SF magazines, the internal politics of the SFWA, associate members of that organization with hardly any publishing credits to their name who nevertheless turn up at every official gathering, resentment of new writers and their media savvy, what may very well be a dig at free online fiction, and, of course, the capacity of science fiction to actually predict the future. Though there is a more accessible sub-plot that runs through the story, in which the narrator tries to affect the life of one of the people he glimpses in his visions, it is overpowered by what feels like a succession of inside jokes with very little substance. That said, I think I'm going to have to give "Visionaries" a little more thought, because I can't help but suspect that it does have a larger point that I'm missing.

Geoff Ryman is less prolific than Robert Reed but a great deal more dependable--I don't think I've ever read a poor or uninteresting piece of short fiction by him. His novelette "Days of Wonder" is no exception, an utterly original take on the post-apocalyptic, post-human future familiar from so many other stories. The narrator is a horse, and yet not a horse--a genetically engineered creature whose species was created just prior to humanity's destruction along with many other altered animals, who possess sentience but are also ruled by their biological nature, at least until the narrator's throwback friend, Leveza, starts questioning the natural order of things--why should the old and sick be sacrificed to predators on migration? Why can't truce be made with those predators? Why can't technology be used to prevent the need for migration at all? The result feels at first like a Tiptree-esque story about intelligence and free will at war with, and ultimately overpowered by, biological determinism, but this is Geoff Ryman, and if there's anything more predictable than that his stories will be good it is that they'll have a happy ending. Fortunately, the ending of "Days of Wonder" feels earned, not least by the clever SFnal mechanism driving the story and its gradual revelation, which are both far too much fun for me to spoil here, but also by Ryman's refusal to draw the kind of stark division between human and animal nature that Tiptree so often did. When Leveza is cast out of the group, animal instinct is mingled with human emotion, and with the all too human tendency to enforce conformity and, when pushed too far, to cast out anyone different or rebellious. "Days of Wonder" ends up asking a lot of questions about both human and animal behavior, pointing out that the two are a great deal more similar than we'd like to think while still holding out the possibility of rising above our worst impulses--whether biological or emotional.

Fantasy & Science Fiction's October/November issue is worth reading for Ryman's story, though you'd probably get as much out of it if you skipped the rest of the issue and just read this one piece. It's clear that the issue was intended to draw in new readers and potential subscribers--it marks the beginning of F&SF's 60th anniversary celebration, and clearly the big guns were trotted out just for this purpose. It's a shame, therefore, that the authors in question seem to have, one by one, failed to live up to the promise of their names and bibliographies.

Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King

Short stories are hot right now. Or rather, talking about short stories, specifically their commercial and artistic viability, is hot. For SF/F fans, this is a familiar discussion. Perhaps because of the greater importance that short fiction enjoys within these genres, discussions of the future, or lack thereof, the the print SF magazines and the form they peddle are a semi-annual tradition within the community. The most recent iteration (sparked by Warren Ellis noting that the circulation figures of the 'big three' SF/F magazines have once again dropped, though as usual the debate has ranged all over the SF litblogosphere), however, came shortly after a analogous debate was sparked in literary fiction circles. Lighting the fuse on the powder keg was Stephen King, guest editor of this year's entry in the Best American Short Stories series. In his introduction to the collection (reprinted in the New York Times in a somewhat reduced form on September 30th), King lamented that literary magazines were increasingly being relegated to 'the bottom shelf' of most bookstores' magazine racks (that's if they're even in the store to being with) wondered what effect short fiction's loss of popularity has had on the final product:

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. ... Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

King's diatribe made the plight of short fiction front page news (for those of us who follow the litblogosphere, that is. The rest of the internet, and the world at large, remain, I suspect, blissfully ignorant), and spawned numerous responses. Most of them are either variations on 'but I still like short fiction, so there!', which, given that their authors are usually writers, publishers, or reviewers, seems to be making King's point for him, or the more sensible comment that things are not so different, if perhaps less dire, for novel-length literary fiction, both in terms of sales and cultural importance. The next highlight of the debate came on October 16th, when Jeff VanderMeer, who along with wife Ann guest-edited the first volume in a new series, Best American Fantasy (though the series's title is obviously meant to recall the Houghton Mifflin Best American books, the Fantasy series is not affiliated with it and is published by Prime), posted an entry to his blog titled 'The Triumph of Competence,' in which he offered his response to a year's worth of slogging through dross to find a bit of gold:

the more I’ve thought about it, the more I feel that my general apathy when reading a lot of fantasy short fiction today comes from finding in it a profoundly disturbing, if sturdy, middle class professionalism. The magazines and anthologies are dominated by what I’d call centrist fiction that simply drowns in competence. It’s good–it’s just not great. It’s clever–it’s just not trying to do more, or it does reach for more, but in familiar ways.

As I thought about this further, I visualized an endless churning sound as thousands of writers typed and handwrote the first drafts of stories destined from conception to be good enough. Good enough for publication. Good enough to pass muster. Good enough to earn an appreciative nod. It was a depressing thought.

VanderMeer's post, as can be imagined, has churned the waters even further and elicited even more responses, some supportive and some critical, and at this point the sheer volume of 'whither the short story' blog posts is prohibitive. Which may be the reason why, in spite of a good hour and a half's work this morning, I was unable to track down the two responses to King's introduction which I found the most interesting and illuminating (or possibly my Google-fu is just weak, and I will of course be eternally grateful to any AtWQ reader who can provide me with actual links). The first discussed the history of the short story, and tried to track the economic reasons for its artistic stagnation. The author's argument is that short stories used to be popular entertainment, with authors like Arthur Conan Doyle becoming extraordinarily wealthy and even more famous based solely on their short fiction. Even some way into the 20th century it was possible for a writer to earn a living wage--a very good one, at times--writing stories for magazines. Then the audiences were lured away by movies and later television, causing the market to shrink and turn inwards, and the stories became self-referential, consciously artistic, and downright hostile to the notion of entertainment (a comparison was made, if memory serves, to the similar effect that the popularization of photography had on the graphic arts).

The second essay, a response to the first one, argues that the events described happened in the opposite order--the stories didn't change because the audience went away; the audience went away because the stories had changed. The reason, the author argued, was modernism, and more specifically, James Joyce's Dubliners, which has exerted something of a choke-hold on literary short fiction since its publication, mandating an emphasis on character and psychological realism over plot and event.

Even within literary fiction circles, the discussion of art versus entertainment, and of the importance or lack thereof of commercial viability, as they pertain to short fiction, is a habitual occurrence. The last iteration I remember, though I'm sure there have been several in the interim, is Michael Chabon's experiment with short fiction for McSweeney's, which resulted in two anthologies, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. The concept for both of these anthologies was that Chabon had commissioned mainstream literary authors--people like Rick Moody, Roddy Doyle, and Joyce Carol Oates--as well as some genre authors and others whose work straddled the divide, to write genre shorts that would harken back to the Saturday Evening Post and pulp novel era. In his introduction to the first volume, Chabon unsurprisingly gets into the plight of the American short story:

Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half-century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces wold have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre--that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance--would have paled somewhat by 2002. Over the last year in that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, would be laying down Michael Chabon's Dr. Kavalier and Nurse Clay with a weary sigh and crying out, "Surely, oh, surely there must be more to the novel than this!'

Instead of the "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little Gedankenexperiment with "jazz" and "the bossa nova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now, go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."

Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.

Chabon's prescription for the short story's ailment was to bring genre back into play, hence his assignment for the authors he commissioned stories from. But even ignoring the at-best marginal success of his experiment--the first volume is not so great; the second, pretty strong, but, tellingly, almost all of the really good stories in both collections come from genre authors, whereas the mainstream authors mostly seem to have sprinkled a bit of genre trappings on their story and otherwise produced just the kind of plotless, competent-yet-familiar stories Chabon was militating against--this seems like a reductive approach. Unlike King, VanderMeer, and almost all of the people who responded to them, however, Chabon is willing to say the word that almost no one will utter when it comes to literary fiction of any length--plot. Though he makes the mistake of equating plot with genre, which both mainstream and genre readers will tell you is entirely untrue, Chabon correctly diagnoses the core problem of most modern short stories, the reason that they don't appeal to wide audiences, and that those audiences have been taught to disdain them as something intended only for a rarefied, joyless in-group--they have no plot.

In seventh grade, we were taught that the short story unfolded in a straightforward sequence: exposition, crisis, complication, resolution. The stories we read--stuff like O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi", Maupassant's "The Necklace", or Isaac Asimov's MultiVac stories--did indeed follow this simple progression. Looking back, I can see how restrictive this structure is, how many excellent stories it leaves by the wayside, but it also strikes me that most of my favorite short stories do feature these four elements. They may not appear in the precise order laid out above, and the ratio of one to the other may be very different than the one my teacher would have considered appropriate (or at least appropriate for twelve-year-olds), but the steps are all there.

Dorothy Parker's "The Standard of Living," for example, which I first read in tenth grade and which continues to resonate with me more than a decade later, is almost all exposition. Most of the story is taken up with a description of a game the two vain, air-headed office girls, Annabel and Midge, have invented--they each have to decide how they would spend a million dollars on no one but themselves--and the deep importance that it has come to hold for them. It's only in the last page that Parker introduces a crisis--the pearl necklace the girls spy in a store window would set them back a cool quarter million--a complication--the girls, knocked out of their fantasy, are suddenly forced to acknowledge the dreariness of their life and the hopelessness of their prospects--and a resolution--Midge changes the game so that now the girls' fantasy bank account contains ten million dollars--but introduce them she does. In many of the more modern short stories I've read, however, not only have these steps been absent, not only has there been no plot, but there has been no event. Nothing happens, and these stories amount to nothing more than a description of a state. Sometimes this can work--many SF shorts are essentially a plotless introduction to a neat alien or future culture the author has invented--but most of the time it doesn't, and the story is meaningless.

All of this has been an incredibly long-winded way of getting around to talking about the actual stories King selected for Best American Short Stories, which very few people seem to be interested in doing (thus far I've seen only one review of the collection). I like short fiction very much--aside from Best American, I came back from the States with six other short story collections--but as a rule I tend to prefer single-author collections over magazines, themed anthologies, or best-of-year collections. When I read a single-author collection, it's usually because I've read and enjoyed the author's novels, or have come across an example of their short fiction and enjoyed it, or because people whose taste I trust have spoken highly about either the author of the collection. In other words, it's not unreasonable for me to believe that I will enjoy a significant portion of the collection.

With edited collections, however, I'm placing myself entirely in the editor's hands, relying on the existence of some overlap, however small, between my taste and theirs (and with best-of-year collections, the odds of satisfaction are even lower since, as Dan Hartland so perfectly put it, the year's best is the decade's mostly-forgettable). In King's introduction, he writes that "There isn’t a single [story] in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!”" Given the above-mentioned, inevitable gap between King's taste and mine, and his by-now famous penchant for hyperbole (he is, after all, one of the most prolific and least reliable blurbers out there), I steeled myself for some degree of disappointment. Sadly, this was not sufficient.

There are good pieces in Best American Short Stories. Some of them, like Alice Munro's "Dimension" or Richard Russo's "Horseman", are well-written. Others, like Stellar Kim's "Findings & Impressions" and T.C. Boyle's "Balto", are well-plotted. Others still, like William Gay's "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You" or John Barth's "Toga Party", are innovative (for a very restricted value of that word, really more along the lines of 'not as familiar as expected'). Very few of them--only one, in fact--are all three. Which, perhaps, is asking too much. I've often said that it's unfair to expect a novel to do too many things--to ask Tolkien to write psychologically realistic characters or George Eliot to write exciting battle scenes--and the same holds for short stories. The Munro story, for example, is yet another abuse survival story, but it is remarkable for the delicacy with which Munro describes her heroine and the deftness with which she makes us care for her. When Doree, defeated and joyless, begins drifting back into the orbit of her abusive husband, the horror we feel is visceral. We want to shake some sense into her, a miracle to stop her from throwing her life away a second time--and are then gratified and relieved when Munro delivers exactly this. "Dimension" is a perfect example of a story that does nothing new, but some things exceptionally well.

The same can be said of several other stories in the collection. "Toga Party" is an example of that rare bird, successful political fiction (unlike Kate Walbert's "Do Something", which closes the collection). Its protagonists are a couple in their seventies (it's interesting to note how many stories in the collection feature or revolve around aging baby-boomers and their struggle to grow old gracefully) whose constant obsession with their looming decrepitude is interrupted by an invitation to the titular party. Once there, Barth draws painfully sharp comparisons between the looming senescence of the characters and the one faced by the modern-day equivalent of the empire the party is in homage to. The story takes place as hurricane Katrina pounds New Orleans (hence the obligatory "why didn't they get the hell out instead of hanging around and looting stores?" from one of the party guests), and soon the party goers are not so much eating, drinking, and being merry in case they die tomorrow as fiddling while their empire burns, or floods. This is a mean story, with genuine bite. On the other hand, Barth's prose is only passable, and the delicacy of his political satire is belied by the over-the-top, entirely implausible suicide attempt of a minor character which rushes in the story's ending.

Like Barth's and Munro's pieces, most of the stories in the collection do something well and everything else passably. Quite a few, however, are entirely forgettable or actively bad. Louis Auchincloss's "Pa's Darling" and Ann Beattie's "Solid Wood" are precisely the kind of plotless mood piece Chabon rants about in his McSweeney's introduction, with very little to recommend themselves otherwise in terms of prose, emotional tone, well-drawn characters, or intriguing setting. There are not one but two pieces of the 'stereotypically broad New York Jews talking funny and having issues' variety (admittedly, in one case the Jew in question is from Chicago, but the cliché is boldly maintained), a genre which I had hoped had been buried in a crossroads with a stake through its heart. Roy Kesey's "Wait" is a piece of surrealist fiction--a commercial flight is delayed for days by a mysterious fog, during which time the stranded passengers form impromptu communities, forge relationships, embark on romances, and start wars--which might have worked at half the page count (or, alternatively, if Kelly Link were writing it). On average, the stories in Best American Short Stories are not much more than passable, and when good, only by one yardstick out of several.

All of this has been an incredibly long-winded way of getting around to talking about the sole exception, Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves." I'd heard about Russell's story before the brouhaha about King's introduction had even started, and this in itself was remarkable--how often does a short story, singular, gain sufficient momentum to be mentioned on its own?--but what I'd heard was nothing less than ebullient. My expectations, in other words, had been thoroughly built up, and then bolstered by my lukewarm reaction to the stories preceding it, so that by the time I started reading Russell's story I was nice and neurotic about it, terrified that it could never live up to its reputation.

Well, it does. How good is "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves"? Good enough to justify the ten bucks I dropped on Best American Short Stories all by itself, and the similar amount I spent on Russell's collection of the same title. Good enough to make every other story in the collection seem paltry and uncouth. Good enough that I'm now too nervous to read Russell's collection for fear that the other stories in it won't stack up. Good enough that the idea I've been toying with, of supplementing my year's best and worst novels posts with one about the year's best short stories, is now going to become a reality because there can't be too many opportunities to praise this story. Remember how batshit insane I went over Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down" last year? That's how crazy I'm going to be over "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves."

Coming as it does from a literary fiction author and a literary venue (it was originally published in Granta), I expected the story's title to be a symbol or a metaphor of some sort. Imagine my surprise when Russell started delivering exactly what she'd put on the tin:

At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we'd made to be civilized and ladylike, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dressers drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the stage 3 girls' starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was windowless and odorless. We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.

The girls are the children of werewolves (the condition skips a generation) and their parents have sent them to the nuns in order to give them a chance at a better life. The story tracks the early stages of their socialization, in the days when they're still more likely to growl than speak, and have to be taught to sleep in beds rather than under them. One of the things I was curious about when I picked up Best American Short Stories was whether King's presence as guest editor would make it easier for genre fiction, SF/F and horror in particular, to make it onto the table of contents (though to be fair, having never read a previous entry in the series, I have no baseline for comparison). The twenty stories King picked out include "The Boy in Zaquitos" by Bruce McAllister (whose short story "Kin" was on this year's Hugo ballot), originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a horror short by Randy DeVita called "Riding the Doghouse". Both are good but unexceptional--the kind of genre fiction that usually makes it under the wire in mainstream collections (though the list of one hundred also-rans includes several other stories published in F&SF--for some reason, Asimov's was not included in the list of magazines from which King and series editor Heidi Pitlor drew candidates, which is a shame as 2006 was a strong year for that magazine--as well as stories from other venues by Kelly Link and Matthew Cheney).

When I realized that Russell's story was a fantasy, I expected her to deliver the same kind of mainstream-friendly product that outsider authors generally deliver when they dabble in genre--in this case, an allegory. What I got instead was a fully realized alternate reality. Russell's worldbuilding is exquisite but never flashy. She utilizes known qualities of wolf and human behavior--"The main commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated perfectly. Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please."--and ties them together in ways unique to her world, such as when she tells us that the phrase 'goody two-shoes' originates in wolf-child rehabilitation facilities because the only the good girls aren't constantly having to fight off the urge to chew on their shoes.

"I know it's a fantastical premise, but something about [the girls'] plight felt very true and very serious to me," Russell writes in the contributors' notes to Best American Short Stories. Genre readers have come to dread this kind of naivety on the part of mainstream writers writing genre stories--it usually heralds an obvious, broad allegory whose author is constantly nudging aside the curtain, fearful that their readers won't Get the Point. It's possible to read "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" as an allegory--the girls are immigrants being immersed in their new culture, which will inevitably cause them to lose the old one and become disconnected from their families; the girls' socialization focuses on gender roles (late in the story they meet their brothers for a dance, in which they are graded on their ability to make small talk about the weather), so the allegory could refer to the role that education can take in enforcing those roles; the pack's behavior mirrors the group dynamics in a school, with a queen bee and a perennial screw-up whom no one wants to be friends with (Russell's imaginative take on this dynamic stands in stark contrast to another story in the collection, Aryn Kyle's "Allegiance", which describes a girl's experiences in a new school perfectly without ever trying to do anything that hundreds of other authors haven't already done with the same premise)--but none of these readings sum the story up. In the end, this is simply a story about feral wolf-girls trying to be human, and though it mirrors our reality in certain respects, Russell never loses her faith in the story's reality, and neither do we.

I think "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" is the kind of story Michael Chabon was hoping for when he first envisioned the McSweeney's anthologies. It's also probably the kind of story Jeff VanderMeer would characterize as triumphing over mediocrity (I think it would have had pride of place in Best American Fantasy, and in fact I'm now wondering whether it shouldn't be considered for genre awards). It's certainly the kind of story I was hoping for when I bought Best American Short Stories. Is it disappointing that stories like this aren't more common? Certainly, but it's not necessarily an indication that the short story is ailing. Ultimately, the bell curve asserts itself, and I simply can't imagine any reasonable person expecting to come across more than one or two stories of this caliber in a single year. More disappointing is the thought that so few people will read Russell's story, but the most I can do about that is to tell them otherwise. "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" really is the kind of story that makes you want to grab complete strangers and say “Oh, man, you gotta read this!”, which is precisely what I've just done.