Crash of Dawn by David A. Hill

I woke up this morning to what I thought was an 18-wheeler colliding with a freight train somewhere near my back deck. There was even a noise that sounded something like a train whistle performing a bad duet with a tractor trailer horn. But I knew that wasn’t it.

            By the time I had some pants on; the noises had moved away a bit and were hard to define. Something splintered as I made my way across the hall to a back window. There were a bunch of snapping and whipping sounds to go with the splintering, like someone busting a giant guitar. That’s when the power went out.

            So I got to the window and peeked through the blinds. There was no way I was going to show myself to whatever was going on out there. Somehow, I wasn’t really too surprised to see some kind of giant lizard rising up out of the wreckage of a half-dozen power poles just at the edge of the trees across the street. The equally gigantic crab-looking thing that scuttled up behind the big reptile was a bit of a shock though. I didn’t know what to do. I had a gun, but what was the point? The monsters weren’t on my property.

            When the crab hit the lizard in the back and they both skidded toward the house, I reconsidered the gun but decided to make a run for it instead. The keys were sitting on the table by the door and I snatched them up on my way out. That’s when the giant lizard landed on the back deck and rolled into the living room. I slammed the front door behind me and ran for the truck.

            If you’ve never seen a ’92 Dodge Ram pickup lurch to one side and then hurtle through the air to crash into the head of a 60-foot tall lizard, well, consider yourself lucky. The big crab just stood there in the empty driveway and looked at me, almost like it was debating whether I’d be big enough to make an effective missile. I doubted it and the crab seemed to agree as it scuttled right over me and smashed through the kitchen to get at the lizard again.

             By this time, the scaly green monster with the truck-sized lump on its head had discovered the exposed gas pipe from the stove that was now lying in the shallow end of the swimming pool in the back yard. That big fella gnashed his pointy teeth together and fat blue sparks jumped out like we were at a Fourth of July picnic. The gas ignited and the lizard blew the flames toward the crab right as it came over the kitchen pass-thru. That mean old crustacean didn’t seem to like getting a face full of fire and gas, so it did a quick sidestep into the dining room and I thought I heard the china cabinet take the brunt of it all.

            The last I saw of those two giant monsters, the lizard had rolled through my barn with all four claws latched onto that crab-thing and they kept on tumbling across Highway 11 and then into the river. For myself, I was just glad to be alive and in one piece. Praise the Lord for that.

            I do thank you boys from the insurance office for coming all the way out here to take my statement. When should I expect my check?

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David A. Hill is a freelance writer, artist, and role-playing game designer. His science fantasy poetry and short fiction has been published in Scifaikuest and Lore magazines, and he has co-authored a humorous sword and sorcery tale for an anthology from Loconeal Publishing. He is currently hard at work being an Associate Editor and occasional interviewer for Lore magazine, and the author of a contemporary mythic fantasy novel trilogy featuring a raven and a Baltimore museum curator in their struggle to save the mortal world from dragons, giants, and really big maggots.

Copyright 2013 David A. Hill

The Strange Edge: Have I Stumbled upon a New Idear?

In my reading, my searching out what's going on in fiction, I've run across a lot of unusual subgenres/movements/effects. Two in particular have caught my eye: Slipstream and New Weird.

For those who are unfamiliar, my brief overview. Slipstream is a style or effect in fiction that relies on cognitive dissonance to make the reader feel strange. This can come in the form of unreliable narrators who seem to give contradictory accounts of events or in the inability of a reader to distinguish whether the events in a story are real and magical or imaginary and mundane. Slipstream stories normally occur in a world not entirely distinct from our own. That is, typically only the events in the story itself--or those elements central to the story--are impossible, and the normal rules of existence seemingly apply to every other aspect of life. Slipstream may also use textual subversion while also relating surreal perceptions or events that operate on dream-logic. Slipstream generally deals more with epistemic, ontological or metaphysical uncertainty than social or political ideology. When it is social, it leans toward the psycho-social. You won't find many morality tales in this style.

New Weird, on the other hand, is almost always set in a secondary world, a world very much unlike our own. In this way, it is more accessible to core Fantasy fans than may be Slipstream. New Weird relies on the grotesque (in somewhat the same way Horror does) to give a feeling of wrongness to the reader. There is a tendency toward darkness in theme and the stories tend to contain very gritty social themes squirming below the surface. As these stories are set in a secondary world, many of the creatures, races, venues and customs of that world can be seen as symbols. Unlike your shelf-stable, run-of-the-mill heroic fantasy, you won't see many recognizable tropes (no Elves, Dragons, Vampires, Wizards) in New Weird. You will instead see Lovecraftian variations on those themes.

Though both of these types of story appeal greatly to me, and I'd wager they appeal to a very large common intersection of the Venn diagram of genre readers, they can be contrasted in this way (if somewhat oversimplified for sake of my point): Slipstream features strange events in a typical world whereas New Weird features typical events in a strange world. There is a perfectly good reason why these two conventions have arisen so. In Slipstream, the reader attempts tell what events are real while trying to interpret them in light of the physics of the known world. If those tales were set in a strange and alien world where the reader has yet to be shown an established physics, the reader could easily become overwhelmed with the task. That is to say, when a boy turns invisible in the real world, we know something out of the ordinary has occurred. But when a twarb turns invisible on planet Tandrel, we don't have a basis to decide if that is an unusual event or something that happens all the time. If all elements of the tale are very strange, it takes a lot of work for the writer to expose the necessary information to his reader and gain the reader's trust while enticing the reader to read on. It is much easier to fall into the New Weird conventions of a very strange setting with a fairly typical adventure, romance, drama, or intrigue plot. Or a very normal setting with an entirely unbelievable, confusing, atypical, post-modern plot.

Harder work, maybe. But interesting work? I think so. Here are a few stories I was reading that gave me some ideas about where to begin (and collections where you can find them for your own personal enjoyment):

Brian Evenson - "The Progenitor," "Body" (The Wavering Knife), "Watson's Boy (The New Weird)

Thomas Ligotti - "My Case for Retributive Action," "Our Temporary Supervisor," "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" (Teatro Grottesco)

Kelly Link - "Catskin" (Magic for Beginners), "The Wizards of Perfil," "The Constable of Abal" (Pretty Monsters)

Phillip Raines and Harvey Welles - "The Fishie" (Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet)

Veronica Schanoes - "Serpents" (Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet)

All of the above stories have radically different styles and feels. Evenson plays with bleakness and insanity and alienation. Ligotti combines just about every form of horror ranging from the psychological to the financial to the supernatural. The stories from Link have an off-kilter fairy tale feel, the Raines and Welles collaboration feels like a psychedelic folk tale, and Schanoes' story happens in a non-child-safe Wonderland. But they all have elements in common. They take place in worlds that we are unfamiliar with. They are not in simple Fantasy Land templates ala Tolkien or Terry Brooks. But more than that, they all contain a plot that makes us question the underlying reality of what seems to be the surface reality. Where is this story really taking place? What is really happening to the character? What is the true nature of the characters? Do the characters know what the nature of their reality truly is? Can we the reader be sure of what the reality of the tale is? In one way or another, all these stories create this unified feeling of strangeness. Not just in locale but in action and theme.

So, in short, I want to create successful stories that capitalize on the full spectrum of strangeness. I want to create worlds and plots that are equally bizarre, and fill them characters that don't fall apart under the pressure of being completely and utterly uncanny. I want to entertain, but I also want to encourage my readers to challenge assumptions, which means subverting conventions, but not so much as to become pure experimentalism. Secondary world fiction with plots that induce cognitive dissonance. Let's call it The Strange Edge. Because it will never be a core of any genre. It will always be a frontier region that scares people on all its borders, be they literary, fantasy, mystery, science fiction or horror.