Out of the Window, Into the Dark

by Marian Womack, Vince Haig (cover_art)

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2024

About the author

Marian Womack is a bilingual writer born in Andalusia and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. She is currently completing a part-time Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, and recently graduated from the Clarion Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writer’s Workshop at USCD. She is co-editor of the academic book Beyond the Back Room: New Perspectives on Carmen Martín Gaite (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), and of The Best of Spanish Steampunk (forthcoming, 2015). In Spanish she has published the cycle of intertwined tales Memoria de la Nieve (Zaragoza: Tropo, 2011), has co-authored the YA novel Calle Andersen (Barcelona: La Galera, 2014), and has contributed to more than fifteen anthologies of short fiction, the most recent Alucinadas (Gijón: Palabaristas, 2014), the first Spanish language all-female SF anthology. Her journalism and critical writing on Spanish literature, culture and society have appeared on a variety of English speaking academic journals, as well as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Internationalist, and the digital version of El País. She has fiction forthcoming in English in Weird Fiction Review. Chosen by literary magazine Leer in its 30th anniversary as one of the thirty most influential people in their thirties in Spain’s literary scene, she is also a prolific translator, and runs a small press in Madrid, Ediciones Nevsky.

Reviews

[Ben Unsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frankly, I can say very little which hasn’t been said already, because it truly is a lovely piece of work. When one of Womack’s stories opens with the phrase “Winona Ryder looks at me, sceptically”, you know you’re onto a winner. she makes you focus on yourself and your life, embracing dystopia and genuine emotion with every turn of the page. And unlike a lot of works which throw their ideas at you with all the finesse of a drunkard waterboarding a rat, Womack wields her ideas like a ball of wool, knitting them into her stories until you’re both pleased and surprised to find a full garment you can wrap up warm in. If there’s a slight downfall to the collection, and this really depends on how grounded you like your fiction, it’s the lack of concrete stories with fixed boundaries. Most of the stories possess a kind of ethereal quality, or an atmosphere of narratives within narratives, and while that works in each individual case, combined they might seem off-putting to the uninitiated. Yet, with a number of nods to fandoms which will please the nerdier end of the spectrum (a repository of knowledge in the far future, knowingly akin to Doctor Who: ‘Silence in the Library’, for example), this collection nevertheless spotlights an author to watch and hands you cautionary tales worthy of both Aesop and Philip K. Dick. And the feeling it leaves you with after finishing it is one to be savoured.

Favourite Story: Either ‘Pink-Footed’ or ‘M’s Awfully Big Adventure’