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You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts
M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres – horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing – just as his characters occupy the no man’s land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural parodies of the wider, political landscape. From gelatinous aliens taking over the world’s financial capitals, to the middle-aged man escaping the pressures of fatherhood by going missing in his own house… these are weird stories for weird times
270 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
69 people are currently reading
860 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
110 books829 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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October 8, 2022
M. John Harrison – perfect writing as usual.
The way I discovered him is very verbatim per chance. As a quirk, my book club had decided to choose our next read by rolling dice instead of voting and the dices chose his SF novel Light, which in itself is an eerie thing if you know what the book is about. After that, I was impressed by his Brexit-horror The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and now through his short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. The latter consists of 42 short stories arranged in the way that two shorter stories, sometimes as short as one paragraph, follow one longer. Some stories are loosely connected with each other in that they take place in a fictional, weird sort of England called Autotelia, in which some sort of invasionhas taken place and left its marks, but also in that some terms and words are repeated.
Whether they are classical stories with protagonists and plots or just passages, lists even, like the list of places the author never would think he'd look for himself or even reviews of fictional books: these pieces of writings that often leave blanks for the reader to fill, with their subtle humor, but also their realness that can hide so well weirdness, have a sort of specific gravity that is hard to resist.
The way I discovered him is very verbatim per chance. As a quirk, my book club had decided to choose our next read by rolling dice instead of voting and the dices chose his SF novel Light, which in itself is an eerie thing if you know what the book is about. After that, I was impressed by his Brexit-horror The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and now through his short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. The latter consists of 42 short stories arranged in the way that two shorter stories, sometimes as short as one paragraph, follow one longer. Some stories are loosely connected with each other in that they take place in a fictional, weird sort of England called Autotelia, in which some sort of invasionhas taken place and left its marks, but also in that some terms and words are repeated.
Whether they are classical stories with protagonists and plots or just passages, lists even, like the list of places the author never would think he'd look for himself or even reviews of fictional books: these pieces of writings that often leave blanks for the reader to fill, with their subtle humor, but also their realness that can hide so well weirdness, have a sort of specific gravity that is hard to resist.
November 5, 2017
The door in the wall was an icon beloved by late Victorian and Edwardian alike. The symbol of lost opportunities not fully taken. If you pass through the door, the story goes, you cannot be anything less than changed. If you don’t pass through it, you still cannot be anything less than changed.
Choice, here, offers a fifth major compass point, an unnamed direction or plane. It’s the plane of nostalgia, and of nostalgia’s inverse, a kind of weightless but abiding regret.
Comma Press is a small UK independent publisher and indeed the founder of The Northern Fiction Alliance, a publishing collective that now also includes Peepal Tree Press, Dead Ink, And Other Stories, Bluemoose Books, Tilted Axis Press, Mayfly Press, Route and Saraband.
(http://commapress.co.uk/about/norther...)
Their mission statement:
Mieville’s view: "That Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, we writes fantasy and SF, though of a form, scale, and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction."
You Should Come With Me now is a collection of short-stories (5-10 pages) and flash fiction, written between 2001 and 2015, put pulled together here for the first time. Much of the flash fiction, as well as a series of ‘stories that didn’t make the cut’ has been previously published on the author’s blog (see link below) and several of the stories/flash fiction also feature, explicitly or implicitly, locations that have occurred in his previous works. His own take on the book is worth quoting in full as it gives a better flavour than I will manage in my review:
But while writing in the speculative area, he is no fan of pure genre, particularly when it adheres to constraints. He told the Guardian that “Dividing literature into genres is limiting, a marketing device that got out of hand, and leaked into the audience ... A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that." A manifesto I thoroughly applaud and which comes across, positively, in his work..
On this theme of genre, I enjoyed his series of Imaginary Review, neatly skewering various tropes, even the type of middle-class male literary fiction which is, or rather once was, a staple of the Booker Prize as well as of my own reading:
This novelist’s characters are like himself. They speak in clever & rounded sentences. They have caught life in a linguistic net, & found some odd fish there, & now they are going to tell you about it: not really at length, but in the end at more length than you suspected in the beginning.
The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!”
It isn’t possible at this distance–the distance between writer & reader–to tell how much of the novel is “biographical”. If some of it is, there’s nothing we can do about it; if none of it is, well that’s a joke some decades old by now, & perhaps a little less joyful than it seemed in 1980. What is possible to say is that the acknowledgements page, written in the same tone as the book itself, is a very self-indulgent piece of work.
A butterfly landed on page 52 while I was reading it in my garden. From that single event I learned nothing about the book, or reading, or writing, or anything at all.
Another summed up everything I hate about the type of airport thriller fiction written by, among others, Harlan Coben:
The contemporary investigator is loaded. He drives a Porsche & wears Versace overcoats. He is as big as he is charming, as cultured as he’s ripped & cut. He got his self-defense training from an ex-KGB agent. He has a connection to the CIA; or to a mysterious agency which has only twelve clients worldwide, & which can get him information about anything or anyone, any time he needs it. His family runs every part of the infrastructure of this major American city.
The contemporary investigator is PC, & even when he isn’t, even when he falls from grace a little the way every man can, well, his girlfriend is rich too, and equally well-connected, & she won’t take any male nonsense from him.
Harrison has also come over time to react against traditional sci-fi / fantasy, particularly the type of novel that tries to build and coherently explain an alternative world, an attempt he oddly links to his dislike of neo-liberalism: Free flow of the spectacular is as necessary to a well-built secondary world as it is to the neoliberal state. (from The Theory Cadre)
Politics does seem important to his work. One story, The Crisis, is quite clever but marred by the underlying lazy banker bashing that seems all too de rigueur in today’s fiction (and in other stories).
More successfully, and very humorously, my favourite story Pyschoarchaeology imagines that the events surrounding the exhumation and reburial of Richard III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumat...) lead to a whole country wide industry of suspending and deconstructing big civil engineering projects, looking for dead Royals ... we found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier. He neatly satires the various controversies:
There's always a rights issue. Where does the last Tudor belong? Does he belong where he was found? Or whence he came? Who gets the brown sign? One wrong decision and York won't talk to Leicester, the knives are out again after hundreds of years of peace. Contracts torn up, the industry at war with itself, we all know where that can lead: diminished footfall in the visitors centres. No one wants to see that.
In this re-telling this becomes a major economic activity, the contemporary equivalent of the religious relics industry, enabling Harrison to make a telling comment on capitalism (albeit arguably of the Keynesian rather than neo-liberal variety):
It's as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers. Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this? Out of nervousness? Out of the need for a psychic anchor? Out of economic desperation, so that, having run out of each other's washing to take in, we now take in each other's ancestors? ... At least there a geographical resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available and each containing enough energy to power a couple of careers, a biography, an MA course, a BBC4 series.
Instead his own stories play successfully at the boundary of the real and the fantastic, and the lack of an explanation is often key.
Jack of Mercy’s presents a Borgesian survey of a literary career, by one Hardo Chrome, but one set in an unexplained alternative London in the 1940s:
Most of [his] themes, obsessive images, and techniques of the finished work – including its characteristic sabotage of narrative expectation - were already present in this most marginalised and misunderstood canto, ‘The Gin Gun’. ‘The Gin Gun’ ostensibly a self-contained murder ballad, was published as a run of two hundred stapled pamphlets by Orcer Pust’s Green Pony Epistemological Society Press (then situated in premises on the north bank of Allman’s Reach) and not distributed widely. Reviews by Ray Inevort and Eric Desablier (Inevort famously called it ‘a kind of metaphysical chancerism’) served only to confuse its potential audience among the grisailles and midinettes of the Low City.
(my emphasis as Chrome has obviously been created after Harrison’s own heart)
Cicisbeo has echoes of Ali Smith’s “There But For” – where, in Smith’s version, a dinner party guests simply goes upstairs and locks himself in a room and refuses to leave it. Here it is a husband and father who starts on a lengthy loft conversion and eventually moves up completely, absenting himself from his family’s life altogether, although in Harrison’s hand the story takes a much more surreal turn.
This theme of being able to absent oneself runs throughout the stories, with The Good Detective a story of someone whose job is to track down such people – albeit his advice to the families concerned is usually not to try to find them. Two other stories feature a spurned lover / abandoned wife, in each case convinced that they have seen their former partner on the Central Line, even though he flat-out failed to acknowledge them (‘It was you but with different clothes and a different haircut.’ For God’s sake Julie, how could it be me if I was different? Also you say, ‘There was something different about your face.’)
These short stories are alternated with pieces of flash fiction, typically less than a page in length. Rhythmically it works well, but for me these pieces were less successful. In part, I think this reflects my general issues with flash fiction collections. The very brevity of the form, perhaps at first sight paradoxically, means that it is better consumed in small doses – even with the absolute master Lydia Davis, I found a whole book a little too much for one sitting - but I am a serial rather than parallel reader. Many of these were developed for Harrison’s blog and are/were, I suspect, best read there as they appear over time. Certain images also reoccur (e.g. a smear of sunlight on wet tiles under Barnes Bridge, an odd fixation with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner) although at times one wonders if this is due to the different pieces being reworkings of the same germ of an idea.
My favourite flash fiction example, entitled ‘Explaining the Undiscovered Continent’ of course fails precisely to do that:
All things metal tapping together in the wind. Bleached fishbones one thousand miles from the sea. Sheds where you can get directions & diving apparatus. The inevitable airstream trailer. The inevitable rusty boiler. The inevitable graffito of a coelacanth. The highline of the last tide strewn with yellowish swim bladders of unknown animals like condoms inflated then varnished into fragility. Kilometer upon kilometer of unravelled polypropylene rope. Tin signs. Tied knots. A sense of petrol. Then the cliffs! with their abandoned funicular slicing up through maroon sandstone “to the plateau above”. Windows of static ice cream parlours. Buildings filled to the fourth storey with the grey flock from old padded bags. “This is where we’ll dive.” As far as anyone can tell, they lived in threes or fives, odd numbers anyway. Each household kept a small allosaur on a bit of coloured string. We have no idea who they were or when they were here or what they wanted out of life. That’s the attraction. (& afterwards to sit in the boat, tired, happy, washing a small blue item in the most gentle solvent: no one will ever know what it is.)
Overall: an uneven but, taken as a whole, very impressive collection, yet one that I suspect would have even more resonance had I been more familiar with Harrison’s other work. As one character comments:
He could not describe himself as lost, as he had never known where he was.
Useful sources:
Author’s blog: https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/
Guardian interview (2012): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
Q&A on the novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaXjJ...
Choice, here, offers a fifth major compass point, an unnamed direction or plane. It’s the plane of nostalgia, and of nostalgia’s inverse, a kind of weightless but abiding regret.
Comma Press is a small UK independent publisher and indeed the founder of The Northern Fiction Alliance, a publishing collective that now also includes Peepal Tree Press, Dead Ink, And Other Stories, Bluemoose Books, Tilted Axis Press, Mayfly Press, Route and Saraband.
(http://commapress.co.uk/about/norther...)
Their mission statement:
Comma’s Mission is to put the short story at the heart of contemporary narrative culture. Through innovative commissions, collaborations and digital initiatives, we will explore the power of the short story to transcend cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and to enable greater understanding across these boundaries.M John Harrison was, I must admit, and despite his 11 previous novels and 4 short-story collections, an author not previously on my literary radar. But when a book comes with glowing endorsements from as wide and impressive a range of peers as Robert McFarlane, Olivia Laing, Will Eaves, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, that was clearly an omission on my behalf.
Our Aims are:
(i) To commission and publish new short fiction in a way that demonstrates the potential of the form, and speaks to the diversity of perspectives that make up contemporary England.
(ii) To create opportunities for emerging and established authors to develop, as writers, and to share their work in new contexts, be these interdisciplinary, intercultural, or digital.
(iii) To develop new and diverse audiences for literary short fiction, and new ways for these audiences to access, experience, and interact with it, as well as with each other.
(iv) To support the wider publishing ecology for literary fiction, throughout England, creating new opportunities for translators, editors, and other publishing professionals to enter and prosper in the industry, where those opportunities are often geographically or socially biased.
Mieville’s view: "That Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, we writes fantasy and SF, though of a form, scale, and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction."
You Should Come With Me now is a collection of short-stories (5-10 pages) and flash fiction, written between 2001 and 2015, put pulled together here for the first time. Much of the flash fiction, as well as a series of ‘stories that didn’t make the cut’ has been previously published on the author’s blog (see link below) and several of the stories/flash fiction also feature, explicitly or implicitly, locations that have occurred in his previous works. His own take on the book is worth quoting in full as it gives a better flavour than I will manage in my review:
Formal & generic boundaries, as usual, go unrecognised. Fiction empties its seed into its alter ego, nonfiction. Landscapes are written about, but there will be no landscape writing. Ghosts appear, but not in the ghost stories. Animals feature heavily, but there is nothing here that might be described as “animal fiction”. There is a story which seems to be about dogs until it takes a startling & inexplicable turn for the worse; and another which makes telling reference to the DNA of Richard the Third’s horse. There is less sex than you would expect, but some hauntology.Now I am, I’m afraid, no great fan of speculative fiction, indeed I loathed the one China Mieville book I read, so, at face value, I’m simply not the target market for much of his work.
Other content includes: a distributed sword & sorcery trilogy; two or three full-size sci-fi novels, one of which is two sentences and forty eight words long (fifty if you count the title); several visits to that non-place Autotelia, some that identify as such and some that don’t; and two final dispatches from that other non-place Viriconium, neither of which would get house-room in an anthology of epic fantasy. There is a very angry story which seems to be about an invasion from the astral plane; or perhaps space; or perhaps the financial services industry
But while writing in the speculative area, he is no fan of pure genre, particularly when it adheres to constraints. He told the Guardian that “Dividing literature into genres is limiting, a marketing device that got out of hand, and leaked into the audience ... A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that." A manifesto I thoroughly applaud and which comes across, positively, in his work..
On this theme of genre, I enjoyed his series of Imaginary Review, neatly skewering various tropes, even the type of middle-class male literary fiction which is, or rather once was, a staple of the Booker Prize as well as of my own reading:
This novelist’s characters are like himself. They speak in clever & rounded sentences. They have caught life in a linguistic net, & found some odd fish there, & now they are going to tell you about it: not really at length, but in the end at more length than you suspected in the beginning.
The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!”
It isn’t possible at this distance–the distance between writer & reader–to tell how much of the novel is “biographical”. If some of it is, there’s nothing we can do about it; if none of it is, well that’s a joke some decades old by now, & perhaps a little less joyful than it seemed in 1980. What is possible to say is that the acknowledgements page, written in the same tone as the book itself, is a very self-indulgent piece of work.
A butterfly landed on page 52 while I was reading it in my garden. From that single event I learned nothing about the book, or reading, or writing, or anything at all.
Another summed up everything I hate about the type of airport thriller fiction written by, among others, Harlan Coben:
The contemporary investigator is loaded. He drives a Porsche & wears Versace overcoats. He is as big as he is charming, as cultured as he’s ripped & cut. He got his self-defense training from an ex-KGB agent. He has a connection to the CIA; or to a mysterious agency which has only twelve clients worldwide, & which can get him information about anything or anyone, any time he needs it. His family runs every part of the infrastructure of this major American city.
The contemporary investigator is PC, & even when he isn’t, even when he falls from grace a little the way every man can, well, his girlfriend is rich too, and equally well-connected, & she won’t take any male nonsense from him.
Harrison has also come over time to react against traditional sci-fi / fantasy, particularly the type of novel that tries to build and coherently explain an alternative world, an attempt he oddly links to his dislike of neo-liberalism: Free flow of the spectacular is as necessary to a well-built secondary world as it is to the neoliberal state. (from The Theory Cadre)
Politics does seem important to his work. One story, The Crisis, is quite clever but marred by the underlying lazy banker bashing that seems all too de rigueur in today’s fiction (and in other stories).
More successfully, and very humorously, my favourite story Pyschoarchaeology imagines that the events surrounding the exhumation and reburial of Richard III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumat...) lead to a whole country wide industry of suspending and deconstructing big civil engineering projects, looking for dead Royals ... we found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier. He neatly satires the various controversies:
There's always a rights issue. Where does the last Tudor belong? Does he belong where he was found? Or whence he came? Who gets the brown sign? One wrong decision and York won't talk to Leicester, the knives are out again after hundreds of years of peace. Contracts torn up, the industry at war with itself, we all know where that can lead: diminished footfall in the visitors centres. No one wants to see that.
In this re-telling this becomes a major economic activity, the contemporary equivalent of the religious relics industry, enabling Harrison to make a telling comment on capitalism (albeit arguably of the Keynesian rather than neo-liberal variety):
It's as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers. Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this? Out of nervousness? Out of the need for a psychic anchor? Out of economic desperation, so that, having run out of each other's washing to take in, we now take in each other's ancestors? ... At least there a geographical resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available and each containing enough energy to power a couple of careers, a biography, an MA course, a BBC4 series.
Instead his own stories play successfully at the boundary of the real and the fantastic, and the lack of an explanation is often key.
Jack of Mercy’s presents a Borgesian survey of a literary career, by one Hardo Chrome, but one set in an unexplained alternative London in the 1940s:
Most of [his] themes, obsessive images, and techniques of the finished work – including its characteristic sabotage of narrative expectation - were already present in this most marginalised and misunderstood canto, ‘The Gin Gun’. ‘The Gin Gun’ ostensibly a self-contained murder ballad, was published as a run of two hundred stapled pamphlets by Orcer Pust’s Green Pony Epistemological Society Press (then situated in premises on the north bank of Allman’s Reach) and not distributed widely. Reviews by Ray Inevort and Eric Desablier (Inevort famously called it ‘a kind of metaphysical chancerism’) served only to confuse its potential audience among the grisailles and midinettes of the Low City.
(my emphasis as Chrome has obviously been created after Harrison’s own heart)
Cicisbeo has echoes of Ali Smith’s “There But For” – where, in Smith’s version, a dinner party guests simply goes upstairs and locks himself in a room and refuses to leave it. Here it is a husband and father who starts on a lengthy loft conversion and eventually moves up completely, absenting himself from his family’s life altogether, although in Harrison’s hand the story takes a much more surreal turn.
This theme of being able to absent oneself runs throughout the stories, with The Good Detective a story of someone whose job is to track down such people – albeit his advice to the families concerned is usually not to try to find them. Two other stories feature a spurned lover / abandoned wife, in each case convinced that they have seen their former partner on the Central Line, even though he flat-out failed to acknowledge them (‘It was you but with different clothes and a different haircut.’ For God’s sake Julie, how could it be me if I was different? Also you say, ‘There was something different about your face.’)
These short stories are alternated with pieces of flash fiction, typically less than a page in length. Rhythmically it works well, but for me these pieces were less successful. In part, I think this reflects my general issues with flash fiction collections. The very brevity of the form, perhaps at first sight paradoxically, means that it is better consumed in small doses – even with the absolute master Lydia Davis, I found a whole book a little too much for one sitting - but I am a serial rather than parallel reader. Many of these were developed for Harrison’s blog and are/were, I suspect, best read there as they appear over time. Certain images also reoccur (e.g. a smear of sunlight on wet tiles under Barnes Bridge, an odd fixation with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner) although at times one wonders if this is due to the different pieces being reworkings of the same germ of an idea.
My favourite flash fiction example, entitled ‘Explaining the Undiscovered Continent’ of course fails precisely to do that:
All things metal tapping together in the wind. Bleached fishbones one thousand miles from the sea. Sheds where you can get directions & diving apparatus. The inevitable airstream trailer. The inevitable rusty boiler. The inevitable graffito of a coelacanth. The highline of the last tide strewn with yellowish swim bladders of unknown animals like condoms inflated then varnished into fragility. Kilometer upon kilometer of unravelled polypropylene rope. Tin signs. Tied knots. A sense of petrol. Then the cliffs! with their abandoned funicular slicing up through maroon sandstone “to the plateau above”. Windows of static ice cream parlours. Buildings filled to the fourth storey with the grey flock from old padded bags. “This is where we’ll dive.” As far as anyone can tell, they lived in threes or fives, odd numbers anyway. Each household kept a small allosaur on a bit of coloured string. We have no idea who they were or when they were here or what they wanted out of life. That’s the attraction. (& afterwards to sit in the boat, tired, happy, washing a small blue item in the most gentle solvent: no one will ever know what it is.)
Overall: an uneven but, taken as a whole, very impressive collection, yet one that I suspect would have even more resonance had I been more familiar with Harrison’s other work. As one character comments:
He could not describe himself as lost, as he had never known where he was.
Useful sources:
Author’s blog: https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/
Guardian interview (2012): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
Q&A on the novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaXjJ...
May 14, 2018
Comma Press is a small UK publisher with a “mission is to put the short story at the heart of contemporary narrative culture”
M J Harrison’s has been writing for many years, with his first short story published over 50 years ago. His past successes have included The Boardman Tasker prize for “the best literary work … concerned with the mountain environment”, the Arthur C Clarke award for the Best British Science fiction novel and the US Science Fiction Philip K.Dick award and this juxtaposition of awards reflects the range of genres across which he operates as does the range of authors that give endorsements of this book, which include Neil Gaiman and Robert Macfarlane.
Another endorsement is from China Mieville and it is easy to see that Mieville’s bending of a range of genres within an overarching science fiction and fantasy framework, often to reference social issues from a left wing perspective, takes inspiration from Harrison.
Harrison himself states:
More recently he has used a blog https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/ as effectively an electronic notebook – writing flash fiction some of which later becomes the inspiration for (or is used in) short stories and novels, or alternately which are set in the worlds of those short stories and novel (such as the future earth City Viriconium – around which he wrote a trilogy of novels and series of short stories from the early 1970s to the mid-80s).
This book is a compilation of flash fiction, and short stories, which Harrison has written over the last 15 years (since his previous short story collection). It includes some short stories which have been already published on Kindle, for example “Cave and Julia” – set in the world of Autotelia, see below – or in other compilations or magazines, and Flash fiction which had its origins on the blog. Interestingly recent entries on the blog have included a series of flash fictions which “didn’t quite make the cut” for this compilation.
The first short story is “In Autotelia” and worth discussing in detail as it gives a feel for the book. My investigations of this story (and many others in the book) were aided by exploring Harrison’s blog and by watching You Tube interviews with him (as an aside I also found that watching Harrison read from the book enhanced my appreciation of the flash fiction and short stories).
Autotelia is a lost continent discovered off (and partly over) the North Sea and East Coast of England, reached by a train journey from Waterloo (which as an aside, given the author’s clear knowledge of London, can only have been deliberately substituted for the geographically correct Kings Cross or Liverpool Street) to “eastwards from where Norwich used to be”, a train journey which includes a sudden “transition” to Autotelia. Autotelia itself is a slightly naïve society, a mix of Baltic state with Spanish artists and attitudes to animals, and which oddly of all our cultural society places the highest value on 20th-Century dictator kitsch. The woman travels with a male solicitor and the two seem to be taking part in some form of protocol to clear Autotelians for emigration to our world – an emigration which seems to have an unspoken hint of neo-colonialism and exploitation of immigration.
The story showcases Harrison’s style and much of what lies behind this book: the use of a loosely fantasy/science fiction approach to reflect back on our own society (particularly London) and its injustices and inequalities. It also brings out what for me was a key theme of the book - escape and migration.
“The Walls” (written in 12 hours as part of a Scheherazade “1001 nights” challenge) is a Borgesian absurdity of a man spending his life trying to escape from a series of 7 interlocked cells which he can clearly just walk out of – a metaphor for how we can spend the seven ages of our life in a futile escape from the inevitability of ageing.
The theme of escape, this time from relationships, is also picked up in “Cicisbeo” – a man is drawn back to the life of an old lover when her husband builds a loft extension which is designed to allow him to escape life altogether by way of a series of joined tubes; and in “Not All Men” a man’s old girlfriend is convinced that she sees him on trains and in buildings, despite the clear implausibility of the sightings. “The Good Detective” features a detective tracking down people who go missing from and inside of their own lives.
“Entertaining Angels Unawares” is a semi-autobiographical work, drawing on Harrison’s work while he was rock climbing, about Mike, a labourer, working on the difficult re-butressing of a church with a specialist whose dreams feature decapitation fantasies.
“Psychoarcheology” imagines the discovery of Richard III’s body leading to a sudden wave of minor royal remains popping up all over the country.
Harrison has arranged the flash fiction to largely alternate with and complement the short stories – so that for example “Entertaining Angels Unawares” is followed by a short story of a now geriatric elf-lord, dreaming at night of his fantasy-fighting past and “Psychoarcheology” by the story of an elf queen trying to sell a run-down palace.
“Crisis” is at once a bizarre tale of an invasion from earth of i-ghetti beings from an astral plane who occupy the Square Mile and also I think an allegorical condemnation of the way in which The City sucks in the ambition and talent of the brightest and best in English society, while also creating a city within a city within a country, with its own economic and social system and values. “In a way the Lloyd’s building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster”
“Anti-Promethean” is (including its title) a 50-word science fiction space opera, again looking at the futility of escape while deconstructing the genre, and certainly ends up as preferable to reading say the whole genre of EE Doc Smith:
“Imaginary Reviews” is a series of short TLS-style critiques of imaginary novels, which serves to skewer society, novels, how the latter portrays the former, and what novels say about the novelist and how society wants to see itself. I could see a link to a theme of novels as a form of futile escapism. This story – less than 10 pages – seemed to me to possess such depth than in other hands it would have formed a full novella and was perhaps my favourite of the entire collection.
Another clear theme in the book (even picked up in the sub-title “Stories of Ghosts” on the title page) is hauntings such as in “Yummie” (about a man after a heart-attack) and “Animals” (someone staying in a holiday cottage).
The above stories were those I felt I at least partially understood and appreciated. A number of others passed me by – at least on a first read and I suspect may continue to do so on a second read. There is a lot to be commended in this collection, although I felt that I had to work hard to extract it.
My thanks to Comma Press for a review copy.
M J Harrison’s has been writing for many years, with his first short story published over 50 years ago. His past successes have included The Boardman Tasker prize for “the best literary work … concerned with the mountain environment”, the Arthur C Clarke award for the Best British Science fiction novel and the US Science Fiction Philip K.Dick award and this juxtaposition of awards reflects the range of genres across which he operates as does the range of authors that give endorsements of this book, which include Neil Gaiman and Robert Macfarlane.
Another endorsement is from China Mieville and it is easy to see that Mieville’s bending of a range of genres within an overarching science fiction and fantasy framework, often to reference social issues from a left wing perspective, takes inspiration from Harrison.
Harrison himself states:
Any genre needs its contrarians … it needs constantly reminding that it isn't the centre of the world … Dividing literature into genres is .. a marketing device that got out of hand, and leaked into the audience …A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that.
More recently he has used a blog https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/ as effectively an electronic notebook – writing flash fiction some of which later becomes the inspiration for (or is used in) short stories and novels, or alternately which are set in the worlds of those short stories and novel (such as the future earth City Viriconium – around which he wrote a trilogy of novels and series of short stories from the early 1970s to the mid-80s).
This book is a compilation of flash fiction, and short stories, which Harrison has written over the last 15 years (since his previous short story collection). It includes some short stories which have been already published on Kindle, for example “Cave and Julia” – set in the world of Autotelia, see below – or in other compilations or magazines, and Flash fiction which had its origins on the blog. Interestingly recent entries on the blog have included a series of flash fictions which “didn’t quite make the cut” for this compilation.
The first short story is “In Autotelia” and worth discussing in detail as it gives a feel for the book. My investigations of this story (and many others in the book) were aided by exploring Harrison’s blog and by watching You Tube interviews with him (as an aside I also found that watching Harrison read from the book enhanced my appreciation of the flash fiction and short stories).
Autotelia is a lost continent discovered off (and partly over) the North Sea and East Coast of England, reached by a train journey from Waterloo (which as an aside, given the author’s clear knowledge of London, can only have been deliberately substituted for the geographically correct Kings Cross or Liverpool Street) to “eastwards from where Norwich used to be”, a train journey which includes a sudden “transition” to Autotelia. Autotelia itself is a slightly naïve society, a mix of Baltic state with Spanish artists and attitudes to animals, and which oddly of all our cultural society places the highest value on 20th-Century dictator kitsch. The woman travels with a male solicitor and the two seem to be taking part in some form of protocol to clear Autotelians for emigration to our world – an emigration which seems to have an unspoken hint of neo-colonialism and exploitation of immigration.
The story showcases Harrison’s style and much of what lies behind this book: the use of a loosely fantasy/science fiction approach to reflect back on our own society (particularly London) and its injustices and inequalities. It also brings out what for me was a key theme of the book - escape and migration.
“The Walls” (written in 12 hours as part of a Scheherazade “1001 nights” challenge) is a Borgesian absurdity of a man spending his life trying to escape from a series of 7 interlocked cells which he can clearly just walk out of – a metaphor for how we can spend the seven ages of our life in a futile escape from the inevitability of ageing.
The theme of escape, this time from relationships, is also picked up in “Cicisbeo” – a man is drawn back to the life of an old lover when her husband builds a loft extension which is designed to allow him to escape life altogether by way of a series of joined tubes; and in “Not All Men” a man’s old girlfriend is convinced that she sees him on trains and in buildings, despite the clear implausibility of the sightings. “The Good Detective” features a detective tracking down people who go missing from and inside of their own lives.
“Entertaining Angels Unawares” is a semi-autobiographical work, drawing on Harrison’s work while he was rock climbing, about Mike, a labourer, working on the difficult re-butressing of a church with a specialist whose dreams feature decapitation fantasies.
“Psychoarcheology” imagines the discovery of Richard III’s body leading to a sudden wave of minor royal remains popping up all over the country.
Harrison has arranged the flash fiction to largely alternate with and complement the short stories – so that for example “Entertaining Angels Unawares” is followed by a short story of a now geriatric elf-lord, dreaming at night of his fantasy-fighting past and “Psychoarcheology” by the story of an elf queen trying to sell a run-down palace.
“Crisis” is at once a bizarre tale of an invasion from earth of i-ghetti beings from an astral plane who occupy the Square Mile and also I think an allegorical condemnation of the way in which The City sucks in the ambition and talent of the brightest and best in English society, while also creating a city within a city within a country, with its own economic and social system and values. “In a way the Lloyd’s building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster”
“Anti-Promethean” is (including its title) a 50-word science fiction space opera, again looking at the futility of escape while deconstructing the genre, and certainly ends up as preferable to reading say the whole genre of EE Doc Smith:
The whole enterprise was a let-down. The star drive proved useful, but there was a war or two in consequence and when, after some centuries travel, we reached the mysterious object at the edge of the universe, it turned out to be an advert for hair-gel
“Imaginary Reviews” is a series of short TLS-style critiques of imaginary novels, which serves to skewer society, novels, how the latter portrays the former, and what novels say about the novelist and how society wants to see itself. I could see a link to a theme of novels as a form of futile escapism. This story – less than 10 pages – seemed to me to possess such depth than in other hands it would have formed a full novella and was perhaps my favourite of the entire collection.
Another clear theme in the book (even picked up in the sub-title “Stories of Ghosts” on the title page) is hauntings such as in “Yummie” (about a man after a heart-attack) and “Animals” (someone staying in a holiday cottage).
The above stories were those I felt I at least partially understood and appreciated. A number of others passed me by – at least on a first read and I suspect may continue to do so on a second read. There is a lot to be commended in this collection, although I felt that I had to work hard to extract it.
My thanks to Comma Press for a review copy.
January 14, 2018
What, or who, do these stories remind me of? Anna Kavan, perhaps? Keith Ridgway, Hugo Wilcken, Jen George? Bits of Sam Thompson's Communion Town, bits of Rob Doyle's This is the Ritual. A Christopher Priest novel I never finished reading. The Portals of London blog. I know there are other things lurking around the edges, though, things I wouldn't necessarily clutch at when thinking about fiction at all. Like when I worked in an office with a meeting room that had a door in the corner nobody ever opened, and how I always imagined that if I opened it, there'd be a sheer drop into black nothingness – like the way that door made me feel. The stories in You Should Come With Me Now are 'weird' in the most inexpressible ways, weird in their very DNA.
I haven't read M. John Harrison before, aside from a single story in the Curious Tales anthology Poor Souls’ Light. (That story, 'Animals', is included here, and it's interesting to see how context changes it.) There are 42 stories collected in You Should Come With Me Now, just over half of which are one-page flash-fiction pieces. Some have connections between them; others don't explicitly, but just feel like they are taking place in the same altered world as one another. Some are almost ordinary: 'Animals' is a contemplative Alison Moore-esque tale about a woman staying in a holiday cottage and hearing voices, which might be ghosts or memories – if, of course, those things can be distinguished from one another. Others are outright fantastical: in 'Keep Smiling (With Great Minutes)', an organism referred to as 'Volsie' emerges from parts of the body (the thigh, stomach, arm); it can manifest as various people or things and carries a phone that's 'black, rubber-coated, the size of a fox'. It's interesting to note how Harrison's distinctive style binds the stories together while it remains difficult to say what that style actually is.
One of the earliest stories, 'In Autotelia', sets the tone. It begins with a perfectly normal-sounding train journey: passengers complaining about lost reservations, the man opposite the narrator annoying her by using his laptop. Then we cross into the strange land of Autotelia, where newcomers are greeted by 'the regional president, a marching band, and an escort of police motorcycles', and gift shops sell Stalin alarm clocks and portraits of Hitler. The narrator's job is to make 'medical checks', which require her to inspect adults' and children's genitals for deformities. On the return journey, there is a process called 'transition', which seems to be something unpleasant, for the Autotelians at least, but remains unexplained; such opacity is typical. Autotelia reappears, or is mentioned, in several other stories. 'Cave & Julia' is set there; we learn Julia 'lost' her brother as a teenager at 'one of the mysterious sites on the karst plateau above the town'. There's an artificial tourist beach which is described like something out of a hazy dream:
In 'Yummie', a man called Short has a heart attack, and starts seeing visions of a round-headed person who calls out for someone or something called 'Yummie' and makes pronouncements that walk the line between funny and perturbing: 'Those chickens waiting outside for you now? They are your chickens. You deny them, but I see they follow you with great persistence.' These oddly humorous supernatural encounters are contrasted with the banal dread that accompanies tasks like attending a hospital appointment or remembering to take the correct medication. 'Elf Land: The Lost Palaces' and 'Royal Estate' do a similar thing by situating fantasy characters in dull everyday contexts – an elf queen shows prospective buyers around her home; a princess watches QVC.
Geography and architecture are important, never more so than in 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', one of the least outwardly strange stories, at least at first. The narrator is a labourer who gets a job helping to restore a church in a small Yorkshire town. It's a wonderful portrait of how people navigate the emotional and spiritual effects of their environment without having precise language for it; a psychogeographical journey with someone who would never, ever call it that. The strangeness comes from a violent recurring dream the narrator's colleague has; the way the narrator sometimes chooses to describe things in anomalous ways ('it was rainforest Britain in the second year of Century 21'); his unnerving request to 'share' the dream; and his final actions, entirely random yet somehow frightening.
People run away from themselves – 'Cicisbeo' has a man escaping from his family by withdrawing to the attic, and the protagonist of 'The Good Detective' searches for those 'who go missing in their own lives'. Several stories end with a soothing description of a humdrum act: chopping wood ('The Good Detective'); observing a family standing with their broken-down car ('Dog People'); reading someone else's description of you ('In Autotelia'). If this book was a sound it would be near-silent, white noise – the sound of rain on a window or dead air on a radio – something comforting and very slightly sinister at once.
I've read many other novels and stories that attempt to document the intersections between the strange and the mundane; the beauty of this approach is that there's so much mileage in it, it always feels fresh. There are so many different ways to approach the familiar-yet-not. This book is a gathering of the type of stories that lodge themselves in your head, conjure up startling images and refuse to stop circling around your memory.
Favourite stories: 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', 'Yummie', 'Earth Advengers', 'The Crisis', 'The Theory Cadre', 'Jack of Mercy's', 'Self-Storage'.
Least favourite: 'The Old Fox' – I was really thrown out of the book's otherwise mesmerising mood by the apparent fetishisation of anorexia in this.
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I haven't read M. John Harrison before, aside from a single story in the Curious Tales anthology Poor Souls’ Light. (That story, 'Animals', is included here, and it's interesting to see how context changes it.) There are 42 stories collected in You Should Come With Me Now, just over half of which are one-page flash-fiction pieces. Some have connections between them; others don't explicitly, but just feel like they are taking place in the same altered world as one another. Some are almost ordinary: 'Animals' is a contemplative Alison Moore-esque tale about a woman staying in a holiday cottage and hearing voices, which might be ghosts or memories – if, of course, those things can be distinguished from one another. Others are outright fantastical: in 'Keep Smiling (With Great Minutes)', an organism referred to as 'Volsie' emerges from parts of the body (the thigh, stomach, arm); it can manifest as various people or things and carries a phone that's 'black, rubber-coated, the size of a fox'. It's interesting to note how Harrison's distinctive style binds the stories together while it remains difficult to say what that style actually is.
One of the earliest stories, 'In Autotelia', sets the tone. It begins with a perfectly normal-sounding train journey: passengers complaining about lost reservations, the man opposite the narrator annoying her by using his laptop. Then we cross into the strange land of Autotelia, where newcomers are greeted by 'the regional president, a marching band, and an escort of police motorcycles', and gift shops sell Stalin alarm clocks and portraits of Hitler. The narrator's job is to make 'medical checks', which require her to inspect adults' and children's genitals for deformities. On the return journey, there is a process called 'transition', which seems to be something unpleasant, for the Autotelians at least, but remains unexplained; such opacity is typical. Autotelia reappears, or is mentioned, in several other stories. 'Cave & Julia' is set there; we learn Julia 'lost' her brother as a teenager at 'one of the mysterious sites on the karst plateau above the town'. There's an artificial tourist beach which is described like something out of a hazy dream:
Two men were running about on the tideline, throwing something between them. It didn't look like a ball. Heat already blurred the air, resonated from the steep cliffs of the plateau. Cave sat on the sand, and around him everything was suspended in light; everything like a film, wrapped in cameraman sublime, documentary sublime. Light, silhouettes, warmth like a perfect saturated colour, all at once. Distant objects seemed too large.
In 'Yummie', a man called Short has a heart attack, and starts seeing visions of a round-headed person who calls out for someone or something called 'Yummie' and makes pronouncements that walk the line between funny and perturbing: 'Those chickens waiting outside for you now? They are your chickens. You deny them, but I see they follow you with great persistence.' These oddly humorous supernatural encounters are contrasted with the banal dread that accompanies tasks like attending a hospital appointment or remembering to take the correct medication. 'Elf Land: The Lost Palaces' and 'Royal Estate' do a similar thing by situating fantasy characters in dull everyday contexts – an elf queen shows prospective buyers around her home; a princess watches QVC.
Geography and architecture are important, never more so than in 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', one of the least outwardly strange stories, at least at first. The narrator is a labourer who gets a job helping to restore a church in a small Yorkshire town. It's a wonderful portrait of how people navigate the emotional and spiritual effects of their environment without having precise language for it; a psychogeographical journey with someone who would never, ever call it that. The strangeness comes from a violent recurring dream the narrator's colleague has; the way the narrator sometimes chooses to describe things in anomalous ways ('it was rainforest Britain in the second year of Century 21'); his unnerving request to 'share' the dream; and his final actions, entirely random yet somehow frightening.
People run away from themselves – 'Cicisbeo' has a man escaping from his family by withdrawing to the attic, and the protagonist of 'The Good Detective' searches for those 'who go missing in their own lives'. Several stories end with a soothing description of a humdrum act: chopping wood ('The Good Detective'); observing a family standing with their broken-down car ('Dog People'); reading someone else's description of you ('In Autotelia'). If this book was a sound it would be near-silent, white noise – the sound of rain on a window or dead air on a radio – something comforting and very slightly sinister at once.
I've read many other novels and stories that attempt to document the intersections between the strange and the mundane; the beauty of this approach is that there's so much mileage in it, it always feels fresh. There are so many different ways to approach the familiar-yet-not. This book is a gathering of the type of stories that lodge themselves in your head, conjure up startling images and refuse to stop circling around your memory.
Favourite stories: 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', 'Yummie', 'Earth Advengers', 'The Crisis', 'The Theory Cadre', 'Jack of Mercy's', 'Self-Storage'.
Least favourite: 'The Old Fox' – I was really thrown out of the book's otherwise mesmerising mood by the apparent fetishisation of anorexia in this.
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December 24, 2017
(...)
The joy of reading these stories is not only based on the realistic peek in other people’s lives or the prose style. It’s also the thrill of being surprised. There’s quite a lot of awe packed in these 257 pages. It’s the same awe Gene Wolfe sometimes manages to evoke, or Kafka, or Miéville – the awe of something wild, something just out of sight, turning the corner and all of a sudden seeing something utterly unexpected. It’s the juice speculative fiction fans live for, but it’s let loose here, without the restrictions of genre tropes authors like Sanderson submit themselves to. Not that this a no-breaks wild ride, this is no Perdition Street Station, not at all, the outrageous is subdued. It is neither a Rococo imaginative rollercoaster like The Book Of The New Sun. But it is free. It is without restrictions. It is human creativity. And it will creep up on you on moments you will not expect it.
Things I haven’t mentioned yet: there’s political activism here, literary critique, and critique of the superficial interactive exhibition culture. An immaturity not willing to be shackled. A witty intelligence. The longing for a simple life. Tons of variation, not one story is alike – except for a few that are connected.
(...)
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
The joy of reading these stories is not only based on the realistic peek in other people’s lives or the prose style. It’s also the thrill of being surprised. There’s quite a lot of awe packed in these 257 pages. It’s the same awe Gene Wolfe sometimes manages to evoke, or Kafka, or Miéville – the awe of something wild, something just out of sight, turning the corner and all of a sudden seeing something utterly unexpected. It’s the juice speculative fiction fans live for, but it’s let loose here, without the restrictions of genre tropes authors like Sanderson submit themselves to. Not that this a no-breaks wild ride, this is no Perdition Street Station, not at all, the outrageous is subdued. It is neither a Rococo imaginative rollercoaster like The Book Of The New Sun. But it is free. It is without restrictions. It is human creativity. And it will creep up on you on moments you will not expect it.
Things I haven’t mentioned yet: there’s political activism here, literary critique, and critique of the superficial interactive exhibition culture. An immaturity not willing to be shackled. A witty intelligence. The longing for a simple life. Tons of variation, not one story is alike – except for a few that are connected.
(...)
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
February 25, 2019
A curious melange of beautifully developed, fully realized stories, impressionistic but still rather impressive short pieces, and odds and ends that seem more like sketches for the first. Too long, too digressive and unfocused to really be impressive as a collection, I think this would have worked better as a two volumes-one short book centered on the best, longer works and another fan-focused volume of shorter, impressionistic pieces. But I'm not Harrison and I suppose he's been at this long enough to know what works for him commercially.
Can't say I'd recommend this for anyone but real Harrison fans (particularly as one of the longest tales, "Cave and Julia", has been independently published previously); there are some lovely things here but a lot of underwhelming work as well. If you're familiar with Harrison you'll know what you're getting (there are no surprises in terms of style or theme here) and you'll be happy to reencounter a writer you love, but if you don't, I suspect this will prove unsatisfying and make for a poor introduction to a remarkable author.
Can't say I'd recommend this for anyone but real Harrison fans (particularly as one of the longest tales, "Cave and Julia", has been independently published previously); there are some lovely things here but a lot of underwhelming work as well. If you're familiar with Harrison you'll know what you're getting (there are no surprises in terms of style or theme here) and you'll be happy to reencounter a writer you love, but if you don't, I suspect this will prove unsatisfying and make for a poor introduction to a remarkable author.
November 11, 2017
You Should Come With Me Now is published by Comma Press, an independent publisher based in Manchester, UK. Comma Press describes its mission as
Comma’s Mission is to put the short story at the heart of contemporary narrative culture. Through innovative commissions, collaborations and digital initiatives, we will explore the power of the short story to transcend cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and to enable greater understanding across these boundaries.
The book is a mixture of "flash fiction" and short stories. So far, 2017 has been the year that has finally persuaded me of the value and pleasure to be found in the short story. I have to confess that I am still less taken with "flash fiction". I read this around the time of Guy Fawkes Night in the UK and reading it put me in mind of watching a fireworks display. The short and very, very short nature of the stories being told felt like a lot of fireworks going off around me. Sometimes it felt as if as fast as I could turn round to look at one, it had gone and the next one was going off somewhere else. To torture the analogy further, there were a few that didn’t go off and I was unsure whether it was safe to go back and try again.
I believe this is a book that would benefit from a second reading where I don’t sit and read the whole thing from cover to cover but rather read one or two stories at a time and do/read other things in-between. Partly this is because of the brevity of the stories, but partly it is because the language is also quite disconcerting. A lot of the time you are reading this, you feel like you are in a dream. Not everything makes sense in the traditional meaning of that word.
After a very brief initial piece of flash fiction, we move to a longer short story called "In Autotelia". It sounds almost normal as it starts out with people catching a train out of London, but by the second page, when the narrator gets off the train, everything is definitely not normal. We are "in Autotelia". Towards the end of the book, we are explicitly taken back to Autotelia for some of the final stories. On the journey through the book, we are treated to series of bizarre, dream-like stories.
I was fascinated to discover a blog by the author where he says:
The book features eighteen short stories–five of which are original, unpublished & unavailable anywhere else and a further half dozen that will be new to most readers–and some flash fiction, much of which will be recognisable to habitues of the Ambiente Hotel. Contents include: a distributed sword & sorcery trilogy; two or three full-size sci-fi novels, one of which is two sentences and forty eight words long (fifty if you count the title); several visits to Autotelia, some that identify as such and some that don’t; and two final dispatches from Viriconium, neither of which would get house-room in an anthology of epic fantasy.
In a description of the book, he goes on to say it is…
…organised to bring out the themes the way a novel might. Yes they are short stories, but yes the book is a thing in itself
The reference to the Ambiente Hotel is a reference to the blog where much of the flash fiction is posted. If you explore this blog for a while, you will discover several other references to Autotelia. I think knowing this now means that I would get a lot more out of a second reading. If you are approaching this for the first time, it may be worth a few minutes on the internet looking at the Ambiente Hotel to familiarise yourself with the unsettling world of M John Harrison. What is clear is that there is more to this book than just a collection of short stories, and there is more to the context in which it lives (the Ambiente Hotel) than is demonstrated by the book alone. The mention of Viriconium, for example, refers to a previous book by the same author.
Where does that leave me in terms of rating this book? It leaves me undecided. I am provisionally rating it at 3 stars, but I intend to re-read it (more slowly, as mentioned above) and that may alter my view. If you like stories that resolve, stories that explain themselves, stories that develop plot, then steer clear of this. If you enjoy ambiguity, loose ends, atmosphere, then this may well be a book for you.
My thanks to Comma Press for a review copy of this book.
UPDATE: Now re-read as indicated above but I can’t think of anything new worth adding to this review. It remains at 3 stars for me.
Comma’s Mission is to put the short story at the heart of contemporary narrative culture. Through innovative commissions, collaborations and digital initiatives, we will explore the power of the short story to transcend cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and to enable greater understanding across these boundaries.
The book is a mixture of "flash fiction" and short stories. So far, 2017 has been the year that has finally persuaded me of the value and pleasure to be found in the short story. I have to confess that I am still less taken with "flash fiction". I read this around the time of Guy Fawkes Night in the UK and reading it put me in mind of watching a fireworks display. The short and very, very short nature of the stories being told felt like a lot of fireworks going off around me. Sometimes it felt as if as fast as I could turn round to look at one, it had gone and the next one was going off somewhere else. To torture the analogy further, there were a few that didn’t go off and I was unsure whether it was safe to go back and try again.
I believe this is a book that would benefit from a second reading where I don’t sit and read the whole thing from cover to cover but rather read one or two stories at a time and do/read other things in-between. Partly this is because of the brevity of the stories, but partly it is because the language is also quite disconcerting. A lot of the time you are reading this, you feel like you are in a dream. Not everything makes sense in the traditional meaning of that word.
After a very brief initial piece of flash fiction, we move to a longer short story called "In Autotelia". It sounds almost normal as it starts out with people catching a train out of London, but by the second page, when the narrator gets off the train, everything is definitely not normal. We are "in Autotelia". Towards the end of the book, we are explicitly taken back to Autotelia for some of the final stories. On the journey through the book, we are treated to series of bizarre, dream-like stories.
I was fascinated to discover a blog by the author where he says:
The book features eighteen short stories–five of which are original, unpublished & unavailable anywhere else and a further half dozen that will be new to most readers–and some flash fiction, much of which will be recognisable to habitues of the Ambiente Hotel. Contents include: a distributed sword & sorcery trilogy; two or three full-size sci-fi novels, one of which is two sentences and forty eight words long (fifty if you count the title); several visits to Autotelia, some that identify as such and some that don’t; and two final dispatches from Viriconium, neither of which would get house-room in an anthology of epic fantasy.
In a description of the book, he goes on to say it is…
…organised to bring out the themes the way a novel might. Yes they are short stories, but yes the book is a thing in itself
The reference to the Ambiente Hotel is a reference to the blog where much of the flash fiction is posted. If you explore this blog for a while, you will discover several other references to Autotelia. I think knowing this now means that I would get a lot more out of a second reading. If you are approaching this for the first time, it may be worth a few minutes on the internet looking at the Ambiente Hotel to familiarise yourself with the unsettling world of M John Harrison. What is clear is that there is more to this book than just a collection of short stories, and there is more to the context in which it lives (the Ambiente Hotel) than is demonstrated by the book alone. The mention of Viriconium, for example, refers to a previous book by the same author.
Where does that leave me in terms of rating this book? It leaves me undecided. I am provisionally rating it at 3 stars, but I intend to re-read it (more slowly, as mentioned above) and that may alter my view. If you like stories that resolve, stories that explain themselves, stories that develop plot, then steer clear of this. If you enjoy ambiguity, loose ends, atmosphere, then this may well be a book for you.
My thanks to Comma Press for a review copy of this book.
UPDATE: Now re-read as indicated above but I can’t think of anything new worth adding to this review. It remains at 3 stars for me.
October 28, 2025
M. John Harrison’s stunning collection of short stories, You Should Come with Me Now, subtitled ‘Stories of Ghosts’ continues the exploration of his perennial themes of the dissatisfaction with the humdrum of the quotidian, the necessity for escape and the persistent failure to do so. His previous collections, especially those of the 1980s, which were written whilst Thatcher’s economics dismantled Britain, Harrison’s dialectics of the impulse for fantasy and/or escape was played out against backdrops of liminal urban edgelands. In his recent stories those spaces have now been gentrified, co-opted into suburban London, full of well-heeled professionals in their boating shoes and pink shirts, with their mid-life crises. But there is still something haunting the edges of the vacuous heart of suburbia where life plays out inside chic cul-de-sacs with sleek Mercedes parked outside. Although to all outward appearances London may have changed, Harrison’s focus is still on the disenfranchised protagonists, absent from their own life and distanced from the dominant culture, looking for a way out, for fulfilment, haunted by ghosts of the past.
This impulse to escape is enacted by a family man overcome by a sense of malaise in one of the collection’s highlights, ‘Cicisbeo’. He absents himself from his comfortable middle class life by permanently retreating into his loft. “You have to get away somehow. You have to get away from it all.” This being Harrison, as well as retreat, the loft also becomes a liminal zone of the eery and the fantastic, but at a high cost. (There’s always a cost.)
‘Yummie’ is another highlight. It follows Short, a man in his late fifties anxiously recovering from a heart attack. Since his operation, he has been plagued by disorienting dreams. He begins to be haunted by a round-headed man who seems perpetually on watch—standing at the window, scanning the street, waiting for something, perhaps Short’s death. The story drifts in a somnolent, oneiric haze, where waking and dreaming blur, and a quiet sense of inevitability settles over everything.
‘Entertaining Angels Unawares’ is among the creepiest things I’ve read. Its set-up is minimal: two people restoring a church. The narrator develops an unhealthy fascination with the other’s deeply troubling dreams. The ending is quietly chilling, the sense of impending violence is never fulfilled, only deepened into an enigmatic unease.
The collection also includes the surprise addition of a new Viriconium story, ‘Jack Of Mercy’s’, the first since 1985, when ‘A Young Man’s Journey To Viriconium’ put a stop to all the fun.
Interspersed through the stories and collected for the first time in print are examples of Harrison’s flash fiction; very short, enigmatic pieces, no more than a paragraph, that first appeared on his blog Ambiente Hotel. These works are gnomic and elusive. Always the experimental author, Harrison embraced the freedom that online publishing afforded him, using the blog as a space for formal play. His enthusiasm for this compressed format recalls his New Worlds period in the early 70s, when his stories were energised by J. G. Ballard’s own experiments with new forms.
Throughout this collection, and as always with Harrison’s prose, there is a sharply observed reality which is supremely rendered. In his sentences, his editing, and his elisions, he seems to somehow capture the warp and weave of reality. This attention to the real lays the groundwork for those heightened effects that Harrison consistently reaches, a genuine sense of the uncanny and the deeply unsettling that reverberates throughout You Should Come With Me Now.
Read
April 1, 2020Recently I've been going back in to a few books I'd started ages back, but which hadn't quite grabbed me then, and which turned out to have been waiting for their perfect moment. Case in point: M John Harrison's last collection, from which I read the first few stories around the same time I bought it at a launch event back in 2017 (remember events? I miss those). And not that it wasn't good, but the nature of M John Harrison's recent short work is wispy, drifting, such that you don't find yourself rushing to read the next one. So there it sat on the bedside table until a month or two back, when I accelerated...and of course, now it makes perfect sense. They're all short pieces, some of them very much so, barely longer than their titles. Glimpses, fragments, oblique spoofs predominate. Sentences like "Every morning at six, rain showers rustled on off the sea, tapping on the windows like old women in a cheap seafront hotel" remind us that, had Harrison been less ambitious and less interesting, he could easily have made a career in litfic. But what animates many of the most memorable pieces is a sense of a sort of abstract apocalypse, a crisis seen only in its distant reflections, collateral damage from a desultory war elsewhere. "New buildings began to appear, for instance – vast, not entirely stable parodies of Noughties vanity architecture which lasted a week or a month before toppling away into a kind of dark blue air" – this was very much the feel of the Square Mile in the weeks when we were gradually realising that life as we knew it wouldn't be carrying on as normal this time. And in some ways that's one of the most widescreen stories here; often there's a sense of a quiet, somehow low-budget end of the world, JG Ballard if he weren't trying so desperately hard. Normally I love story notes in a collection, and am delighted with how ubiquitous they've become, but I'm so glad this one doesn't have them, retains its enigmas.
March 7, 2018
“You Should Come With Me Now” is what you get when poetry mates violently with prose.
I guess this is supposed to be identified as a short story collection interspersed with a number of miniatures and fragments, but since “liminal” seems to be the buzzword of the moment, and with the level of polish and optimization of these tales, with each word (seemingly) carefully chosen to evoke an image, an emotion, or a vaguely unsettling non-memory, and everything superfluous pared clean off, Harrison is drifting in the haunting netherworld that straddles the border between these two major forms of literature.
Therein, however, lies my one problem with this otherwise perfect collection – everything is so tight, polished so slick, that at times the eyes slip off the words and the brain drifts off. It is hard to maintain alert attention when handling text in book format when every single word is important – I had to take breaks every dozen pages or so, sometimes for a full day, before coming back to this book.
There is usually an inversely proportional relationship between an author’s literary abilities and their online presence, and Harrison is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. However, I suspect that this hyperfocus that works so well on Twitter or on his blog, in these bursts of temporally limited calls to attention, simply cuts too hard in bound-and-printed pages format, where an ordinary human mind needs some bread, potatoes and salad to rest from the constant high burn of the indescribably delicious pepper steak.
I guess this is supposed to be identified as a short story collection interspersed with a number of miniatures and fragments, but since “liminal” seems to be the buzzword of the moment, and with the level of polish and optimization of these tales, with each word (seemingly) carefully chosen to evoke an image, an emotion, or a vaguely unsettling non-memory, and everything superfluous pared clean off, Harrison is drifting in the haunting netherworld that straddles the border between these two major forms of literature.
Therein, however, lies my one problem with this otherwise perfect collection – everything is so tight, polished so slick, that at times the eyes slip off the words and the brain drifts off. It is hard to maintain alert attention when handling text in book format when every single word is important – I had to take breaks every dozen pages or so, sometimes for a full day, before coming back to this book.
There is usually an inversely proportional relationship between an author’s literary abilities and their online presence, and Harrison is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. However, I suspect that this hyperfocus that works so well on Twitter or on his blog, in these bursts of temporally limited calls to attention, simply cuts too hard in bound-and-printed pages format, where an ordinary human mind needs some bread, potatoes and salad to rest from the constant high burn of the indescribably delicious pepper steak.
November 15, 2017
“You think you see the real world. But you don’t.”
You Should Come With Me Now, by M. John Harrison, is a collection of forty-two short stories written by one of the pioneers of New Wave Fiction. It is his first published collection of short fiction for over fifteen years. The stories offer an unsettling view of a world that is at times surreal. In many ways they depict the negative, stripping back experiences and emotions to show how skewed accepted behaviour can be. The cast of characters vary in time and place but share a need to find a personal space where they can be a version of themselves each considers authentic. Some attempt to reinvent themselves and those they interact with to achieve this. The self-involvement of protagonists is dissected demonstrating how much is ignored if not fitting the narrative a person creates.
Slightly longer stories are interspersed with flash fiction. My favourite of these micro stories was Jackdaw Bingo which depicts a time when aliens arrive on earth and seek the dominant species to interact with and learn from. It is amusingly perceptive, as are many of these tales.
Another that deals with alien invasion is The Crisis in which London’s financial sector is taken over and the authorities, as ever, seek those willing to sacrifice themselves for what is claimed to be the common good.
“You can’t be the rulers if you have no country to rule.”
There are dreams, ghosts, psychodrama. There are manipulations and powerplay between individuals and those granted authority, the acceptance of such in exchange for what is regarded as a safe existence.
“The strangest thing, he says in a kind of gentle wonder, is to live in a time like this, both bland and rotten”
My view of the world is not as negative as is depicted but I can appreciate the sentiments to which the author gives rein. There is little explanation which adds to the potency of each vignette.
In Autotelia offers an alternative view of a future society where entrance to London requires strictly controlled medical checks. Told from the point of view of a doctor who has distanced herself from the disturbing nature of this work it ends with an outsiders view of the doctor. How challenging to be confronted with what others see.
Psychoarcheolgy is an amusing take on the discovery of the skeletal remains of the famous under construction sites.
“dig for the evidence, develop the interactive exhibit, crowdsource the story the public wants to hear. It’s the contemporary equivalent of the religious relics industry”
“Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this? […] All they mean to us is what we want them to mean.”
Dog People portrays the rise and fall of a sexual relationship alongside the complexities of family ties. In this interpretation hope is transient, resentments forever bubbling to the surface.
Although described as science fiction or fantasy, and many of the stories are not of our world, the leaps of imagination within each tale enable the author to parody real life politics, capitalism, and even his own domain, the literary elite. Many of the characters exude a quiet desperation, a distancing of themselves from other’s expectations.
A wide variety of subjects are covered with a few recurring themes. In a collection of this size there will be stories that resonate and others generating a less visceral response. I was amused, challenged and, at time, confused. Overall though my first foray into this award winning author’s work impressed.
Probably best dipped into rather than gorged in a sitting. A varied, intriguing read.
You Should Come With Me Now, by M. John Harrison, is a collection of forty-two short stories written by one of the pioneers of New Wave Fiction. It is his first published collection of short fiction for over fifteen years. The stories offer an unsettling view of a world that is at times surreal. In many ways they depict the negative, stripping back experiences and emotions to show how skewed accepted behaviour can be. The cast of characters vary in time and place but share a need to find a personal space where they can be a version of themselves each considers authentic. Some attempt to reinvent themselves and those they interact with to achieve this. The self-involvement of protagonists is dissected demonstrating how much is ignored if not fitting the narrative a person creates.
Slightly longer stories are interspersed with flash fiction. My favourite of these micro stories was Jackdaw Bingo which depicts a time when aliens arrive on earth and seek the dominant species to interact with and learn from. It is amusingly perceptive, as are many of these tales.
Another that deals with alien invasion is The Crisis in which London’s financial sector is taken over and the authorities, as ever, seek those willing to sacrifice themselves for what is claimed to be the common good.
“You can’t be the rulers if you have no country to rule.”
There are dreams, ghosts, psychodrama. There are manipulations and powerplay between individuals and those granted authority, the acceptance of such in exchange for what is regarded as a safe existence.
“The strangest thing, he says in a kind of gentle wonder, is to live in a time like this, both bland and rotten”
My view of the world is not as negative as is depicted but I can appreciate the sentiments to which the author gives rein. There is little explanation which adds to the potency of each vignette.
In Autotelia offers an alternative view of a future society where entrance to London requires strictly controlled medical checks. Told from the point of view of a doctor who has distanced herself from the disturbing nature of this work it ends with an outsiders view of the doctor. How challenging to be confronted with what others see.
Psychoarcheolgy is an amusing take on the discovery of the skeletal remains of the famous under construction sites.
“dig for the evidence, develop the interactive exhibit, crowdsource the story the public wants to hear. It’s the contemporary equivalent of the religious relics industry”
“Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this? […] All they mean to us is what we want them to mean.”
Dog People portrays the rise and fall of a sexual relationship alongside the complexities of family ties. In this interpretation hope is transient, resentments forever bubbling to the surface.
Although described as science fiction or fantasy, and many of the stories are not of our world, the leaps of imagination within each tale enable the author to parody real life politics, capitalism, and even his own domain, the literary elite. Many of the characters exude a quiet desperation, a distancing of themselves from other’s expectations.
A wide variety of subjects are covered with a few recurring themes. In a collection of this size there will be stories that resonate and others generating a less visceral response. I was amused, challenged and, at time, confused. Overall though my first foray into this award winning author’s work impressed.
Probably best dipped into rather than gorged in a sitting. A varied, intriguing read.
August 23, 2021
In my experience, M. John Harrison has always been a hit-or-miss author. When he "hits," he hits hard; when he "misses," he tends to miss by a mile.
I enjoyed some of the stories in this collection, esp. the longer ones, but most didn't reach me.
I enjoyed some of the stories in this collection, esp. the longer ones, but most didn't reach me.
May 9, 2019
‘You Should Come With Me Now’ an anthology by M. John Harrison from the wonderful Independent publisher Comma Press boasted a collection of short stories that were quite different and a joy to read, this due in part to the range Harrison possesses; the storylines ranged from people with schizophrenia (are they schizophrenic or were there ghosts living among them), different worlds that only some could see and tales of stalking etc.
What I really enjoyed most about these short stories is that Harrison leaves each one open to the interpretation of the reader. In so much as to say I could think that it means one thing and someone else could have a completely different interpretation and reaction to the same story.
Some of the stories were slow burners at first; hard to get into the story, but by the time the ending drops it leaves you with one line that at first you wouldn’t think is a good ending but plays on the mind long after reading, giving you an understanding of why Harrison concluded the story in this way. These short stories really make you think out of the box in the way Harrison uses descriptions of characters and settings.
Reflecting about which was my favourite, the one that stands out in my mind was about a man and his close friend; whom you can tell he loves but she is married and her husband is a hermit that lives in their attic. He is always up there working on some project but no one knows what it is and the story trundles along to show how his absence from their lives is affecting everyone else. When it gets to the ending, the house gets almost torn apart! My interpretation of it is that he has been working on defending himself from another dimension, which is revealed masterfully at the end for the rest of the characters to see. Someone else might interpret this story in a different way which is so cool because then it would spark a discussion about why and how they see it their way.
Overall, this collection of short stories was pretty interesting and they didn’t ramble on as many short stories do, being reminiscent of Novellas instead of the delicate craft of the short story. Each time I returned it felt like reading a new book each time, once again highlighting Harrison’s range of writing and the intricate craft of the short story form.
What I really enjoyed most about these short stories is that Harrison leaves each one open to the interpretation of the reader. In so much as to say I could think that it means one thing and someone else could have a completely different interpretation and reaction to the same story.
Some of the stories were slow burners at first; hard to get into the story, but by the time the ending drops it leaves you with one line that at first you wouldn’t think is a good ending but plays on the mind long after reading, giving you an understanding of why Harrison concluded the story in this way. These short stories really make you think out of the box in the way Harrison uses descriptions of characters and settings.
Reflecting about which was my favourite, the one that stands out in my mind was about a man and his close friend; whom you can tell he loves but she is married and her husband is a hermit that lives in their attic. He is always up there working on some project but no one knows what it is and the story trundles along to show how his absence from their lives is affecting everyone else. When it gets to the ending, the house gets almost torn apart! My interpretation of it is that he has been working on defending himself from another dimension, which is revealed masterfully at the end for the rest of the characters to see. Someone else might interpret this story in a different way which is so cool because then it would spark a discussion about why and how they see it their way.
Overall, this collection of short stories was pretty interesting and they didn’t ramble on as many short stories do, being reminiscent of Novellas instead of the delicate craft of the short story. Each time I returned it felt like reading a new book each time, once again highlighting Harrison’s range of writing and the intricate craft of the short story form.
December 18, 2017
It's everything I expected an M John Harrison book should be, including the unexpected.
In a way, You Should Come with Me Now is a logical and successful sequel to Things That Never Happen, in which his previous short prose is collected – there are some constant themes and motifs, one might say obsessions, woven in the way the author treats his cities, landscapes, human interaction and its limitations, female characters, illness, dreams, etc. – but even someone who’s very familiar with MJH’s prose will find fresh gems in here.
This collection abounds in really short fiction, pieces which the author has published mostly on his web site, and these stories vary from lyrical passages and onyrical musings, to ironic and/or political miniatures, short farces, modern fables, and even condensed novels. They are very interesting and wonderfully written reads. Although one can learn quite a few tricks of the trade by reading any of MJH’s fiction, these short pieces are, in my view, especially valuable, for they demonstrate how important the care for words is, how precise and beautiful language can be, and how great an effect you can create in a very limited space if you use your tools knowingly.
However, this collection does not end with flash fiction. (Actually, it does, but that’s not the point.) There are 18 longer short stories that make the backbone of the book, and they are, along with the miniatures, organized in such a manner that I had a strong feeling I was reading a fragmentary, non-linear, surreal(istic) novel. The author claims on his web site that such effect was intended, and if so, the intent was well realized: in many ways – the overall mood, overlapping themes, formal and substantial refrains, (the illusion of) general progression – this is a novel. Then again, every story speaks for itself. Some are set in MJH’s newest imaginary location – Autotelia, so different and so much the same as the world we live in; some revisit his well-known Viriconium (or versions of it); and some are completely set ‘on our side of things’, but that doesn’t make them prosaic, or more (or less?) realistic. Many of them don’t have what you’d call a “linear narrative”, their structure is often unusual, episodic, mutated, their characters tend to be strange and eccentric and their action arguable, but these stories always follow their inner logic and always manage to bring you a satisfactory conclusion, mostly due to their author’s great commitment to detail. We are often smitten by his observant eye, his ability to pinpoint a small truth of life in a side remark, in sparse dialogue or seemingly irrelevant description. The focus of the story isn’t always where we’re used to finding it, but there always is one, although it might require a search party of our own, set to explore these undiscovered continents. The magic lies in the possibility of different readings, in the variety of our findings. Nothing in these stories is unimportant, every word is there because it is necessary, and sometimes this realization by itself seems enough. But, of course, the final reward is always much greater.
In a way, You Should Come with Me Now is a logical and successful sequel to Things That Never Happen, in which his previous short prose is collected – there are some constant themes and motifs, one might say obsessions, woven in the way the author treats his cities, landscapes, human interaction and its limitations, female characters, illness, dreams, etc. – but even someone who’s very familiar with MJH’s prose will find fresh gems in here.
This collection abounds in really short fiction, pieces which the author has published mostly on his web site, and these stories vary from lyrical passages and onyrical musings, to ironic and/or political miniatures, short farces, modern fables, and even condensed novels. They are very interesting and wonderfully written reads. Although one can learn quite a few tricks of the trade by reading any of MJH’s fiction, these short pieces are, in my view, especially valuable, for they demonstrate how important the care for words is, how precise and beautiful language can be, and how great an effect you can create in a very limited space if you use your tools knowingly.
However, this collection does not end with flash fiction. (Actually, it does, but that’s not the point.) There are 18 longer short stories that make the backbone of the book, and they are, along with the miniatures, organized in such a manner that I had a strong feeling I was reading a fragmentary, non-linear, surreal(istic) novel. The author claims on his web site that such effect was intended, and if so, the intent was well realized: in many ways – the overall mood, overlapping themes, formal and substantial refrains, (the illusion of) general progression – this is a novel. Then again, every story speaks for itself. Some are set in MJH’s newest imaginary location – Autotelia, so different and so much the same as the world we live in; some revisit his well-known Viriconium (or versions of it); and some are completely set ‘on our side of things’, but that doesn’t make them prosaic, or more (or less?) realistic. Many of them don’t have what you’d call a “linear narrative”, their structure is often unusual, episodic, mutated, their characters tend to be strange and eccentric and their action arguable, but these stories always follow their inner logic and always manage to bring you a satisfactory conclusion, mostly due to their author’s great commitment to detail. We are often smitten by his observant eye, his ability to pinpoint a small truth of life in a side remark, in sparse dialogue or seemingly irrelevant description. The focus of the story isn’t always where we’re used to finding it, but there always is one, although it might require a search party of our own, set to explore these undiscovered continents. The magic lies in the possibility of different readings, in the variety of our findings. Nothing in these stories is unimportant, every word is there because it is necessary, and sometimes this realization by itself seems enough. But, of course, the final reward is always much greater.
May 9, 2018
Right. Okay. This is very good. Been trying to put my finger on what it is about this that is so amazing and the closest I can get is something about a sense of anxiety that is somehow related to the passing of time that is inside or underneath all of these stories. You're always on the edge of something that never really materialises in the way you'd expect it to, and somehow that is more satisfying, although also disturbing, than if it did what it seems it should. Anyway, just read the book, you won't regret it.
January 26, 2021
These short stories are astute observations of fracture, describing incidents between characters which may or may not have happened, where memory, reality and irreality combine, and within which truths that we hold dear might not actually exist. In summation, then, an accurate portrayal of human life where one person's perspective can be equally as valid and yet equally differ from another. The writing is spot on - descriptive and engaging, intellectual but always readable.
Interspersed between the longer works, however, are short vignettes which I felt added nothing to the book. Even as diversions from the more substantial pieces they don't prove to be palette cleansers but rather minor annoyances. This might be reflective of my reading preferences - it was a struggle to read something so short which due to the brevity held little engagement - but then one person's perspective can be equally as valid and yet equally differ from another, and so others might switch that opinion around. Unfortunately, for me, this caused the book to drop a star. Without those this was undoubtedly a five star book.
Interspersed between the longer works, however, are short vignettes which I felt added nothing to the book. Even as diversions from the more substantial pieces they don't prove to be palette cleansers but rather minor annoyances. This might be reflective of my reading preferences - it was a struggle to read something so short which due to the brevity held little engagement - but then one person's perspective can be equally as valid and yet equally differ from another, and so others might switch that opinion around. Unfortunately, for me, this caused the book to drop a star. Without those this was undoubtedly a five star book.
February 8, 2019
A collection with a handful engaging stories: 'Autotelia', 'The Walls', 'Cicisbeo', 'Awake Early', 'Explaining the Undiscovered Continent', and 'A Web'. Half of these stories are a paragraph long. The shorter the story in Harrison's case, the easier I found it to care, to study, to inspect the elements he uses to chart the liminal spaces advertised at the back of the book. Horror, science fiction, fantasy? He straddles the boundaries, perhaps, but I found the storytelling hard to engage with.
The following quote shows Harrison at his most lyrical, an aspect I wish there'd been more of.
Even though I didn't particularly enjoy China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion, I'd still recommend it over You Should Come With Me Now. Miéville's stories had ideas that seared themselves into my mind. I might come to say that of Harrison's too, but I need to give it some time.
The following quote shows Harrison at his most lyrical, an aspect I wish there'd been more of.
Daybreak at the ship hospital, dawn along the Dock of Dreams. May's my favourite month. It's a hairline fracture of the heart. It's a smear of flight across the back of an eye.
(from 'Awake Early')
Even though I didn't particularly enjoy China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion, I'd still recommend it over You Should Come With Me Now. Miéville's stories had ideas that seared themselves into my mind. I might come to say that of Harrison's too, but I need to give it some time.
June 8, 2019
Hay veces en que Harrison se me atraganta (Nova Swing) y esta ha sido una de ellas. Historias de fantasmas que giran alrededor de un misterio entendido como una ausencia no explícita, un vacío en el relato, recordando mucho a Aickman pero en pesadísimo, estilo impecable para una poética insulsa (no quiero entrar en el espinoso asunto de los diálogos). Salvaría el primer relato del universo de Autotelia y el relacionado con Viriconium, una irónica y divertida (a ver, divertida de levantar la ceja obligándote a hacer una pausa para rellenar la pipa y acomodar el foulard de seda) reflexión sobre el propio autor y su relación con Viriconium a lo largo de los años.
May 22, 2023
I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to finish this collection. The stories in it are so bland. Almost nothing happens in them, they’re vague in the uninteresting and confusing sense, there is almost nothing by way of characters and the “endings” have no impact. It seems like the stories just abruptly finish, leaving me to wonder what the point was.
Having said that, there were some I enjoyed. Imaginary Reviews and Not All Men were both creative and thought-provoking. My favourite was Entertaining Angels Unawares, as this was the only one (in my eyes) with a strong narrative voice, intriguing subtext and a sense of change from the beginning to the end. These three stories I’d have given higher ratings to, but unfortunately the collection as a whole didn’t do it for me.
Having said that, there were some I enjoyed. Imaginary Reviews and Not All Men were both creative and thought-provoking. My favourite was Entertaining Angels Unawares, as this was the only one (in my eyes) with a strong narrative voice, intriguing subtext and a sense of change from the beginning to the end. These three stories I’d have given higher ratings to, but unfortunately the collection as a whole didn’t do it for me.
October 3, 2018
There's no doubt in my mind Mike is a superb craftsman and an intelligent writer. I've been following his career for a long time now, and he continues to amaze me as he often tries to do new things with the old tools of SF and speculative fiction. The stories in this collection are mundane and weird at the same time, often unhinged, often set loose in a world that only lives by details. There's a bit of repetition in the titles, as some of these have been collected before, but all right, I can live with that.
March 12, 2018
Harrison is consistently the best short story writer in the UK.
October 31, 2017
If you have are looking for something with endings, resolution or even plot this isn’t really the book for you. However if you are looking for a sea of short stories to wondrously wash waves of weirdness over you then you have come to the right place.
My stand out favourite tale in this collection is “Psychoarcheology”, which is clearly inspired by some real life archaeological adventures in a Leicester car park.
My stand out favourite tale in this collection is “Psychoarcheology”, which is clearly inspired by some real life archaeological adventures in a Leicester car park.
October 30, 2018
Swinging back to leave a review for this book, although I finished it a few months back. I think this is a must-have for fans of genre-bending literary short fiction.
The writing is stunning, in a technical sense. I don't think I've ever seen such consistently immaculate execution of craft.
The main reason this is four star rather than five: almost all the stories have no ending. I don't mean they go on endlessly or anything, because the don't, and indeed some are very short. What I mean is that they don't resolve; the stories just stop.
I start each short story, get immediately caught up in the truly excellent microtension and phenomenal eye for authentic detail that Harrison seems to have mastered (and made to look effortless) but after a certain point the story just... abruptly calls it quits, and the next one starts. What happened? What did they decide? Where did the characters go from here?
It's as if, having crafted an intensely riveting mystery, Harrison wasn't quite able to provide an explanation at that last gasp to wrap it all up. A few of the stories wrap up in "sequels" later on down the line, but most don't. It could be this is stylistic, of course. Some readers, I imagine, will take much delight in being left guessing. This reader, however, was left a smidgen frustrated, and so this incredible collection of shorts is relegated to 4 stars only, instead of the 5 that it probably deserves.
The writing is stunning, in a technical sense. I don't think I've ever seen such consistently immaculate execution of craft.
The main reason this is four star rather than five: almost all the stories have no ending. I don't mean they go on endlessly or anything, because the don't, and indeed some are very short. What I mean is that they don't resolve; the stories just stop.
I start each short story, get immediately caught up in the truly excellent microtension and phenomenal eye for authentic detail that Harrison seems to have mastered (and made to look effortless) but after a certain point the story just... abruptly calls it quits, and the next one starts. What happened? What did they decide? Where did the characters go from here?
It's as if, having crafted an intensely riveting mystery, Harrison wasn't quite able to provide an explanation at that last gasp to wrap it all up. A few of the stories wrap up in "sequels" later on down the line, but most don't. It could be this is stylistic, of course. Some readers, I imagine, will take much delight in being left guessing. This reader, however, was left a smidgen frustrated, and so this incredible collection of shorts is relegated to 4 stars only, instead of the 5 that it probably deserves.
March 8, 2018
This collection of short stories and flash fiction amply illustrates why MJH is regarded as one of the most technically gifted writers in the world. His prose is frequently breathtaking; when he has a story to tell, he is unbeatable. Unfortunately this collection also illustrates why he is not better known. Locked in some kind of 1980s timewarp, MJH remains addicted to a style of postmodern, meta-textual literary onanism that was already becoming unfashionable when John Fowles was at his peak. Whoever edited this tome is well aware of that, and has front loaded what is readable into the first third of the book. For those works, five stars is not enough. But then we are subjected to endless tales of lost writers searching for lost texts, or finding themselves trapped within lost texts, or non-writers who think and talk like writers and lose things, and by the end, you will be begging for it all to stop. It's a shame, because it's like listening to a racing car engine being revved in neutral - terrifyingly powerful, if only it could shift into gear.
October 6, 2022
M. John Harrison invade la razón en forma de mundos alternativos y posibles -siempre y cuando se tenga en cuenta lo improbable de esa posibilidad-. Genera una mecánica que avanza desbocada; sus personajes son hombres y mujeres rotos, amantes, trabajadores, voyeurs que van tras algo: un misterio en la noche, una palabra susurrada, una fuerza alienígena, ellos mismos. Las palabras en sus bocas no son simples palabras, diálogos inconexos dichos al azar; son sentencias que miden la realidad; que no pretenden definir sino hallar nuevos rumbos, límites más allá, adentrarse en búsquedas que dirigen hacia íntimos planos deformados. Harrison mira en la penumbra de las fantasías silenciadas y nos trae los relatos que encuentra en el interior de las cosas.
February 3, 2018
Fun and strange and wonderful, in parts, but obtuse and difficult in others.
July 7, 2019
This book just didn't land with me at all. I think I'm a reasonably intelligent, yet abstract chap but most of these short stories left me scratching my head. Some were cool, all well written, but unlike other books, I did not look forward to digging this out at lunch, and it became a chore rather than a joy. Onwards! Life is too short to get stuck on books that didn't do anything for you.
January 5, 2021
You Should Come with Me Know, contém 42 contos, variando entre contos longos e outros bem curtos, não indo além de uma página e meia. As histórias tem um clima bem estranho, no sentido de inquietação, de algo não estar certo. Cidades evocam memórias de tempos passados, paisagens já
distantes, abandonadas, cheias de melancolia.
Aquele tipo de estranheza de estar em um local em que geralmente é frequentado por muitas pessoas, naquele momento está vazio. Como estar em uma rodoviária, aeroporto ou estação de trem durante a madrugada. Esses locais vazios, dão uma sensação de um tempo parado e estranho. Em inglês o termo pra isso é "liminal space".
É este tipo de atmosfera que os contos invocam. A estranheza aqui, é a mesma de Mark Fisher no The Weird and the Eerie. É esse "eerie" de locais abandonados, estruturas e ruínas. O autor também menciona bastante a "psicogeografia", como eu não entendi muito bem a ideia desse tema, algumas
coisas passaram batido.
O escritor não se importa de explicar os contos. As coisas simplesmente acontecem, situações surreais e fantásticas deixam os personagens e o leitor sem respostas.
Alguns dos contos que mais gostei:
"In Autotelia" os personagens chegam a uma estranha cidade, que parece ter recém saído de um desastre nuclear. E são recebidos pelo prefeito, com uma banda em marcha e estranhos alarmes em forma de Stálin e quadros de Hitler.
Esse lugar é um:
"congruent with what we used to know as the North Sea"
“a place which is both here and not here,”
“once inhabited by something neither human nor pre-human.”
"Cicisbeo" é sobre uma crise de casamento, o marido resolve se esconder no sótão da casa e não sai pra nada, nem pra ver sua filha recém nascida. Ele diz estar construindo algo lá. O conto toma contornos mágicos nas linhas finais.
"Cries" é uma das histórias curtas, logo após o por do sol, os habitantes começam a ouvir choros vindos das ruas já vazias. Esses lamentos percorrem as redondezas, e ninguém sabe o que produz tais choros.
"Theory Cadre" fala sobre o Ambiente Hotel, um lugar em que os objetos se movem durante à noite e os hóspedes nunca são vistos apesar do lugar estar sempre lotado.
"Animals" é meu conto favorito do livro. Uma mulher vai passar as férias em uma casa no litoral. Depois de um tempo ela passa a ouvir vozes, que podem ser de fantasmas ou memórias - isso se uma coisa pode se diferenciar da outra. Ambas podem ser a mesma coisa, memórias que ainda assombram a casa, ainda vivas nos seus corredores.
"Recovering the Rites" um narrador entra em seu apartamento e sente uma presença sumindo como "an oily residue mixing in water". Quando o personagem olha para fora, para procurar a presença, é que é possível perceber a atmosfera estranha do conto: "Under the bridge the dead are a cultural force. 'Even when they're perfectly still', I said, 'they seem to use to be moving. We only see them moving through.'"
Meu único ponto negativo é que em alguns desses contos curtos, tudo passa muito rápido. As vezes o conto acaba e você nem entendeu direito sobre o que era o conto. É claro que, você pode ler de novo para entender melhor, mas tem vezes que isso não funciona, pelo menos para mim. Fica uma dúvida sobre o que o autor estava tentando dizer.
Não diria que essa é uma boa porta de entrada para quem não conhece o autor (acredito que Viriconium, seria melhor). Um ótimo livro, com bons contos e ideias.
distantes, abandonadas, cheias de melancolia.
Aquele tipo de estranheza de estar em um local em que geralmente é frequentado por muitas pessoas, naquele momento está vazio. Como estar em uma rodoviária, aeroporto ou estação de trem durante a madrugada. Esses locais vazios, dão uma sensação de um tempo parado e estranho. Em inglês o termo pra isso é "liminal space".
É este tipo de atmosfera que os contos invocam. A estranheza aqui, é a mesma de Mark Fisher no The Weird and the Eerie. É esse "eerie" de locais abandonados, estruturas e ruínas. O autor também menciona bastante a "psicogeografia", como eu não entendi muito bem a ideia desse tema, algumas
coisas passaram batido.
O escritor não se importa de explicar os contos. As coisas simplesmente acontecem, situações surreais e fantásticas deixam os personagens e o leitor sem respostas.
Alguns dos contos que mais gostei:
"In Autotelia" os personagens chegam a uma estranha cidade, que parece ter recém saído de um desastre nuclear. E são recebidos pelo prefeito, com uma banda em marcha e estranhos alarmes em forma de Stálin e quadros de Hitler.
Esse lugar é um:
"congruent with what we used to know as the North Sea"
“a place which is both here and not here,”
“once inhabited by something neither human nor pre-human.”
"Cicisbeo" é sobre uma crise de casamento, o marido resolve se esconder no sótão da casa e não sai pra nada, nem pra ver sua filha recém nascida. Ele diz estar construindo algo lá. O conto toma contornos mágicos nas linhas finais.
"Cries" é uma das histórias curtas, logo após o por do sol, os habitantes começam a ouvir choros vindos das ruas já vazias. Esses lamentos percorrem as redondezas, e ninguém sabe o que produz tais choros.
"Theory Cadre" fala sobre o Ambiente Hotel, um lugar em que os objetos se movem durante à noite e os hóspedes nunca são vistos apesar do lugar estar sempre lotado.
"Animals" é meu conto favorito do livro. Uma mulher vai passar as férias em uma casa no litoral. Depois de um tempo ela passa a ouvir vozes, que podem ser de fantasmas ou memórias - isso se uma coisa pode se diferenciar da outra. Ambas podem ser a mesma coisa, memórias que ainda assombram a casa, ainda vivas nos seus corredores.
"Recovering the Rites" um narrador entra em seu apartamento e sente uma presença sumindo como "an oily residue mixing in water". Quando o personagem olha para fora, para procurar a presença, é que é possível perceber a atmosfera estranha do conto: "Under the bridge the dead are a cultural force. 'Even when they're perfectly still', I said, 'they seem to use to be moving. We only see them moving through.'"
Meu único ponto negativo é que em alguns desses contos curtos, tudo passa muito rápido. As vezes o conto acaba e você nem entendeu direito sobre o que era o conto. É claro que, você pode ler de novo para entender melhor, mas tem vezes que isso não funciona, pelo menos para mim. Fica uma dúvida sobre o que o autor estava tentando dizer.
Não diria que essa é uma boa porta de entrada para quem não conhece o autor (acredito que Viriconium, seria melhor). Um ótimo livro, com bons contos e ideias.
February 17, 2018
M John Harrison's latest collection of short fiction, spanning the last decade or so, is possibly his finest yet. Comprised of longer fictions interspersed with short (less than a page) You Should Come With Me Now is an unsettling read, juxtaposing as it does the ordinary and mundane with the strange, the weird, the fantastic.
In one story a man disappears into his own attic, escaping his own family; in another people are afflicted by strange emanations (Volsie) while in another London is besieged by a strange alien intelligence (the iGhetti). But nothing in a Harrison story is as it seems. Everyday things are bent and twisted into new perceptions. The metaphysical and the supernatural converge. Many of these stories are haunting, or haunted. Closure is relative. Themes of escape run through the book, whether from this world, a mundane existence or from oneself.
There are stories of Autotelia, the continental landbridge concurrent with our North Sea, where things are the same yet different. Echoes of Viriconium pervade these stories.
In Jack of Mercy's we also get one last visit to Viriconium itself, Harrison's mythical far future city where we follow the fortunes of the poet Hardo Crome. Yet even here he plays with the reader, setting Crome's timeline as concurrent with the 1930s and 40s.
There are imaginary reviews of works unpublished (at least in this universe); an exploration of the Theory Cadre, that mysterious organisation that set up shop in the Ambiente Hotel. Above all there is the sense of a master storyteller on top of his game.
If you haven't encountered Harrison's work before, this is as good a place as any to start. Highly recommended.
In one story a man disappears into his own attic, escaping his own family; in another people are afflicted by strange emanations (Volsie) while in another London is besieged by a strange alien intelligence (the iGhetti). But nothing in a Harrison story is as it seems. Everyday things are bent and twisted into new perceptions. The metaphysical and the supernatural converge. Many of these stories are haunting, or haunted. Closure is relative. Themes of escape run through the book, whether from this world, a mundane existence or from oneself.
There are stories of Autotelia, the continental landbridge concurrent with our North Sea, where things are the same yet different. Echoes of Viriconium pervade these stories.
In Jack of Mercy's we also get one last visit to Viriconium itself, Harrison's mythical far future city where we follow the fortunes of the poet Hardo Crome. Yet even here he plays with the reader, setting Crome's timeline as concurrent with the 1930s and 40s.
There are imaginary reviews of works unpublished (at least in this universe); an exploration of the Theory Cadre, that mysterious organisation that set up shop in the Ambiente Hotel. Above all there is the sense of a master storyteller on top of his game.
If you haven't encountered Harrison's work before, this is as good a place as any to start. Highly recommended.
October 3, 2021
Harrison's ghosts - liminal people leading liminal lives in liminal places. Typically strange and oneiric with a reluctance to explain and resistance to closure that's been a characteristic of Harrison's work from the start. Liminal fiction too perhaps - for the most part these stories have more in common with the recent The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again than the widescreen SF of The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy Light, Nova Swing, Empty Space: A Haunting. While possibly less compelling than Harrison's longer tales there is still much here to relish though this is maybe not the best starting place for newcomers.
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