The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel

by John Kessel

The Dark Ride collects John Kessel’s best short fiction, beginning with 1981’s “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” and ending with 2021’s “The Dark Ride.” The stories range from flash pieces to novellas, from comedy to existential horror, from far future SF to Kafkaesque fantasy, including 40,000 words of never-before-collected fiction and extensive author’s notes.
All his best are here, among them Nebula Award winners “Another Orphan” and “Pride and Prometheus,” by the writer Sci-Fi Weekly called “quite possibly the best short story writer working in science fiction today.”

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson
Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!
Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance
Pride and Prometheus
The Motorman’s Coat
The Closet
Some Like It Cold
The Miracle of Ivar Avenue
Spirit Level
Stories for Men
The Pure Product
Gulliver at Home
Buddha Nostril Bird
Invaders
The Lecturer
Buffalo
Clean
Another Orphan
Consolation
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence
The Dark Ride
Story Notes

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Collections, Speculative Fiction

584 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2022

About the author

John (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Joe Karpierz · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I didn't know very much about John Kessel before I started reading this collection from Subterranean Press. I was aware that he had written a novel called THE MOON AND THE OTHER, and just before I started writing this review I discovered that I'd read and reviewed (back in 2012) an anthology that he co-edited with James Patrick Kelly called Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (which, now that I think about it, is one of the best anthologies I've read in a very long time). So what caused me to pick up Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel?

Most likely because I'd heard his name uttered enough by people in the field whom I respect that I felt reading it was worth a try. I will also have to say that Subterranean Press puts out some fantastic collections, many of which I own. What I didn't realize, once I started reading the book, that I was in for a magnificent treat.

Not knowing any of Kessel's fiction allowed me to come into the book with an open mind and little to no expectations. The works would stand on their own; I would not really be influenced by anyone's thoughts on these stories because I'd never read them before. I was prepared to discover a bunch of new favorite short stories. And I did.

I really enjoyed "Pride and Prometheus", a merging of Jane Austen and Frankenstein, in which Mary Bennet meets Victor Frankenstein (and encounters The Creature, albeit briefly). Bennet falls for Frankenstein, and Victor is impressed with her curiosity and knowledge. It was, of course, not meant to be. "Pride and Prometheus" won a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. Little did I know that there were more stories like this in the collection.

Then there's "Another Orphan", a story in which a stock trader from Chicago ends up smack dab in the middle of MOBY DICK, on the Pequod herself as part of Ahab's revenge mission against the titular whale. It's not really clear whether the central character is actually on the Pequod or back in Chicago (and he does go back and forth a few times), but the longer he's around Ahab and the crew, the more he feels like he might be Ishmael, who does eventually survive the original tale. It's another one of my favorites in the book. Sure enough, another Nebula winner.

Another, "Stories For Men", in which the Society of Cousins on the moon is essentially role-reversed, where the men are pampered and protected and the women go out and do the hard labor, won a Tiptree (now Otherwise) Award. It's a powerful story about men without agency and an underground group of men who want to have meaning in their lives. The protagonist, Erno, is caught between his mother - a police officer - and that underground group who want to shake things up. "Stories For Men" takes place in the same setting as "THE MOON AND THE OTHER", and I like it enough that I will probably head to my local bookstore - yes, there
is an independent bookstore in my town - and pick it up.

Another favorite is "Gulliver at Home", which doesn't actually answer the question of what Gulliver's wife does while he's off on all his travels, but instead it explores the effect of his absence on his wife. "Buffalo" is a beautiful tribute story about Kessel's father and an imaginary meeting with H.G. Wells. Wells did go to Buffalo when Kessel's father worked there, although the meeting never did take place. "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" follows a couple looking for a quick score of cash in an empty (but not abandoned) house that has a subway station running underneath it that leads to an idyllic location where all their needs are met and requests are granted. The Baum in the title does refer to the author of the Oz books, with the female of the couple being Dorothy, and the city at the end of the subway line being Oz, a place where all wishes are granted.

Probably the best story of the collection is the last one, "The Dark Ride", which gives the collection its title. It takes the true story of the assassination of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo by anarchist Leon Czolgosz and give it a genre twist by introducing a "Dark Ride" to the moon, where Leon meets and falls in with some rebels there who want to kill the lunar leader. Leon falls in with the group after he sees what the lunar natives are doing to human slaves. The similarities between Czolgosz wanting to assassinate McKinley and the members of the rebellion on the moon is deliberate, of course, but the real question is whether the experience Czolgosz had on the moon was real, or just a figment of a deranged imagination. "The Dark Ride" is a terrifically powerful story that, as I said, is probably the best tale in the collection.

These may be the best of the stories in the book, but by no means are any of the stories weak. The stories are excellent genre fiction, with the fantastic elements doing a slow burn before they come to the forefront. Those same genre elements don't knock the reader over the head, but instead slowly insinuate themselves in the reader's consciousness until they become a natural part of the tale that Kessel is trying to tell and cause the reader to ask how they got in there when they clearly weren't there when the story started.

I may not have known much about John Kessel before I read this collection, but I do know a little more now, and it's clear that the thing to do is go out and find more John Kessel fiction to read. I'm sure I won't be disappointed.

[WorldconReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dark Ride" is a thought-provoking collection of stories by John Kessel. The anthology is well named as these stories tend to be dystopian and each certainly takes the reader on a journey to an unexpected conclusion. With 582 pages and 20 stories spanning 40 years starting around 1980, there is a lot of content in this book. It is clear that these are all well acclaimed stories since over half of them were originally published in either The Magazine of Fantasy (8 stories) and Science Fiction or Asimov's Science Fiction (4 stories). And remaining stories were originally published in collections of the author's works, or anthologies edited by people such as Bruce Sterling and Jonathan Strahan, or magazines such as Omni.

One of the things that stood out about the introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson was the challenge of categorizing these stories into a single genre. To be sure, there are strong elements of science fiction such as time travel, nano technology, lunar colonies, galactic empires, aliens, and esoteric physics. There are also whimsical aspects of fantasy and several stories that look at unexpected viewpoints of classic novels. To me, these stories fall into the genre of "Deeply Speculative Fiction that Makes You Think."

If you are looking for short stories to cheer you up on a rainy day during a pandemic, then you should keep looking. However, if you appreciate slightly dark and philosophically speculative fiction with a punch, then this would be a good book for you.

I thank John Kessel and Subterranean Press for kindly providing a temporary electronic review copy of this work.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Kessel's writing is always engaging and entertaining, not to mention thoughtful. I don't have to emphasize how well written it is, because he's a writing instructor who actually writes. He's seen a lot of what doesn't work, what works for others, and has established his own style.

He likes speculative stories that involve some aspects of the past, either real or imagined (some of the stories deal with Gulliver's Travels, Oz, and Moby Dick). He likes to filter those pasts through a contemporary lens, sometimes in a very meta fashion (where the protagonist knows it's happening, as in the Moby Dick story, 'Another Orphan'.)

The stories about real history deal with such diverse topics as the Spanish conquest of the Incas, and the assassination of President William McKinley.

Probably his best known story in this collection, and one he spun into a novel, is 'Pride and Prometheus', where Elizabeth Bennet's sister Mary (the smart, mousy one) encounters the Creature from Frankenstein, and forms a bond. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley overlapped (Austen died a year before Shelley published Frankenstein), so they were both writing about a similar England and society. I am leery of many literary mash-ups, but this one works splendidly. It makes you realize how much Mary was overshadowed in that family by beautiful Jane, witty Elizabeth, and flirty Kitty.

[Andrew Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Competent. Most of it more everyday type fiction with a little twist than what I expected after the story that led me to try this collection The Baum Guide to Financial Independence