Weird Fiction discussion

This topic is hereby started for discussing the anthology Dead Letters: An Anthology of the Undelivered, the Missing & the Returned, edited by Conrad Williams. It won the poll for the weird fiction book the most group members wanted to read this July, 2024.

There may be a good review somewhere of this book. If so, I could not find one. If anyone else knows of one I hope they will provide a link to it here.

Essentially, I gather that the premise concerns The Dead Letters Office of the Post Office, the final repository of undelivered mail. These include love missives unread, gifts unreceived, all lost in postal limbo. Dead Letters is an anthology of 21 new stories from masters of horror, fantasy and speculative fiction, each inspired by an object from the Dead Letters Office.

I have not heard previously of our editor, Conrad Williams. He is a prolific author who has published five speculative fiction novels so far and well over sixty short stories appearing mostly in other editors' anthologies, not in magazines. This is the second anthology to my knowledge that he has edited. His first looks like it would have been of great interest to me: Gutshot: Weird West Stories

Frankly, this dead letters office in the post office acting on letters that went astray is an extremely well-known trope. It was done to death, in fact, recently in a Hallmark television series, most of which I saw with my family. It was more their choice than mine. The series was cute enough, the premise promising, but I really burnt out on the concept long before the series finally ended. Of the four books nominated for our poll last time, this was the only one I actively did not whatsoever care to read. I may change my mind; I haven't reached a final decision.

That said, I hope those who nominated and voted for this particular choice do indeed read, enjoy, and discuss the book here at this topic. I will read your comments with interest when you do post. I hope you all will be encouraging and engaging in your comments with one another about this anthology in order to generate a healthy, lively discussion about it. Happy reading!

Williams' first anthology Gutshot: Weird West Stories was a World Fantasy Award Nominee for Anthology (2012). I went ahead and ordered that instead. (I know, bad moderator!) It was not cheap. I don't think I should therefore ever nominate it for the group read. Anyhow, thanks to the group for having brought this very interesting looking anthology to my attention. Enjoy those dead letters....

Aw, I'm sorry to hear you're not enthused by this collection, but I'm glad to hear you've discovered something else in the process. I had no idea dead letters is a well-known (and overused) trope, so that's why I got excited in the first place. I'll let you know how these stories are, and whether they might be worth a read.

No problem. Here's the Wikipedia page on the TV series that may have inspired the anthology, if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed,....

I'm a few stories in now and I can safely say that the authors have done their assignments differently, which is a relief. The stories are not quite as I exptected - in a good way, because the setting is not just in a so called "dead letters office" or some returns centre etc.. The only thing that the stories currently seem to have in common, is letters or packages. Some of them have unknown origin, some of them end up in unintended places, some have an unknown sender or recipient or both. Sometimes the author uses the assignment only as a starting point, so that things play out as if it's any kind of weird fiction or science fiction story that's not really about the letter/package, but about incomprehensibly powerful entities, addiction, time machines or aliens. The authors I've read so far have a lot of experience writing books, as far as I can gather from the short introduction/bibliography of them after each story. Quite a lot actually, it's impressive.

"The Green Letter" by Steven Hall is written like a research report into "the green letter phenomenon", which is of "unparalleled scientific interest". There are strange appearances of green letters (674 that they know of), and all of them have different effects on anyone who comes in contact with them. Some are forced to behave in a certain way, others ... well, it can only be hypothesized what's happened to them. I didn't enjoy reading an overly technical and formal report, because that's what it was, but there are some really cool ideas in here. And hey, it's weird fiction! Three stars.

"Over To You" by Michael Marshall Smith is about Matt, who receives an envelope containing a chess piece and the message "over to you". It's not an ordinary piece, of course, and I won't say more about it. In addition to this mystery, Matt hides his smoking addiction from his ten year old son. This was a nice story, but nothing special. Classic fiction. It has heart, but lacks oomph. Three stars.

Notably, the author has won multiple awards and, at the time, written eighty short stories and four novels, winning both the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild and August Derleth Awards. Not bad indeed!

"In Memoriam" by Joanne Harris. Here, we finally have someone who works at a typical dead letters office, more specifically the Nation Returns Centre for the UK. The narrator is a Customer Experience Worker handling all the mail that end up there. Things like "begging letters, death threats, photographs of lost loves, keepsakes, unopened Christmas cards, undelivered manuscricts" etc., but one day he finds something adressed to him. Something that brings back painful memories and memories he didn't even know he had. Harris makes use of certain kind of motif here that I feel makes the story a bit too metaphorical and on the nose, while other aspects of the story is a bit too unclear to me. Another three stars.

But the next two are five stars! Wooh! Will comment on those tomorrow.

"Ausland" by Alison Moore is a story about Karla who one day meets a friend from childhood, Lukas. She's in her seventies now. They catch up, and she tells him that she once found an envelope with some curious old photographs among her mother's effects after she past away.

Five stars! Short, mysterious, speculative and based on a well-known science fiction trope. I liked the premise, I liked Karla, and I liked the ending. It leaves just enough to the imagination.

Alison Moore has written a lot of short fiction over the years, and it shows. Fun fact: she's actually a contributor to the most recent issue of "Weird horror" magazine, Weird Horror #8!

Next is "Wonders to Come" by Christopher Fowler. It's the longest story I've read here so far, and despite a lot of technical jargon at the beginning, I breezed through it. The narrator is an engineer working at a hotel that's finally about to open. There will be a grand opening, with lots of celebrities and rich people and press, but there's something amiss, something wrong with the sewage control system. And then there's this strange, organic, flexible, sentient rock like things underground. So, it begins with a mundane office meeting and ends (view spoiler)[in apocalyptic doom (hide spoiler)]!

The only reason this story fits in this anthology, is because they send a sample of those things to an expert at the Marine Biology and Ecology Research centre. That's it. The rest of the story is seething with suspense and action. A cool and classic type of page-turner. There's a little bit of critique of capitalism and technology reliance in there as well. The character's weren't all that interesting, though (basically all male, tech savy engineeers on the clock), but that didn't detract from the entertainment value. I actually think this story/the premise would work as a full-length novel too and definitely as a movie.

Five stars!

Sadly, Fowler passed away in March 2023 due to cancer and leaves behind more than forty novels and short-story collections. I personally would like to read his book The Book of Forgotten Authors one day and his own memoir Word Monkey about what it meant for him to be a writer and him coming to terms with his own mortality.

And then, coincidentally, we get a story about a person who receives news that they have terminal cancer.

"Cancer Dancer" is the closest thing we get to a detective story so far. One with a bit of gallows humor and refreshing attitude from a 62-year-old woman who's suddenly faced with the reality that she only has to two more years to live. At best. When she receives a mysterious letter – meant for a retired detective - with some cryptic information and the words “Please help”, she’s determined to go out of her comfort zone and investigate.

Allow me to share something personal: I am a cancer survivor, and I can empathize with this woman in that meeting with the oncologist. I recognize all too well what she describes as a "personal paradigm shift" in the wake of the news, which is "like nothing you've ever been through before" (97). Another paradigm shift happened within me after the treatment as well, and I can imagine that’s what happened to the the multi-award-winning science fiction author Pat Cadigan. It says on page 121 that she was also diagnosed with terminal cancer and used that experience to shape this story.

You suddenly realize that you do have plenty of opportunities - every day - to be funny, crazy, bold and beautiful. That you should make life worth living in all the ways you can think of. For yourself and others. This story isn’t about the cancer, per se, and it certainly is no sob story, but the cancer informs the character’s decisions, heightens the suspense and ultimately that pleasantly surprising ending. The gravity of the situation made things funnier, made her funnier. So, it wasn’t really horror, fantasy or science fiction, and nothing very exciting happens, honestly. And some might argue that too much were left unresolved and unexplained, making it an unsatisfying read. I still liked it a lot.

Four stars. But hey, I’m biased!

"The Wrong Game" by Ramsey Campbell was a huge disappointment. I was really looking forward to this one. I mean, Campbell is supposed to be "Britan's most respected living horror writer" according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature and that "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood", according to S.T. Joshi in Campbell’s Goodreads bio.

What on earth happened here, then? I don't think Campbell bothered to take the assignment from Conrad seriously. This is, as he himself puts it, just an "account disguised as fiction" (147). The account of him receiving the letter from Conrad. He then makes a call and travels to an abandoned hotel where he once met the guy whose name was on the envelope. I'm not sure if that was part of the prompt. I'm not sure he knew that. But the title is certainly fitting. This approach does not fit in here. It's too dull and unassuming.

At least he’s honest about it:

“Or perhaps my career has been the cheat, in which case this account disguised as fiction is the latest proof. Writing it has left me feeling grimy, desperate to clean myself up, and I only hope it hasn’t invited anything out of my past, let alone given it more substance.” (147)

I don’t believe for one second that his whole career has been “the cheat”. I believe he is a great writer, but this story is … No, it's hardly a story. Merely a desperate attempt at some form of contribution to this anthology.

Yikes.

In "Is-And" by Claire Dean we follow a couple to an island. The unnamed narrator accompanies Gareth to visit his mother and childhood home. She is initially looking forward to this trip, but gets the feeling that something's off, with Gareth, with his mother, with the island itself. And her feeling of uneasiness begins with a mysterious package Garet receives.

I liked how Dean describes the island; the elements sort of interact with the landscape and makes the scenery lovely, vibrant and hopeful, but all the while there's an undertone of tenacity in the island; something there has become dark and hardened by solace. That's not actually the supernatural element, but I really liked the feel of her prose.

Dean also manages to make me empathize with the main character in a graceful, discreet manner, so that I simply intuited before I realized that the story centres around feeling disconnected, distanced, lonely and helpless.

Four stars.

Claire Dean's short stories are published in a variety of anthologies, and I just added one of them to by tbr-list: Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds published in 2011. I love both birds and weird fiction, so that's right up my alley.

"Buyer's Remorse" by Andrew Lane is an ominous lovecraftian story of a guy who is "fascinated by lost spaces and ambigous or forgotten locations". When he receives an envelope adressed to someone in one of these places, he goes there to deliver it to them. Once there, he discovers some kind of secret community of people who sells old, strange items and cryptic tomes.

The only reason I give it four stars and not five is because it takes too much time to get going, but once it does...

Andrew Lane has written more than thirty books in several genres and this story in particular is described as "a story written against the fictional and nihilistic mythological background inventet by [...] H.P. Lovecraft (generally known as the Cthulhu Mythios), but transplanted to the backwaters of England rather than its native New England." (199)

So that's cool!

"Gone Away" by Muriel Gray is an odd story. It begins in very much the same way as most of the others here, by describing a letter/envelope in excruciating detail, down to font or writing utensil used and colors etc., but here we have a rich woman from a wealthy aristocratic family who's lonely and bored. She lives with her grandfather for reasons you should discover for yourself. The woman accidentally receives a letter addressed to someone else and finds in its contents a mystery worthy of her time, or at least she needs it to be, bored of her life as she is. Luckily, she has plenty of self-irony and self-awareness, which makes things quite amusing at times.

"I realized that I had wished for some rare detective treat to unfold and found myself childishly disappointed that it had not led to something grisly and sinister" (209)

"The horrible truth was that I had been excited at the prospect of a more intriguing mystery. It was my loneliness I suppose. There. I will admit it. I am lonely." (210)

And I enjoyed watching her live out her detective fantasy right up until the end. Unfortunately, the ending ruined a perfectly good 4 or 5 star story, as it did not any make sense. At all. I have not been able to figure it out, and I wish the author had elaborated or explained certain things, anything that could help me understand what happened. Disappointing. Also, Gray writes horror novels, but I did not see any indication of that here, which would have elevated the story even more. There is potential for it based on what's revelead in the second half, so that was a wasted opportunity. Three stars.

Next up is "Astray" by Nina Allan. She has written plenty of short stories and novels, some included in anthologies with the words "best horror", "best science fiction and fantasy" and stuff like that,. She's even award-winning too, which sounds very promising.

Her story in this anthology is not what you would expect, though. And the beginning does not sound very promising. She devotes a lot of paragraphs in the beginning to various, seemingly unrelated things, like a memory of a horror movie, the legal offence of opening someone else's letter, about dead letter offices, about her flat, about stamp collecting, about boarding schools etc, which, tbh, she could easily have left out.

The narrator is a woman in a wheelchair who becomes somewhat obsessed in a missing person's case from years before. She receives a letter addressed to the missing person's sister. There is very little science fiction, horror or fantasy going on here, but there is one speculative element, a crucial one, which I found quite fascinating.

It's a long short story, and even though it's not suspenseful, not written in a particularily interesting manner or anything like that, I became equally invested in the narrator's obsession, and the author withheld the right amount of information and revealed it at the perfect time several instances in the novel, which kept me engaged all the way. Well-written and cleverly plotted. Four stars.

Adam Nevill is the next author, who seems like a fairly well-know, fairly prolific, full-time author of horror stories. He has many awards and nominations. His short story contribution here is called "The Days of Our Lives", which is an unhinged and hilarious story with a sharp absurdist edge about an abusive relationship, a poet gone mad, a nonsensical occult ritual, a deeper belief system, murder and compulsion. I freaking loved it! His writing is over-the-top eccentric, his ideas are borderline volatile insanities, but there's are deeper meanings behind it all, it's not just ramblings and silliness. I couldn't help but be fascinated by every paragraph, and every line of text flowed like contaminated blood out from a rusty rainbow painted faucet on the 3rd floor of an abandoned children's hospital. Or like tears of joy down a shiny dagger used to slit the throats of demon worshippers. Something like that. Marvellous! Five stars.

"The Hungry Hotel" by Lisa Tuttle is a fairly unnassuming and unamusing story about infidetily. It's a fairly standard one at that, except for the ending. I mean, she even gets it on with a drummer! Nothing special. Two stars.

It's a shame because Tuttle seems to be an experienced writer who has written a lot of great stuff over the years.

And now I'm almost at the finish line. "London" by Nicholas Royle is a peculiar treat. I take notes as I read, and at one point I wrote "metafiction", but later I crossed it out, and then I wrote it again. There's an uncertainty about what's happening here that makes me question things. I checked his other works and he seems to have written similar things in the past. One reviewer of his book First Novel, describes perfectly the experience you get when reading this short story as well:

"you have the sense that it is delving into so many layers of meaning, so many seemingly incidental details that are in fact intentional, that it is much smarter and deeper than it at first appears. When I reached the end I was astonished at how carefully and skilfully the author had woven everything together, and how many 'clues' I hadn't picked up on. I have the feeling this is a book I could read again from the beginning in a completely different way, and I'd probably notice hundreds of little things I missed the first time."

Four stars!

"Change Management" by Angela Slatter is one of the shorter stories here, I think, and it feels short too. Eva, who happens to be working at a dead letter office, seizes on an opportunity to spicen up her rather mundane life, in a surprising turn of events towards the ending. I thought it was cool. Slatter says that when she received the prompt from Condrad, she says "[...] the ideas that stuck with me were about identity, our own and the ones others impose on us; the things we cling to whether unhealthily or otherwise; how little things can have big and unexpected impacts; how the secrets people keep can be utterly unexpected and unsuspected [...]" (362)

She has won several awards and published many collection. Mostly in the fantasy genre. It seems like her other works are quite different from this one. But I liked it. Four stars.

The second to last story, "Ledge Bants" is co-written by Maria Dahvana Headley and the well known weird fiction author China Miéville. I've only read "Kraken by China Miéville before, and I recognize his style from that: full of quirks, heavy on intermittent exposition and digressions, confusing random stuff, funny dialogue, crazy magic, cool action scenes, weird elements, some sort of nonsencial apocalyptic scenario and a confidant air of cryptic references.

Headley is a New York times-bestselling author with plenty to show for. In my mind, she's the one responsible for making this story make sense to me.

In the short afterword, she has this to say about their story:

"The idea of a much reduced wizard (view spoiler)[she wrote "Merlin" here (hide spoiler)] hunting his scattered magic in the Office of Dead Letters comes from a mutual interest in the snarled lovesick relationship between (view spoiler)[Merlin (hide spoiler)] and his (clearly brilliant apprentice witch (view spoiler)[Nimue (hide spoiler)], though neither of us remembers where the idea of eating the dead letters came from. From there, the parts that look like one of us wrote them were probably written by the other, in nearly all cases. One of us had a great deal of fun writing a ridiculous verse spell, and the other had an appalling amount of fun writing the line 'I go horizontal and fly'."

And this is what is written about China Miéville:

"China Miéville is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who lives and works in London."

Hah!

And the last story, "And We, Spectators Always, Everywhere" made very little sense to me, up until the author, Kirsten Kaschock explained her thinking in the afterword:

"I have always been drawn to stories and films of children who where somehow off or wrong [...] When I received in the mail a toddler-sized sock with a skull pattern, I began thinking about such a child's caretakers. I wondered, was it possible to write a bad-child story and have blamte NOT fall primarily on the mother? What kind of presence was necessary to shift that trope? I began writing from there, from inside that presence. It felt... odd."

She has an unusual writing style, I think. Which I applaude. It's rythmic (shifting consistently between long and short sentences, sentences with verbs and lines without, between the poetic or abstract and simple, directe or concrete. There's a provocative edge to her themes and characters too. In any case, I found it a bit too obscure and veiled. And overly complicated. It was like trying to find a hidden stash of meaning and answers. Somewhere in a gloomy swamp. Three stars, mainly because her prose stands out.

My review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I actually had to continue my review in the comment section! I wish they would up the character count on reviews now.