Sterling City (2014) by Stephen Graham Jones

In my own definition of the 'Weird Western' I extend the sub-genre's purview to include fiction set not only in the western United States of the 'cowboys and indians' era, but also that set in the 20th and 21st century western U.S. - as long as said fiction also includes elements of the uncanny or macabre or otherwise outré.  So in addition to books by, say, Arianne 'Tex' Thompson and Guy Adams it would also include books by, say, Joe R. Lansdale and, our man of the hour, Stephen Graham Jones.  (To take an example from a single author's oeuvre, the Weird Western encompasses both the 1850s Texas-Mexico setting of Cormac McCarthy's scalp-hunting odyssey Blood Meridian and the 1980s Texas-Mexico setting of his brutal crime thriller No Country For Old Men.)

This is my third review of a Jones book (the first two are here and here) and I think I can say that his is always a western sort of vantage, albeit a contemporary Blackfeet Native American one.  (That said, explicitly American Indian characters are by no means a guarantee in his fiction.)  His works also always seem to contain some element of the bizarre or gruesome, from out and out genre material, such as zombies and werewolves, to surreal and 'meta' narration of dark and mysterious events and relationships.  And Jones's brand of weird can imbue a range of modes from crime thriller to family drama to horror story, all with loose and blurry borders, often hybridised, and yet always 'literary'.  I've rarely seen someone so joyously and offhandedly mix the 'highbrow' and the 'lowbrow'. (All the 'high' stuff is in the prose style and themes by the way.  It's the content that seems pretty consistently working class, with occasional white collar stuff in the margins.)  There's often a lot of poignancy, and ever an undercurrent of very, very wry (and occasionally bonkers) humour.  (I get these impressions from having dipped into his first few novels as well, an experience I'll return to below.)

So, to a degree, I think all of Jone's work can be said to be of the Weird Western mode, though that by no means captures the entirety of what he's doing.  In fact, his kind of western writing is really just showing us how weird the western USA (and at a larger scale, existence itself) simply is, a fact we are prone to ignore.  Thus our need for prophets like Jones.  And thus advancing my own theory that all good literature is weird literature, all good philosophy is weird philosophy, all good theology is weird theology, etc.   And by the 'weird' I don't mean just the 'messed up' or the morally twisted. Jones's is not a freakshow literature for the titillation of easterners' prejudices.  It's a regionalised mirror that can be held up to anyone from anywhere to show that the comically grotesque carnival shapes are not in the glass but in life.  For all of us.

Reality is weird.

Sterling City is a lovely little meditation on just that.  Coming in at a mere 81 pages, it's a one-sitter for you fast readers out there and a two or three sitter for slowpokes like me.  I don't want to give too much away, but on page one you know there's a cosmic element and by page six you see a big reveal of the creepily weird, which the rest of the novella circles round as a major plot factor.  In tandem with this knowingly pulp element is the story of the breakdown of one man's marriage.  Or rather, the very moment his wife leaves him and his attempt at playing that event cool, and failing to.  Both of these - a grotesquery's arrival and a spouse's departure - would be highly dramatic events in real life, and yet Jones's relentlessly elliptical and indirect style makes them seem almost like things that happen in the corner of your eye.  I mean, he confronts both directly.  You get a juicy view and the weird element in particular is initially surrounded by strong emotion from one of the characters.  But it feels like the view is for mere seconds at a time.  The history of the marriage's troubles and the present bizarre cosmic influences come only in half-understood glimpses for the reader.  Both of these happenings consume the consciousness of the protagonist, yet both seem oddly just off stage for most of the novella.

Similarly, the larger West Texas landscape is fully backgrounded in favour of the farm on which the story unfolds (with one episode in town).  This makes for a tight focus.  It achieves some atmosphere in its concision, mostly focused on farming equipment and farm buildings and farm work.  This is good, and I enjoyed being there in that kind of small psychogeography.  Yet I can't help but feel that the story's possibly a little too long to sustain its own smallness.  After forty pages or so I felt it needed to somehow open out to the greater environs more, and possibly the point of view of more characters.  I enjoyed being in Lee Graves's head, and recognised a little of myself in him, but a story this length needed a little more scope I felt.  It's a fairly minor complaint and by no means ruined the read.  There were, it must be said, about ten pages toward the end that didn't work at all for me.  It was supposed to be a tense scene of the central piece of large equipment almost malfunctioning, but I have no knowledge of this whole area (farming and its equipment and procedures) and the description did not enlighten me, so I was just plain bored.  But again, it was a minor misstep and the story finished well. The denouement of the weird element was especially satisfying to me, gorgeous with alien wonder.

Indeed, this is kind of a story about the Beauty of Monsters, which I can always get behind.  It's also very intentional and explicit about hope in the end, about New Beginnings after the Apocalypses that punctuate our lives. It reminded me of R. A Lafferty in that respect.  This actually makes it incredibly radical among its Horror and Weird Fiction cohorts, which tend, especially among the avant-garde, towards powerful pessimism and bleakness (the avant-garde of the Lit Fic crew can be this way too, and Double-Fish Jones swims in both worlds).  The story doesn't promote hope without any ambiguity mind you.  And from what I've read from Jones so far, he has a number of pieces both for and against hope and lots of places in between.  His despairing pieces, however, are always poignant and humane and even kind of sweet.  He seems to want to hope, even in despair.  That might make him kind of 'out' with some of the Cool Kids of Nihilism, I don't know.  I hugely respect it.

I'd probably give this particular book something like a 3/5, but right now I'm more into Jones for the total package than merely for particular works.  He's a presence, a force.  Following his elusive, yet somehow generous, remarks on Twitter and Facebook round out both his style and substance, just like his 'Acknowledgements' at the end of Sterling City.  (Always be sure to read any dedications or story notes or other authorial 'paratexts' by Jones - he's always telling you a little bit more of what he means and who he is and what he cares about in those things, even whilst deepening the mystery). Any time you see an article written by him, it'll be worth checking out as well.  I'll note here that I'm still trying to find my way into his more 'literary' works.  I read around a hundred pages each of his first two novels, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong and All The Beautiful Sinners, and while both blew my mind on some level, both also kind of lost me with the almost painfully indirect style in which he wrote them.  Mind you, I wasn't really committed to reading them at the time.  I was only dipping and dabbling and when they proved difficult, I shelved them for a future go.  Which I look forward to, along with a ton of his other prolific output, both on the more literary end and on the more genre end. His is an exciting career to follow.

Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth (2013) by Stephen Graham Jones

Look, I'm the type of person who, if you give your book this amazing title and adorn it with this amazing artwork, I'll buy it before I really knew what hit me.  It's a Pavlovian reflex for a dog like me. Plus I'd already read Jones's Zombie Bake-Off (2012) and was very eager for more.

I polished this sucker off pretty quick after receiving it in the post (I don't know if local bookstores even stock this kind of stuff).  It's a compulsively readable collection of short stories and yes, there's a titular one. But no (I think readers deserve to know), there are no zombie sharks with metal teeth, not really - I mean, yes, technically there are, right at the end of that story, but barely and only in a passing conjecture.  This surprised and disappointed me because Zombie Bake-Off had been about exactly that. And when the blurb said it had zombie soccer moms vs. zombie pro-wrestlers, it wasn't lying or exaggerating.  The whole novel's setting was a bake-off and the whole novel's action involved pro-wrestlers, soccer moms, and zombies - battling each other and a small band of the living.  So I don't think I was out of bounds in expecting from the titular story of this collection literal undead sharks that somehow had teeth made of metal.

But I wasn't disappointed with this volume, no no no.  When what it does give you is plenty of stories that do feature zombies, in fresh variations of scenario and depth of survivor characterisation, and a story about a hardboiled detective flying through outer space by means of being psychically implanted into a giant space-faring lobster, and enigmatic alien encounters aplenty, more apocalypses than one has a right to expect from a collection, the most elliptical meta-fictional slasher story you'll ever read, and a story starring Rod Serling, well, you don't complain, you give thanks.

But the reader will inevitably wonder:  what am I reading?  What is this stuff?  Horror?  Well, some of it, yeah.  Sort of.  Science fiction?  Some of those too.  Kind of.  Weird fiction or ‘the New Weird’? Mm, not really, not to me, not from what I've read of China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer - this is a different kettle of queer fish.  Is it ‘bizarro’ fiction?  I guess maybe that’s the main thing I expected from the title and cover art.  But that label too only partly captures it.  I want to say these stories feel like they're by someone who set out to be a pulp writer influenced by the cosmic horror of Lovecraft (or, probably closer to the mark, the nihilism of Romero's classic Dead Trilogy), but said pulp-ist got liberal arts educated and introspective and transmuted his impulse toward horror through the likes of, what... Wes Anderson?  David Foster Wallace?  I don’t know exactly.  (I don’t have the reference in my experience, but I’m sure someone does.)  There’s an unflinching attention to monstrosity, violence, freakishness, aliens, cosmology-that-dwarfs-the-cosmologist, and so on.  But it’s all delivered through a very sensitive, even tender, heart.  Indeed, even though there is bloodshed and body-horror aplenty in this book, my final impression is that it is gentle, contemplative.  And I think that's just Stephen Graham Jones.  No one genre or genre-mix can really hold him.  He does what he does.

Despite being clearly intellectual, it all comes across fairly working-class too.  The characters tend to be underlings in offices or warehouses or laboratories.  Or they're young or old married couples who remain devoted to each other despite (or because of?) discovering very disturbing darknesses about one another.  Or they're little kids being cruel and kind to one another as kids do.

Part of the gentle contemplativeness is also down to the way tales are told, for they are as much about the telling as the subject matter.  The diction is at first hard to parse until you get the hang of Jones's almost oral cadences and patterns, like how a normal guy from right here and now would talk to you, would unfold a narrative to you in person.  Yet, paradoxically, it's also poetic and writerly, made for the page it seems to me.  It's downright mesmerising when you get into its rhythms.

And (I had never noticed how much this also is how it sounds when someone is telling you a story they know off the cuff) though the narrator usually seems to know what’s coming and codes that story arc into the opening pages, these tales do not feel heavily plotted.  Stephen King says stories are pre-existing fossils that writers discover and unearth and that plotting is a jackhammer that breaks as much as it liberates.  Jones feels almost hyper-aware of this.  He works very delicately, mostly with small hand spade and brush, to exhume the tales he's found.  He leaves a lot of the story still buried. But he has taken depth-readings and he knows what’s down there, if murkily, and I tended to find myself halfway through a story going back over its first few pages with a better understanding of all that was being revealed to me right off.  In other words, Jones writes richly enough that (as with Gene Wolfe) re-reading is almost required, and a pleasure.  You get your money's worth.

Philosophically, the stories evince ruminations rife with material for my own interests in monster theory and horror theory ('Little Monsters' is a two-page piece packed tight with fodder for this and I hope to do a separate post about it).  The story 'How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Planet Earth, and Everyone On It' is my favourite contemporary mutation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror that I've encountered.  It is a mutation though, as is every other bleak demise of humanity or relativising of humanity in the face of infinity that Jones depicts.  There's definitely a warm beating heart underneath the cosmic coldness in Jones's take.  What I can't tell is whether he's simply saying let's hold onto our scrap of humanity even in the face of the nothingness that will eventually devour us all, or whether he might just might be saying that such 'scrap of humanity' might just might actually be a grubby little hint or clue that nothingness is not necessarily the final word about either us or the cosmos.  Even Cthulhu and his elder god ilk look very different in Jones's vision:  alien intelligences vastly above us may view us only as food, sure, but that doesn't mean they might not be 'humane' souls who cause us no more suffering than is necessary.  The story 'Catch and Release' is the best variation on an old s.f. twist-ending that I've come across and illustrates this almost anti-Lovecraftian theme poignantly.

Jones says in an interview (the interview is a masterclass in creative writing, by the way) that one of his favourite short stories is about a boy who can predict the future who has a TV show:

But then one day he looks ahead and sees this comet just hurtling to Earth, to wipe us all out, no chance of survival, no Bruce Willis, so, on his program that morning, he looks right into the camera and he says that this is going to be the best day ever. That people are going to hug each other, nobody's going to be unhappy, all of it. It's the best gift he could possibly have given the world, and it's a lie. This is at the bottom of everything I write.

What I wonder is whether Jones thinks that this 'lie' gives the lie to ultimate meaninglessness, whether he thinks that maybe such a 'lie' really serves a greater truth about us and the world.  I don't know. (His delightful story notes at the end of the book are, though disarmingly vulnerable, as elliptical as the stories themselves and only deepen the mystery and poignancy.)

I do know I can't wait to read more by him (I've got his first novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong coming in the post).