By WILLIAM RELLING, JR. (Scream/Press; 1989)
This was the first collection of stories by the late William Relling, Jr.—or would have been, at least, had its publisher Scream/Press not gone belly-up before THE INFINITE MAN’S scheduled October 1989 publication. The book, which was to have been illustrated by the great Harry O. Norris, survives only in the form of review galleys, 200 of which were distributed at the 1989 World Fantasy Convention.
By 1989 Relling had already published two well-received horror novels, BRUJO and NEW MOON, and THE INFINITE MAN is very much in keeping with those novels’ overall thrust. Relling subsequently published four more novels and a second short story collection before committing suicide (at age fifty) in 2004. This book, whose contents span the years 1973-89, affords us a glimpse of this talented writer in more hopeful times, near the beginning of his writing career.
Quality-wise the 21 stories collected here are above-average overall, with one that attains greatness and one that would have been better off discarded. The great one is “The Trunk,” which works due to its thematic resonance, being a provocative and even profound exploration of friendship and jealousy, with a tantalizingly ambiguous coda that foreshadows Jack Ketchum’s “The Box.” As for the better-off-discarded story, that would be “From: Your World and Mine,” which essentially takes the form of a joke—a bad one—about dark-skinned aliens landing on Earth.
That last point brings up one of Relling’s more unfortunate tendencies: his insistence on injecting a not-very-humorous sense of humor. Too many of these tales conclude with annoying comedic twists–as in “Tony,” in which a character’s psychotic alter ego Tony reveals that his identity was inspired by Tony the Tiger, and “Burton’s World,” an EC Comics-like story in which a man is a given a magic word that when spoken will inspire any woman to go down on him, only to be laid low via a twist that’s even less plausible than the story it concludes. Of “Abbott & Costello Go to Jonestown,” which plays out exactly as you’d expect it to, I’m not quite sure what to make; it’s supposed to be comedic but frankly isn’t very funny.
The most memorable stories are the non-comedic ones written later on in Relling’s career. These include the aforementioned “The Trunk,” which Relling in his afterword ironically dubs “unsaleable,” and the disturbing “Blood,” about a young man who fancies himself a vampire. The second-to-last story “Weatherford’s Ghosts” is also quite strong, a perverse and imaginative 18th Century set number about a young man caught up in a bizarre drama involving clandestine pornography.
Then there’s the title story, about a disturbed writer convinced that he’s penetrated an alternate reality through his prose. I suspect that, given Relling’s fate, one of the story’s final descriptions, of the title character’s visage seen in the pieces of a broken mirror, appearing as “countless doomed men who were desperately trying to claw their way from an eternal prison from which there was no escape,” has a resonance that extended far beyond the page.
R.I.P. William Relling, Jr.