By ALEXANDER ZELENYJ (Fourth Horseman Press; 2022)
Absolutely indispensable! This is a retrospective collection of standout short stories spanning twenty years (1999-2019) of the career of Ontario’s Alexander Zelenyj, a modern master of all things weird, macabre and wonderful (and furthermore, he comes up with some of the best titles in the business). Previous Zelenyj collections include EXPERIMENTS AT 3 BILLION A.M. and SONGS FOR THE LOST, contents from both of which are included in this book, along with previously uncollected tales and a few that appear here for the very first time—meaning that even if you own those earlier books you still have get this one.
The newly written introductory notes are nearly worth the price of admission. Taken together those introductions provide a good barometer of the author’s overriding concerns, most elegantly stated in Zelenyj’s intro to his 2009 tale “In the City Where Dreams Wander the Darkness”: “Let’s take care of each other, and never, ever feed our children to the darkness.”
The opener is “Maria, Here Come the Death Angels!,” a Vietnam War set tale that offers a dark (very dark) variant on the war movie cliché about how when a soldier shows his buddies a picture of his significant other he’s sure to die soon. Darkness is also the defining feature of “Your Bone Spider Will Find You,” about an abused girl and a massive “spider” (actually a dead man’s hand) that proves both deeply horrific and unexpectedly useful.
“We Are All Lightless Inside” offers a full-blown science fiction parable set in a future world where diseases take the form of monsters to be vanquished; the inspiration was the death of the author’s mother from cancer, so it’s a personal tale. “Gladiators in the Sepulchre of Abominations,” a tribute to Robert E. Howard, features a most unlikely hero charged with protecting an even more unlikely god-like being.
“Love in Uncertain Times” offers a rare note of optimism in its account of the finding of prehistoric giants whose discovery makes the world, and the life of an inquisitive young boy, much better. Of a similar, though slightly less optimistic, hue is “Poppy, The Girl of My Dreams, and the Alien Invasion,” the first story Zelenyj ever published, a sweet and funny evocation of childhood innocence in which a little girl reads a boy’s diary and learns that 1). he’s in love with her, and 2). an extraterrestrial invasion is imminent.
If the above aren’t sufficient indicators of the author’s considerable range, I submit the dark humored “The Bloodmilk People,” about a man who shocks a mousy bookstore owner by unveiling the ability to randomly expel blood from his body—to reveal any more would risk ruining the impossible-to-predict final line. In a similar category is “This Lustful Earth,” which Zelenyj calls “one of the most depraved stories I’ve ever written,” a gruesome blast of Nazisploitation ruled over by a “nipple and cock-faced Beast.”
Especially resonant (to me) is “The Priests,” a mindbender about a being composed of three bodies linked together at the shoulder, and these “Priests’” misadventures in a freak show and, eventually, the tutelage of a sympathetic pastor. The introductory note claims this personage began as “a minor character in a novel I took many years to complete.” That’s a novel I’d very much like to read.