By JULIE TRAVIS (Eibonvale; 2019)

Oftentimes it’s how a story is told rather than the story itself that’s most important. Case in point: this novella, a most peculiar fantasy about a mortal woman named Zanders who finds herself aboard The Giantess, a ship making its way through a world that corresponds to our own but for the fact that life, death, past, present and future all co-exist, and mythological creatures pack the seas. The Giantess is manned by a transgendered figure who identifies as the Golden Sea Captain, and who grows quite close with Zanders.

Crucially, we’re thrown directly into the action on the Giantess, with the explanation for Zanders’ presence on it left open-ended until later on in the story. It is, in essence, an “answers first, questions later” structure in which the traditional dream-reality narrative dynamic is inverted, with the surreality of the Giantess’s voyage assuming “normal” status and the details of Zanders’ former life, consisting of tragedies and haunted memories, presented as a “series of dreams.”

Hence the story’s central conceit, involving a mysterious Peruvian ancestor of Zanders with whom she’s become obsessed. Zanders comes to view her ancestor as an anchor to her rootless, grief-stricken existence, “something from her family’s history that she’d know was fact.” She decides to utilize her time on the Giantess to seek out this person, and the Captain is quite eager to accede to Zanders’ wishes, steering the Giantess on a course for Kensal, the city of the dead—and, when that fails to turn up any trace of the desired party, to Peru.

In keeping with the novella’s consistently unpredictable gist, the finding of Zanders’ ancestor is presented in a manner far removed from the expected mystery to be solved. That mystery is indeed solved, but the author’s true concerns are far more ethereal.

The closest antecedents I can think of to TOMORROW, WHEN I WAS YOUNG are THE SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (both the Bruno Schultz novella and 1973 film adaptation), which also concerned a dream-region marked by a decidedly fluid sense of reality, and the writings of England’s M. John Harrison, whose frank approach to the surreal and fantastic is reflected here (in lines like “She had never met the dead before and wasn’t sure how to act around them” and “Over his years as a Captain, he had found ghosts to make the best crew”). Ultimately, though, it’s pretty unique, a potent example of freeform fantasy done right.