Third Bear Carnival Direct Links

Can’t Fight the Seether by Paul Jessup http://pauljessup.com/2010/07/14/cant-fight-the-seether/ The Third Bear Carnival by Hal Duncan http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival.html The Third Bear by Eric Schaller http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/07/third-bear-carnival-third-bear.html “The Quickening” and “Lost” by Larry Nolen http://ofblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/third-bear-carnival-use-of-voice-in.html “The Quickening” by Matthew Cheney http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/07/third-bear-carnival-quickening.html “Finding Sonoria” and “Three Days in a Border Town” by David A. Beronä http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival-finding-sonoria-and.html http://oz.plymouth.edu/%7Edaberona/third%20bear.doc Ontology, Perception and the Malleability of Reality in “Lost” by Paul Charles Smith http://www.paul-charles-smith.com/?p=594 The Situation by Deborah Biancotti http://deborahb.livejournal.com/351088.html A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories “Appogiatura” and “Fixing Hanover” by Rachel Swirsky http://rachel-swirsky.livejournal.com/210715.html Shark God vs. Octopus God by Eric Schaller http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/07/third-bear-carnival-shark-god-vs.html “The Goat Variations” and “Three Days in a Border Town” Brian Francis Slattery http://newhavenreview.com/index.php/2010/07/29/jeff-vandermeers-the-goat-variations-and-three-days-in-a- border-town/ On “The Surgeon’s Tale” and “Three Days in a Border Town” by Micaela Morrissette http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival-surgeons-tale-and.html “The Magician” by Matthew Cheney http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival-magician.html VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence by Ann VanderMeer http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival-finale.html Third Bear Carnival Contest Winner http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/08/third-bear-carnival-winner.html Table of Contents

Introduction Matthew Cheney...... 4 Preface W. Irving Bishop...... 5 Can’t Fight the Seether Paul Jessup...... 6 The Third Bear Carnival Hal Duncan...... 7 The Third Bear Eric Schaller...... 10 “The Quickening” and “Lost” Larry Nolen...... 10 “The Quickening” Matthew Cheney...... 14 “Finding Sonoria” and “Three Days in a Border Town” David A. Beronä...... 17 Ontology, Perception and the Malleability of Reality in “Lost” Paul Charles Smith...... 19 The Situation Deborah Biancotti...... 24 A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories “Appogiatura” and “Fixing Hanover” Rachel Swirsky...... 25 “Shark God vs. Octopus God” Eric Shaller...... 31 “The Goat Variations” and “Three Days in a Border Town” Brian Francis Slattery...... 32 On “The Surgeon’s Tale” and “Three Days in a Border Town” Micaela Morrissette...... 34 “The Magician” Matthey Cheney...... 37 VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence Ann VanderMeer...... 38 Carnival Contest Winner Alys Sterling...... 42 Introduction by Matthew Cheney, Ring Leader

The individual items in this collection were first published at various places on the internet during the summer of 2010, when Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection The Third Bear first appeared. I knew I wanted to mark the occasion somehow, and I certainly wanted to write about some of what I thought Jeff was up to in the stories, but I didn’t have time to write a full critical analysis of the entire book, and just posting some sort of note about the book’s publication on my blog, The Mumpsimus, didn’t seem like it would be enough to do this fascinating collection justice. So I decided to ask some friends if they’d like to write about individual stories in the book. Or perhaps not even write about them -- perhaps create something in sympathy with them. By the end of the summer, we had not only some critical writings on the stories, but also cartoon illustrations of them and what Rachel Swirsky called fan fiction … though it seems much more than just that to me. Eric Schaller had a spare copy of The Third Bear to do something with, and Eric and I came up with an idea: a contest! (What, after all, is a carnival without a contest?) We asked folks to write a short-short story about a “fourth bear”, leaving it up to them to decide what this meant. (Jeff, when he heard about this, cowered under his desk for at least a day. “The third bear was scary enough!” he whined. We threw him some stale bits of cotton candy, and that seemed to pacify him.) From the various entries, we chose the marvelous one you find at the end of this book. I owe lots of thanks to everyone who participated in the carnival, and, behind the scenes, to Matt Staggs and Jill Roberts of Tachyon Publications. Tachyon was very trusting in sending out a bunch of copies of the book around the world to potential contributors to the carnival, and Matt and Jill deserve all the credit for puttting this version of it all together. And now, without further ado, let the carnival begin again!

 Preface by W. Irving Bishop, World-Renowned Anti-Spiritist and Retired Mime Translated by Larry Nolen

There are no facts, only interpretations. – Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886-1887 Notebooks

Nietzsche’s maxim applies not just the world around us but also to the stories that we hear or read. There really are no stories that exist outside of their readers; interpretation is everything. Once the reader enters into that conversation about what constitutes a story, even the author may find him or herself taking a backseat, as if it were a triple threat pro wrestling match and the author has been rammed into the ringpost while the reader and the text battle it out to create a workable interpretation. Here in this little e-book you will find critical analysis of some of The Great VanderMeer’s stories as if they were meta-narratives that exist to be broken down into their component parts. There are illustrations that aim to grab the heart of that narrative and to transform it into a visual interpretation that will cause viewers to tilt their heads, first to one side and then to another, to see if a new understanding can occur if only they just behold it just so. These stories are, as Hal Duncan the Amazing aptly labels one of them, monstrums, quirks in the narrative warp and weft that make the intrepid reader pause and reconsider what she has just read. The Third Bear may be in part about memory and place, or it may be something completely different; both could be true, depending on how you choose to interpret things. But perhaps the best word to describe what occurs in reading The Third Bear is the title that Matthew Cheney gave to this sharing of interpretations: a carnival. Carnivals are more than just celebrations, they are a ritualization of beliefs and behaviors. It is fitting that so many diverse souls have gathered together in this collection to celebrate the power of interpretation. VanderMeer’s stories do not lend themselves to an easy, pat definition; their mutability engages, challenges the reader. Here in these essays, recollections, and illustrations, we celebrate this ancient ritual of stories being shared and transformed as they are passed from storyteller to audience. May you be entertained, challenged, and stimulated to create your own interpretations of our sharing of what VanderMeer’s stories have meant to us.

 Can’t Fight the Seether Paul Jessup

The Third Bear Carnival is now at hand. Bring the monsters, bring your friends! Bring the horses on the mend, bring the bright dancing stars, but leave the souls at home, trapped in mirrors. Bears come dancing, clowns riding on back, waving their censors in the air. Down on knees, down in front! All will lose all, all will be all, all will see all.

Bears. First it was squid. Then meerkats.** Now bears. Does VanderMeer have an animal fetish? Does each creature become a totem spirit for him? Or do they exist as symbols, as dream spirits, as mythology he is exploring and devouring? Why does he pick an animal symbol and run with it for so long? Will he marry a bear soon? Will he ride one to war? Will the meercats get jealous, and team up with the squid, and take to the skies shouting KrakenCrackenCrakkyn! and tear the world apart out of neglected rage? Is he like a boy, with new toys, he plays and loves them and then after so many years just leaves them lying on the floor, discarded empty symbols without any spirit? Where do his old images go? Do they haunt his books, wandering between the pages, lonesome ghosts calling out, Jeff! Jeff! Mister Vandermeer! Please, come back to us, bring us back to court! We miss you so! Do they turn then, to readers, who will not abandon them, who will not render them inert, but will go back and re-read and cherish them? What a hollow victory that would be for these objects, for these old pieces of art left in the rain like lost loves forgotten. You are not He they say you are not the creator, the one, the true one we love. But I guess — I guess you’ll do. Until that reader picks up The Third Bear and starts reading. And those old books now shuffle on the shelves, lonesome again. Always, always. Lonesome again.

**Footnotes are a poor man’s tool. Ignore this at your own peril.

 TheThird Bear Carnival By Hal Duncan

The Third Bear is a monstrum. This is to say it is a quirk in the mimetic weft of the narratives that comprise Jeff VanderMeer’s latest collection, specifically its titular short story, “The Third Bear.” It is to say that it is a fictive figure that creates affective warp in the fiction, straining the base-line suspension- of-disbelief with a boulomaic modality of disposition: a monstrum is that which should not be. Actually, a monstrum of the level of the Third Bear is more a boulomaic modality of conviction. Really, this sort of monstrum is that which must not be. Such a monstrum comes as an unknown force of slaughter, taking at will any and all who stray into its path, leaving only “bloodstains and bits of skin” or “a shredded hat.” The monstrum is not in the mere act of killing here, nor even in the brutality of it, in the carnage suggested by the reduction to scraps. It is in the absenting. A dead body, in however many pieces is horrible. The absence of that body is what makes it monstrous. Those scraps are the ragged edges left where something has been ripped from the world. A person. It is this sort of disruption of equilibrium that instigates narrative. In those stories that simply bind the monstrum into a monster, the ramifications of that disruption will impact some protagonist, force them to recognise and engage, find the action that brings about resolution. Mostly this means to face the monstrum and overcome it or be overcome by it — story following narrative grammars we can label Heroic and Horror respectively. In their crudest forms, neither grammar seems... entirely honest to me. Neither really does the monstrum justice. The monstrum of the Third Bear is not amenable to such mechanisms of control. To leave the path in the forest around the classically folkloric village of Grommin — where that folklore is one of winters and wolves rather than princesses and pumpkins — to go into the woods in search of the creature’s lair is to encounter “a hint of offal” as the first gleaning of the nature of the monstrum. To enter its lair as a makeshift hero in “chain mail, leathers, and a metal helmet, carrying an old sword some knight had once left in Grommin by mistake,” (no magic weapon here, just an aged

 second-hand tool forgotten by... someone or other,) is to come face-to-face with the incomprehensible monstrosity that can only remain incomprehensible; the makeshift hero can only become another victim; the monstrum persists. To seek some understanding of its origins and motives, of its reason for being... this will take the narrative on a more complex course, one that essentially refuses Horror’s grandiose religious notions of Evil, but the outcome will be no more Heroic. To face a monstrum like the Third Bear and either slay it or be slain by it, as a victor or victim of Evil... that would be to delimit it as Evil, to pretend an understanding. When faced with the Third Bear’s monstrous artwork, with a “pattern” rendered monstrous by its medium, the protagonist Horley will see beauty in it, but not understand it. If we could make sense of the Third Bear’s “pattern,” it would cease to be a monstrum. Or to turn it about, that we encounter it as a monstrum is why we cannot make sense of it. That boulomaic modality (the conviction of desire, that something “must not” happen) overlaps not just with the “must not” of deontic modality (the imperative of duty, that something “must not” be done) but also with the “must not” of epistemic/alethic modality (the necessity of fact, that something “must not” be because it cannot.) To assert that something must not happen may be to articulate a personal emotional rejection and/or a societal moral prohibition, but it may also be to articulate an understanding of necessity, of How Things Work. If A then B. What B must necessarily happen if A does. With the monstrum of the Third Bear, it is rather a matter of the B that must necessarily not happen if A does, where A is “the world making sense.” Where the Third Bear is “merely making a pattern,” that pattern is perhaps the other A from which the B of the Third Bear does follow. We might well note: “When the pattern is finished, it will leave and go someplace else. Maybe the pattern will even help send it home.” Maybe once the pattern is in the world, this is a redefinition of the world, a reconfiguring of How Things Work for the people of Grommin such that none can say “that must not be.” Not in that epistemic/alethic sense. So maybe the full monstrum is gone then, in one sense, even if — the paradox is — that pattern leaves the monstrum indelibly written into the world. (A ghost? An echo? A story? The weaker monstrum of that which should not be?) However we read the completion of the pattern, the monstrum’s ultimate effect upon the world, it makes sense for that which must not be to be described in terms of what it is not. (It is the only way to make sense of that which can’t be integrated into our understanding, to describe the negative space that can be.) So the Third Bear is not a bear, but rather “partially composed of some large furred animal, almost like a bear.” Like a bear then, but... “But, near the end, no one really though if it as a bear, even though the name had stuck.” The Third Bear is given another name in the story — Mord — a name perhaps pointing to a deeper nature as a force of death... except that this name is only a label like those

 of Leer and Scarskirt in “The Situation” (where Mord reappears); these characters’ names “are not their real names.” A monstrum is unnameable, really. To allow a name to act as crude symbol, to make a straight equation of the monstrum with death, would be to diminish the Third Bear. (It would also be to diminish death by rendering it mere monster.) So its name must remain unstable — “Theeber, Seether.” So we can only catch glimpses of the monstrum, glimpses of the human and glimpses of the bestial: “He retained his hands, but they morphed to become more like those of a racoon.” And “... all anyone ever saw of it, before the end, would be hard eyes and the dark barrel of its muzzle” as it “whirled around and snarled and bit the air, as if a clumsy ballet dancer trapped in a straitjacket.” We might imagine this ballet-dancing bear-that-is-not-a-bear at a carnival that is not the Ringling Brothers Circus, which does not have as one of its performers a talking rabbit named Sensio, who comes from “somewhere else,” from “a place far from here,” just as the Third Bear comes “from a place far distant... across the miles, across the years,” another country that is not Sonoria. But that Sonoria is not on the map is the point. Sensio does not become a performer in the Circus. In this Third Bear Carnival, the Third Bear is not a bear.

 “The Quickening” and “Lost” Larry Nolen

Surrealist writing often can be the hardest literature for a reader to process. Not only does the reader have to retrain himself to avoid disparaging reactions to the oft-fractured narratives because they run counter to received conventions on what is “proper” writing, but she can also find it difficult to find a “center” around which she can “ground” the narrative and begin to process what is transpiring. Although the best surrealist narratives frequently do not have traditional plot progressions or characterizations, they often do tend to have something, whether it be a narrative “voice” that, whether or not it is attached to a particular character, helps the reader “ground” himself in relation to a narrative that usually is anything but predictable. Too often recently, I have read works where the authors have created these wild, crazy, manic settings, but regardless of how much talent they might have in creating an atmosphere or springing narrative series, often their stories fall flat because they do not “ground” the narrative. There is nothing around which I can wrap my mind; zaniness for the sake of being zany can only carry a story so far.

10 Often, there needs to be something to tug the reader in, to make that reader go beyond the fractured, surrealist narrative surface in an attempt to discover something deeper about that work. One author who manages to grab my attention in this fashion is Jeff VanderMeer. Well before I got to know and work with him, I was (and still am) an admirer of how well he grounds his characters in settings that are anything but normal. In reading his second short story collection, The Third Bear, I was enthralled by how he develops voice and character in his short fiction. In this short piece, I want to focus on two stories from that collection: “The Quickening,” which is published for the first time in this collection, and “Lost,” which originally appeared in 2005 in TEL: Stories. “The Quickening” is, on the surface, a talking rabbit story, or rather a story about a talking rabbit that rarely talks and who sometimes denies that he is a rabbit at all. Fascinating as Sensio the talking rabbit may be, what I really noticed about this story was how around all of this strangeness surrounding the rabbit, there is a very different tale being told by the first-person narrator, Rachel. Here is a representative quote that illustrates this second story contained within the first:

“That’s him,” Aunt Etta said, as if Sensio were her rabbit and not mine. Shameful, but that’s what I felt that long-ago day: Sensio is mine, not hers. I was twelve in 1955, and big for my age, with broad shoulders that made me look hunched over. I did chores around the orange groves. I helped to get water from the well. I’d driven the tractor. In the season, I’d even harvested the oranges, just for fun, alongside the sweating, watchful migrant workers, who had no choice. But I was still a kid, and as Aunt Etta put Sensio down and bound him to the post I’d pounded in the day before, all I could think was that Aunt Etta had no right to do anything with him. “Do you have to tie him up like that,’ the photographer asked Aunt Etta, but not in a caring way. He reached down to ruffle my hair and wink at me. I flinched away from him, wrinkling up my nose. People were always touching my head because of my curly red hair, and I hated it.”

Around this rabbit, who may or may not talk, is the story of young Rachel and how she sees the world in the Florida of the 1950s. VanderMeer does not switch over to Rachel’s story from Sensio’s, rather the non-talkative talking rabbit’s tale becomes so intertwined with Rachel’s that the strangeness of one infects the brutally mundane coming of age tale, creating an amalgam that is all the more effective because while it contains elements of the quotidian, it also contains surprises; while there are some

11 bizarre twists, these twists serve to frame characters who benefit from the weirdness that occurs. If Rachel did not have a strong “voice,” Sensio’s tale in turn might not have carried as much meaning as it otherwise does. Narrative voice also plays a large role in framing “Lost.” This time, the narrator does not reveal his backstory, nor even his name. The story begins with a simple question, which begets a complex response:

“Are you lost?” it says to me in its gravelly moan of a voice and for a long moment I can’t answer. I’m thinking of how I got here and what that might mean and how to frame an answer and wondering why the answer that came to mind immediately seems caught in my throat like a physical form of fear, and that thought leads to this: remembering the line of color that brought me here: the spray of emerald-velvet-burgundy-chocolate mushrooms suddenly appearing on the old stone wall where yesterday there had been nothing, and me on my way to the university to teach yet another dead-end night class, dusk coming on, but somehow the spray, splay of mushrooms spared that lack of light; something about the way the runnels and patches of exposed white understone contrasted with the gray that brought me out of my thoughts of debt and a problem student named Jenna, who had become my problem, really, and I just stopped. right there.

At first glance, this story seems to begin with a flashback that folds in upon itself, going further and further into a non-linear time, where mushroom growths collide against the apparent specter of a student named Jenna. It is one thing to write complex, Ouroboros-like sentences that spiral around the narrative until their ends join together. That is not hard to accomplish. What is much more difficult to accomplish is to create a haunting, self-recriminating atmosphere so quickly utilizing such a method. Yet this is what VanderMeer accomplishes with this. The nameless male narrator stands at the heart of this weirdness, represented in the narrative form as well as in the events described in such an unusual pattern, and this narrator’s story is interesting. Who is he? Why is he having such thoughts? What does it mean for him to be asked if he were lost? Will there be a resolution of sorts to this?

12 These were the questions that occurred to me as I read this short, six-page story. The weirdness of the situation was made both more strange and yet more understandable because of the narrator’s voice. The narrative is grounded around him and since his character has such a strong voice, the rest of the story worked well for me as a result. Too often a writer might try to craft a strange situation, but fail to provide a character or situation that accentuates and furthers that weirdness due to their own unique characteristics. VanderMeer succeeds well in this two stories, just as he does in virtually all of the stories found within The Third Bear, because his characters’ voices contain strong counter-rhythms to the surrealist weirdness that envelops them. It is this balancing of the two that makes his stories so enjoyable for me to read.

13 “The Quickening” Matthew Cheney

“The Quickening” is the one story original to The Third Bear, and it’s a story that fascinates me because it is entirely composed of ambiguities. I like ambiguities in fiction — they respect the reader by assuming an intelligent audience that wants to be an active participant in the meaning and import of the tale. First, I want to suggest the narrator is unreliable and that this is a story about memory and imagination. Let’s create a corpus — here are all the uses of the words “memory” and “remember” in the story:

• My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. (21)

• It was a summer day, I remember. (22)

• I remember thinking that his face shone oddly in the same way as Sensio’s as he suffered his humiliation bound to the post. (24)

• At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Aunt Etta couldn’t hear us. I’d forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I’d just decided to risk it. I can’t remember. (26)

• “Remember, it’s just an animal,” Aunt Etta said to me, during that first meal after she discovered me talking to Sensio. This was back when she thought she might flatter Sensio into cooperating with her plans. I know she was wearing something else, but in memory she is wearing the same outfit as she did to the photo shoot. (28)

14 • That was just the first of three fancy dinners, each more tense than the last. In memory, they are all mixed together, but they each had their own characteristics… (30)

• I imagine I was screaming at her, although I can’t remember making a sound. (32)

• The circus woman, whose name I can’t remember, sat on the couch and looked out at the orange orchards in the distance while I brought Sensio in and put him on the wicker chair to her left. (33)

• I remember feeling a perverse pleasure at being a kid, at not being expected to put forth the effort. (33)

• “She liked you, Sensio,” I remember telling him. “She’d definitely help us.” As if I were an adult, or had any money, or any sense. (36)

• I know I should think of Aunt Etta every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. (41)

The structure of the story itself is also relevant to this movement through memory. The narrative consists of basically two parallel, alternating structures: Structure A is a loose and nonlinear collection of memories and thoughts; Structure B is a mostly linear description of the events during the photography shoot and then immediately afterward. Given how many times Rachel-as-narrator refers to memory and remembering, and even sometimes says she knows something is not as she remembered it, but she is presenting what is remembered anyway, there is no reason to trust her representation of events as factual within the world of the story. Instead, the events are what she prefers to remember. But that’s not all. How we remember the past affects who we are in the present. The meanings of past events are not incontrovertible. It’s no coincidence that Aunt Etta hires a photographer to capture her portrait with Sensio — photographs, to the naive mind, are a representation of truth. We’re all more aware of the difficulty of assigning such truth to photographs now in the age of Photoshop, but it’s as true for old photographs as for today’s digital wonders. Aunt Etta has actually chosen a middle way between the obvious subjectivity of a portrait painter and the perhaps least obvious subjectivity of a documentary filmmaker — the photograph is a moment preserved, but it’s preserved without movement

15 or (significantly for a talking rabbit) sound. Rachel has her idea of “what really happened” during the photo shoot, and what the photograph means, but that meaning is unavailable to the wider public. For though Aunt Etta wanted people to see her with Sensio, and wanted Sensio to become a lucrative attraction, instead the picture has been separated from any sort of reality, becoming instead little more than a weird image anyone can add meaning to: You can see the photograph now, as a postcard, in antique stores and gift shops in Florida. Sometimes it comes with a funny title, like “She dealt swiftly with evildoers.” It has been doctored to include shadows for both Sensio and Aunt Etta. Her clothes have been colored, as has his straitjacket uniform. Because of these changes, which make the photo look even less real, there is no chance that anyone would ever believe Aunt Etta really tied a talking rabbit to a post and, dressed in her Sunday best, had someone take a photograph of her with the rabbit. No one will ever know that I was there, too, or what happened after. (36) The reality as Rachel perceives it is more absurd than any meaning the photograph has attracted in its career as a free-floating signifier. Note the last sentence of that quote, too — by reading it, we invalidate it: “No one will ever know that I was there, too, or what happened after.” Well, now somebody knows. The ambiguity of the story sometimes enters the sentences of it like this, or even just at the level of grammar and syntax. For instance, sometimes when I read the first sentence of the story, “In the old, tattered photo Sensio has been dressed in a peach-colored prisoner’s uniform made out of discarded tarp and then tied to a post that Aunt Etta made me hammer into the ground,” I misread it as saying the discarded tarp that became the uniform was tied to a post. Obviously, the sentence means Sensio was tied to a post, but I still hold the odd image from the other meaning in mind. Rachel’s idea of “truth” is sort of like that odd image: too strange to be credible, but appealing nonetheless. (I remember at least one other sentence with similar ambiguity for me in the story, but I didn’t mark it and haven’t been able to find it by quickly skimming the story. This seem appropriate.) After Aunt Etta’s death, Sensio didn’t speak to Rachel again. She moved on from the trauma, Sensio died, and her life became, by her own admission, pretty standard stuff, rather boring, in fact. The excitement of her life was the excitement of having a talking rabbit and then killing her aunt. Or so she remembers it. But she’s not sure, and neither are we, and nothing can be determined for sure, and that’s the wonder here — nothing can be pinned down, and everything can be re-imagined.

16 “Finding Sonoria” and “Three Days in a Border Town” by David A. Beronä

As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed world of different sights and sounds, which worked perfectly when I entered VanderMeer’s highly imaginative world. In the first story, “Finding Sonoria,” a retired land surveyor, John Crake, discovers a stamp from the Republic of Sonoria from a collection he accumulated as a boy with the hope of traveling one day and discovering these distant countries. However, his stamps and his interest in travel waned as he grew older and settled for less, following a “path of least resistance.” John hires his friend Jim Bolger, an aging private detective down on his luck, to locate the Republic of Sonoria, which does not seem to exist on any map. The stamp and Sonoria become an obsession to each man. Jim, “in his little rotting house,” begins writing an imaginary history of Sonoria while John, “in the Murat Motel,” begins dreaming about Sonoria and finding a personal solace in his dreams that he is unaccustomed to having in reality. Despite their differences, the two men share “the same world, all because of a stamp.” How both men resolve this imaginary country in their lives raises a personal question how we individually resolve the mediocrity or restricting conditions in our own lives. Before continuing with the next story, I peeked out the window of the jet I was seated in and saw large fields in the Midwest and small groups of homes and buildings, representing an unknown town. When I sit on my porch reading and a plane passes overhead, I take a moment and think about

17 the people in that plane and sometimes wave, though I doubt if anyone in the plane could see me from that distance. It does not matter. I continue waving and I guess this action is more for me, claiming my own space, than for anyone else. In the second story, “Three Days in a Border Town,” VanderMeer skillfully tells a story about a woman who is searching for her lost husband, a farmer named Delorn, who has been captured by a floating City that is “forever moving across the desert.” With the use of the pronoun, “you,” the reader becomes closely associated with the heroine, a border guard in a small town called Haart; the strange customs in this desert border town; and her search for a “familiar,” which is a manta ray-like creature whose “tube of flesh, the umbilical,” after insertion into a host, reveals visions and knows how to find the City. We are left with uncertainty about the heroine ever finding the City and questions are raised about Delorn’s choice in leaving her. Is this a lifetime quest? The improvableness of her rediscovery of the City and Delorn brought up personal loss in my own life and I counted those losses I accepted without a second thought; those I mourned for an hour, a day, a week, a month or years, and the one that I refuse to accept and am walking aimlessly in my own desert every day. At that moment, the pilot’s voice interrupted my thoughts on the plane and announced that we were presently flying overK ansas and, at our current distance from the ground, the temperature outside was 60 degrees below zero. I gazed out the window and was suddenly aware of my own vulnerability and the mind-boggling reality of where I was at that moment. It seemed the perfect time to continue reading Jeff VanderMeer!

18 PAUL: This shall comprise of my serious contribution to the carnival, the silly one will follow.

Ontology, Perception and the Malleability of Reality in “Lost” Paul Charles Smith

Et c’est encore la vie! — Si la damnation est éternelle! Un homme qui veut se mutiler est bien damné, n’est-ce pas? Je me crois en enfer, donc j’y suis. C’est l’exécution du catéchisme. Je suis esclave de mon baptême. Parents, vous avez fait mon malheur et vous avez fait le vôtre. Pauvre innocent! — L’enfer ne peut attaquer les païens. — C’est la vie encore! Plus tard, les délices de la damnation seront plus profondes. Un crime, vite, que je tombe au néant, de par la loi humaine.

Arthur Rimbaud — Une Saison en Enfer

The way in which we perceive the world around us has always been of interest to both writers and philosophers. In VanderMeer’s “Lost”, one of my personal favourite stories in The Third Bear, the nameless protagonist moves from one world to another, from the real to the fantastic, through one sphere to the next. But to what extent is the world ‘real’ in the ontological sense? Is there some relationship between the history and the emotions of the main character and the changes in the world around him? Is reality a concrete idea or something more abstract? Can it be shaped by perceptions? These were the questions I was left with after I finished the story, and something that I wanted to explore further.

Early in the story, during the first paragraph we get the first reference to the point where reality and the perceptions of the protagonist intersect, when VanderMeer writes,

Remembering the line of colour that brought me here: the spray of emerald-velvet- burgundy-chocolate mushrooms suddenly appearing on the old stone wall where yesterday there had been nothing, and me on my way to the university to teach yet another dead-end night class, dusk coming on, but somehow the spray, slay of

19 mushrooms spared that lack of light; something about the way the runnels and patches of exposed white understone contrasted with that gray that brought me out of my thoughts of debt and a problem student named Jenna, who had become my problem, really, and I just stopped right there.

The first thing I noticed was that this was all one sentence and flows beautifully, with the stylistic break at the end creating a literal pause. The relation between the mushrooms and something inherent to his self brings to mind the recollection, as VanderMeer goes on to say, of the colour of his dead wife’s eyes. In this case, it is the sense of sight that brings him out of his thoughts of his life into the realm of memory. The question is where did the mushrooms come from? As he says they were not there yesterday, can it be a mere coincidence that they should be there today to remind him of that single phenomenon? The mushrooms become a trail, in a way of sort of yellow brick road, leading the main character further down the path. As he continues, further senses bring to mind the memories of his life with his wife, such as his sense of smell. The perfume of a passing woman reminds him of his wife’s and “the emerald color of the mushrooms”, although interestingly it is left out whether or not the perfume actually smelled like that of his wife’s. These things cause him turn away from the direction of the university and in doing so make a definite choice to leave his life behind.

I turned and turned and turned, turned as if turning meant wrenching my life from a stable orbit.

We learn that he was raised in an orderly fashion, taught to make plans and follow them through. His life up to the death of his wife was lived in such a way, order was an important factor, like the world around him. After the death of his wife, who we are told dies in a car accident during an argument with the main character, something changes. We are told that he turns away from the university because it is unlike something that he would do, something fundamental has changed.

The path of mushrooms leads to the only place it really can. Away from the troubles and worries of his normal ordered life soaked in grief and loss and into the random, violent chaos of the festival night. Surrounded by the frenzy, the piss and vomit of human depravity and the madness of a fresh new hell, inter faces et urinam. His great revelation

I realised this might be a break from the linkage

20 a severing of routine a way out. Had I missed how random my world had become since my wife had died? Had my grief obliterated the real world for me?

Faced with the very real threat of death at the hands of those subterranean indigenous fungal monstrosities of Ambergris, he realises that he is not lost after all, he may in fact, for the first time since his wife died, be found. The question remains, to what extent did his grief and his guilt lead him down that emerald lined road? Can emotions shape perceptions and in turn reality itself, turning the cosmic order on its head? Is the road to Ambergris paved with self-pity and self-flagellation?

To return to our old friend Rimbaud, Je me crois en enfer, donc j’y suis.

I believe I am in hell, therefore I am.

Part Two

When I read The Third Bear, I reached the story The Quickening and I had to stop, I could not continue. What was this story about? I did not know, I could not understand. What was the significance of the character Sensio and why did he continue to insist that he was not a rabbit? I read it again, hoping to glean any more information from the text, looking for logic in the language, semiotics in the structure, but still I did not understand. I read the work of my esteemed colleagues Larry Nolen and Matt Cheney, hoping in their own erudite explanations that they would hit upon something that I did not, but still the meaning evaded me. That rabbit haunted and taunted me, called, cajoled, harassed and harried me. Each night I would see it in my dreams, a perverse smile on its face as it repeated its declaration as a mantra. I am not a rabbit. I am not a rabbit. I am not a rabbit. I would wake screaming in a cold sweat. Then I had a breakthrough. I realised I had been going at this all wrong. The answer was not to be found in erudite intelligence, not in the world of the noumena, but in the realm of phenomena, pure physicality. If, as Heidegger says Dasein is being-in-the-world, then I had to understand what it means to exist as being-a-rabbit-in-the-world. Only in revelling in the pure exuberance of existence, the secrets held by the flesh, could I ever understand that story. Through the sheer act of will I became that which I could not understand. I am become the bunny. Behold.

21 Artistic impression provided by my beautiful and talented fiancé, who, yes, is way out of my league.

22 To Bid Adieu And now I must bring this act to an end. To quote one of Jeff’s favourite authors, Angela Carter, As Umberto Eco once said. ‘An everlasting carnival does not work.’ You can’t keep it up, you know; nobody ever could. The essence of the carnival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstruction of order, a refreshment. . . after which everything can go on exactly as if nothing had happened. In conclusion, The Third Bear is a great collection and definately worth picking up. I hope you will all consider buying it.

23 “The Situation”, by Jeff VanderMeer Deborah Biancotti

The Situation is... (there’s a fish project and a boss who’s found in the corridor crying and a friend who’s increasingly becoming a bear). The Situation is... (the fish, it has the boss’s face, but that was done on purpose, part of the project to build the fish). The Situation is... (the ceiling is a giant black manta that spies on you). The Situation is... (the boss, she keeps asking, ‘Do you love me?’, I mean, how do you answer that? Honestly? Or not?). The Situation is... (friends aren’t friends in the office, some of them are faking it and some of them aren’t strong enough and some, some are turning into animals). The Situation is... (the company will ask of you many strange things, and you can do these things to the best of your ability or the best of your cunning self-interest, and the outcomes of your efforts will not be met with justice. Or am I reading too much into this situation?). The Situation is... (to quote Jeff VanderMeer, “If I just concentrated hard enough on these images, I believe I thought I could survive all of it.) The Situation is... (as crazed, as surreal as this story is, it’s the most honest story of workplace relations I’ve read in a long time. It makes my situation look if not sane, then normal, almost predictable). The Situation is... (you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps). The Situation is... (part of The Third Bear Carnival to celebrate Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection, The Third Bear).

24 Rachel: Last month, Matt Cheney emailed me to let me know that he was putting together a celebration of Jeff VanderMeer’s new collection, The Third Bear. He asked a number of writers and critics if we would each write about two stories the book. Matt told us we could write however we wished about Jeff’s stories. In this case, I felt fan fiction would be the sincerest form of flattery.*

A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating

to the Stories “Appogiatura” and “Fixing Hanover” Rachel Swirsky

I. Rebecca

Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She’d heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source. Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she ran out the door to school, eschewing the playground to snatch more time at recess and lunch, her evenings collapsing into a formless mass of homework seeping into study… well, six years into it she found herself waxing e-l-e-g-i-a-c about the days when words had seemed to sing and spin. It seemed almost s-a-c-r-i- l-e-g-i-o-u-s to admit it, but she regretted the k-n-a-c-k for words that had bound her to this labor. Until she discovered s-m-a-r-a-g-d-i-n-e. The word shattered the mundane expectations of her suburban m-i-l-i-e-u, rising in a flash of verdant foliage and lime feathers and sensuous snakeskin scales. It was fir trees and cat’s eyes and

25 peridots and long silk gowns and malachite and moss. Wondrous shrapnel inundated her imagination. She could almost touch it: a land where everything shone like emeralds. There was no reasonable explanation for why she had not run into the word before. It was a well- known spelling challenge, having decided the National Spelling Bee championship in 1961. She should have been spelling it in her sleep for years, as she spelled s-y-l-l-e-p-s-i-s and r-a-t-o-o-n and h-a-r-u- s-p-e-x. There was no reason for her persistent ignorance, none, unless—and here the a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h- o-n-o-u-s theory began to raise its head with whispers of mysticism and d-e-i-f-i-c-a-t-i-o-n—unless something had been waiting to show her the word until she was ready to receive it. Day and night, no matter how laborious her studies, she was never again thinking about the words, not really, never again wondering if she had transposed the “i” and the “e” in a-n-t-e-d-i-l-u-v- i-a-n or used the right double letters in a-p-p-o-g-g-i-a-t-u-r-a. She was too busy contemplating her imaginary, emerald realm. Would it have green coins, she wondered? What would they eat there? Probably only things that were m-a-c-e-r-a-t-e-d; that would make her turn green. What were the people like? She imagined them with exotic, untenable names, like E-c-z-e-m-a and P-s-o-r-i-a-s-i-s. Rebecca became so intent upon her fantasies that soon she forgot to rifle through her flash cards at all. Her parents became concerned. Her father tried to engage her with the kinds of intriguing words that had always lured her before—h-y-d-r-o-p-h-y-t-e and s-o-u-b-r-e-t-t-e and o-d-o-n-t-a-l- g-i-a—but these words did not fit into Rebecca’s imagined kingdom, and so she paid no heed. Rebecca’s mother became hysterical with worry, and brought the child into the s-a-n-i-t-a-r-i-u-m for a healing dose of Freudian t-h-e-r-a-p-y. A diagnosis of depression was applied, complete with prescription, but it made no difference. The rapid decline began at P-u-r-i-m that year, when Rebecca looked down at the traditional celebratory meal and declared she would not eat anything that had not been m-a-c-e-r-a-t-e-d and was preferably green as well. Her parents, fearing anorexia, served their finicky offspring frog-in-chicken and chicken-in-duck, but Rebecca ate little, growing thinner and thinner. P-s-y-c-h-i-a-t-r-y had nothing more to offer, even when Rebecca tried to explain away her sudden onset of n-a-r-c-o-l-e-p-s-y by saying that her episodes coincided with the times that the ambassador of S-m-a-r-a-g-d-i-n-e was calling her for diplomatic duty. By the end of spring, the emaciated Rebecca slept more often than she was awake, until even that preciarious condition d-e-t-e-r-i-o-r-a-t-e-d and she slipped into a coma. The sad tale might end there but for the fact that Rebecca’s skin turned green while she was in the hospital. A resident physician, running tests for his own inscrutable reaosns, realized that the girl’s body had somehow begun producing c-h-l-o-r-o-p-h-y-l-l, leading to photosynthesis. At her parents’

26 insistence, Rebecca was taken off the machines to see if she could survive on her own—and not only did she survive, but she flourished. She even regained consciousness on one brief occasion, muttering incoherent v-i-g-n-e-t-t-e-s about her dream life where she studied at a l-y-c-e-u-m in S-m-a-r-a-g-d- i-n-e. At least she seems happy in her dreams, her parents concluded when Rebecca’s brief wakefulness lapsed. The young doctor, shaking their hands on their way out, added as a minor observation that he had been dreaming himself of green people of late, and wouldn’t it be funny if there were a whole country full of photosynthetic, green individuals? “Smaragdine!” Rebecca’s parents exclaimed simultaneously, looking to their i-n-t-e-r-l-o-c-u-t-o-r with amazement. “Do you think—do you think it could be true?” Rebecca’s mother asked the doctor. The doctor shrugged. “I really have no idea,” he said--but in his pocket, he held a single emerald coin.

II. Lady Salt

“Someday I will kill you and escape to the sea,” Lady Salt whispers to her former lover. They sit together on the airship that destroyed Lady Salt’s village and everything she’d ever known. Lady Salt’s former lover designed the airship—he designed all airships. He claims he didn’t know that they would be used as weapons. He claims that he fled the Empire once it began using them to rain destruction on neighboring peoples. He claims that he is innocent of their blood. He listens calmly to her threat. He does not tense or clench his fists. Only his eyes change, stony resignation drifting beneath the blue. She refuses to call her former lover by the name he used when they lived together in her island village during those years when she knew his skin almost as well as she knows her own. He’d come as a refugee, washed up like the salvage her people used for trade. She had salvaged him and made him her own. Then the airships came and destroyed everything, all because they wanted to recover one man. She shouldn’t have survived the destruction, but he had been there when the soldiers found her, and he’d told them he’d come back willingly if they took her as well. She could never forgive him for anything, but especially not for denying her a clean death. Instead of his village name, she uses the same title the soldiers do: Engineer. The soldiers are deferent. They need the Engineer to invent more weapons. They are in danger of

27 running out of new ways to kill people. But even their deference does not change the fact that the Engineer and Lady Salt are prisoners. At night, they are placed in the same room. Lady Salt refuses to share the Engineer’s bed. She sleeps on the floor instead, one ear pressed to the door, listening to the click of the guards’ heels as they pace the hardwood. During the day, the soldiers take the Engineer away to consult with the Captain. While he’s gone, Lady Salt is allowed to explore a small suite of rooms adjoining their bedroom, the guards at her heels. On the island, there was the asymmetrical, organic beauty of cliffs and beaches, the white dive of ocean birds and the glint of fish scales sliding through water, the whip of agitated waves and the stillness of calm seas. On the ship, there are fine polished woods and objects chipped from shiny stones that Lady Salt doesn’t recognize. Everywhere, the gleam of metal—more metal than Lady Salt saw in a lifetime of salvage. Everything is laid out in regimented designs, almost mechanical in their precision. The people are equally mechanical, marching in matched-length steps, repeating the same salutations whenever someone enters or leaves a room. The only other woman is the cook who brings their meals while wearing enormous skirts and a cinched bodice that seems to contribute to her pink face and shallow breaths. Lady Salt shouted at the soldiers who tried to bring her similar garb, but in the end it was only the Engineer’s intervention that left her in trousers. There is one thing she likes onboard: a globe of the world. Despite her refusal to acknowledge him, the Engineer insisted on explaining what it was once he saw that it fascinated her. When he’s gone, she slides her hands over the strangely smooth surface, and lets her fingertips bump up and down as they skim over the raised island chains. She leaps back in surprise when she feels other hands seizing the globe to stop its spinning. It’s the Engineer. She glances up in disgust, but she’s equally disgusted at herself for becoming so immersed that she failed to hear him enter the room. The Engineer points to a misshapen green island. “We’re here,” he says. Lady Salt moves to a porthole which overlooks a barren field. “We’re here,” she says, “but where are the farmers?” There are scorch marks on the ground. This territory has been burned by the air ships. “I never meant for this to happen,” says the Engineer. “I wanted to build airships. I was stupid. But what child hasn’t looked at the birds and wanted to fly?” Lady Salt curls her lip. “Don’t court my pity.” The Engineer ducks his head. “I wanted to explain,” he says softly, spreading his hands in a gesture

28 of vulnerability. When they were lovers, Lady Salt had liked his openness. Now she loathes that, too. Sometimes at night, her dreaming mind conjures scenes best forgotten. The smell of his sweat mingling with ocean salt. The smooth of his teeth. The rough of his thighs. Can she kill him? She’s killed before, but never someone she once loved. As soon as she considers it, she realizes she can. Now that she refuses to look at the globe anymore, she spends her time staring out the porthole. They pass over vast tracts of scorched lands. In some places, the Empire’s citizens are building new farms and new cities, all in the same, regimented style. Beyond the wastelands, they reach disputed territories. Now instead of scorch marks, there are corpses rotting into the soil. Everywhere is blood and guns and screaming. Everyone on the airships is responsible—from the soldiers who fire the guns to the cook who fills their stomachs. But the original fault is the Engineer’s. Lady Salt gets her opportunity one night when the breathless cook tips into a faint, their dinners clattering to the ground. The cutlery is blunt, but a paring knife falls from the cook’s voluminous garments. Lady Salt contrives to take it before the soldiers can notice. The Engineer sees, but he says nothing. She waits until the soldiers retreat outside their bedroom. The Engineer doesn’t look surprised until she hesitates with the knife against his throat. He squirms. His eyes bug out like a frog’s. “You still… love me?” he asks. Lady Salt scoffs. “I want more blood than you can give me. I want the blood of all these men.” The Engineer’s ragged breaths almost cause the knife to cut him without moving. “I can make them trust me.” “Your problem is that you’re too weak,” says Lady Salt. “You never asked questions. Why do you want missiles on airships? Then when things got violent, you fled. Even in our village, you fixed Hanover, knowing this could happen.” “You’re not weak,” says the Engineer. “I’ll still kill you,” says Lady Salt. “When it’s over.” The Engineer contrives to indicate his agreement without slitting his own throat. “When it’s over, I’ll kill myself.” Lady Salt withdraws the knife. The Engineer’s breathing eases. He watches her as she crosses the room, tossing the paring knife into a shadow where one of the soldiers will find it in the morning and believe it to have been unused. Together, they will infiltrate the regiments

29 until they find other weapons, better weapons. And when they have them, the airships will burn.

*Particularly because I suspect “Fixing Hanover” is itself a form of fan fiction, written in response to a Bradbury story.

**Note: Words spelled out with hyphens are drawn from the list of words that have won the national spelling bee. The idea is lifted from Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, an anthology edited by John Klima based around the same list of words, in which “Appoggiatura” originally appeared.

30 31 Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Goat Variations” and “Three Days in a Border Town” Brian Francis Slattery

One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels — my favorite is the New Weird — but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I’d say he’s the man to beat. Which is why when Matthew Cheney asked me if I’d contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer’s new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it. I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer’s writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. “The Goat Variations,” which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don’t know how to stop it. Oh, right — this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there’s still a sense that VanderMeer’s too close, that there hasn’t been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn’t have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in

32 my mind to VanderMeer’s vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do. And then there’s “Three Days in a Border Town,” which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in years; it’s no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it’s about figuring out how to move on. It’s Beckett, it’s the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story “Until Gwen,” with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it’s VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. “Three Days in a Border Town” is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer’s writing at the top of his game — which is pretty much all the time — it’s foolish to talk about beating him, because you can’t.

33 On “The Surgeon’s Tale” and “Three Days in a Border Town” by Micaela Morrissette

“The Surgeon’s Tale” and “Three Days in a Border Town” are both love stories, or erotic tragedies; and the universes in which the stories occur bump and rub each other in places. Each takes place in a Weird but decrepit dimension that postdates the collapse of a stronger, richer civilization. In “Three Days in a Border Town,” that past can be read as the readers’ own present, the here and now; and this creates a relevancy, a poignancy that is echoed in the despairing ache of the tone. Despair, enervated but grim, bitter, and ruthless, is everywhere in the stark, moistureless ecosystem of this reptilian narrative, in its dusty, mirage-ridden desert and crumbling border town. ”The Surgeon’s Tale,” on the other hand, written in collaboration with Cat Rambo, author of Eyes Like Smoke and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem 2009) and managing editor of Fantasy Magazine, cannot easily be located in some postapocalyptic future of our own world. It occurs in a culture that has lost almost all of its magic and mages, that pieces its small powers and healings together out of scraps of pseudoscience and half-spells. Its fantastical removal from realism finds a parallel in a certain emotional remove, too. Seemingly the more sensual of the two stories, “The Surgeon’s Tale” is really the more academic piece. It unfolds in a fecund environment that is rich with spices and botanicals, textures and scents, briny sea water and gelatinous sea creatures, as well as with ironically ripe similes, playful conscientiousness of language, and metaplay with genres. The narrator of “The Surgeon’s Tale,” it would seem, is an old man on a beach at the time of the telling of the story, though he was once a young medical student, estranged from his parents, professional preservationists of dead flesh. He was a young man to whom a horrible and absurd thing occurred, a thing that, having persisted, has become banal, even homely. It’s the stuff of pulp horror and B movies,

34 and also of raunchy sitcoms and 80s comedies: our shy young doctor, having fallen besottedly in love with a young woman’s corpse, which he has attempted to reanimate and then to destroy, finds himself pursued, and pleasured, by her amputated arm, which he eventually has no choice but to attach to himself in place of one of his own arms. This obsession with the lovely golem with the piercing blue eyes is related almost but not quite in the tone of a nineteenth-century Tale of Horror, a slightly elevated, somewhat literary, vaguely stiff or antiquated diction that draws attention to the tropes as tropes and undermines — or at least disturbs — the exotic, visceral world of the piece, the neurotic sexual longings of the narrator, the beautiful language and imagery. The self-mockery of the story, like the old man’s own self-recriminations and self-investigations, is pleasingly complex. Even the old man’s position as narrator is undermined when he reveals that the hand he has been using to write his story is the hand of his dead beloved, the hand that sews and sutures better than he does, that comforts him, that has its own intelligence, and possibly, it seems, its own voice. And then, it’s a delight to see VanderMeer and Rambo take their conceit one step farther and reveal that the story has been written on the sands of the beach, and that “each day’s work [is] washed away in time for the next, lost unless my counterpart has been reading it.” For the old man has a counterpart, a doppelgänger with one or two aliases of its own. The gesture of the doppelgänger implicates the reader in the story, explicitly identifying her as the audience for this tale that preserves, by spells and science, a dead thing; and that is erased each day by tides. The fractured mirroring of doubles also sketches a slight nod (the merest jerk of the chin) toward the collaborative aspect of the composition. It’s all very deft and quick and clever, and, best of all, it’s wrapped up in a gooey sensationalistic pulp package of necrophilia, onanism, Repressed Homosexual Desires, jellyfish, sargassum, and the hair of a luscious young half-zombie floating dreamily on the waters of the emerald ocean. In “Three Days in a Border Town,” there’s no water. The blue of the sky serves for a time as a metonymic substitute for moisture, but then even that comfort is denied: “You look up at the blue sky — that mockery of a sky that, cloudless, could never give anyone what they really needed.” Apart from that, and the red juiciness of some raw meat in a coffin, the world is arid, dusty, sandy: stone blown to bits by heat and wind and time and death. Although the story makes a kind of ending for itself by at the last moment resolving, through the filter of a text-within-a-text, a central mystery, there is no real resolution for the tragic heroine. “Three Days” reads like a single grain of sand in an empty, shifting desert; a moment in an infinitive narrative that spins on hopelessly far beyond the last words.

35 Those words are the last for a reason. At the close of this piece, the second-person protagonist has surrendered her consciousness, her identity, her voice, to a mutant familiar, a freakish and crippled albino with wings like a manta ray, that enters through the base of her neck and melds its mind with hers. (The choice of the second-person voice, the imperative tense, which commands and controls, is well made.) She has done this in order to find the mythical floating City that has taken her husband away from her, and she has done it despite the fact that, by accepting the familiar, she destroys the woman who was her husband’s wife: she joins unsunderably with another and loses herself. The story is craggy, sharp and hard and treacherous, with cruel or bewildering contradictions like these. While the silent, brutal, seemingly infinite desert appears to have accumulated over the ruins of a perished civilization, the City that appears and disappears above its oases and border towns, both in actual form and as a translucent holographic ghost, seems utterly alien, inexplicable, incomprehensible. The City is feared by all, worshipped and fruitlessly sought by many, but only the narrator seeks, vengefully, to take back something from it. To this end, she travels from border town to border town, though the settlements appear to be on the border of nothing except themselves and the desert. In her head a phallic or clitoral stone pulses and throbs painfully when the City and her lover come near to her. She writes her own Bible, The Book of the City, a collage of knowledge imparted or overheard; and she follows it unswervingly. She is passionately lonely. She is a sharpshooter and a corpse robber. She feels herself a wisp of hot smoke, and believes the City will give her back her body. She is relentless in her pursuit of her husband, yet, like the Surgeon of “The Surgeon’s Tale,” she is driven instead to a physical union with the unclean, the alien, the morbid, the taboo. The love in “The Surgeon’s Tale” is Romantic, idealized, literary: he adores a woman who died before he knew her — while the love in “Three Days” is visceral, humanized, emotional: VanderMeer makes a point of interrupting the bleak narrative with flashbacks to homey, agrarian, connubial bliss. But the erotics of both stories succumbs to the shameful lure of the forbidden; the golem and the familiar are both so full of secrets and mysteries: their flesh is clammy and unhealthy, their intercourses with our protagonists masturbatory. VanderMeer is a very deliberate and conscious writer — his language is almost always accomplishing more than it seems to be, or to be doing something other than it seems to be doing, which is why it’s such fun to read him with an active and critical eye. But he also is deft at the sick shiver, the pang of queasy appetite, and that lingering itchy unease that marks the very, very best of the speculative spectrum. These stories will disturb and slightly dirty you, but everyone must pay a price for a union with the Strange.

36 MATT: This post will end my own contributions to the Third Bear Carnival. To bring things to a close, I recorded a reading of a very short story hidden in the Afterword to the book, called “The Magician”... (It may take a few seconds to load and buffer.)

“The Magician” by Jeff VanderMeer Recorded by Matthew Cheney

Direct Link: http://mcheney.podomatic.com/entry/2010-08-26T10_17_25-07_00

37 MATT: When I came up with the idea for the Third Bear Carnival, I quickly knew one post I wanted: something by Ann VanderMeer, Jeff’s wife, who first knew him as a very young and mostly-unpublished short story writer, and who was one of the first editors to publish him with any frequency. She was Ann Kennedy back then, and it’s partly the stories that put her on the path to becoming Ann VanderMeer, because in Ann Jeff found his perfect reader and his perfect love.

It took a bit of convincing for me to get Ann to write about her relationship not only to her husband, but to his stories. Ann thinks of herself as an editor and not a writer, but she sent me a contribution back in July, and I’ve held onto it until now. Much as I love what everybody else has contributed to the Carnival over these past weeks, and grateful as I am to each them…well, this one’s special…

VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence by Ann VanderMeer

The earliest VanderMeer stories I read came from The Book of Frog, a self-published chapbook of stories that contained all manner of frogs and toads. In some stories the creatures were featured prominently, but in others, they were merely a whisper. I had to force the then young man of 20 (who was trying so hard to grow a beard) to allow me to purchase a copy (he wanted to give it to me). “Nonsense,” I said. How will you ever be a full-time writer if you give your work away?” And then

38 I bought five copies; perhaps one of the best investments I’ve ever made (and I am not just talking about how rare and valuable those copies are now). I knew back then from reading those early tales that this was a writer to watch. He might find those stories sophomoric and simple, but there was a passion to the writing. And heart. And a great deal of playfulness. He sent me stories for The Silver Web (a magazine I was publishing in the late 80’s early 90’s). One was a god-awful story about a high school girl going to her prom and some secret fantasy world hiding in her closet. I turned that one down quickly only for Jeff to tell me it was a test of my editorial taste. Yes, of course it was, I believe this. I did publish many of his stories during the years of The Web; “Heart for Lucretia” — a far future science fiction piece that fully illustrates the real sacrifice of sibling responsibilities, “Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat” — a surreal look at the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, “Black Duke Blues” — a story about a gifted musician in New Orleans (this one won him the Florida Individual Artist Grant) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” — a zombie story long before zombies were popular. Each one more different than the last and yet so uniquely VanderMeer. Jeff has always had a fondness for animals, as you can see from his fiction. From frogs he moved onto meerkats, then squid and now bears. He tells me that he doesn’t like talking animal stories and yet…his frogs talk. So do his meerkats. And in his latest story, “The Quickening,” there is a talking rabbit. I think. At least, it seems to be talking (and it looks like a rabbit). And this is his strength: writing fiction that has so many layers. When you read one of his stories you are immediately grabbed by his command of the language, the beauty of the words he puts together. You get caught up the characters and sucked right into their screwed up yet amazing lives. And it doesn’t matter if the character is a talking rabbit or a risk-taking surgeon, the president of an alternate United States or even a version of Jeff himself. Because they are all so honestly who they are. And you just gotta know what happens to them next. When I first started reading VanderMeer, I used to hold one back. What I mean by that is I would leave one story unread until he wrote another one. Silly, I know (and it drove him crazy), but I wanted to make sure there would always be a new story for me to read. Now I am privileged to be on that short list of readers who see the work first. So all I can do is continue to encourage him, and give him the space he needs, to write the next one (‘cause I’m kinda selfish that way). So yeah, I’ve read all the stories and I’ve read them in every version. Plus I’ve read all the stuff that didn’t go in. And when the final book (or magazine) comes out, it’s such a treat for me to sit and read the stories again just for pleasure as a reader, not an editor and not for critique or commentary. (I must

39 have read at least 100 versions of his novel Shriek, yet when I sat down with the hardcover in my hands, I still cried when Janice considered herself so alone in the world she wished to leave it and I felt a hitch in my heart when Duncan discovered Mary’s betrayal.) When I immerse myself into Jeff’s world through his fiction, I can’t help but be taken back to the time when I first encountered each tale. Much like listening to certain songs can take you back to the time when you first heard that song, so each of these stories is also a piece of my personal history. “The Quickening” reminds me of that trip to St. Augustine when Jeff picked up that postcard that sparked the story (he wrote the first few snippets then, making me impatient for him to write the whole damn thing so I could read it, damn it!). “The Secret Life of Shane Hamill” takes me back to that crazy time when Jeff was doing a promotion for his book Secret Life, by writing a customized, unique secret life for each person who bought the book from Mark Ziesing (Ann, it will be easy, only about 10-12 stories — OMG why are there 200 people buying the book???). And he hand-wrote each one. Seriously…I know because I spent hours seeking the “right” paper for him to use. And they are truly things of beauty. I can’t read “Predecessor” without remembering when he woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me about a truly wacked-out dream. By the time I arrived at work a few hours later, there was this amazing story in my inbox. Forget about that customer whose computer system was down, I HAD to read this RIGHT NOW. Not all the memories are blissful, however. “Errata” takes me back to the worst time of my life. And every time I read it, I cringe and hold my breath because I know where it will go. But how can you appreciate the good times if you don’t have those dark moments, too? So I read it again... and again. And each time the pain is a little bit less and the creativity of story overwhelms me. And “The Situation?” Well, of course this is a version of his corporate working life before he became (thankfully) a full-time writer. I KNOW these people and he portrayed them perfectly. He might have even been too kind. So yeah, when I read this, I hear their voices, those turkey-heads. “Lost;” I remember sitting in the blue chair early one morning reading this story and my heart just going out to this poor, poor guy. And feeling a bit lost myself as my daughter was going through some rough times and I didn’t know how to help her. “Three Days in a Border Town,” is, I believe, the last story he’s written (so far) that takes place in the same world as Veniss Underground. When I first read this I was ready for the rest of the novel. Because these are people and this is a world I want to know more about. At the time Jeff said there would be more. And maybe there will.

40 OK, so now this book is out. And Jeff is out of town. So this means I can sit back and relax and relive these stories once more. Heaven…

41 The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into.

by Alys Sterling

Winner of the Third Bear Carnival Contest

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