ABSTRACT LUNDBERG, JASON ERIK. Lies and Little Deaths: Stories. (Under the direction of Dr. John J. Kessel.) This collection of stories covers a wide variety of characters and settings, which alternate (for the most part) between third- and first-person viewpoints, with the final piece, “In Jurong,” told in second person. Most of the tales take place in the mundane world of the present day, but a world that allows the magical or surreal to seep through. This blending of the realistic world with the fantastic one is of great importance to me as a writer and as a reader, as is the discussion of its merits within the broader field of literature. These twenty-three stories explore the perils and pleasures of sex (mostly the perils), the issues of the day but twisted into satire or literalized metaphor, the slightly magical, the truly bizarre, and the constant questioning of identity and the afterlife. LIES AND LITTLE DEATHS: STORIES by JASON ERIK LUNDBERG A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts ENGLISH Raleigh 2005 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ _______________________________ Wilton Barnhardt Jon Thompson _______________________________ John J. Kessel Chair of Advisory Committee DEDICATION for Janet ii BIOGRAPHY Jason Erik Lundberg once read all of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and got shot at in the same afternoon. He was born in Brooklyn, but has called North Carolina home for the past seventeen years. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Strange Horizons, Fantastic Metropolis, Infinity Plus, The Green Man Review, Fishnet, Intracities, Americana, Lone Star Stories, Electric Velocipede and the Serbian fiction magazine Znak Sagite. His story “Songstress” garnered an Honorable Mention in the Seventeenth Annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and his mosaic flash story “The Artists Pentaptych” was both a finalist in the 2004 NCSU Short-Short Story Contest and a nominee for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2004 Fountain Award. He is the co-author of Four Seasons in One Day (2003) and the editor of Scattered, Covered, Smothered—an anthology of food-related fiction published in December 2004 by Two Cranes Press. As publisher, in March 2005 he also produced Off the Map, a four-story mini-collection by Big Fish author Daniel Wallace. Lundberg is a graduate of the 2002 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and is currently at work on his first novel. In March 2004, he was married to artist and writer Janet Chui, whom he met at Clarion, and they live in the Raleigh area with their three dwarf hamsters and many books. He maintains a website and online journal at jasonlundberg.net. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to John Kessel, Wilton Barnhardt, Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Karen Joy Fowler, Tim Powers, Anna Tambour, Michael Jasper, Jamie Bishop, and the Clarion class of 2002 for their close readings of these stories in their various incarnations. Thanks also to Jon Thompson for introducing me to postmodern fiction, and all the fun that it brings. Many thanks to H.L. Shaw, Michael Jasper, Luís Rodrigues, Keith Brooke, Eric Marin, John Klima, Boban KneÛeviƒ, Raechel Henderson Moon and Watts Martin for publishing some of the pieces in this collection. Thanks to Jim, Maria, Kristin, Ivy, Raymond and James for their support and encouragement, even when they had no idea what I was writing about. But most of all, my everlasting gratitude to Janet Chui for her love, keen eye and collaborative presence. She is my reason to be. This book would not exist without her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1 Most Excellent and Lamentable 4 Don’t Blink 14 Hair 28 Songstress 34 Jury Duty 36 The Artists Pentaptych 37 One Less 42 Stuck 53 One Big Crunch 60 The Time Traveler’s Son 70 A Night in the Great Dismal Swamp 78 Solipsister 84 Ghost Dancing 90 Night Off 101 Enlightenment 104 Watersnake, Firesnake 110 Skin Flute 119 Irregardless 127 Wake-Up Call 130 Hypomnesia 144 Expiation 145 Reality, Interrupted 147 In Jurong 162 Appendix: Copyrights 184 v PREFACE THERE IS A steadily-growing subgenre of literature which blurs the boundaries between contem- porary realistic literature and fiction of the fantastic. Depending on whom you talk to, this subgenre can be referred to as Slipstream, Interstitial Art, Transrealism, or The New Weird, among several others. Slipstream fiction (which, for purposes of clarity, will be the label of this subgenre from here on in the preface) is typically set in the present day, but one where the magical or surreal can intrude. This style hearkens back to the oldest type of fiction—myth— where gods interacted with humans in everyday situations. But where myth and traditional forms of fantasy treat magic as something extraordinary which disrupts mundane reality, slip- stream takes it for granted, unconcerned with the origins of the surreal landscape evoked in the fiction. According to Bruce Sterling, slipstream is “a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.” The tone and style that typical slipstream stories employ are similar to magic realism, exemplified by such authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. But where the term “magic realism” is rooted in the specific location of Latin America, “slip- stream” can be applied globally and retroactively. The twenty-three stories in Lies and Little Deaths fit within this subgenre of slipstream literature, usually told in a contemporary setting with fantastic elements. All of these stories draw on the traditions of both realism and the fantastic, and pay tribute to the tropes of each genre. The purpose of this short-story collection is twofold: to add to the current body of slip- stream literature, and to creatively express certain opinions or homages through fiction writing. It is an important step in the career of any writer to collect his or her fiction, to look at the common themes that tend to crop up and examine what issues are truly important. In looking 1 over the stories in this collection, I discovered quite a lot of sex. More than I remembered writing. It is there most notably in “Don’t Blink,” “One Big Crunch,” “Most Excellent and Lamentable” and “Skin Flute.” Sometimes there is a sexually charged atmosphere, such as Peter and Mira trapped together in an elevator in “Stuck.” Or it may be an innocent crush, like Ray’s on Consuela in “Enlightenment.” There is also a cynicism that surprised me, a negative view of the way things are in the world. “Hair” satirizes the Bush administration’s foreign policy and attitude toward war, placing the major players in an imaginary secondary world. “Songstress” explores the ramifications of abusive relationships, while literalizing the metaphor of a singer wearing her heart on her sleeve. “The Time Traveler’s Son” shows a son’s pessimism of his father’s chosen profession. “Jury Duty” extends the waiting period in the jury selection process to absurd lengths. “Irregardless” franti- cally and brutally describes an awkward and uncomfortable dinner. “Hypomnesia” descends into the realm of memory and the effects of torture. “Expiation” describes an end-of-year ritual to purge the many sins a man has committed in his life. But underneath these stories is also a small voice of optimism, the hope that things may turn out differently, that terrible things may happen in life, but good things do too. It is the hope for these good things which keeps us going, able to whistle through the blitz. And then there’s just the bizarre. “One Less” presents the Kafka-esque possibility of completely losing your identity. “Solipsister” explores the conceit of solipsism, and the possibility that you might be the only existing person in the universe. “Night Off” plays with the idea of a sick Saint Nicholas, and of being replaced by the Buddha on the most important night of the year. “Watersnake, Firesnake” is a young adult story about a small boy and what happens when he find a very unusual egg. “The Artists Pentaptych” progresses from the fairly ordinary to the wildly strange, in its emphasis on the artist. Ghost stories are also included: “A Night in the Great Dismal Swamp” and “Ghost Danc- ing.” And the final pair of stories—“Reality, Interrupted” and “In Jurong”—which should be read together, tell of the consequences of actions related to elemental magic. Questions of iden- 2 tity and the afterlife are also explored, as a man makes the ultimate sacrifice, and another must face the choices he has made over his long life. Sex, cynicism, optimism, the bizarre, ghosts, and the big issues. I am a tremendously curious person, and the fact that all of these issues come up in this short collection is solid evidence of this curiosity. Nine of the stories herein have been previously published in various literary journals and anthologies, and two of those stories, “Songstress” and “The Artists Pentaptych,” have been singled out for further recognition. 3 MOST EXCELLENT AND LAMENTABLE SOMETIMES I’LL BE driving the Z3 on the highway and imagine my brakes cut, unexpectedly, unexplainably. And the gas pedal will get stuck, maybe with superglue, like in that Blues Broth- ers movie, and the speed, the speedometer keeps rising, past ninety, one-twenty, one-seventy, and the cars I’m racing past are just blurs, streaks of colors which barely register before they’re gone, and the fluid for the steering wheel has evaporated and I’m careening now, careering across lanes, across the median, and I’m heading straight for an eighteen-wheeler, knowing that when I hit that there’ll be nothing left of me to identify, no fingerprints, no teeth, just a liquefied mass that used to be a person, knowing all this but completely helpless, unable to do anything about— But of course none of that happens.