Though its cover may be among the ugliest I’ve ever seen, THE ELASTIC BOOK OF NUMBERS is one of the most original anthologies I’ve ever read. Edited by Allen Ashley, this small-press collection is comprised of 21 stories examining our relationship with (and dependence on) numbers.
If it sounds like a math assignment, don’t be startled. This is speculative fiction at its finest, with an underlying sense of paranoia a la the film PI. For instance, the married couple in John Lucas’ “Approaching Zero” seem mysteriously compelled to purge their household of belongings, while a computer nerd finds his life meaningless when he wins the lottery via an all-zero ticket in Joel Lane’s “Where None Is the Number.” Eric Shapiro’s “3:21″ deals with a man who believes he can resurrect his dead wife by focusing on the same number over and over; similarly, E. Sedia’s “Every Eight and Eleven” finds a man obsessed with two numbers attempting to use it to his monetary advantage.
In more horror-oriented entries, Donald Pulker’s enigmatic “Dial 1-800-2-To-Live” is on par with Richard Matheson’s classic “The Box” in both suspense and desperation. The hero of Charles Lambert’s “The Zero Worm” finds his body invaded by a worm that burrows red numerals all over his skin, and a man is driven to madness via his compulsion for perfection in Phil Locascio’s “The Square Root of 2.”
All of these stories mentioned are clever, but none as much as the powerfully enigmatic “Breach of Contract, Clause 6A” by Mark Patrick Lynch. In this increasingly tension-ratcheting puzzler, a man begins a job where he is presented a briefcase each day. Its contents are different and unexplained, and he has to figure out what he’s expected to do with them in an allotted amount of time, in order to be let out.
There are a couple of space-set stories that did nothing for me, but the book makes up for that in being brave elsewhere, such as a foreword rendered entirely in code and the closing “story” – “While We Were Sleeping, Numbers Took over the World” by Tim Nickels with Allen Ashley – that’s among the most experimental your eyes will see, namely because it reads like H.A.L. from 2001 wrote it just to fuck with your head. I like that, Dave. –Rod Lott
