Darren Speegle might have been born too late for speculative fiction’s “New Wave,” but reading A RHAPSODY FOR THE ETERNAL, his third short story collection, recalls the heady days of the late ’60s and ’70s, when writers like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg and several others were stretching science fiction, fantasy and horror into new, previously uncharted areas.
Like most of the work from that groundbreaking period, Speegle’s stories are impressively literate, intelligent and highly imaginative. But they can also lose sight of their narrative intention in an intoxicating whirl of sensations — again, like their New Wave predecessors.
In “The Lunatic Miss Teak,” the opening story of the collection from Raw Dog Screaming Press, an unnamed traveler in Germany happens upon an oddities shop and discovers a slotted doll made of teak. “You can be hers or she can be yours,” says the shop owner. And as time passes, the traveler slowly fills each of the slots in the doll with coins until it consumes his every thought and existence. Here, Speegle maintain both the eerie ambience and the plot progression throughout. Another example is “The Man in Window Three,” where a group of thieves on a futuristic space station replaces the figures of a holographic art display with their own bodies, only to then become victims of a heist themselves.
But then there are stories like “Transtexting Pose,” which starts out solid enough with the sale of a piece of ordinary-looking art hung on a household wall. But as the image of the art changes, the story itself dissolves into an endless stream of poetic descriptions. It’s all very intriguing until we discover that we’ve lost sight of the story’s narrator and any idea of what happens. Similar problems are found in stories like “The Tiptoeing Monk,” “Glitzing with the Big Delicious” and “Disapparency.” They all begin with alluring premises — often in some far, near-apocalyptic future — and then get lost in their hallucinogenic prose.
Things seem more on solid ground in the open scenes of “The Third Stanza,” where an author of a popular but controversial book about an evangelical army of the future is approached by representatives of that army to write the script for their staged second coming of Christ. But then the story is left behind near the end as the narrator contemplates the meaning of a poem read by the Christ figure.
Speegle’s stories are likely to divide readers into two camps: those who are highly impressed with his inconclusive conclusions and are more than willing to read each story numerous times to discover their meaning, and those who get frustrated after so many promising beginnings drift into elaborate but empty endings.
Oddly enough, both camps are right. And that is reason enough for you to seek out this alluring collection, read it and decide for yourself. —Alan Cranis
Related posts:
- The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 1
- Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
- The Traveler
- The Best of Michael Moorcock
- Highly Irregular Stories
