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"He went
home to Brooklyn. When he walked up to the house he’d lived in his
entire life, he had to stop, bend over, hands to knees, and breathe
until the nausea went away. So many lives tied to that wood-frame farm
house. He could almost see Dad and his brothers working on it… "
Reviewed by David Woodruff Blind Swimmer is a collection of 11 stories with the theme of creativity in isolation and the results are interesting and varied. There are different takes on the theme and the stories stretch from classic horror to urban bizarre to experimental and surrealism. In terms of setting, the stories take us from the wilderness of Britain and Sweden to the American city. To this reader, Blind Swimmer was full of colorful and trippy adventures, although there were no expeditions to other planets. The collection opens up with Nina Allan's story Bellony, the story of Terri, who after leaving her newspaper job, wishes to write a missing-persons story about her favorite children’s author, Allis Bennett. Not only does Terri visit the English seaside town where Allis lived, but Terri discovers that she also bought the very house where the author lived before her disappearance. While Bellony can be viewed as a traditional mystery, there is an element of identification, involving how Terri slowly begins to think like Allis. Terri wonders whether she was born with the same compulsions and tendencies as Allis, especially that strong inclination to be alone: Teri felt she could weep for Allis. The story itself was sad but understandable; most children feel resentful of strangers, at least to begin with. It was Allis’s reaction that was extraordinary. From a private domestic tragedy she had constructed a whole new universe, a reality from which she had been prepared to exclude even her own daughter. Terri did not like to imagine how lonely she had been. A certain twisted irony runs through The Flowers of Uncertainty by Douglas Thompson. Here, a bestselling author named Harold Swimmer has turned his back on society for 30 years to live alone and write on a secluded island. And in so doing, he has dodged personal and familial obligations. After deciding to reenter the world he left, he meets with recriminations, perhaps a different kind of isolation since he erased himself for 30 years. Also, as in other stories in this collection, the tenuous line between reality and fantasy is affirmed: Where the hell does fantasy end and reality begin? Presumably nowhere or everywhere and where the hell do you draw the line between them... There’s more than a few stories here about writers in isolation. In Andrew Coulthard’s Lussi Natt, we have an anxious writer living in a cabin the Nordic wilderness. He has sought solitude and relief from the city. He has forgotten about his family. His sought after peace of mind proves to be an illusion. He sees strange figures outside, including beautiful sirens and a big hairy creature called The Shorewalker. Tom learns that he must tread very carefully the shore that separates sanity from insanity. His fingers reached for the lamp switch. Light on, bedroom much as always, blankets hurled onto the boards in a heap and his damp sheets furled about him. A dream, it was just a dream; or was it? It was, as usual, hard to articulate anything though and he forced himself to shut up and concentrate. This was just another tide after all. Just another story to be found and recorded. He grabbed the passports impatiently, examining them—feeling the small thrill that they sent through him. The faint hint of the unnerving. He tried to feel them in more detail, but he wasn’t sure. All he could feel was Feather’s eyes on his back. One of this reviewer’s favorites is Rhys Hughes’ The Talkative Star. It’s a series of flash fictions, of quirky shorts based upon what the sun might say if it could talk. One piece, titled On the Windowsill, serves as an example. The sun wanted to complain about a trick that humans kept playing. "I’m intrigued by the magnifying glass they leave on their windowsills; but every time I peer into one, all I can see is a rapidly expanding charred circle and wisps of smoke. I’m certain that’s not the same as what humans see. There’s something funny going on!"Blind Swimmer is an intriguing and thought-provoking collection, filled with stories which often sit on the edge of genre classifications, sometimes defying our expectations, sometimes challenging them. |
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Authors: Nina Allan, Gerard Houarner, Rhys Hughes, Brendan Connell, David Rix, Allen Ashley, Jet McDonald, Douglas Thompson, Terry Grimwood, Alexander Zelenyj, Andrew Coulthard |