Friday, September 16, 2011

IN THE MEAN TIME by Paul Tremblay

IN THE MEAN TIME by Paul Tremblay is a collection of weird short fiction that lives up to its title, offering readers fifteen sociopolitical tales that inform us of inner conflict as well as interpersonal conflicts, world-ending plagues, psychological horror, and inconsolable loss as they lead us down dangerous avenues where adaptability and resiliency are the only means of defense and survival. IN THE MEAN TIME unfolds in a merciless world not unlike our own, and yet distinctly different from ours – as different and distinct as the writing style and literary voice employed in the telling of these tales.

The first story-offering is titled “The Teacher” in which a high school teacher employs unorthodox methodology to instruct his students on the subject of violence. This story is one of my favorites. The rest of the stories in order of TOC are as follows: “The Two-Headed Girl” – in which a young child compensates for loss in a most unusual manner; “The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas: An Excerpt from A History of the Longesian Library” – where readers of Tremblay’s novella CITY PIER: ABOVE AND BELOW revisit City in a tale about the mysterious balloons of Annotte that appear every nineteen years and wreak havoc on the residents; “Feeding the Machine” – a cautionary tale about denial and sublimating suicidal urges; “Figure 5” – a visually stunning, other-worldly story about the merging of art and plague, bringing to mind the Garten der Luste triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch, another favorite of mine; “Growing Things” – in which two young sisters battle urban botany gone terribly wrong; “Harold the Spider Man” – gives us a recluse who keeps some unusual eight legged pets with odd appetites; “Rhymes with Jew” – a sociopolitical tale about class distinction; “The Marlborough Man Meets the End” – three brothers wage war on advertizing and the destruction of habitat; “The Blog at the End of the World” – an online blogger who details mysterious deaths occurring in and around her city; “The People Who Live Near Me” – psychological horror utilizing the unreliable narrator in a tale about projective identification and decompensation, my third favorite in this collection; “There’s No Light Between the Floors” – a nuanced tale with a nod to Lovecraft about the survivors of an apocalyptic event; “Headstones in Your Pocket” – a USA border patrol agent will stop at nothing to quell his haunted past; “It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks” – a riff on Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” about a family on vacation trying to cope with the disappearance of fellow vacationers; “We Will Never Live in the Castle” – another riff on a Shirley Jackson story, her famous and last novel WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, in which a disenfranchised teenage boy sets up housekeeping in an abandoned amusement park after an end-of-the-world disaster has occurred, and lays siege to “Cinderella’s Castle”.

Paul Tremblay is the author of COMPOSITIONS FOR THE YOUNG AND OLD, his first collection of short fiction; two novellas titled CITY PIER: ABOVE AND BELOW and THE HARLEQUIN AND THE TRAIN; THE LITTLE SLEEP and its sequel NO SLEEP TILL WONDERLAND, two Chandleresque crime noir novels featuring protagonist Mark Genevich, the narcoleptic detective.

Learn more here.

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