On some level, I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit in J.
Daniel Stone. I’d previously only read his (awesome) story in I Can Taste the
Blood, which offered hints of Barker without resorting to pastiche, and now I’m
finally getting around to reading more of his work. Thankfully, Stone is no
one-hit wonder.
At the risk of making this seem like the All About Me Show,
allow me to begin this review by touching on why I relate to Stone’s approach
to dark fiction before I dive in and speak a little more specifically about his
work. We clearly have at least a few of the same literary influences (especially
the aforementioned Barker, as well as Poppy Z. Brite), and we both cannot
resist incorporating the music we love into the fiction we give birth to.
However, we use these influences in such distinct and different ways that the
similarities are only enough to make a personal connection (which is cool in my
book).
Oh, and get this—Stone has a character named Dorian Wilde. I
have a character named Dorian Wylde. Methinks we are officially two sides of
the same subversive coin. Either that or we share a very unhealthy brain.
Stone’s short stories reek of the streets of New York
(though not always) as well as what goes on beneath those streets and in the
cracks between, and they frequently (again, not always) delve into queer themes
and/or use queer characters. And these characters, whether they are gay,
straight, or somewhere in the void, are more or less all outsiders. The sorts
of people who are attracted to the underground not because they are “cool” or
attempting to be, but because they have no choice but to be there. They simply
don’t belong anywhere else. The true misfits and freaks of the universe. Many
of the stories in this collection reuse characters from his novels Blood Kiss
and The Absence of Light and are intended to be companion stories to those
books. I can’t help but feel that, though all of these particular stories were
well written and interesting, they would have resonated with me a bit more had
I been familiar with the novels. That said, one of my favorite stories in the
book fell into the appendage story category (“The Tunnel Record”). Really
awesome stuff that is essentially Stone’s personal stamp on C.H.U.D.s. I mean,
really, how much more New York can you get than that?
The title story is definitely one of the standouts, a somewhat
disgusting tale about a disturbed young man with a Frankenstein complex whose
idea to make his own undead patchwork monster does not go quite as planned. My
favorite, however, would probably be the closing story, “Ecdysis,” which
involves a transformation that goes far beyond the limits of mere gender. But I
feel the favorites might become fluid over time. This is the type of collection
that if you like one story, chances are you’ll dig the rest. They maintain a
fairly consistent tone, with a lyrical command of language that rarely wavers. Often sad, frequently strange, always so, so dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment