Bookplanet: that fabulous fabulism reinvented

Make it weird
Feel like the fiction you've been reading has been missing something -- aliens perhaps, or the occasional occult incursion of rabbits? A new literary movement, based in Northampton, has just the thing for you.
By Jessica Winter

A subdued group of middle-aged friends sits around a table over cards and beer. They're benumbed by their jobs and uninterested in their dusty, adulterous marriages. They're tired; they have no secrets between them. They decide to call a phone-sex line, where the seductive voice on the other end spins a yarn about the devil and a cheerleader. And then the cheerleader herself unravels a tale--weirder than the one she's in--about clones and potions and imminent alien visitations and a troubled husband and wife. And then the husband starts telling a story about a time machine...

Welcome to “Lull," the story that closes Kelly Link's collection “Magic for Beginners" and, with its potent blend of the supernatural and the everyday, might just encapsulate one of the most fertile literary movements of recent years.

Like many genre categories, this one is a shape-shifter with an array of aliases, including “slipstream," “new weird," and even a variation that combines “weird" with a common scatological term. The jacket copy of “Magic for Beginners" invokes “kitchen-sink magic realism," but perhaps the most evocative label is “new wave fabulists," denoting those writers who are currently staking out ground between mainstream literary fiction and the more specialized domains of science fiction and fantasy.

Coined by Bradford Morrow, a novelist and the editor of the journal Conjunctions, the phrase nods to the “New Wave" science fiction movement of the 1960s and '70s, which brought a newfound experimentalism and high-literary aspirations to the genre. (Think Philip K. Dick.) A pair of recent collections survey this new territory: “Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology" features hardcore genre practitioners alongside such lit-celebrities as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders, and “ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction," bills itself as a collection of “fabulist and new wave fabulist stories."

“A new wave fabulist is a writer who has transcended the conventions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction, lifting the traditional genre form into a new literary realm," says Morrow. Any effort to narrow down the category much further than that, he adds, “would be like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall."

. . .

Link is perhaps the genre's brightest rising star: Two of her stories have been optioned for screenplays, and Harcourt published the recent paperback edition of “Magic for Beginners." She's also one of its most industrious champions. Link and her husband, Gavin Grant, run Small Beer Press, an independent publishing house, from an office adjacent to their Northhampton home. The press has provided a platform for engrossing but hard-to-classify work such as Carol Emshwiller's dystopic fable “The Mount," Rust Belt surrealist Alan DeNiro's collection “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead," and Shelley Jackson's conjoined-twin Gothic “Half Life."

The story of Small Beer Press, and of the new wave fabulists, begins a decade ago in Boston, where Link met Grant at the dearly departed Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street. (She later dedicated “Magic for Beginners" to both spouse and shop.) Their 'zine, “Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet," which specializes in what Grant calls “weird or speculative fiction," planted the seeds for a do-it-yourself publishing house.

“Doing the 'zine put us into contact with a lot of small presses, so we thought, OK, we can publish books," Grant says.

One of Small Beer's first efforts was Link's debut collection of stories, “Stranger Things Happen" (2001), an aptly titled phantasmagoria of underworld journeys, alien visitations, creepy families, and other bizarre phenomena. A year later, “Lull" appeared in a special issue of Conjunctions called “The New Wave Fabulists."

With endless permutations of the wry, the enchanted, and the quotidian, Link employs fantastical elements as thrilling ends in themselves, but also as the means for expressing her characters' emotions and private dilemmas. The denizens of “Lull" are aware that their lives have stalled and started to move backward, and the story internalizes their predicament with its reverse-spooling stories-within-stories.

In “Stone Animals," members of a fracturing family struggle to adapt to a new home, and Link adds an eerie luminescence to their unease via intimations that their house is haunted--that and a possibly occult incursion of rabbits. “The Hortlak," concerning zombies at a convenience store, could be an allegory of lockstep consumerism and the mental freeze of wage work, or it could be about...well, about zombies at a convenience store.

“There is pleasure in resolution, like putting together a jigsaw; I can come to the end of a story and say, 'Yes, that solution makes sense to me.' But those stories aren't the ones that you go back to," Link says. “I like stories that leave enough space that the reader can navigate it and contribute."

Cory Doctorow, another author in the new wave fabulist vein (although he prefers yet another label, “contemporary fantasy"), also sees the genre as altering the traditional relationship between story and reader. “The meaning of the allegory becomes a conversation between the reader and the writer," Doctorow says.

Of course, that statement is true of most literary fiction, but new wave fabulists such as Doctorow push their readers' deciphering skills to the extreme. Conflating the normal and the paranormal, Doctorow's novel “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" starts as a slice-of-life about a fastidious fellow who's busy renovating his house and bugging his neighbors, but soon enough drops a bomb about the protagonist's unique family tree.

“Readers will project their own interpretation of why his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine," Doctorow explains matter-of-factly. “It's not necessarily subject to rational interrogation. I've heard lots of critical opinions; I have my own and they change from day to day."

Even if it's tricky to pin down a new wave fabulist, they have more than mutant characters and mutating meanings in common--they're also notably flexible about how their work is disseminated. Both Doctorow's “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" and Link's “Stranger Things Happen" have been released under Creative Commons licenses, leaving them free to be downloaded and adapted for noncommercial purposes. And “Half Life" author Jackson is currently coordinating the publication of her short story, “Skin," which will be printed via tattoos on 2,095 volunteers, one inked word at a time.

Mainstream publishers may not be adopting such distribution methods anytime soon, but that's not to say that new wave fabulist fiction itself is entirely outside the mainstream. Grant's description of Small Beer's repertoire cites a hugely popular exhibit of paranormal survivalism: the ABC series “Lost."

“People who are fans of 'Lost,' with all the weird bits--they're watching something on the same spectrum as we're publishing," Grant says.

Link invokes a certain massively profitable children's franchise as a gateway between genres as well as age groups. “People working in the publishing industry saw significant numbers of adult readers reading Harry Potter on the subway," Link says, and they thought, 'We can sell a lot more stuff than we realized.'

“There's enough entertainment out there that is realistic in some ways and in other ways is really crazy stuff," Link continues. “It's not just writers who got a little bit tired of writing in one narrow vein of fiction."

(Jessica Winter is a writer in New York.)