Triangulation: Dark Glass, edited by Pete Butler
“The Milton Feinhoff Problem” by Mark Onspaugh
“Saint Darwin’s Spirituals” by D.K. Thompson
“Imaginal Friend” by Kenneth B. Chicchia
“Monstrous Embrace” by Rachel Swirsky
“Dancing Lessons” by Aaron Polson
“Deadglass” by Lon Prater
“Perchance to Dream” by D.J. Cockburn
“Windows to the Soul” by Gerri Leen
“More Things in Heaven and Earth” by Jason K. Chapman
“On the Path” by Kelly A. Harmon
“Broken Things” by Kathryn Board
“Audition for Evil” by Amy Treadwell
“One Touch to Remember” by David Seigler
“Souls on Display” by Kurt Kirchmeier
“A More Beautiful Monster” by Loretta Sylvestre
“Seeing Is” by Craig Wolf
Reviewed by Nathan Goldman
Triangulation: Dark Glass is a small press anthology of speculative fiction, the sixth in a series produced by the Pittsburgh-based science fiction organization PARSEC. The thematic pole to which each story is tethered is the vague idea of “dark glass,” here taken both as literally and figuratively as possible. The collection is diverse in style and skill, from witty to morose and amateur to professional.
Mark Onspaugh’s “The Milton Feinhoff Problem” is absurd and fun science fiction. It commandeers the genre for comic effect and, wisely, foregoes weak attempts to justify itself scientifically. In the story, the titular character goes down to breakfast one morning and finds a doppelganger already at the table enjoying a stack of waffles. They begin to determine the cause of the phenomenon and quibble over which Milton is the real Milton, but their crisis quickly escalates after more and more copies join the fray. The story begins silly but devolves into ludicrousness. A tighter conclusion might have made it a more polished piece, and one worthy of rereading and sharing. But as it stands, it’s an enjoyable read, and the one-joke shape of it is fine for a story so brief.
In “Saint Darwin’s Spirituals,” D.K. Thompson leads a housewife-turned-detective, a prostitute in disguise, through an urban fantasy wasteland populated by copulating ghosts and a golem police force. Clearly Thompson is excited by his subject matter, and it’s good that this passion comes through; unfortunately, there’s little in the text to entice the reader to join him. The protagonist is a walking stereotype – the female badass – and it’s a struggle to connect to her cookie cutter motives. The story is held back by amateur writing: stilted dialogue, script-like description that gives the reader no spatial orientation, and use of unnecessary lingo (“ghostgasm,” “grounder”). The connection to Darwin – in this world a saint and author of a sequel to Origin of the Species called Origin of the Spirits – must make sense to the author, but just confuses the reader and brings him out of the story. One scene that does stand out is the ghosts’ “rape” of Lucy, which is well illustrated. Here, for once, the author’s fascination shines through gorgeously.
Kenneth B. Chiacchia’s “Imaginal Friend” takes the reader away from Earth, to an alien planet overtaken by humans, to the chagrin of its xenophobic previous residents. Like a lot of SF, it’s an idea story, designed to showcase the concept more than the characters or plot. The characters are real enough, though none stand out, and the plot works, but the story is made amateur by its use of tired devices for exposition: “Emil, you understand why the Gotcha colony is important to humanity, don’t you?” – followed by Emil’s explanation. I understand that writers of speculative fiction have more to explain than others. They need to establish not only characters and scenarios, but also alien worlds (literally), often in small spaces. But failure to infuse this information within the text kills the story’s realism. The writing is mostly smooth, with a few rough passages, but the semicolon is liberally abused. The story is worth reading for the cool idea at its core, but it’s not something you’ll read again or think much about after you’re done.
“Monstrous Embrace” by Rachel Swirsky takes as its protagonist ugliness itself, longing for the prince’s hand in marriage and seeking to guard him from an even more potent, though less primordial, evil. The story is told in dramatic, wordy Romantic style. Fans of Jane Eyre will be thrilled, while those who prefer sparser prose may find they’ve bitten off more than they’d like to chew. Swirsky’s descriptions are immersive and her drama well crafted, so the denseness does not hinder the satisfying fairy tale underneath.
“Dancing Lessons” by Aaron Polson is technically SF, but feels more like fantasy. This brief tale of a dead (undead?) circus attraction and the girl who he fascinates is compelling and told with both wonder and realism. It opens with a hook (“The man was dead and the girl was twelve.”) and keeps the reader engulfed in the story with vivid description, characters to care about, and the sharpest prose in the collection.
Lon Prater’s “Deadglass” depicts a world in which heretic souls are tracked down and hidden away in shards called deadglass, safe from Hell’s clutches. The protagonist, Father Holden Drury, begins to doubt the Church after he separates a man’s soul that appears to be pure. After being chastised by the bishop for questioning his superiors, Holden embarks on a detective mission to figure out what’s going on, inching towards heresy himself. The concept is fresh and the story fits nicely into the collection. But neither the writing nor the plot is extraordinary, and the story’s confusing and unsatisfying conclusion mars it beyond repair.
In “Perchance to Dream,” D.J. Cockburn offers us a glimpse into the afterlife – well, the afterlives – through the eyes of a young World War II pilot who is mistakenly tossed into Hades after an otherworldly clerical error. Like “The Milton Feinhoff Problem,” “Perchance to Dream” is light and does not take itself seriously, but its handling of the humor and overall wit is more satisfying. Cockburn clearly knows his stuff (though he falters once in having Achilles, a Greek, speak Latin). The result is acute cleverness, and Cockburn’s prose moves the reader along so quickly that when the story ends, he’s sad there isn’t more. As a student of Classical Mythology I found it immensely entertaining, but you don’t have to know much more than the basics to appreciate the humor.
Gerri Leen’s “Windows to the Soul” is an emotive monologue from the perspective of a soul-sucking mirror that feeds on suicidal bar patrons. As a concept this is interesting, and the story’s fatal flaw is that it doesn’t go much beyond a brief elaboration of the idea. A plot is there, with all the mechanical requirements – beginning, middle, end – but so little is there, with so little specificity of emotion and nuance of diction, that the reader wonders if what he’s reading is a published story or a brief sketch begging to be expanded into something more.
“More Things in Heaven and Earth” by Jason K. Chapman opens with a gimmicky hook – “How, exactly, do you plan to kill God?” – and from there it would have to be superb not to seem amateur. The story concerns a war against a religious cult, the Children of the Dying Sun, and a machine that destroys the part of the brain associated with blind faith. Like many other stories in this collection, the idea is sound, but the execution is poor. The characters – a hardass colonel, his wily attaché, and the scientist behind the machine – are stereotypes with no flesh and blood to them, mere puppets taken out of the old trunk of the SF/action canon. The story opens with a parade of exposition and stilted dialogue, devolves into a boring action sequence, and anticlimaxes with a predictable and poorly related twist.
“On the Path” by Kelly A. Harmon is an SF take on Taoism, wherein the protagonist must deal with a malfunctioning “reincarnation engine” (used to farm) and a posse of family spirits he can’t seem to exorcise. There’s no doubt the story is original, and its embracement of ideas from Asian culture is intriguing. Unfortunately, it fails to properly explain itself to the reader, and though the writing itself has no distinct flaws, the plot and its underlying principles become too muddled to properly digest. After that, it’s hard to maintain interest.
Next is Kathryn Board’s “Broken Things,” where we meet Ellen, who, while grieving her mother’s sudden death, becomes unexpectedly acquainted with Vimm, her mother’s wish-granting genie. Board makes the step from good speculative fiction to plain good storytelling in using her story’s fantastic element not only as an interesting idea at which to ogle, but a device through which to examine real life human emotion. Board’s style is spunky and inventive, and her story has a rhythm that makes it feel fresh and satisfying. It’s both entertaining and genuinely meaningful, a small treasure of a story.
“Audition for Evil” by Amy Treadwell brings us back to comedy. The malicious protagonist, Charla Malignissima Esmerelda di Malfeasance (a joke in and of herself) prepares for an audition to the HAG (Hexagonal Alliance for Glamourie), trading insults with her familiar, a bird known as the Chancellor. The story succeeds at being what it is – something of a parody. It’s clever and will make you smile. But it’s not something you’ll recall the details of a week after reading it.
In “One Touch to Remember” by David Seigler, an emotionally despondent nineteen-year-old girl named Jennifer seeks work, still mourning her brother’s death. She is brought under the wing of Roy, a mysterious artist who works with canvases of glass and prefers memories to paintbrushes. The idea of memory removal is an old one, but Seigler’s tale still seems novel. The writing feels somehow schizophrenic, going between wonderfully descriptive in the sections without dialogue and too sparse in the sections with it to give the reader grounding. As a whole, the story is succinct and satisfying, an enjoyable read and worthy of reflection.
Kurt Kirchmeier’s “Souls on Display” is the age-old story of the boy who breaks the old neighbor’s window. Except instead of a window, it’s the neighbor’s soul. Kirchmeier brings his story to life with vivid details, from Billy’s obsessive gum chewing to the irony of Fat Sam’s slimness. He has a real sense of what it means to be a kid and a human being, and this allows the story’s fantastic element (the physicality of each person’s soul) to enhance and not inhibit the characters’ developing relationships and the clever theological probing at the story’s core. My only complaint: it should have ended three paragraphs earlier. The story as it stands is still great. Just a tad clichéd.
“A More Beautiful Monster” by Loretta Sylvestre plunges us back into religious high fantasy, with a priest, a damsel in distress, and a demon-bound sorcerer. The prose is so stylized, rhythmic, and illustrative in a way seen usually in romance that it can be hard to enjoy if such writing doesn’t suit your taste. Other obstructions include head-scratching changes in point of view and the unclear logistics of the afterlife as these characters understand it. Lovers of this sort of religion-laced fantasy will enjoy the story despite its flaws, while anyone not immediately keen on this genre will find little to his liking.
The collection concludes with Craig Wolf’s “Seeing Is,” in which a young boy named Jody is stopped on the way to the swimming pool by a mysterious eyeball in the sidewalk seeking his attention. As the eye begins to bombard Jody with his friends’ and family’s dirty secrets, he is forced to deal with the consequences of seeing them in a new light. There’s an evocativeness to Wolf’s language, a modern sense of poetry: “The sun was so hot it melted the telephone lines in strands of black licorice.” Jody’s thoughts are related with sharp realism. There’s nothing about this story that isn’t emotionally believable. It feels paradoxically both classic and novel, a story you’re likely to think back on long after it ends.
If what Triangulation: Dark Glass sought was diversity of style and interpretation of the theme, it succeeded wildly. As a collection it’s uneven, with the great stories obscured by the mediocre ones. There’s too much amateur writing to recommend it, but there’s nothing here that doesn’t have potential, and I predict a few of these authors will go far. Grab it if you’re up for a risk. Many of the stories may disappoint you, but I’m sure a few will surprise you.
Publisher: PARSEC Ink (July 2009)
www.parsecink.org Price: $12.00
Paperback: 156 pages
ISBN: 978-0-578-03103-3