Robot Viking

Marge Fulton offers up some taut tales set in Appalachia, while Jason Walters takes us on a tour of the bizarre in the Black Rock Desert.

Reviewing fiction isn’t Robot Viking’s usual gig, but Jason Walters of Blackwyrm Press was kind enough to send along these two upcoming collections (you might know him from his work on the Hero System RPG). As a fan of anything weird, strange, horrific or otherwise beyond the ordinary, I was eager to dive in. Then I had to let these books percolate in my brain for awhile before I could formulate an opinion.

Marge Fulton’s collection of short stories is called The Holler: Tales of Horror from Appalachia. The term “short story” is very apt here – few of the tales are longer than three or four pages, and some of them border on flash fiction territory in their brevity. As a result, there’s not a lot of time spent getting to know the characters, and the plots are relatively straightforward. Each story details some strange incident, or bizarre development in the life of some poor soul from an area of the U.S. that is marked by extensive rural poverty.

Fulton’s attitude towards her characters takes some time to get a hold of, because it is not immediately evident whether she despises them or loves them. They are put-upon, to be sure, but there is rarely a tone of mockery or condescension. Neither is there any romanticizing of their situation. They may be poor, ignorant, noble or wise, but Fulton doesn’t make sweeping generalizations about the region or the people who live there. She simply puts her characters out there, flawed and honorable, then observes how they react to the weird events of their lives.

There is strength in the fact that little is explained regarding the events within a given tale. For instance, in “Blood Bank,” an ATM sprays blood, which is somehow connected to an office Christmas party, but you never quite know why. Other stories feature brutal murders with barely hinted at motivation, such as “Recycling Ruth,” in which the title character meets her end in a recycling machine, which is possibly some kind of cosmic irony related to the fact that Ruth liked to recycle. This lends an air of chaos and mystery to the collection, and leaves the reader feeling decidedly off-center (and not in a bad way – these are horror stories, after all).

To be honest, I found some of Fulton’s phrasing and dialogue awkward, and the abbreviated length of the stories forces some of them into strange plot leaps that don’t seem to make sense. It often feels like you’ve walked in halfway through a movie (or fallen asleep during a crucial point in the middle). You might reread a story several times trying to figure out how a character got from one place to another, or why they took some seemingly inexplicable action. Final verdict: it’s a weird and interesting collection that feels quite surreal at times.

Jason Walters’ The Hualapai Cycle is another matter entirely. It’s a collection of short stories, but, as the title suggests, they revolve around a single location (a town called Hualapai at the edge of the Black Rock Desert in northwest Nevada) and the cast of characters who live there. It starts out slowly, the stories seemingly unconnected, but builds steam and intensity. The stories attain a certain gravity, swirling around each other before finally meeting in the center, then exploding in the book’s wild and climactic final story.

If you’ve ever heard of the Black Rock Desert before, it’s probably because of the Burning Man Festival, which is held there each year. Hualapai is populated by Native Americans, Mexicans, cowboys, desert rats, hermits, a few survivalists and, thanks to the festival, more than a few hippies (including one named Hippie). While they don’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, the characters share a common bond – their love of the hard, dry, mean place they call home, not to mention a certain disdain and mistrust of outsiders and the government.

The genius of the cycle is the way characters and events central to one story play a secondary role in another, then pop up again a few stories later. Instead of laying out huge slabs of exposition, Walters drops little crumbs of info about things that the reader has to piece together. The story “Phat Albert” involves a semi-mythical massive mutant mountain lion on a killing spree. Where the creature came from is left unknown, but towards the end of the cycle, a conversation between two characters reveals Phat Albert’s origin. This slow unraveling of mysteries keeps you turning the pages.

The skillful structure of the stories is matched by Walters’ wordcraft. He evokes the danger and beauty of the Black Rock environment in spare terms that, over time, allow the reader to get to know the place (Walters himself knows it well enough – he lives there). His descriptions of his characters are just as effective, and often laced with a certain dark humor.

“He looked like a shaft of barbed wire wrapped in beef jerky.”

Not a single word more than that is required to describe an old cowboy.

Ultimately, any set of short stories rests on the strength of the ideas themselves. What does The Hualapai Cycle give you? A lust demon preying on Burning Man revelers. An equine prophet of doom. A Mexican cowboy who takes on El Santo and Sid Vicious as patron saints. A mad scientist or two, plus a tribe of meth-heads in a chemical badland. The aforementioned mutant lion. A coyote creature that provides comfort in the last weeks of a Mormon widows’ lonely life. And finally, an all-out war between the Black Rock denizens (both human and not) and the government. And if a certain amount of libertarian ranting bleeds through now and then, consider it part of the charm.

Related posts:

1. Fiction Friday — “Extraneus Invokat” Published in Black Static 21
2. Five Great Guides to the Weird and Unknowable at io9