Stalker (1979): Co-written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky: [Cast and Crew]: The great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's follow-up to his elliptical Solaris (the original, not the Clooney debacle) is the even-more elliptical Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic, a novel I haven't read by Soviet science-fiction legends the Strugatsky Brothers. It's also a clear influence on Jeff Vandermeer's recent Southern Reach Trilogy, adapted by Alex Garland as Annihilation. Except Stalker actually is a philosophical puzzle.
It's also one of the slowest movies ever made. Strap in and feel the lack of gees! Three Soviet men venture into The Zone, a mysterious area created by a mysterious something that may or may not be from outer space. Only a Stalker can navigate the shifting, dangerous landscape of the Zone to reach the center, where a person's wishes can be granted by yet another mysterious something.
The movie consists primarily of the three men trekking through forest land littered with industrial garbage, rotting houses and warehouses and factories, tunnels, and many other seemingly mundane things. They all talk a lot about life, the universe, and everything. There are many startling visuals created by Tarkovsky's skill at making the mundane seem peculiar and even numinous.
By the end, one is left with a science-fiction movie about mysteries and Mystery itself. It's certainly not for everyone, but I found its cumulative effect to be haunting, lingering long after the final, mysterious scene that seems like a prelude to some sort of crazy, languorous Soviet X-Men movie. Highly recommended.
Annihilation: Book One of the Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer: Interesting, cosmically horrifying ideas are relentlessly stripped of all horror and weirdness by the attenuated, flat nature of both characterization and description in this first, shortest novel of Jeff VanderMeer's double-named Area X/Southern Reach trilogy.
VanderMeer seems to be striving for the sort of vague horror of his Weird Fiction touchstone M. John Harrison, specifically in the vein of Harrison stories that include "The New Rays" and "Egnaro." Which is to say, the two Harrison stories included by VanderMeer in his massive and massively flawed anthology The Weird. Harrison's stories take place in places that seem contemporary, but vaguely so, with both time and place being disturbingly off-kilter.
So some time in the near future in the Southern United States, a research team of five women ventures into an area called Area X. They're the 13th such team. Or are they? Is this the near future or is this going on 'now'? Do the characters have names or are they only referred to by their occupations?
Our Biologist narrator lost her husband to Area X. Just getting into Area X somehow wipes one's memory of getting into Area X. The whole place is a sort of mutated dimensional space caused by Something from Outside crashing into a lighthouse some time in the past. Or that's what it appears to be. To the lighthouse, then!
Ciphers squabble with other ciphers. No one figures much out. There's a weird thing in an underground complex. There are signs of bloody battle at the lighthouse. The narrator's husband nicknamed her Ghost Bird, a nickname that doesn't seem to apply much to our characterless main character.
VanderMeer throws around italicized words and phrases like August Derleth editing H.P. Lovecraft stories. Is that intentional? Because the set-up of Area X is pretty much the set-up of Lovecraft's 1928 classic "The Colour Out of Space," in which the titular something mutates and destroys a New England landscape and everything in it.
It takes a special sort of genius to make events and things as weird as are posited in this novel so boring, so enervating to this reader that there is no way I'm reading the second and third books. Your results may vary. It all feels like horror for people too refined for horror. Not recommended.
Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly, containing the following stories:
- The Nineteenth Step by Simon Strantzas: Not so much a story as an opening that's missing a middle and an end.
- Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks by Paul G. Tremblay: Sharp and nasty character study suddenly turns into a vaguely observed (and possibly completely subjective) invasion of Lovecraftian horrors.
- Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron by A. C. Wise: Well, it's sort of funny, and it sort of feels like something that was written in about 1970 for the magazine Weird Heroes, given that the genre tropes it spoofs are all very, very, very old.
- The Year of the Rat by Chen Qiufan: Nice dystopian satire in translation from the Chinese would be pretty much at home in an issue of Galaxy magazine from 1955.
- Olimpia's Ghost by Sofia Samatar: Something to do with Sigmund Freud but I never really cared what or why.
- Furnace by Livia Llewellyn: Solid bit of weird horror reminds me a lot of late-career Thomas Ligotti...which makes a lot of sense when you realize that it's from a Ligotti tribute anthology.
- Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us? by Damien Walters Grintalis: The pomposity of the title has literally erased the story from my memory. Honestly, it's like an episode title from Season 3 of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
- Bor Urus by John Langan: Typically solid Langan piece with a really spooky, disturbingly dream-like climax.
- A Quest of Dream by W. H. Pugmire: A tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle stories. There's really only one W.H. Pugmire story, a sort of Swinburne-meets-early-Lovecraft fragment, and this is another one of those. Enjoyable, rotted twee.
- The Krakatoan by Maria Dahvana Headley: Promising start, completely goofy weird ending.
- The Girl in the Blue Coat by Anna Taborska: Solidly written and observed ghost story of the Holocaust.
- (he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror... by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.: No memory of this.
- In Limbo by Jeffrey Thomas: Twilight Zone-like set-up for a keenly observed character study. Very reminiscent of a lot of stories that appeared in Charles Grant's Shadows anthologies in the 1970's and 1980's.
- A Cavern of Redbrick by Richard Gavin: Very nice weird tale with a disturbing either/or conclusion that offers closure without a definitive answer to what just happened.
- Eyes Exchange Bank by Scott Nicolay: Really the 900-pound gorilla of this anthology super-collides splatterpunk and kitchen-sink horror with some great riffs on Poe and the Decadents.
- Fox Into Lady by Anne-Sylvie Salzman: Mostly unpleasant, amorphous, mythy.
- Like Feather, Like Bone by Kristi DeMeester: Story fragment about some gross stuff.
- A Terror by Jeffrey Ford: Excellent period piece depicts Emily Dickinson's first meeting with Death.
- Success by Michael Blumlein: I could imagine this story as having been written by someone like Robert Sheckley or Cyril Kornbluth and published in a 1957 issue of Galaxy magazine, only at about one-third the length. As is, it's almost monstrously attenuated.
- Moonstruck by Karin Tidbeck: A sort of inert bit of dark fantasy shading into a postmodern folk story.
- The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass by John R. Fultz: This one, enjoyable as it is, would be more enjoyable if it were the script to a Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant comic-book story from 1979, preferably illustrated by some very baroque and murky European comics artist of the time.
- No Breather in the World But Thee by Jeff VanderMeer: The usually subtle and understated VanderMeer cuts loose, to increasingly dire and unengaging effect. It may be a satire of weird-fiction tropes the writer has grown tired of. It's sort of a rubbery, pointless, "shocking" mess.
Barron casts the net so wide for his definition of the Weird in his introduction that the term becomes almost meaningless. And the extraordinarily broad reach of the contents bear this out. It seems less like an attempt to come up with a new genre and more like a land grab. Nonetheless, there's a lot of good stuff here. In all: recommended, a little lightly.
