I recently pleaded with Andrew Hook at Elastic Press to get rid of those online "Sold Out" signs and put all thirty Elastic titles onto Print-On-Demand status, so that a wider audience can enjoy their back catalogue. This excellent short story collection by Neil Williamson perfectly illustrates my point.
It quickly becomes apparent within these pages that Williamson has all the skill necessary to be any kind of writer, a mainstream "literary" writer for instance, but chooses to incorporate elements of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Supernatural, in order to serve his own agenda rather than any publisher's or marketeer's whim. In which case "Slipstream" may be the best term to cover this book.
Williamson is adept at delicately bringing his characters to life, through well-observed little details, and switches with alacrity between a cold impersonal style and strong emotions drawn from real life. Stories like "Shine Alone After The Setting Of The Sun" or "Hard To Do" are essentially very touching tales of love and loss in everyday life, with only very tiniest hints of the "speculative" about them.
Then a story like "The Bone Farmer" on the other hand takes us to a wildly surreal post-plague landscape where huge sculptures of human bone are constructed amid isolated rural landscapes, an astonishingly imaginative and unforgettable story, both shocking and beautiful. In "Softly Under Glass" Williamson dazzles us again with descriptions of paintings by an avant-garde artist that I found so arresting that I can't believe they don't exist yet. Brilliantly conceived and constructed, this story grips from first to last. But here's the thing: it also puzzles, and leaves things unanswered (one of the usual trademarks of "Slipstream") which is where Williamson is at his strongest.
The territory gets more Slipstream still, with stories like "Amber Rain" (where an ex-girlfriend may or not be an alien, during some unspecified transformation event) or "Postcards", where another lost girl leads the narrator via video diaries through a series of enigmatic Florentine encounters towards a meeting with madness, the irrational, the unknowable.
In yet another strand to this collection, in "The Happy Gang", and "The Apparatus", a kind of historical ghost fiction creeps in, demonstrating the impressive range of the author's voice. Only in two stories, "Sins Of The Father", and "Harrowfield" did I feel this voice became a little too "faux" for my taste, somewhat M R Jamesian in the latter case, but there are editors out there who seem to adore such emulations, so I'll hold my tongue.
As a fellow Glaswegian, it was refreshing to see how Williamson seamlessly combined local elements here (Lanarkshire dialect, the George Bennie experimental train-plane for instance) with Sci-Fi of the wider universe. I've only mentioned a few of the many first-rate stories in this book, and for anyone who wants to witness technical excellence of the highest order allied to a fecund and unpredictable imagination, here is a good place to look and learn. Williamson's voice is gentle and playful, as it seeks out the mysteries that surround us, to record and preserve them to make real the rich atmosphere of life. Doubtless many ephemeral things will be lost to history, but this book should not be one of them.
