McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

Michael Chabon's newest anthology, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, is a follow-up to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.  As both lurid titles proudly announce, the stories in these collections affiliate themselves with genres more commonly associated with popular or even pulp fiction, predominantly Gothic and its near neighbors.  And both books have an agenda: revitalizing the short story by transgressing the boundaries between the "literary" and the "popular."  As Chabon explains in his introduction,

From Borges to Calvino, drawing heavily on the tropes and conventions of science fiction and the mystery, to Anita Brookner and John Fowles with their sprung romance novels [. . .], writers have plied their trade in the space between genres, in the no-man's-land.  These great writers have not written science fiction, or fantasy, horror, or westerns--you can tell that by the book jackets.  But they have drawn immense power and provided considerable pleasure for readers through play, through the peculiar commingling of mockery and tribute, invocation and analysis, considered rejection and passionate embrace, that are the hallmarks of our Trickster literature in this time of unending crossroads.  (xiii-xiv)

In other words, this anthology tries to reanimate and break down conventional genre categories, in part by "shelving" authors like Poppy Z. Brite, Stephen King, and Peter Straub next to Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, and Jonathan Lethem.  (King also put in an appearance in the first anthology.)  Readers who prefer literary fiction, then, find themselves faced with the likes of King and Straub, while aficionados of hack-and-slash horror have to contend with Heidi Julavits.  Our reading habits are as much at issue as the boundary lines separating the popular from the literary.

There's only one problem.  Come to think of it, it's a rather large problem.  Like the first anthology, the stories in this collection are, on the whole, not especially memorable.  On average, there's far more engaging (and experimental) genre fiction available in annual venues like the Year's Best Science Fiction, Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best American Mystery Stories, and the like.  Most of the literary authors seem unmotivated by their adventures into genre fiction.  Roddy Doyle's "The Child," for example, works adequately as an exploration of one man's increasingly disturbed consciousness, but it fizzles out once the mystery comes to light.  Similarly, Margaret Atwood's "Lusus Naturae," featuring a young girl metamorphosing into something decidedly unpleasant, tipped over into a too-obviously allegorical mode once it reached the conclusion.  I was willing to take Heidi Julavits' "The Miniaturist" seriously as a parody of the horror story, especially given this opening sentence:

As the tire chains continued their maddening irregular clinking and the steeply pitched road disappeared for a third time beneath a snowdrift, Jennifer reminded herself: it was Helen's idea to spend the weekend in the creepy Cascades in mid-February, mere miles from the cabin where, just last year, a man had killed his entire family in a fit of winter melancholy.  (129)

Julavits starts us off with every horror cliche imaginable.  Bad weather! Scary  location! Icky murder!  With so much conventionality packed into a single sentence, the reader can't help but expect a sly send-up of the horror story's usual operations.  Unfortunately, a certain unease creeps in as we continue reading, because--despite the appearance of yet more horror cliches--Julavits doesn't really think through what such cliches are supposed to do.  While she does a good job tapping into the apparent randomness that haunts the poor victims in horror fiction, the end result doesn't represent an innovation in the practice of horror more generally.    Not, to be honest, that the fantastic/horror writers necessarily manage much better: Poppy Z. Brite offers a light, pleasant (!) story about a young girl haunted by either a poltergeist or the Devil himself, while Stephen King has a great conceit for "Lisey and the Madman"--the invisibility of the writer's wife--but doesn't really delve into its implications. 

This is not to say that there's nothing entertaining to be found here.  China Mieville's "Reports of Certain Events in London" features both a delightful concept--living streets!--and reflections on the nature of the ever-changing urban landscape.  Daniel Handler offers a possible nod to Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner in "Delmonico," which features a sexy bartender who solves crimes without ever leaving the bar.  David Mitchell, who demonstrated a talent for genre-bending in Cloud Atlas, does more of the same in "What You Do Not Know You Want"--a combination SF/thriller/mystery, revolving around the knife Yukio Mishima used to commit suicide.   And Peter Straub's "Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle," partly descended from Sartre's No Exit, manages to yoke some dour reflections on back-scratching in the publishing industry with some questions about originality and plagiarism. 

Genre-bending fiction, at least when written at novel-length, normally incorporates some element of self-reflexivity.  (A case in point would be the British mystery novelist Reginald Hill, whose Dalziel and Pascoe series does all sorts of interesting things with classical and contemporary literary forms.)  That element is surprisingly absent here, although Joyce Carol Oates' tribute to Poe, "The Fabled Light-House at Vina del Mar," comes closest.  There's not much sense that any of these genre conventions have a history, in other words.  Metafiction for metafiction's sake is not particularly enjoyable, but metafiction for literary history's sake might generate a somewhat more provocative collection.