Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people! (A Memoir by R. A. Lafferty)

The following is from Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (1980).

Memoir by R. A. Lafferty 

Galaxy was the golden magazine of science fiction.  At its best, there were nuggets in at least half its issues.  No one else came close to that.  

Let the hills leap like little lambs at the memory!

“About a Secret Crocodile” was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing “trendiness,” whose other name is “unoriginality,” on the world.

Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people!

Galaxy died several times from embracing this trendiness or unoriginality.  The “magazine-that-is-different” became quite like all the other “magazines-that-are-different.”  And it died because it spent all its retrospection on things past.

The newest Galaxy editor, Hank Stine, is an experienced resurrectionist.  He brought a dead and rotting Louisiana alligator back to life by laying his reanimating hands on it and breathing into its nostrils.  Later he brought back to life a dead rabbit, a dead goat, and a little dead boy.

(He has not told these things himself.  Others have told them of him.)

Now he will, probably raise the magazine from its second or third death.  You’ve got to have faith!

(If he isn’t still at the helm when this appears, that just means that good guys move around a lot.)

Never trust  a retrospectionist who isn’t two-faced.  A little of that retrospection for the future, please!

Galaxy, esto perpetua:  Thou art forever!  (I hope.)

But, for all that, the way-it-used-to-be was quite extraordinary.

 

The editors (Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander) introduce Lafferty’s memoir piece, which is followed immediately by his collected short story ‘About a Secret Crocodile’, this way:

Raymond [sic] Aloysius Lafferty began writing science fiction when he was well past forty, producing a large body of work that can only be described as wonderful, wild, and often bewildering.  His is an original voice, and his contributions to sf are only now becoming apparent.  Lafferty also meant a great deal to Galaxy in the 1960s, with something like 20 stories, including such major works as “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” (December 1962), the fabulous “Slow Tuesday Night” (April 1965), “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (February 1967), and “Primary Education of the Camiroi” (December 1966) and its “sequel” “Polity and Custom of the Camiroi” (June 1967).

            “About a Secret Crocodile” is one of his best and most famous stories, one that rewards rereading time and time again.  Lafferty’s agent, Virginia Kidd, tells us that whent eh story appeared in Galaxy, she received an indignant call from the editors of Playboy magazine wanting to know why they hadn’t seen it first.  Virginia says, “Frankly, it had never occurred to me that it was anything but a Galaxy story, so that is where I sent it.”

[I for one can vouch that this particular story has hit me with new and profound depths of both artistry and significance every time I’ve read it over the years.  It is of keen relevance to our current meta-culture of opinion-forming social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google +, Buzz Feed, and so on.  Lafferty did oddly fit the usual projected role of an SF writer being a ‘prophet’, but he did so, as Neil Gaiman has recently remarked, in an uncanny social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical way rather than in a technological way.  Then again, his social ‘predictions’ are all about current information technology.  So really, he fit that aspect of the role too.]

R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit

The astonishing emergence of R. A. Lafferty on the horror and science fiction scene over the last dozen years is a subject of much discussion and a Hugo Award.  Appreciated by both those who favor the more traditional story and those inclined to prefer the most offbeat and experimental, he has been a favorite of the best anthologists: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Damon Knight.  And while best known for his inimitable short stories, he has also turned out fine novels of science fiction, as well as Okla Hannali, which deals with the American Indians.  All this from a writer who has published most of his work past age fifty. But readers should not confuse Mr. Lafferty's chronology with an identifiable style of writing.  R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit.  Like this bit of regionalistic myth-lore, set in his native Oklahoma.

-from Frights: Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976), edited by Kirby McCauley, featuring Lafferty's story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'.

Lafferty news (that’s right, NEWS!) – Reminiscent of a Future

All great smells […] have a reminiscent element, but with this it is reminiscent of a future.  There is a pleasurable mustiness here, that’s sure, but it isn’t of a past time:  it’s of a future time, long waiting, and now beginning to unfold suddenly.

-R. A. Lafferty, ‘World Abounding’ (1971)

There is indeed a whiff of something approaching in the air.  Lafferty’s breakthrough into a larger audience has been ‘long waiting’ and seems as if indeed it may be about to ‘unfold suddenly’ in this the centenary year of his birth.  Neil Gaiman has been talking about him a lot in podcasts recently, so much so that Lafferty’s name made it into a Wall Street Journal blog alongside Flann O’Brien.  Just scant weeks after this brief article appeared, another more lengthy news piece was featured in The Guardian this past week devoted exclusively to Lafferty, citing again Neil Gaiman and also ‘our own’ (as I like to think of him) Lafferty scholar, Andrew Ferguson.  This Guardian article is currently being repeatedly tweeted on Twitter and no doubt other social media networks.  The article comes out in conjunction with the Lafferty panel  (hosted by Ferguson and featuring Michael Swanwick) that was held last week at the London WorldCon. 

In my own Lafferty news, I recently started an RALaffertyTweets account on Twitter that has garnered 80 followers in just a few weeks (seems a lot for such an obscure writer).  I started it because I have been officially approved to write my dissertation this year on Lafferty (more on that in the next blog post), but it has come in handy as this article on Lafferty has broken.  

All in all, it seems like exciting and auspicious times for all things Lafferty.  The following from Lafferty’s story ‘The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen’ (1973) comes to mind:

“Get ready for it, kids, don’t miss it!” Mary Mondo chirped so clearly as to be heard by every ear in the room. “This is going to be good.”

But, of course, Mary Mondo is a ghost and most of the time the people around her only slightly hear her, if at all.  One can’t help but feel that this potential breakthrough for Lafferty’s work is profoundly promising, but also precarious.  This moment of wider recognition for Lafferty feels a bit like the uncertain cliff-hanger endings to so many of his tales (e.g. ‘Frog On the Mountain’, ‘The Configuration of the North Shore’, Annals of Klepsis, Serpent’s Egg).  But I’ll gladly take the expectant stance of the ending of his seminal 1968 novel Past Master:

Remember it?  Then it happened?

Be quiet.  We wait.

[…]

Well, does it happen? Does the reaction become the birthing? What does it look like?

Will we see it now, in face and rump, the new-born world?

Be quiet. We hope.

(artwork for Past Master by Leo and Diane Dillon)

Lafferty as writer of Mystical Slashers

They'd kill the Stutgards first, that very night, with axes.  They'd axe old man Stutgard, and all the blood would run out of his big red neck.  They'd cut off Mrs. Stutgard's head that was round as a pumpkin, and it would roll down to the bottom of the hill and look at you.  They'd kill the Stutgard kids.  It's most fun to kill kids who are just enough bigger than you to make it interesting.

-R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968)

What has been a slow-dawning thought for a while now coalesced for me on a walk this morning:  Lafferty wrote slashers.  Once you say it plain and simple like that, you then, of course, have to qualify it to death. But let's leave the qualifications and nuances for another time.  I'm re-reading The Reefs of Earth right now, which is one of Lafferty's blatantly bloodiest tall tales, a backwoods murder-spree told through a loose-fisted science fiction trope (the killers are alien children who look a lot like human children).  But it's not just this famously murderous early novel.  It has occurred to me that almost every one of Lafferty's published novels (and a significant number of his short stories) involves attempted (and eventually successful) murder as a crucial element of the story arc (this is often in the form of politically motivated and often state-sanctioned assassinations).  Such killing all by itself, of course, only nudges these works into the murder mystery or crime story (a genre Lafferty assayed in a number of tales, including some yet-to-be-published novels).  But anyone who has read more than a few Lafferty stories will know full well that he goes way beyond mere depiction of a murder, even a grisly murder.  His tales are often soaked in buckets of blood and gore.

To throw out some of the more conspicuous specimens from his short fiction, there are  'Snuffles', 'Once On Aranea', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Thieving Bear Planet', 'Jack Bang's Eyes', 'The Last Astronomer', and 'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'.  (Lesser specimens could include 'Camels and Dromedaries, Clem', 'Name of the Snake', 'The Hole On the Corner', 'The Man Who Never Was', 'Cliffs That Laughed', 'Frog On the Mountain', 'Ride a Tin Can', 'Sky', 'Groaning Hinges of the World', 'Ishmael Into the Barrens', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'And Mad Undancing Bears', 'Endangered Species', 'Fog in My Throat', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', 'The Hand With One Hundred Fingers', 'Thou Whited Wall', 'Splinters', 'The Funny Face Murders', and 'The Ninety-Ninth Cubicle' - each of which depicts grisly death or graphic violence, even if it's not as pervasive as in other stories.)

But it is probably mainly in his novels that one encounters the most gory, slashery stuff.  In fact, those of you who have read the novels can go back and re-read them with this theme in mind.  I think you'll be surprised how much of the bloodshed and killing you may have forgotten.  The quote above from Reefs is one of the tamest samples.  (Okay, I'll add in a nuance here:  a lot of the time it may be more accurate to say that Lafferty practiced a lot of literary gore rather than slasher stuff per se.  There are some really bloody scenes that don't have anything to do with persons murdering other persons - e.g. the wildly gory slaughter of the devil fish in Past Master, or the blood-spattering high-fall deaths from wrestling with God in 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.  But the depiction of gruesome bloodshed remains central.)

Now why call all this violence 'mystical'?  Lafferty seems to have had a sort of death-vision through which he saw the world in bloody-rosy hues.  I add 'rosy' to that characterisation on purpose.  How does such a bloody-minded author also fill us with so much joy and laughter, sometimes even as we cringe at horrific maiming and death scenes?  It's partly because Lafferty is almost always funny or wry.  He can't write anything it seems, no matter how dark, without at least a wink.  This often means that the more violent and grotesque the matter, the more hilarious (sometimes uncomfortably so) it comes across to us.  So Lafferty's work is grotesque in the comedic and carnival sense.  'I Think I Will Dismember the World With My Hands' is a chapter title in Lafferty's celebrated novel Fourth Mansions (1969) and it could be an artist's statement for Laff.  Andrew Ferguson has argued persuasively that Lafferty's practice of literary dismemberment is an artistic strategy of taking apart the science fiction genre in order to put it back together again 'renewed and revealed' in 'new potentiality' (Lafferty and His World, page 29 and following).

It is very much this and it is also very much more also.  Lafferty's comedic-grotesque slasher fiction is mystical because it exemplifies his deeply held convictions.  Comedy and laughter are huge central worldview categories for Lafferty.  He can't bring himself to flinch from writing bloody murderous horror, but nor can he bring himself to not laugh at it as well - and his laughter is ontological.  He's laughing because he thinks there's something more real than grisly horror and brutal death.  He has probably tricked you into laughing at that level too.

It seems that Lafferty just couldn't see death as termination, not finally.  Death was more of a waystation than a terminal for Lafferty.  Characters (even whole planets and the cosmos itself in Lafferty's stories) go through death on their way to something else.  Sometimes this is pretty jokey and immediate, such as when a just-severed head keeps talking and is placed at the prow of a boat in order to navigate raiders to other villages to pillage ('Groaning Hinges of the World'), or when a group of astronauts are slaughtered by their hosts on a planet only to regain life the next morning and be invited to enjoy the slaughter all over again as the day's entertainment (that's a rough remembrance of a long-ago reading of Lafferty's 1968 novel Space Chantey).

But often, neither narrator nor reader are privy to what-comes-next. Lafferty simply tells us that a resurrection, a new birth, a new creation is probably in the offing thanks to this bloody death we have witnessed--personal, communal, planetary, or cosmic.  He leaves the story open-ended on that score.  It's up to the reader whether she'll participate in the hushed anticipation that Lafferty enjoins, for example, at the end of Past Master (1968), when the narrator asks whether the destruction of the world will result in its rebirth and answers:  'Be quiet.  We hope.'

The carnival hope in Lafferty is not mere slapstick, however, as many of the deaths depicted are quite poignant and tragic ('Ride a Tin Can' is an obvious example; another for me is the intelligent talking elephant in Laff's 1987 novel Serpent's Egg).  Lafferty is aware of the big ask he is making of the reader:  to laugh even through the tears.  Indeed, to laugh in outright defiance of ultimate tragedy and sorrow (see his ending of 'I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows' as one instance of a direct depiction of laughter as subversive resistance - a story that contains amusingly grotesque surgical body-horror as its main trope).

Well, this post is just a first stab (wink) at this theory about Lafferty.  I'll have to come back to it and more thoroughly evidence it for a start - a very fun task if you like totting up and citing deliciously gory scenes. Please let me know what you think.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have you noticed all the bloodshed and if so, what do you make of it?

Related:

Cosmic Horror vs. Cosmic Laughter (Lovecraft vs. Lafferty)

An Excessively Normal Childhood (according to Lafferty)

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal, for he came very near the high norms themselves.  He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk.  All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel.  Abel was an imaginative, a creative boy.  He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world:  that is always important.  And he did not like empty spaces at all.  Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination.  There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house.  He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes.  He would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley.  A house had once stood there.  It had burned down: the house had faced on the side street.  Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house.  He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs and Mr Ostergoster.  He put a boy to live in the house.  He fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster.  Mikey fixed a cat.  Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away.  Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick.  Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man (he was a soldier such as they used to have in another time, not the sort of soldier they have now).  Mrs and Mr Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier.  Everybody began to have a big fight then.  Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

"You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina.  "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there - ah, in the little house that is not there.  And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern.  And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog.  I remember that dog before they had to kill it.  It was one mean dog; its a wonder that you weren't bitten.  Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid."

But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all.  He was absolutely normal.  It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel.  The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected.  (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts... Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult.  An average child will lose such talents, but a normal child will retain them:  the two aren't the same.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Rivers of Damascus' (1974)

Not To Mention Camels (1976) - Interworld Horror & Ultra-Purple Fun with the Media Lords

This is probably the most brain-melting work of fiction I've ever read.  I'm a huge fan of Lafferty, but I would not recommend the novice start here.  (Then again, I once saw someone on a forum say this was the first thing they had read by Lafferty and they were hooked.)  The novel's quite exciting, full of very strange and gruesome wonders, but possibly even fuller of philosophical exposition about the multiple identities of one person instantiated across various possible worlds:  'that wide tangle of buckling, parallel worlds' and 'the smell of bi-location' or 'bi-location kickback'  and 'interworld routes' and 'transworld impetus' and many other such modal locutions abound.  Characters often chat to one another thusly:  'It is the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds that generates incredible force in the line of creativity and shaping also.  Half the pattern has to come from another world' (p. 42).

Even the names of the characters add to the oddity in the air of the narrative:  Pilgrim Dusmano, Aubry Pim, Cyrus Evenhand, Howard Praise, Rhinestone Suderman, Noah Zontik, Mary Morey and many more.

The protagonist (Dusmano) is an unlikeable political villain, which makes for unpleasant reading sometimes.  Then again, the lampooning of media-manipulated spin of political-celebrity identity is some of the most enjoyably acerbic I've ever seen.  There are Media Lords and cults of personality and at one point a meteorological Hand of Heaven pointing down at the political candidate, which has been contracted in advance.  This manufactured divine approval is a central motif of the novel.  It's a viciously satirical study of the intersection not only of media and politics, but also of theologies, both bogus and true.

Resistance to the cult/cultural group-think is dispatched by 'the chopping down of uncultic and unelectronic persons... Who would want to save them?  They are the unelectronic people, the nontinsel people, the folks of the unfractured flesh, and they never showed a deep love for us of the Media' (p. 73).  Remember, this was published in 1976.  I can't imagine what Lafferty would make of our internet generation.  No, I think I can.  I think he'd just quietly sardonically remark:  'Told ya.'

Counterpoising the jargon and philosophical discourse are moments of focalised narration that can reach grotesque lyricism:

To swoop it all in!  That would be the last great commercial stroke for Pilgrim Dusmano before leaving the world.  This would be the real final pleasure, a break-bone and blood-suck pleasure.  The red joy of it, gathering in all the fine property with its long roots with bits of flesh still clinging to them, would go far to nourish even the parallel Dusmanos on alternate worlds or aspects.  It was a corporate good, really (p. 89).

It's not all dialogue and terminology and commentary, of course (though there's a ton, which is often the case in Lafferty).  Vivid (but usually brief) scenes of action are furnished now and again as well:

The scarf that Pilgrim had been twisting in his hands now overflowed or exploded into a mantle or a cloak.  Arrayed in this, Pilgrim went right through the walls of the Prismatic Room and the Personage Club in incipient flight.  Noah Zontik stepped to a window and watched Pilgrim ascend the incandescent blue air of the outdoors in slanting, soaring flight.  He had a finesse beyond that of any bird.  A bird doesn't understand how to pose in the air, how to get the most from his natural lines, how to live a lyric in quick stanzas of flight.  Pilgrim covered half a city in the ticking off of a dozen seconds.  It was perfection... Pilgrim Dusmano, halfway across town, descended from his flight into the interior of an unspecified house.  He quickly killed a startled man there.

"A bit casual, was it not?" the victim rasped with his dying breath (p. 24).

Or witness a snippet of the boar hunt that takes place as part of the festivities on Hieronymous Bosch Day in one alternate world:

Parrots were like flights of fat green arrows in the air.  Dogs had a catchy bark on every gasping breath... But the present and embattled boar wheeled again and killed several of the harrying peasant girls and lads.  It left them awkwardly broken in the sunny grass.  The boar coursed again, and it foamed, not with weariness, but with fury.

Lorica, on a steep bay horse, closed in on the boar and let his horse overrun itself and become impaled on the wheeling boar.  At the moment of overrunning, Lorica's lance went into the boar in snout and mouth and throat, but the bogus-stone lance head did not touch the boar brain in any way.  That animal, disdaining even to notice the lance, was into the horse with long tusks, richly and redly into the belly; and it raised horse and rider high into the air as it reared on giant bristled hams and small feet (152-153).

The modus operandi of the book appears to be:  'This requires a new way of looking at margins, which are spaces outside of accepted spaces' (p. 15).  The action usually takes place in fairly solid and essentially rational, if wild and violent and dystopian, variations of worlds.  But late in the book there's even some time spent right inside one of those psycho-freakish liminal voids:

Foremost of the threats was a hulking apelike creature that the polymorph saw high ahead.  (This was all by firelight, there being no sun in the iron sky, so the seeing and the seeming ran together.)  The ape-thing was moving down the terrible and steep path toward the three climbers.  It was coming fast enough to intercept them at the Narrow Corner.  The path was fearfully narrow even where the three climbed it.  The ariel had her crest drooping and smoking; the dog had his singed tail between his legs; the polymorph himself had teeth in his heart that crunched it and gnawed it away (p. 123).

Oh heck, there's even a bit of loveliness thrown in here and there:

She was freckled and unaccountably brilliant.  She was dappled and sunbeamed.  She was daylight itself, freckled daylight with clouds roiling up behind her (p. 150).

I really can't begin to convey how chock full of delightfully inventive jargon and mind-bending ontology this novel is.  It simultaneously hurts and thrills the brain.  You often feel as some characters are early on described as feeling:  'There was a bit of horror gnawing at them in the area there, but also some ultra-purple fun' (p. 10).

I leave you with a final sample of the visceral carnival ontological chatter that bristles throughout the book:

Let me tell you a little bit more about the Prime World of prime people, Pilgrim.  It is the uninfused world, the grubby world, the spiritualist world, the quack world, the Fortean world.  That world is real, and all others are shadows of it.  You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it.  But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person.  On Prime World, fish and rocks and blood do indeed fall on the earth out of low and stationary skies.  For these are stale skies and do not turn.  One can reach those skies with stones thrown by a ballista, and such shots will bring other stones falling in showers onto prime earth.  Everything moves very slowly on prime, like objects moved by poltergeists.  It is like things moving underwater.  It is things moving in prime atmosphere and the reek and heaviness of it.  There are vulgar shouts out of that lowering sky.  Why not?   There are giants living up there, dimwit giants who are the original people.  What, Pilgrim - would you swallow only half a camel?  And what will you do with the rest of it? (p. 24).

Serpent's Egg (1987) - 'That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing'

Meet the Twelve Children of the Experiments, each one hyper-intelligent, each one a Mega-Person, each one under suspicion and surveillance as a potential Serpent's Egg to be crushed in the shell:

The Lynn-Randal Experiment:  Ruddy Lord Randall, the young male human; Inneall, the young female ambulatory computer; Axel, the young male Golden Ape (or Blue-Eyed Ape or Gargoyle, a member of the Unfallen People or Second Humanity).

The Wintergreen-Luna Experiment:  Marino the young male seal ('his mind and his personality and his outgoing spirit gleamed as his hide gleamed with its wetness in the sun when he came out of the water'); Luas the young male angel (who wouldn't be greatly missed in heaven - 'he was of one of the lower classes of the highest of creatures'); Henryetta, the young female human (flame-haired, flame-tempered, and flame-powered, gifted with pyro-kinesis).

The Dorantes-Saleh Experiment:  Lutin, the young female python (a prophetess); Dubu, the young female bear (whom all the other children called Little Mother); Schimp, the young male chimpanzee (erudite, degreed with a doctorate, he regularly wore an academic cap and gown).

The Gruenbaum-McGregor Experiment:  Gajah the unborn female Indian elephant (in the tenth and final year of her gestation in the womb of her mother, an Empress elephant; she communicates by telepathy as well as by means of a percussion language on a tiny drum inside her mother's belly); Carcajou, the young male wolverine (half animal, half devil); Popugai, the young male parrot (from New Zealand, big enough to kill and eat a sheep; with perfect recall and understanding and pronunciation, 'he knew the basic vocabularies of six hundred human languages, and of many thousands of insect, reptile, animal, and bird languages').

The location is only barely named, but this is one of Lafferty's many Oklahoma stories.  It is the end of summer in the year 2035, specifically the Last Three Days of Summerset.

Each set of three 'children' grew up together and now all twelve have been brought together as each approaches his or her tenth birthday.  Their project has been to find 'new ways of looking at the world, but not too cockeyed new'. But it looks like they have indeed been 'too cockeyed new' in their shining intelligence and vision and thus the Dolophonoi, the knife-wielding assassins, are drawing near to put an end to it before it really gets started.

Serpent's Egg is another of Lafferty's many apocalypses and shares themes (e.g. 'is this world an Egg that will shortly birth a new world?') strongly in common with Past Master (1968), Arrive At Easterwine (1971), and Annals of Klepsis (1983).  The novel also shares, in a more minor key, the theme of 'is any of this real or are we just dreaming?' with Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney (these two short novels are collected together in Apocalypses, 1977) and East of Laughter (1988).  The novel's satiric dystopian quality (e.g. a Kangaroo Court rules the Global Village) resonates with works like Lafferty's novella Ishmael Into the Barrens (1971) and his short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972).  The characters are said to be living on the Floating World and this critique of modern society's lack of depth frequently recurs in Lafferty's fiction - e.g. Fourth Mansions (1969), 'Encased in Ancient Rind' (1971), From the Thunder Colt's Mouth, (1975),  and 'Bequest of Wings' (1978).

From the above thematically associative list it's easy to believe Lafferty's own claim that his body of work really added up to one long unfinished novel (which he called A Ghost Story).

The prose in Serpent's Egg is perhaps not as dense or as lyrical as the likes of Fourth Mansions, Past Master, Annals of Klepsis, or The Devil Is Dead (1971) or indeed of many of Lafferty's most famous short stories (the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers contains many prime examples).  The poetry seems to mostly have been externalised into the very characters and events of the novel more than in the language that describes them.  The above cast is a shining example and various scenes in the novel sing out in sheer conveyance of the happenings.  Examples of the latter are that Inneall the little girl computer is making a New Ocean right there in the town and Heart's Desire Cove springs up round it as a local carnival or fair, the description of which is classic Lafferty 'high time' fun, full of outrageously oddball activities and elements:

Hearts Desire had become a great entertainment center, all within a week... A feature there was 'Computer Enhanced Music', and all sorts of music lovers came there.  The birds also were faithful listeners and participants.  Human music alone had never touched them much, but the enhanced music struck a chord with them.  Sometimes there were whole choruses of larks and catbirds and mockingbirds and of the multi-songed cardinals.  There was even the mightiness of ten-thousand voice crow-calls.  And the swifts and swallows and even the evil shrikes did air dances when the people and the 'people' danced.

And the fast-lunch and fast-drink places were attractions for old and young... Where else could one get Hot Coon Sandwiches?  Where else Ocean Catfish garnished with Crayfish tails?   Where else Persimmon Wine?  Where else Choc Beer as Mother Used to Make It?

[...]

At night there were the bonfires on Ocean Shore.  They were built out of folk memory... Oh the Campfire Songs that the people and the 'people' sang and entoned [sic] on the rocky shores of the Cove on those chilly End-of-Summer-Nights!  They sang 'Star People' and 'Skokemchuck Rag', 'Bandicot Blues' and 'World Village Medley', 'Ambulatory Ambles' and 'The Socsollabcomdem Party Potlatch', 'New Directions Ramble', 'Charisma Concerto', 'The We-Owe-A-Lot-To-Otto-Wotto Hootnanny', 'The Sixth Dream of Molly Mechanicus', 'New Entity Rock', 'Oh New Rice Feeds the Far-flung World!', 'Interspecies Intermezzo', 'Inneall's Ocean Hallelujah'.

[...]

Every night, some of the Computers sang 'Moon People Vaunt', a song that always caused at least a small amount of friction.  Only computers lived in the Moon Colonies.  Humans couldn't live on the Moon without elaborate support systems.  But Computers could live anywhere, even on the blistering hot surface of Venus or on the killingly cold surface of Jupiter... But everybody could enjoy such sing-a-longs as the 'Excitements Hot and Cold Suite' and 'It's the Crustacean in Me', a song of aeons-spanning nostalgia; and 'Going Home Over The Star Bridge'.

(pp. 57-60)

Or take the antic images that fizz and sparkle in your mind after hearing a series of little wisdom tall tales related by Dubu:

"I have a notion," said the young female bear Dubu, "that the answer to all the hard questions are written on the inside of one single Acorn somewhere.  This particular acorn, if placed in lye-water, will swell to a billion times its original size, and then it will burst open.  And whole mountains-full of writing will come tumbling out of it.  Then everyone can come and read it and enjoy it and know everything.  The only difficulty is knowing which acorn in the world is the right one.  I believe that there are clues pointing directly to the right acorn, but we do not notice them because they are so big and so plain and so close to our noses."

[...]

"Many bears in their natural state know everything.  Go down into the Winding Stair Mountains and walk out on the bear tracks.  When you meet another bear, if he is one of the bears who know everything, he will give you the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  No animal except the bear can give the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  The face muscles of other animals simply aren't adequate for it."

[...]

"I have a notion that turtles have uncanny and cryptic information written in the groove on the bottom side of their tongues.  The turtles themselves do not know about this, nor do the chelonologists.  But the people who work in turtle-soup factories are so very smart because they know about this hiding place.  They  read the turtles' tongues like Chinese fortune cookies, and what they read is total knowledge."

(pp. 74-75)

Lafferty's weaving together of folkloric, anthropological, and ecological tropes is both bewildering and awe-inspiring.  That, I suppose is part of the point of this novel.  It is a search (as is most of his work in one way or another) for how we can obtain an adequate view of the world that doesn't leave anything out and also Ties It All Together in some satisfactory and even salvific coherence - a coherence, we may be assured from the above quotes, that is comedic and carnival, not static and 'tidy'.  Indeed, it was the putting forward of two contrary views about this vision-casting that prompted Dubu's reflections:

"As to why we are here, Satrap, and what we are supposed to be doing here," Felix Snake-and-Dove got on the track again, "we are here to weave the seamless garment of our individual lives, and of the lives of those around us, of the neighborhood, of the countryside, of all the creatures down to the smallest, of all realms and continents and oceans. We are here to weave the seamless garment that will be highly detailed from the subatomic particles to the galaxy clusters. It must include all minds and ideas and inklings, all joys and all immediacies. There can never be enough weavers, there can never be enough brilliant details in the seamless garment known as 'The Life Affair'. And we can never be finished with it, for it continues to grow seamlessly."

"Weaving is outmoded, Felix," said Livius Secundus the history-writing Computer.  "Fabrics are no longer woven.  Now they are extruded by extruding machines.  Personal groups, landscapes, worlds, galaxies, all are extruded by a simple extruding machine which you could make yourself."

(pp. 73-74)

As always in Lafferty, there is a deadly urgency to these philosophical debates, as the presence of the aforementioned assassins attests (reminding one of the mechanical killers in Past Master and the nothoi-hunters in Ishmael Into the Barrens).  The Powers That Be in this tale are not only perpetrating socio-massive thought-control (another theme dear to Lafferty who repeatedly bemoaned catch-phrases and slogans and how the masses were made into 'sheep' by being 'fed' on them), but also death-dealing population control.

As to the former - thought-control - Lafferty describes a scenario very much like our 21st century internet planet:

It became a world in which everything and nothing was public.  It became a world with very little superstructure.  It became a world in which ideas and notions were transmitted instantly to every part of it.  But could such a world work? (p. 80)

He's asking the question honestly.  It is evident from his body of work that Lafferty loved technology and the sciences and he longed for humanity to truly stretch out and mature in itself, spiritually and intellectually, and in harmony with the natural environment.  Lafferty believed in the 'Fulfilment and Enlargement of the World' (p. 94), but his works dramatise how competing visions of what this is and how to bring it about collide. Wrong-headed utopias, Lafferty averred, would only make the bottom drop out on such maturing processes. The Kangaroo that Rules the World, as the elite social engineers in this tale are called, had backed the 'leveller movement':

One used to thinking of levelling as trimming the top off something into a semblance of evenness. But these 'levellers' trimmed the bottoms off of humanity and computerdom and the world itself. (pp. 80-81)

This was tragically not only the cutting out of our psychological and spiritual depths through reductionist philosophies and worldviews, but also the cutting out of our population depths:

The lower classes of everything were terminated without particular ado, without much apparent suffering, without any great quantity of visible bloodshed.  The bereft families did not ask where their inept members had gone because most of the families that had inept members went with them. Persons seldom asked where their neighbors had disappeared to, because usually it was entire neighborhoods that disappeared. The 'Don't make a big thing out of it' mentality was rife in the world, so a big thing was not made of the disappearance of eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world.  After all, that eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world had made ninety-seven percent of the trouble in the world.  In all logic there was much to be said for the 'removals'.

This is skin-crawling stuff.  The wisdom of Dubu the young female bear had earlier countered this pogrom programme:

"Oh, Oh, Oh, what will we do, Dubu, with all those countless billions of unwashed commoners?  I wonder whether they're necessary at all."

"Yes, they are necessary," Dubu answered in that 'ruf-ruf' voice that bears use for human talk. "We are the tree.  You are only the top leaf on the tree.  It's the one that quakes and moves in the wind as though it were an aspen leaf, the first one to fall when the inclement weather comes.  And I'm unwashed myself.  I don't use water.  I use a curry comb instead.  Curry combs are too good for horses, but they're just right for bears."

(p. 63)

If you read Lafferty long enough, you'll notice what might amount to a paranoia about this possibility of mass extermination of those who don't 'fit in' to certain versions of utopia.  But then again, his was a century that included literal secret police, travesties of trials, public executions, and dicatatorial mass exterminations of millions of people who didn't fit in to certain social visions.  (Not just Hitler and Nazism, of course, but also Stalin and Pol Pot and others.)

At any rate, though Lafferty was self-professedly 'cranky' and certainly had a dark turn of imagination, I can't in good conscience call his body of work pessimistic.  His themes of hope and of new birth on the far side of tragedy persist from the earliest to the latest novels and stories and Serpent's Egg is no exception.  The wonderful later chapters of this novel with their depictions of whales and sea lice building profound monuments on the ocean floor give vivid form to Lafferty's hopeful vision.  Chapter twelve in particular immerses the reader in an 'Oceanic Hyper-Active Dream State', which provides 'new eyes and new ways of looking at the world' full of creativity and possibility.  Our dream guide is a man who is one of the 'metamorphic creatures who can turn into Deep Ocean Denizens'.  Such a man is an 'Ocean Obscenity or Monster' for 'All Ocean Creatures are obscene, in the nicest sense of that word'.  Thus he is 'in his beautiful oceanic-ugliness-monsterness as we saw him and loved him today' (p. 144).  Lafferty is always very comfortable with placing grotesquery and monstrosity in the category of beauty and virtue.  With these phantasmagorical goggles on we see:

And the whales were making giant crypts and cenotaphs and menhirs from the blocks and shafts and trabants of marble.  It was utterly strange down there at Whale Town, and completely homey also.  A sign which the whales had put up proclaimed to all visitors "We're Glad You're Here".

[...]

The Temple-City that the Whales were building was certainly prodigious and entirely wonderful.

[...]

The beautiful pink, lilac, tan, orange, and mauve-tinted marble of the Whales' Constructions had also on it happy blotches and gouts of the greenest green ever.  It was a color so green that no language of Earth except only Malay has a word for the color.  Malay does have a twelve-syllable name for the color, a name that might be translated as 'The Green of Swarming, Ocean-floor etching, deep-sea lice'.  Yes, that vivid green was a living color, and one beautiful blotch of it, festooning the caput of a pillar, might contain a million of the small ocean-floor sculpturing Lice. They were quite small.

The small ocean-lice were etching figures and faces into the big marble and granite stone-pillars. Though not one, and not ten thousand of the little lice had enough scope and reach to comprehend what they were sculpting, to know what the statuary was all about, yet the lice were receiving and obeying orders from somebody, and likely from the whales.  The portraiture art, cut in high-and-bas relief out of the giant stone pillars and walls and lintels, had to be the Art of the Whales.

Mostly the faces and forms were those of famous whales of yore.  But there were also distinguished-looking animal faces, human faces, god faces, even strange computer faces, all emerging from the big stones that the sea-lice were sculpting for the whales.  And whenever they finished one of the great and distinguished faces, the sea-lice covered it over with a beautiful and thin plaiting of nacre or mother-of-pearl.

(pp. 137-138)

By the novel's end this dream of a coalescing vision of life has not yet saved the day.  It is still an underground thing. It is the resistance movement that stubbornly refuses to be stamped out.  It is the 'egg' of promise and new beginnings.

Indeed, one of the surviving Children of the Experiments, Lutin the young female python, who had become pregnant earlier in the narrative, appears to have given birth to a giant egg:

"Lo! - and Behold It!"

"That thing!" Inneall cried out aghast.

"Yes, that thing with the beautiful golden and blue light pulsating about it!"  Lutin spoke out of her mood of rapture.  "That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing." 

(p. 154)

Dubu the wise young female bear says that 'a couple of odd fellows' gigglingly informed her about the egg:

"It is the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed". (p. 155)

And this too resonates with one of Lafferty's consistent themes.  In his early story 'Nine Hundred Grandmothers' (1966), when a space explorer asks "How Did It All Begin?" of those who purportedly can tell him the answer, those who were actually there at the Beginning, he is met with giggling and laughter and told: '"Oh, it was so funny how it began.  So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing!" [...] And they laughed. And laughed.  And went on laughing...' Storming off angry, thinking he hasn't received an answer, the explorer misses that he has.  He misses that he is being told that the universe is rooted in Cosmic Laughter.  In the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972), the scattered disciples of Christ are the only hope left for rebuilding a post-catastrophe world and one of them informs another that sometimes 'the Lord... jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes.'  And so here in Serpent's Egg also, Cosmic Laughter is the creative power for the New Beginning as much as the Beginning. We are not told what is inside the egg, but only given clues and hints and an 'Epilog by a Sea Louse'.

This novel is one of the more coherently structured and executed of Lafferty's notoriously difficult novels.  It meanders a bit in the third quarter, but the majority of it is packed with Laffertian wit and wisdom and weird wonders.  It is perhaps not quite the feast that, say, Annals of Klepsis or Fourth Mansions or Past Master or Arrive At Easterwine are, but I would definitely call it unmissable.

new Lafferty Facebook Page

A Facebook 'author' page already exists, but it's been dead in the water for several years now.  I decided to make a page under the category of 'community'.  It's not a 'group' that you ask to be 'added' to, but rather a page that you 'like'.  I'm using it to promote appreciation of Lafferty's body of work.  I'm putting up some nice photo albums of the varied editions of his works.  So far you can see book covers for Past Master, Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, and Nine Hundred Grandmothers - all in a number of editions including some Italian, Dutch, and Japanese.  You are also able to comment on any posts, so discussion is available and welcome.  Please go 'like' it and let's build this thing up!  (The aforementioned unused 'author' page had 176 likes, so I imagine we can eventually do better than that as Lafferty's star slowly rises.)

Thanks.

https://www.facebook.com/ralaffertyfans <== just click on this link to go to the FB page

Laffertian fragments

Searching for Lafferty book covers to put on my 'pulp' SF Pinterest board, I came across the following isolated snippets from Lafferty's story 'Through Other Eyes'.  (I found the snippets HERE.)  

I find the paragraphs strangely fascinating out of context like this:

It kind of gives me a fresh view of the Lafferty madness/sanity.  It looks freshly science fictional and philosophical too, in a way so unique I'm not sure you'd see it as pungently if you excerpted Delany or Zelazny or Dick this way:

I've used a lot of images on this blog too, which is fun to me and provides a certain kind of window into Lafferty's work.  But seeing only the words in scanned isolation like this also furnishes a kind of illumination.  Enjoy.

anthropological SF and Lafferty

So I've started doing general SF reviews over at my blog They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven On Their Heads.  The latest is of Michael Bishop's short novel Stolen Faces (1977), which is a specimen of 70s anthropological quasi New Wave science fiction.  The general discussion of the book may be of interest to Laffertians.

But it's got me thinking about anthropological SF (maybe most emblematically exemplified by Ursula Le Guin) and Lafferty:  does his work fit into this category/phase/expression of science fiction?  Probably not any more than his work fits into the New Wave in general.  But just as his work is amenable to the literary, experimental, psychological, linguistic, philosophising characteristics of New Wave (such as the likes of Zelazny and Delany exhibited), so too his work is amenable to the emphasis on indigenous identity, worldview, magic, ancestry, ritual, and culture in the anthropological SF of the likes of Bishop, Le Guin, and Tiptree.

One potential difference I see in Lafferty over against other practitioners of anthropological SF is that Lafferty's exploration of 'tribal' ethnicity and culture feels much more insider than what I've read in other authors.  Other writers often feel more like the compassionate and self-censuring view of a master race who is trying to repent of its atrocities and make amends.  Don't misunderstand that:  Le Guin and Bishop, for example, are exemplary liberal humanists (Taoist and Christian respectively) who are earnest about repentance and new policies toward the Other, working that out deeply and powerfully in their fictions.  But Lafferty feels more like a tribesman speaking out on behalf of the People.  His voice comes across to me more like a Chinua Achebe or Black Elk.  (It's interesting to note in this connection that Gene Wolfe said Lafferty's unique genius would have been taken more seriously in the USA if he had been of South American or some other non-white ethnicity.)

Lafferty deals often with other ethnicities and tribes than his own, sure - Native Americans and Native Indonesians spring to mind - but I think his empathy comes from the inside of his experience.  And those other Others sometimes stand in symbolically for his own, I think.  I know he self-identified as an ethnic and religious minority.  In one interview he said he just narrowly missed being a WASP by being instead a Ruddy Irish Catholic.  His own worldview too was far more in line with various indigenous peoples of the world than with the modern secular humanist worldview dominant in the West.

While I can think of quite a few short stories which are explicitly anthropological in theme, I'm not sure I can think of any of his novels that are really centred in this concern (aside from the obvious Okla Hannali).  Past Master, for example, seems more about sociology and political philosophy (and class is more at issue than race).  Anyway, here are a list of some of the short stories, off the top of my head, that are pretty deeply anthropological I think:

'Narrow Valley'
'Ride a Tin Can'
'Groaning Hinges of the World'
'How They Gave It Back'
'Frog On the Mountain'
'Nine Hundred Grandmothers'
'Land of the Great Horses'
'Smoe and the Implicit Clay'

More stories that feature anthropology, but I'm not sure whether they centre in that theme:

'Cliffs That Laughed'
'Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne'
'Name of the Snake'
'Old Foot Forgot'
'Tongues of the Matagorda'
'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'
'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'

Can anybody think of other instances and perspectives on this?

Globular Narratology (and glimmerings of a case for the greatness of Lafferty's late works)

'The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.

But why narrate spheres? Why strive for such an ideal or ideated form? Surely there are other shapes more curious, more open, more pregnant, though pregnancy does tend toward the spherical. There are other shapes more varied. Why not narrate saddles or quarries?  What kind of saddles, then?

Dromedary saddles, I suppose.  They're the closest thing to the shape of it.'

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive At Easterwine (1971), Chapter Eleven (attributed to the fictional work Ermenics of Shape by the fictional character Audifax O'Hanlon)

For years this has been one of my go-to passages on the craft and puzzle of writing and storytelling. In the scheme of Lafferty's novel I think it takes on cosmic and ontological significance as well.  But in regard to narration it speaks of a universal puzzle that all storytellers must confront.  Few perhaps have pursued it as rigorously as Lafferty did.  I think this is why his narrations can be so notoriously (yet delightfully) difficult (not least among them Arrive At Easterwine!).

Not all of his stories are narrationally difficult, of course.  As one commenter on this blog aptly put it: Lafferty wrote the 'storiest of stories'.  Some of them positively hum and buzz with taut style and plot and the reader happily trips down the paragraphs to the usually wham-bang ending.  But let's be honest, Lafferty also wrote some utterly brain-melting narratives:  wildly and joyously baffling novels like Easterwine as well as Not To Mention Camels and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. And, of course, there are the woollier, idea-drenched and/or structurally experimental short stories like 'Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies' or 'Rivers of Damascus' or 'The Man Who Walked Through Cracks' or 'St Poleander's Eve' or 'Inventions Bright and New'.

Lafferty himself admitted in an interview that he wrote 'choppy novels', but I think that was due as much to the unwavering integrity with which he genuinely tried to 'narrate a sphere' (or a saddle or quarry for that matter) as to any lack of skills or intuition he may have suffered as regards traditional notions of plot and so on.  (And just as is the case with the short stories, there are examples of novels that, for me at least, flow quite well - e.g. Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, The Devil Is Dead - even if what they narrate can be fairly mind-bending or mystifying.)

In some of the later and seemingly crazier-than-ever novels, Andrew Ferguson (in an unpublished paper) makes a very convincing case that Lafferty was stepping out into the true and un-plied innovation he had been calling for in his works from earlier decades.  From what I've read of those novels - mostly published in the 1980s - I couldn't agree more.  Among these too is showcased (intentionally) 'choppier' and more 'flowing' instances:  East of Laughter being an example of the former and Annals of Klepsis and Aurelia being examples of the latter.  They strike me as the fruit of a very mature and very exciting, if inevitably disorienting (because of the sheer newness of the endeavour), phase of an author finally truly stretching forth into the great work of his life.  (Pace Webster, who's excellent and engaging article I already took issue with when I 'fisked' it here.)  If illness (and at last, alas, the weight of obscurity) had not diminished him in the 1990s, I think we would have seen Lafferty write his final and fullest masterpieces.  But even the beginnings of that late and mature work are powerful statements to behold - if we have ears to hear.

In my opinion, the way to obtain such ears is to very carefully listen to the early works and follow where they lead.  That is the huge mistake I think so many of even Lafferty's ardent admirers make. They were fond of his 60s and early 70s stuff and revel only in that era and fail to see how those very works are paving the way for later greatness.  For probably a very long time to come, our best guide to grasping how these early works set us up for later works is Andrew Ferguson.  Start with his Master's Thesis 'Lafferty and His World' - don't worry about the passages of this paper that get incredibly dense with theory and jargon.  They lighten up again and bear a lot fruit when he starts analysing specific stories by Lafferty.  Then proceed to his mesmerisingly informative and insightful blog:  Continued On Next Rock.  Pay close attention, stay tuned in.  Beyond that, all one can do is pray for the day some sane and just publisher eventually gives Andrew the go ahead to write Lafferty's biography (I've seen a sample - it's gonna blow us away), and when that happens you'll see what I mean.  Our understanding of Lafferty is gonna go interstellar.  We'll still be mere half-conscious mortals plumbing infinities, but we'll be far better off than we are at present, trying as we are to see a mosaic from too close, lacking vantage and vista.

Complete Lafferty Library Volume 1!

It's finally gonna happen!  I'd heard about this, but I just now found out about a lovely page over at Centipede Press that outlines the project to publish all 200 of Lafferty's short stories (12 volumes' worth!) over the coming years.

Each volume, they inform us, will include 'a guest introduction by a notable author in the field of fantastic fiction' (the first being Michael Swanwick - you can see an excerpt of the opening paragraph over on the page linked to above).  They even give us the table of contents for the first volume:

I have all of these stories in one format or another besides 'The Ninety-Ninth Cubicle', a rare story only appearing in the Weird Tales Fall 1984 issue or the 1991 collection Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) from United Mythologies Press, both now all but impossible to obtain.

I'm very happy to see that some of the more obscure stories are already showing up, even those collected only in the Chris Drumm paper chapbook format from the early 80s (these are like little zines really - quite a cool DIY 'punk rock' sort of format in my opinion, but the typewriter lettering is a little hard to get into as a reader, to really feel like you're reading a genuinely published story and not just someone's unpublished manuscript).  The story 'Jack Bang's Eyes' is one of my favourites, especially because of the wonderful chimpanzee character Flip O'Grady.  It's the first story in Drumm Booklet # 13: Snake in His Bosom and other stories.

I'm a little surprised, however, that they're kicking the whole book off with the story 'The Man Who Made Models', the titular story of Drumm Booklet # 18, a story I found rather difficult and not as gob-smacking or exquisitely crafted as many other stories by Lafferty.

It just shows me once again that Lafferty fans differ so very widely as to what is his best work, or where to start with his work.  But I'll have to go back and re-read 'Models' thinking of it as the first story in this volume and see how it hits me.  I'm glad they go on to 'The Six Fingers of Time' right after that.  It's a story I've used to introduce and hook quite a few people to Lafferty.  Straightforwardly written and packing a vivid imaginative punch with its well-imagined slow-down of time and movement, with characteristic playfulness and mischief and, of course, rather diabolical consequences (and a poignant little love story too). 'The Hole on the Corner', next in line, is a classic and well-loved tale, which really shows off some of the outrageously weird lengths Lafferty can go to in two seconds flat.  Very funny, uproariously gruesome, wildly imaginative, unsettling. Both 'Six Fingers' and 'Hole' are from the ever popular first collection of Lafferty's short stories Nine-Hundred Grandmothers (1969) and unsurprisingly, they're not the only ones on the list. 'Square and Above Board' was not a story that particularly struck me when I read it (I have it in the 1983 anthology The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 9), but I'd love to see it again in this new context.  I have a feeling most of his stories are going to take on a fresh shine in these new formats and constellations.

I could wish they had at least one more story from Lafferty's 1971 collection Strange Doings besides 'All But the Words', and also at least one more story from his 1974 collection Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? besides 'About a Secret Crocodile', and perhaps also one more from the 1991 collection Lafferty In Orbit besides 'The Skinny People from Leptophlebo Street' (and these are probably not the stories I'd have chosen from those collections if it was only going to be one).  But I am happy to see a number of stories that I first encountered in the under-appreciated 1984 collection Ringing Changes:  'The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Parthen', and 'Rivers of Damascus' (two of them being ones I'd definitely have picked).  As I said Nine-Hundred Grandmothers provides the lion's share of the collection with three more stories in addition to the two I've already mentioned:  'Frog On the Mountain', 'Narrow Valley', and 'Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne', the latter two consistently considered classics and 'Frog' being another very worthy choice in my opinion.

That just leaves 'Condillac's Statue or Wrens In His Head' from the 1982 collection Golden Gate and Other Stories (a book which also first collected 'Days of Grass').  It's a great story, but it continues with the trend of this first volume to collect stories that are heavy on philosophy and complex ideas and narrations.  I think this first volume could do with a few less hefty numbers and a few more that are slam-bang fun - otherwise people might get the wrong idea about what all Lafferty accomplishes across the spectrum of his storytelling.

Then again, I guess this series is really only for those who are already dedicated fans, since it's gonna cost a pretty penny per volume and run into five or six hundred dollars to collect all twelve books.  To be perfectly honest, huge fan that I am, I'm going to have to really scrape pennies (and maybe auction off a few children) to keep up and collect each one as it comes out.  And that's the only way to be sure of being in on it apparently.  This first run is limited to 300!  Presumably the subsequent volumes will be similarly limited in number.  (If any rich readers want to sponsor my collection, I can promise the Lafferty Library in my hands will go to very good use and be thoroughly reviewed and publicised to the further fame of Lafferty!  The rest of you, stop judging my beggarly kowtowing to the wealthy!)

I'm gratified to see 'Parthen' and 'Six Fingers of Time' on this opening list as I've championed them as good starting points over the years and most of my fellow Lafferty fans have demurred.  Also, I'm very happy to see 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw' as it deserves to be widely known as one of Lafferty's very, very best.

Looking over the list again, it's also good to note that Lafferty's inimitable bending of space, time, and persons are all represented in these stories - the way he goes sideways and ultraviolet with the classic science fiction and fantasy tropes of time travel and multiple worlds and alien contact and planetary expeditions.  There are also several of his Native American-centric tales and those featuring animals to pleasantly odd effect.  Also included are tales showcasing how he can stretch and shrink both people and places at will.

All in all it's very exciting!  'This is beginning, this is happening!  Let no least part of it ever forget the primordial tumble that is the beginning!'

I'll conclude with the photo of Lafferty the first volume includes, which I've never seen before and I find just lovely.

The Oklahoma Troll

'Lafferty?  Lafferty?  He's that Oklahoma troll who's been bamboozling us for years with his indescribable and impossible stories.  (Who but Lafferty would write a story whose main characters are a ghost, a sawdust-filled doll, and an Australopithecus?)  His work has been published all over the lot, though he's best known outside the science-fiction world for his powerful novel of the American Indians, Okla Hannali. An issue of New Dimensions wouldn't be complete without him.'

-Robert Silverberg, intro blurb to Lafferty's story 'Animal Fair' in New Dimensions IV (1974)

Cosmic Horror vs. Cosmic Laughter (Lovecraft vs. Lafferty)

Finally!  I've written something new on Lafferty over at my Ride the Nightmare blog as part of a '30 Days of Halloween' series:

Day 24: Cosmic Laughter vs. Cosmic Horror (Lafferty vs. Lovecraft)

I recall that we discussed a 'theology of monsters' in Fourth Mansions in the comments of a past post.  I think horror and monsters in Lafferty need to be explored again and again, deeper and deeper.  Considering he said his whole body of work was an unfinished novel called 'A Ghost Story', the category of horror is obviously a crucial way to grapple with what Lafferty was doing.  (It's fascinating too that quite a few of his stories in the 60s and 70s were first published in horror magazines and horror anthologies.)

I welcome your thoughts!

(And Happy Halloween!)

(image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'The Ultimate Creature' - image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'The Man Who Never Was' - image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'The Ghost in the Corn Crib' - image found HERE)

(contians Lafferty's story 'The Man With the Aura' - image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'Splinters' - image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight' - image found HERE)

(contains Lafferty's story 'The Funny Face Murders' - image found HERE)

Gut-Level Books

'Certainly present circumstances and coming events can be read from animal or bird entrails, if one has enough shrewdness of vision to bring to them.  Entrails are gut-level books with everything in them literally.  Horoscopes aren't in it with entrails at all.  Crystal balls aren't, and fortune-telling cards aren't.  The entrails of hot-blooded animals give the deepest readings.  The entrails of fish and squid give the most elegant interpretations.  But bird entrails are the easiest, and they are the most commonly used.  The beginner is urged to stay with bird entrails till he is completely proficient, and really there is nothing wrong with staying with them forever.'

-R. A. Lafferty, opening paragraph to his short story 'Haruspex' (1974), collected in Drumm Booklet #12 Heart of Stone, Dear and other stories (1983)