(The Mammoth Book of Erotica)
Love Without Gun Control
Is
there any style or genre that M. Christian can’t (or won’t) write in? After
reading these two very fine short story collections from one of today’s most
prolific professionals, I’m leaning heavily towards “no”. The ‘m’ in M.
Christian seems to stand for “multi-faceted”, or possibly “mega-multi-tasker”.
The guy certainly is versatile, as well as daring, imaginative, often funny,
and seldom—if ever—unentertaining, one of those writers who seems to be
everywhere at once, though if he has, in fact, cracked the saintly secret of
bi-location, he’s not talking.
Betty Came,
a gathering of half-a-dozen of Christian’s erotic short stories, is part of
super-editor Maxim Jakubowski’s on-going Mammoth
Book of Erotica series, which, to date, includes some of the best, biggest,
and brightest names in contemporary sex literature. My only serious complaint
about this present volume is that, with over 400 erotic stories to Christian’s
credit, six is hardly a very satisfying sampling—rather like one of those teeny
weeny boxes of Godiva chocolates that seem to appear out of nowhere during the
holiday season, containing barely enough to whet a healthy appetite.
Not
that what is here isn’t worth sinking
one’s teeth into. I like the pungent, near-future-ishly noir atmosphere of Everything but the Smell of Lillies, its
character’s perverse motivations, and the way the author plays a fearlessly
seductive game of literary Chicken with one of erotica’s major taboos,
skirting, but never straying completely over the line. I like the title story’s
portrayal of life on the edge of subsistence and sanity, and, in The Colour of Lust (related from the
point-of-view of a pool hustler’s perpetually frustrated girlfriend), the edge
of love and ennui. But Christian always has his lighter moments, too, as in the
darkly comic Regrets (think Boccaccio
meets The Hangover), and the crafty foray
into Steampunk in The New Motor:
It is not our place to say, via
hindsight, what exactly happened that one particular night. It’s easy to
dismiss, with scorn, or even a kind of parental, historical fondness, that he
was just visited by vivid dreams, a hallucinatory fever, a form of 1854
delusion (after all, we smile, frown, grimace, laugh or otherwise; this was
1854); or some hybrid kin of them all; a vision one third unresolved traumas,
one third bad meal of steak and potatoes, one third nineteenth century
crippling social situation. What we cannot dismiss—because it’s there with
miniscule precision, in detailed blocks of blurry type in rag pulp sidebills,
in the fine filigreed pages of the genteel or just the skilled—was that John
Murray Spear, a spiritualist of some quite personal renown and respect, did
indeed depart Miss August’s Rooming House for Gentlemen of Stature (near the
corner of Sycamore and Spruce in Baltimore, Maryland), and go forth to tell
anyone who would listen—sand some did, as those newspapers reported and those
diaries told—about his visitation by the Association of Electricizers
. . .
The
sexy bits aren’t bad either! Highly recommended.
Readers
get an even broader sense of Christian’s range in Love Without Gun Control, the author’s 2009 self-compiled and
–published collection of short fiction, most of which originally appeared in
genre anthologies, now-defunct niche-specific literary magazines and long-since
cached or dead-linked websites. These fourteen stories run a dizzying—and
impressive—gamut of mood and style, each with its own carefully measured ratio
of light to shadow, buoyancy to seriousness, horror to humor, and hope to
despair.
Christian
has clearly learned from, and distilled the essence of the best examples of 20th-century
American fiction, everything from Ray Bradbury and Jack Kerouac to Cormac
McCarthy and Stephen King. He does not shy away from his influences, but has
wisely allowed them to sing through him as he delves the deep, sometimes silly recesses
of the American psyche. The title story is a broad, campy social satire in addition
to being a pitch-perfect sendup of old Western movies and TV shows, while Wanderlust and Orphans pay dark homage to the uniquely American mythos of “the road”—think
Steinbeck’s musings on Route 66 in The
Grapes of Wrath, or the arid, windswept, dread-haunted vistas of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger and The Stand.
In
Needle Taste, Christian shows that he
is no less adept at horror of the decidedly psychological variety. Techno-thriller
melds seamlessly with High Fantasy in The
Rich Man’s Ghost; political satire meets The Zombie Apocalypse in Buried with the Dead, while knotty existential
drama and the classic Post-Apocalyptic narrative come together in 1,000, and Nothing So Dangerous, a story of love and betrayal in a time of
revolution. Perhaps my favorite stories in this collection are the beautiful,
elegiac, Bradbury-esque Some Assembly
Required, a narrative at once clever and poignant, and the brilliantly
breezy Constantine in Love:
It was called The Love Shack, and
it sold all kinds of obvious things: candy, flowers, poetry books, jewelry,
balloons, perfume, lingerie, and many other sweet, frilly, and heart-shaped
items. It stood alone, bracketed by two vacant lots. Its busiest days were just
before Valentine’s and Christmas. It was described by many newspapers and
tourist guides as “. . . the place to go when love is on your mind.”
The night was dark, the place was
closed. The streets were quiet.
Then the Love Shack exploded—with a
fantastic shower of fragmented chotchkes, and flaming brick-a-brack, it went
from a shop dedicated to amore to a skyrocket of saccharine merchandise. Flaming unmentionables drifted down to land
in smoking heaps in the middle of the street, lava flows of melted and burning
chocolate crawled out for the front door, teddy bears burned like napalm
victims, and cubic zirconia mixed with cheap window glass—both showering down the empty, smoldering hole that used to be
the store.
A
few complaints as well. In several of these stories, I found myself wishing for
a stronger editorial hand. The text is rife with typographical errors and the
kind of occasional omission of verbs and articles typical of the “cranked-out-in-a-terrible-hurry”
manuscript. Several otherwise excellent stories (Hush, Hush; 1,000; Friday) are
simply too long to effectively maintain the emotional impact for which the author
aims. I found them overly repetitive and rather dull, with the narrative lines collapsing
into nebulous incoherency. After all, the “short” in short fiction should be a
clue to the essence of the form; all unnecessary baggage and ballast summarily
jettisoned to achieve an economy of language, and, with it, maximum expression.
These are all issues a good, personally
detached editor, or even an honest beta reader might have helped to resolve early on.
Christian is an established and well-respected editor in his own right, but no
matter how skillful or perceptive an author may be as an editor of other people’s
work, when it comes to self-editing, even
the best and brightest have their blind spots.
Still,
there’s far more to like and admire in this collection than to kvetch about or
pan. Readers will be well-rewarded for what is, in the end, a ridiculously modest
price of admission. Recommended.
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