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Things That Never Happen
'Like all good literature, Harrison's stories are worth reading again and again; the more you read, the more you understand.' Iain M. Banks.
Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing.
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.
Contents:
Settling the World (1975)
Running Down (1975)
The Incalling (1978)
The Ice Monkey (1980)
Egnaro (1981)
Old Women (1984)
The New Rays (1982)
The Quarry (1983)
A Young Man's Journey to London (1985)
Small Heirlooms (1987)
The Great God Pan (1988)
The Gift (1988)
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever (1989)
Gifco (1992)
Anima (1992)
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring (1994)
Empty (1995)
Seven Guesses of the Heart (1996)
I Did It (1996)
The East (1996)
Suicide Coast (1999)
The Neon Heart Murders (2000)
Black Houses (1998)
Science & The Arts (1999)
Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing.
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.
Contents:
Settling the World (1975)
Running Down (1975)
The Incalling (1978)
The Ice Monkey (1980)
Egnaro (1981)
Old Women (1984)
The New Rays (1982)
The Quarry (1983)
A Young Man's Journey to London (1985)
Small Heirlooms (1987)
The Great God Pan (1988)
The Gift (1988)
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever (1989)
Gifco (1992)
Anima (1992)
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring (1994)
Empty (1995)
Seven Guesses of the Heart (1996)
I Did It (1996)
The East (1996)
Suicide Coast (1999)
The Neon Heart Murders (2000)
Black Houses (1998)
Science & The Arts (1999)
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
M. John Harrison
114 books736 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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December 20, 2023
A stunning collection of short stories from one of England's greatest contemporary stylists, gathered from 1975 - 1999. Harrison builds his sophisticated and ambiguous stories by honing in on the minutiae of reality, atmospheres, moods, the subtle play of light, the interplay of alienated characters and the ties that bind them. His crystalline and poetic prose builds an intimate portrait of reality, the physicality of the world. These are character-driven stories, with elements of science fiction, the supernatural and weird fiction positioned evocatively in the background, that erode away at the edges of the narrative, at the real.
There are a few tropes and themes that occur throughout these stories. Dislocation in urban environments and a movement to healing in wilderness and isolated places, like moors and mountains. The idea of transformation. The desire to escape the quotidian. Reality's strong gravitational pull on that desire. Fantasy as consolation. It is the pull and push of these forces that set up the inner dynamics of many of these stories.
The stories appear chronologically and the earliest here, Settling The World, is from 1975 when Harrison was still editor of New Worlds magazine. It is the most distinctive fantastical science-fiction story here, and in this way it is at odds with the rich realism apparent in the rest of this collection. It opens with a paragraph of light brevity which tells of the discovery of God, his return to earth and society's transformation into a utopia as a result. The narrator falls in with Estrades, a rebel, an anarchist, who wants to destroy God. Although there is something of the Ballardian hero in Estrades, he is a typical Harrison protagonist; a character going against the grain, rebelling against the mundane, obsessed, looking for transformation, the ecstatic.
Running Down (1975)
Recounts the dysfunctional and destructive relationship between Egerton, the narrator, recovering from a mountaineering accident, and Lyall, an acquaintance from his Cambridge days. Lyall has a dark energy about him ("he carried his own entropy around with him,") that seems to influence the disintegration of objects and relationships. This erosion is echoed in the background as the political system breaks down with the rise of the Patriotic Front, and Britain is engulfed in violence ("and by noon England, seventy or eighty years too late, was taking her first hesitant but heady steps into this century of violence.") With the scenes set in the Central Fells, Lake District, there is a strong sense of place evoked, of wild nature, liminal spaces at the edges of civilisation, primal space.
The Incalling (1978)
Austin, the narrator is invited by Clerk to the Incalling, an occult ritual. Over the course of the next few weeks Austin observes the weird instigators of the ceremony, the peculiar Sprake family, and watches the dissolution of Clerk. The occult ritual is another of Harrison's preoccupations, which will be seen again in The Great God Pan in this collection and in the novel The Course of the Heart. Harrison is generally not concerned with the purpose or aims of the ritual. Here, Austin is skeptical and questions its authenticity, seeing it as something of a sham, the Sprakes as charlatans. Harrison is interested in the ritual as an operation to incite profound change on his characters' psyches. They desire change, transformation, escape or healing and the ritual mediates that desire.
The Ice Monkey (1980)
An achingly beautiful and enigmatic tale that could be a seminal text for Harrison, as it marks a shift into the mature style seen in the rest of the stories in this collection. It concentrates in a few brilliant pages Harrison's concerns of desire, memory, obsession in the face of a bleak, run-down reality.
Jones, impractical to all else in the world except rock climbing in which he excels, has conceded all his connections to society. He asks Spider, the narrator, to help in practical concerns like liaising with his estranged wife over maintenance payments. Maureen lives in a dilapidated flat at the centre of an urban wasteland, "the ruins of East London, the rain", from which she surveys the broken landscape, like an abandoned lady in a tower, "Maureen, in E3 where all horizons are remembered ones, dwelling on vanished freedoms."
The writing is beautiful, Harrison captures the characters' inner states of mind and subtle atmospheres of time and place in a single sentence: "Jones in a cafe, watching with his head tilted intelligently to one side as the sparse traffic groaned away south and a kind of mucoid grayness crept into the place through its steamed up windows." The characters seem real, dialogue rings true, there is a strong sense of life as it is lived. There is an undercurrent of poignant despondency to the whole thing, of loss, death, defeat and forgetting.
The Ice Monkey title and three brief sentences concerning a necklace add a faint supernatural element that is at odds with the rest of the story. The fact that the story was written for Ramsey Campbell's New Terrors horror anthology gives a context to this tale that invites a certain kind of reading to it, even though the text resists that reading. There is a kind of textual friction at play here, forcing a certain reading of the text and denying it at the same time. Which all adds to the enigmatic power and brilliance of this story.
Egnaro (1981)
Lucas, a second-hand fantasy book store owner, becomes obsessed with Egnaro, a fantastical land at the edges of the known world. The pragmatic narrator, his accountant, has no time for Lucas' fantasies, viewing his fantasy books as feeding a longing for the past, the simplicity of childhood, when desires were more easily consummated. To him, fantasy is merely adolescent desire. Lucas' obsession takes over and his livelihood and his health suffer.
The setting of Deansgate is vividly realised in its dishevelled state of urban neglect. A transient urban space where office workers and students pass through the rundown streets on their way to their destinations. The bitter winter winds blowing through the drab streets are contrasted with the warm sun-soaked landscapes of Egnaro. Deansgate is a society without a culture or a soul. Why wouldn't you chose the fantasy when reality is this bleak? So fantasy is a consolation to the quotidian mundanity of life. But it is more than merely escapism. Egnaro is many things, a fantastic realm at the edges of reality, the conspiracy to keep its location hidden, a longing for childhood simplicity, a desire for what is lost. Desire itself. Also and maybe the most obvious, it is orange spelt backwards. Even in the title, Harrison undercuts the romantic longing with the banal.
The New Rays (1982)
The first appearance in this collection of Harrison's recurring character type - the very ill woman, or the Fisher Queen as China Mielville calls her. (see also Ann in The Great God Pan, Isobel in both Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring and the novel Signs of Life, Mona in Science and the Arts. From his novels, Audsley King in In Viriconium, Pam Stuyvesant in Course of the Heart, Anna Kearney in both Light and Empty Space.)
The Quarry (1983)
The narrator is recovering in Yorkshire moors from an emotional breakdown in the city. Convalescing in nature, he is pulled back to the quarry of the title. There he dreams of the Green Woman, a twist on the pagan green man of folk tales. He keeps running into a an odd couple, which he watches with fascination - a blind woman and a paraplegic man, they are co-dependent on one another, and seem to transform ino one beast. With the quarry and its environs, Harrison's great nature writing evokes a strong sense of place.
Small Heirlooms (1987)
Kit, returns to her writer brother's house to take charge of his literary estate after his death. She reads his diaries which recount his pre-war travels in Austria. Sex and tarot with a gypsy girl. She wonders what death befell the the girl after the rise of Nazi Germany? She wonders about their child. She dreams. She awakes to the smell of attar of roses perfume, haunted by her brother's concerns, the ghosts of the past.
The Great God Pan (1988)
This story charts the last despondent meetings, the end of the relationship between the narrator, Lucas and Ann, who are bound together by the magical ritual they participated in as students at Cambridge twenty years before . The ritual itself, its purpose and what was involved, is never disclosed, indeed the narrator has lost all memory of it. But there are hints in the text that it enabled the participants to access the enigmatic Pleroma, of which nothing else is told. The participants now pay a high price for this access. They are all damaged in some mental or physical way, none more than Ann, who suffers from epilepsy, migraine headaches, is paranoid and anxious. Lucas suffers from hallucinations and illness. The cost of accessing the Pleroma has, as Lucas puts it, "ruined something in ourselves."
The Gift (1988)
Nine alternating chapters depict Sophia and Peter Ebert's separate lives in the same city. Both are solitary, lonely figures. Sophia lost in alcoholism and casual sex. Ebert's life is suddenly given meaning when he receives a tattered book by a stranger on the underground, the book becomes his obsession. The narrative charts their journey to each other.
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever (1989)
Structured into ten chapters named after cards of the Tarot. Like a piece of performance art, a young man bestows meaning to objects and events from train journeys chosen using the Tarot deck. Meaning is seen to be ultimately mutable, randomly assigned.
There is something essential to Harrison's writing in the opening paragraph quoted above and shows his attitude to writing within genre and writing in general. He is not interested in the ordinary and the easily understood, the comforting tropes and cliches of genre. His is the pursuit of the reality of things, the struggle with language to depict something not overused, hackneyed, but true, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that language itself may not be up to the task. The next paragraph, in which the narrator replaces the disappointment of the foundry he saw on TV with one of the imagination, offers a solution to the consequent question, then why write at all?
Gifco (1992)
Gifco is another high point in this anthology. The narrator and his wife are, in their own separate ways, dealing with the death of their daughter. Neither openly grieving, they seem to be repressing their grief, moving away from their old family house, starting life anew in Peckham. A derelict house across the street from their new home, with the word Gifco scrawled on a boarded up window, begins to play a dark role in their lives.
The internal space of the Gifco house seems to operate outside of reality. He can hear the lunch-time traffic outside, but inside this dark interior feels more like the narrator’s inner space, his psyche where dark happenings occur. The place where his mental disorder is made real. A space cut off from reality, a space out of time and place (almost Lovecraftian.)
The narrator is cold and unemotional and the reader is kept a distance from events by his impassive recital. He puts a strong emphasis on his dreams; within which meanings and language isn’t fixed. His dreams seem to reveal his repressed feelings. The reader can never be quite sure of what the narrator is disclosing is in fact reality as the narrative itself starts to take place within "that zone of slippage between waking and dreaming." It’s as though his repressed grief has erupted into the narrative itself, disrupting the quotidian with the weird and the uncanny.
He has a terse relationship with his wife; there is no mutual consolation between them. The narrative is littered with her brusque, indifferent exchanges and we intuit her deep dissatisfaction. Her inscrutability is not diminished in the memories of his holiday in Tenerife, where he would meet his wife. Their first meetings show that there never was an emotional intimacy between them; and their physical intimacy was determined by her omnivorous, insatiate desire.
It is also in the Tenerife memories that the psychological source of the Gifco house is disclosed. The darkly enigmatic character of Allo Johnnie looms over these passages. The Gifco graffiti resounds with the narrator so much, it as though the narrator’s subconscious has made a strange kind of connection with the meeting of his wife and the death of the daughter, with the character of Allo Johnnie as some preternatural dark midwife to this association.
Despite the unsympathetic characters, it is the emotional punch of this story that remains with the reader. There is a deep sense of loss here. Memory, identity and a sense of indeterminacy. Nothing is fixed. Everyone lost within their inner selves, slave to their own obsessions and false desires..
It is interesting to read M. John Harrison’s blog entry on Gifco as a postscript of sorts:
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring (1994)
A seminal M. John Harrison short story in which all the author's obsessions appear, notably the profound yearning for the impossible that leads into obsession and neurosis. The narrative, concerning the intense love affair between Isobel and Mick Rose, is a tangled chronology; scenes alternate between their relationship's lust-filled early days to the twisted, detached end days.
Despite being in love, Isobel yearns for transformation, and beyond that, transfiguration. Love is not enough. David Alexander (in the patriarchal sciencist/doctor role seen in The New Rays), a mediator for the promises of total enablement late-capitalist society confers on the individual, facilitates Isobel's transformation.
She returns home after her treatment as foretold by the poetically laconic title of the story, with its metaphors of re-birth. But Isobel has transformed into something eerie and unsettling, something post-human. There is spring-like new growth but nothing natural about her new state.
Empty (1995)
Set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, the ghosts of the dead, the moors murders, missing children haunt this story of ageing, death and of how the past indelibly marks itself on a landscape.
Seven Guesses of the Heart (1996)
Falkender, an old magician and his wife are grieving over the loss of their daughter through some magical mishap. Set in the land of Autotelia, the quiet realism of this story focuses on the characters, their grieving and their loss with subtle shifts of mood, atmosphere and feeling. Another sad and beautiful tale.
The East (1996)
The narrator befriends and later follows a strange old refugee as he visits sites around London. The old man says he comes from the land of Autotellia, (see Seven Guesses of the Heart). Harrison describes the outsider immigrant experience and milieu reminiscent of Iain Sinclair / Rachel Lichenstein's Rodinsky's Room.
Science & The Arts (1999)
The early days of relationship between writer and artist. Quantum mechanics and the body. The injured woman, healed. The wound becomes naturalised. The bleeding, part of life.
This brief final story is a kind of summation, an insight into Harrison's concerns and a fitting end to a masterful collection. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
More M John Harrison reviews at kulchurkat.uk
There are a few tropes and themes that occur throughout these stories. Dislocation in urban environments and a movement to healing in wilderness and isolated places, like moors and mountains. The idea of transformation. The desire to escape the quotidian. Reality's strong gravitational pull on that desire. Fantasy as consolation. It is the pull and push of these forces that set up the inner dynamics of many of these stories.
The stories appear chronologically and the earliest here, Settling The World, is from 1975 when Harrison was still editor of New Worlds magazine. It is the most distinctive fantastical science-fiction story here, and in this way it is at odds with the rich realism apparent in the rest of this collection. It opens with a paragraph of light brevity which tells of the discovery of God, his return to earth and society's transformation into a utopia as a result. The narrator falls in with Estrades, a rebel, an anarchist, who wants to destroy God. Although there is something of the Ballardian hero in Estrades, he is a typical Harrison protagonist; a character going against the grain, rebelling against the mundane, obsessed, looking for transformation, the ecstatic.
Running Down (1975)
Recounts the dysfunctional and destructive relationship between Egerton, the narrator, recovering from a mountaineering accident, and Lyall, an acquaintance from his Cambridge days. Lyall has a dark energy about him ("he carried his own entropy around with him,") that seems to influence the disintegration of objects and relationships. This erosion is echoed in the background as the political system breaks down with the rise of the Patriotic Front, and Britain is engulfed in violence ("and by noon England, seventy or eighty years too late, was taking her first hesitant but heady steps into this century of violence.") With the scenes set in the Central Fells, Lake District, there is a strong sense of place evoked, of wild nature, liminal spaces at the edges of civilisation, primal space.
The Incalling (1978)
Austin, the narrator is invited by Clerk to the Incalling, an occult ritual. Over the course of the next few weeks Austin observes the weird instigators of the ceremony, the peculiar Sprake family, and watches the dissolution of Clerk. The occult ritual is another of Harrison's preoccupations, which will be seen again in The Great God Pan in this collection and in the novel The Course of the Heart. Harrison is generally not concerned with the purpose or aims of the ritual. Here, Austin is skeptical and questions its authenticity, seeing it as something of a sham, the Sprakes as charlatans. Harrison is interested in the ritual as an operation to incite profound change on his characters' psyches. They desire change, transformation, escape or healing and the ritual mediates that desire.
The Ice Monkey (1980)
An achingly beautiful and enigmatic tale that could be a seminal text for Harrison, as it marks a shift into the mature style seen in the rest of the stories in this collection. It concentrates in a few brilliant pages Harrison's concerns of desire, memory, obsession in the face of a bleak, run-down reality.
Jones, impractical to all else in the world except rock climbing in which he excels, has conceded all his connections to society. He asks Spider, the narrator, to help in practical concerns like liaising with his estranged wife over maintenance payments. Maureen lives in a dilapidated flat at the centre of an urban wasteland, "the ruins of East London, the rain", from which she surveys the broken landscape, like an abandoned lady in a tower, "Maureen, in E3 where all horizons are remembered ones, dwelling on vanished freedoms."
The writing is beautiful, Harrison captures the characters' inner states of mind and subtle atmospheres of time and place in a single sentence: "Jones in a cafe, watching with his head tilted intelligently to one side as the sparse traffic groaned away south and a kind of mucoid grayness crept into the place through its steamed up windows." The characters seem real, dialogue rings true, there is a strong sense of life as it is lived. There is an undercurrent of poignant despondency to the whole thing, of loss, death, defeat and forgetting.
The Ice Monkey title and three brief sentences concerning a necklace add a faint supernatural element that is at odds with the rest of the story. The fact that the story was written for Ramsey Campbell's New Terrors horror anthology gives a context to this tale that invites a certain kind of reading to it, even though the text resists that reading. There is a kind of textual friction at play here, forcing a certain reading of the text and denying it at the same time. Which all adds to the enigmatic power and brilliance of this story.
Egnaro (1981)
Lucas, a second-hand fantasy book store owner, becomes obsessed with Egnaro, a fantastical land at the edges of the known world. The pragmatic narrator, his accountant, has no time for Lucas' fantasies, viewing his fantasy books as feeding a longing for the past, the simplicity of childhood, when desires were more easily consummated. To him, fantasy is merely adolescent desire. Lucas' obsession takes over and his livelihood and his health suffer.
The setting of Deansgate is vividly realised in its dishevelled state of urban neglect. A transient urban space where office workers and students pass through the rundown streets on their way to their destinations. The bitter winter winds blowing through the drab streets are contrasted with the warm sun-soaked landscapes of Egnaro. Deansgate is a society without a culture or a soul. Why wouldn't you chose the fantasy when reality is this bleak? So fantasy is a consolation to the quotidian mundanity of life. But it is more than merely escapism. Egnaro is many things, a fantastic realm at the edges of reality, the conspiracy to keep its location hidden, a longing for childhood simplicity, a desire for what is lost. Desire itself. Also and maybe the most obvious, it is orange spelt backwards. Even in the title, Harrison undercuts the romantic longing with the banal.
The New Rays (1982)
The first appearance in this collection of Harrison's recurring character type - the very ill woman, or the Fisher Queen as China Mielville calls her. (see also Ann in The Great God Pan, Isobel in both Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring and the novel Signs of Life, Mona in Science and the Arts. From his novels, Audsley King in In Viriconium, Pam Stuyvesant in Course of the Heart, Anna Kearney in both Light and Empty Space.)
The Quarry (1983)
The narrator is recovering in Yorkshire moors from an emotional breakdown in the city. Convalescing in nature, he is pulled back to the quarry of the title. There he dreams of the Green Woman, a twist on the pagan green man of folk tales. He keeps running into a an odd couple, which he watches with fascination - a blind woman and a paraplegic man, they are co-dependent on one another, and seem to transform ino one beast. With the quarry and its environs, Harrison's great nature writing evokes a strong sense of place.
Small Heirlooms (1987)
Kit, returns to her writer brother's house to take charge of his literary estate after his death. She reads his diaries which recount his pre-war travels in Austria. Sex and tarot with a gypsy girl. She wonders what death befell the the girl after the rise of Nazi Germany? She wonders about their child. She dreams. She awakes to the smell of attar of roses perfume, haunted by her brother's concerns, the ghosts of the past.
The Great God Pan (1988)
This story charts the last despondent meetings, the end of the relationship between the narrator, Lucas and Ann, who are bound together by the magical ritual they participated in as students at Cambridge twenty years before . The ritual itself, its purpose and what was involved, is never disclosed, indeed the narrator has lost all memory of it. But there are hints in the text that it enabled the participants to access the enigmatic Pleroma, of which nothing else is told. The participants now pay a high price for this access. They are all damaged in some mental or physical way, none more than Ann, who suffers from epilepsy, migraine headaches, is paranoid and anxious. Lucas suffers from hallucinations and illness. The cost of accessing the Pleroma has, as Lucas puts it, "ruined something in ourselves."
The Gift (1988)
Nine alternating chapters depict Sophia and Peter Ebert's separate lives in the same city. Both are solitary, lonely figures. Sophia lost in alcoholism and casual sex. Ebert's life is suddenly given meaning when he receives a tattered book by a stranger on the underground, the book becomes his obsession. The narrative charts their journey to each other.
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever (1989)
Structured into ten chapters named after cards of the Tarot. Like a piece of performance art, a young man bestows meaning to objects and events from train journeys chosen using the Tarot deck. Meaning is seen to be ultimately mutable, randomly assigned.
"Two men were molding in brass something which looked at first sight like the stripped carcass of a turkey that exact, sharp-edged cage of bone which reveals itself so thoroughly through all the strips and flaps of flesh after Christmas dinner. It turned out, though, to be something less interesting, a classical figurine, a Poseidon or Prometheus which systematically lost its magic as the layers of casting material were knocked off carefully with the back of an axe. This was so essentially disappointing – a striptease by which, by removing veils of strangeness and alien signification, the sculptor revealed a value ordinarily and easily understood."
There is something essential to Harrison's writing in the opening paragraph quoted above and shows his attitude to writing within genre and writing in general. He is not interested in the ordinary and the easily understood, the comforting tropes and cliches of genre. His is the pursuit of the reality of things, the struggle with language to depict something not overused, hackneyed, but true, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that language itself may not be up to the task. The next paragraph, in which the narrator replaces the disappointment of the foundry he saw on TV with one of the imagination, offers a solution to the consequent question, then why write at all?
"Another foundry, somewhere in the night, somewhere in history, in which something like a horse's skull (not a horse's head: a skull, which looks nothing like a horse at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, a wicked, intelligent–looking purposeless thing which cannot speak) came out of the mold, and all the founders were immediately executed to keep the secret. They had known all along this would happen to them. These men wear the great craftsmen and engineers of their day. They could have looked for more from life. Yet they crammed down their fear and got on with the work, and afterwards made no attempt to escape."
Gifco (1992)
Gifco is another high point in this anthology. The narrator and his wife are, in their own separate ways, dealing with the death of their daughter. Neither openly grieving, they seem to be repressing their grief, moving away from their old family house, starting life anew in Peckham. A derelict house across the street from their new home, with the word Gifco scrawled on a boarded up window, begins to play a dark role in their lives.
The internal space of the Gifco house seems to operate outside of reality. He can hear the lunch-time traffic outside, but inside this dark interior feels more like the narrator’s inner space, his psyche where dark happenings occur. The place where his mental disorder is made real. A space cut off from reality, a space out of time and place (almost Lovecraftian.)
The narrator is cold and unemotional and the reader is kept a distance from events by his impassive recital. He puts a strong emphasis on his dreams; within which meanings and language isn’t fixed. His dreams seem to reveal his repressed feelings. The reader can never be quite sure of what the narrator is disclosing is in fact reality as the narrative itself starts to take place within "that zone of slippage between waking and dreaming." It’s as though his repressed grief has erupted into the narrative itself, disrupting the quotidian with the weird and the uncanny.
He has a terse relationship with his wife; there is no mutual consolation between them. The narrative is littered with her brusque, indifferent exchanges and we intuit her deep dissatisfaction. Her inscrutability is not diminished in the memories of his holiday in Tenerife, where he would meet his wife. Their first meetings show that there never was an emotional intimacy between them; and their physical intimacy was determined by her omnivorous, insatiate desire.
It is also in the Tenerife memories that the psychological source of the Gifco house is disclosed. The darkly enigmatic character of Allo Johnnie looms over these passages. The Gifco graffiti resounds with the narrator so much, it as though the narrator’s subconscious has made a strange kind of connection with the meeting of his wife and the death of the daughter, with the character of Allo Johnnie as some preternatural dark midwife to this association.
Despite the unsympathetic characters, it is the emotional punch of this story that remains with the reader. There is a deep sense of loss here. Memory, identity and a sense of indeterminacy. Nothing is fixed. Everyone lost within their inner selves, slave to their own obsessions and false desires..
It is interesting to read M. John Harrison’s blog entry on Gifco as a postscript of sorts:
Those who have failed to regulate the self. Those whose behaviours enact a medicating fiction. Those who flew to the Canary Islands on a cheap ticket in December 1991 & left the remains of their personality in the apartment hotel. Those who ran from everything in a zig-zag pattern, so fast they never found the transitional object. The unsoothed. The dysmorphic. The unconditional. Those who were naive enough to take what they needed & thus never got what they wanted & whose dreams are now severe. Those who were amazed by their own hand. The confused. The pliable. Those who look at the sea & immediately suffer a grief unconstrained but inarticulable. Gifco is coming. Gifco you are always with us. Gifco we are here!
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring (1994)
A seminal M. John Harrison short story in which all the author's obsessions appear, notably the profound yearning for the impossible that leads into obsession and neurosis. The narrative, concerning the intense love affair between Isobel and Mick Rose, is a tangled chronology; scenes alternate between their relationship's lust-filled early days to the twisted, detached end days.
Despite being in love, Isobel yearns for transformation, and beyond that, transfiguration. Love is not enough. David Alexander (in the patriarchal sciencist/doctor role seen in The New Rays), a mediator for the promises of total enablement late-capitalist society confers on the individual, facilitates Isobel's transformation.
She returns home after her treatment as foretold by the poetically laconic title of the story, with its metaphors of re-birth. But Isobel has transformed into something eerie and unsettling, something post-human. There is spring-like new growth but nothing natural about her new state.
Empty (1995)
Set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, the ghosts of the dead, the moors murders, missing children haunt this story of ageing, death and of how the past indelibly marks itself on a landscape.
Seven Guesses of the Heart (1996)
Falkender, an old magician and his wife are grieving over the loss of their daughter through some magical mishap. Set in the land of Autotelia, the quiet realism of this story focuses on the characters, their grieving and their loss with subtle shifts of mood, atmosphere and feeling. Another sad and beautiful tale.
The East (1996)
The narrator befriends and later follows a strange old refugee as he visits sites around London. The old man says he comes from the land of Autotellia, (see Seven Guesses of the Heart). Harrison describes the outsider immigrant experience and milieu reminiscent of Iain Sinclair / Rachel Lichenstein's Rodinsky's Room.
Science & The Arts (1999)
The early days of relationship between writer and artist. Quantum mechanics and the body. The injured woman, healed. The wound becomes naturalised. The bleeding, part of life.
This brief final story is a kind of summation, an insight into Harrison's concerns and a fitting end to a masterful collection. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
More M John Harrison reviews at kulchurkat.uk
January 7, 2008
Kitchen sink gothic horror magical surrealism but very English...only Ligotti and Borges are worthwhile comparisons for these beautiful tales..also of note this is some of the best prose being written anywheres...
December 19, 2012
A member of a science fiction/fantasy discussion group suggested this book to me.
Two stories I consider outstanding:
"Eganro" I mentioned this story before on goodreads. The narrator observes his employer descend into delusion due to the influence of a book.
"Running Down" In this story, the narrator observes a man who causes an increase of entropy around him--things break down, he is accident prone, even the earth shook.
Other stories I though highly of: "The Gift" is another story about an imaginary book. In this story, one of the main characters is given a unique book. The book is somewhat damaged; some parts of the text is missing, even part of the book's title. And this person can't find a complete copy of this book; it may truly be one of a kind. I think readers who enjoy fiction about imaginary books would enjoy this story.
"Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring" is a near future science fiction/horror story, about a woman who undergoes a treatment in order to realize her dream. The result is hideous.
"A Young Man's Journey to London" is about a secret, magical portal.
"The Neon Heart Murders", I conjecture, is influenced by Borges and Lem. The detective in this story discovers a pattern to a series of murders; the murderer, though, is the nature of reality itself.
Another influence on the stories in this book, I submit, is Hemingway. M. John Harrison _shows_, and avoids an occupational hazard of the science fiction/fantasy writer: the info dump. But because the subject matter is somewhat divorced from contemporary reality, the stories might seem somewhat opaque; the reader has to infer some things.
To conclude, I highly recommend this book for those who want to read well written fantastical stories.
Two stories I consider outstanding:
"Eganro" I mentioned this story before on goodreads. The narrator observes his employer descend into delusion due to the influence of a book.
"Running Down" In this story, the narrator observes a man who causes an increase of entropy around him--things break down, he is accident prone, even the earth shook.
Other stories I though highly of: "The Gift" is another story about an imaginary book. In this story, one of the main characters is given a unique book. The book is somewhat damaged; some parts of the text is missing, even part of the book's title. And this person can't find a complete copy of this book; it may truly be one of a kind. I think readers who enjoy fiction about imaginary books would enjoy this story.
"Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring" is a near future science fiction/horror story, about a woman who undergoes a treatment in order to realize her dream. The result is hideous.
"A Young Man's Journey to London" is about a secret, magical portal.
"The Neon Heart Murders", I conjecture, is influenced by Borges and Lem. The detective in this story discovers a pattern to a series of murders; the murderer, though, is the nature of reality itself.
Another influence on the stories in this book, I submit, is Hemingway. M. John Harrison _shows_, and avoids an occupational hazard of the science fiction/fantasy writer: the info dump. But because the subject matter is somewhat divorced from contemporary reality, the stories might seem somewhat opaque; the reader has to infer some things.
To conclude, I highly recommend this book for those who want to read well written fantastical stories.
March 8, 2022
This collection ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the best stories are among the finest written in any genre, mingling a sense of the uncanny with an unerring eye for the abject realities of post-Thatcherite Britain: an important collection.
August 10, 2020
The real deal.
November 16, 2017
Things That Never Happen. It's an apt title for a collection of strange, disturbing, thought-provoking stories. Harrison has long been a favourite author of mine and half of this collection I'd read years ago when it was published as The Ice Monkey. That book is here collected with a later collection (Travel Arrangements) and so we have a set of stories ranging from 1975 right up to 2000.
Harrison's development as a write over this period is palpable. Early stories betray an obsession with insect tropes (Settling The World) which found it's apotheosis in the Viriconium novel A Storm of Wings in 1980. The other-worldliness of the insect informs his Science Fiction and Fantasy writings at this stage. Running Down, a tale of entropy and decay as a metaphor for mid 70s Britain (indeed, as a metaphor for today) is an early classic with the world literally collapsing around the protagonist.
Several stories here are either dry runs for tales later expanded into novels (The Ice Monkey was the basis for his superb novel Climbers), or excised parts from an early draft of a novel (The Great God Pan formed part of an early version of his masterpiece, The Course of The Heart). But these are great stories in their own right. Harrison's writing is powerful, his prose evocative and disturbing at the same time.
Later stories play with the idea of the nature of reality. Beneath this world, if you scratch the surface of reality, lie altogether stranger worlds, none of them benign. A couple of the later stories introduce the imagined land of Autotelia, which, like Viriconium before it, is nowhere and everywhere, both real and unreal.
That is the nature of Harrison's writing: he haunts the margin between worlds, dimensions, drawing surreal horrors from the everyday and strangeness from the ordinary and mundane. He is a powerful writer well worth your time.
Harrison's development as a write over this period is palpable. Early stories betray an obsession with insect tropes (Settling The World) which found it's apotheosis in the Viriconium novel A Storm of Wings in 1980. The other-worldliness of the insect informs his Science Fiction and Fantasy writings at this stage. Running Down, a tale of entropy and decay as a metaphor for mid 70s Britain (indeed, as a metaphor for today) is an early classic with the world literally collapsing around the protagonist.
Several stories here are either dry runs for tales later expanded into novels (The Ice Monkey was the basis for his superb novel Climbers), or excised parts from an early draft of a novel (The Great God Pan formed part of an early version of his masterpiece, The Course of The Heart). But these are great stories in their own right. Harrison's writing is powerful, his prose evocative and disturbing at the same time.
Later stories play with the idea of the nature of reality. Beneath this world, if you scratch the surface of reality, lie altogether stranger worlds, none of them benign. A couple of the later stories introduce the imagined land of Autotelia, which, like Viriconium before it, is nowhere and everywhere, both real and unreal.
That is the nature of Harrison's writing: he haunts the margin between worlds, dimensions, drawing surreal horrors from the everyday and strangeness from the ordinary and mundane. He is a powerful writer well worth your time.
March 27, 2015
Slightly opaque stories that both demand and reward multiple readings: like Harrison's Viriconium stories (and novels) the tales collected here seem to trace their ways around the edges of the lives and events they depict. A Viriconium story actually appears in this collection, in a modified (Non-Viriconium) form: "A Young Man's Journey to London" is essentially "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" probably adapted for mainstream (non-sf/fantasy) publication somewhere, or is it the other way around? There are 24 tales in this collection, and I enjoyed each and every one of them: especially those that seemed the most opaque and elliptical. Harrison's strength lies in implying stories rather than in telling them, and he (like Iain M. Banks and China Mieville) crafts some of the most haunting/startling images in creative fiction that usually slips between genres. For those who have read his later novels, "Nova Swing" there's a pleasant surprise called "The Neon Heart Murders", though I must say that I find myself returning again, and again (and again) to "The East" an improbable story that is driven more by mood and milieu than by plot. As with all good writers, one doesn't read Harrison so much as one experiences him. For me, that's a good thing.
September 13, 2012
Van Vogt, a much celebrated and disputed master of Golden Age SF, wrote a huge body of short stories, many of which have been scaled into novels. He called these "fixups." The stories found in Things that Never Happen, or at least snippets of them have eventually found their way into novels like Climbers, Light, The Course of the Heart, Nova Swing, and even his latest publication, Empty Space (which seems to me to be a nexus of his works, with a little from everything).
You arrive at the narrative at a point where the main event has occurred; you are merely experiencing the aftermath. The information is incomplete, to you, at least, and this is often true for the protagonist as well. You see them struggle with these issues, and fail, for the most part of it. Memory is an enemy, haunting the thoughts as they try to leave behind the weirdness of it all. You leave the story, which is not a conventional short story in its truest sense, slightly guilty, as if you've just watched a woman change her clothes in an open window from an empty street at midnight.
A pervasive theme here is Harrison's preoccupation with light—I would venture to call it an obsession—and how it relates to perception. He expertly creates atmospheric landscape which seem to drive the plot instead of any real relationship between characters. You see his skill grow, and marvel at his skill at creating different kinds of light. It suffuses the narrative in a dreamy glow or delineates it with the harsh shadows of fluorescent lighting.
You arrive at the narrative at a point where the main event has occurred; you are merely experiencing the aftermath. The information is incomplete, to you, at least, and this is often true for the protagonist as well. You see them struggle with these issues, and fail, for the most part of it. Memory is an enemy, haunting the thoughts as they try to leave behind the weirdness of it all. You leave the story, which is not a conventional short story in its truest sense, slightly guilty, as if you've just watched a woman change her clothes in an open window from an empty street at midnight.
A pervasive theme here is Harrison's preoccupation with light—I would venture to call it an obsession—and how it relates to perception. He expertly creates atmospheric landscape which seem to drive the plot instead of any real relationship between characters. You see his skill grow, and marvel at his skill at creating different kinds of light. It suffuses the narrative in a dreamy glow or delineates it with the harsh shadows of fluorescent lighting.
October 16, 2013
Enchanting, uncanny and mysterious. Underpinning many of these stories is the theme of desire, of people dreaming of the impossible and what happens to them in their attempts to get what they so badly want. I think what impressed me most is Harrison's ability to ground the bizarre and fantastical in the banalities of everyday experience and the realistic psychological imperatives of his characters, that and his obvious technical prowess and seductive prose. One of Britain's best living writers without a doubt.
August 12, 2016
A powerful collection of beautifully wriiten stories. Harrison has the ability to make the ordinary extraordinary, and vice versa. The horror in the stories is inernalised and that is what makes them so compelling. This is a collection that should maybe not be gulped down in a single sitting, but savoured and enjoyed.
October 16, 2009
Poetic writer who can't quite be called lyrical--like all nerves are open in description and narration. Bleak-ish but not bleak because the fiction is so lush in a sensory way. New discovery for me, and wondering why I didn't run into his work before--another sudden find amongst the library stacks.
March 31, 2024
Harrison naturally defies genre. He leans toward his own style of fantasy realism, sometimes incorporating elements of surreal and psychological horror. A vampire story with a twist describes the victim's reality-changing experience. One of the pieces closer to recognizable science fiction describes man having direct visual contact with God. The intent? Revenge! "I Did It" is a personal favorite; it’s absurdist bathos with a wry but simple punchline.
"Anima" and "Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring" are extracts (or perhaps early creations) from the novel Signs Of Life. They describe an actual faery visitation, and a woman whose dream of avian transformation turns to nightmare. These are both more succinct and powerful as short stories than their role in the novel, the titles alone are more meaningful.
It's all heady stuff! The topics explore social commentary, science, religious themes, tarot meditation applied to the physical world, Jungian fantasy (the keywords Anima, and Sophia are subtle clues!). The uniting substrate is metaphysics: human inner struggle, and the wonder of our existence.
Accomplished magus, M. John Harrison, folds his glamour in imaginative prose, enriched with complex meaning and with winking gems that sometimes succeed to distract. These are stories meant to be re-read for deeper meaning (or for high-brow escapism when that proves too difficult!)
This short story omnibus collects The Ice Monkey, Travel Arrangements and a few additional works, all spanning the 70s through the early 2000s, and some periods less identifiable!
Harrison uses a technique in in "The Gift" and "Neon Heart Murders" familiar to Viriconium fans. The city is described identically in each, reinforcing a shared mythological setting:
"Egnaro" is a passage to an ephemeral alternate world (has anyone else spotted the orange?):
"Settling the World" has a world-weary, knowing tone:
An example of wonderfully distracting imagery:
Welcome to a disturbing world where science has engineered mute, but very real golems in "The New Rays":
Dr. Alexandre is the Frankenstein who has brought these beings into the world 'because he could':
“The Quarry” is a fractured retreat where one's physical presence doesn't guarantee being able to see reality, nor being seen by it:
"The Great God Pan" is also inexplicably disturbing. A visitation from the god of chaos leaves strange, residual effects; lost senses are briefly restored:
A character in "The Gift" is named Sophia. Is this an intentional reference to classical wisdom? You bet!
"The Horse of Iron" is a stand-out piece framing metaphysical questions as an illusionist poses a trick:
"Anima" is intellectually and visually imaginative:
"Suicide Coast" puts the individual's control on the road on a speeding motorcycle:
You'll find a provocative blend of metaphysics and gum-shoe mystery in "The Neon Heart Murders." The trope may seem familiar, but there's no room allowed for cliches:
"Anima" and "Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring" are extracts (or perhaps early creations) from the novel Signs Of Life. They describe an actual faery visitation, and a woman whose dream of avian transformation turns to nightmare. These are both more succinct and powerful as short stories than their role in the novel, the titles alone are more meaningful.
It's all heady stuff! The topics explore social commentary, science, religious themes, tarot meditation applied to the physical world, Jungian fantasy (the keywords Anima, and Sophia are subtle clues!). The uniting substrate is metaphysics: human inner struggle, and the wonder of our existence.
Accomplished magus, M. John Harrison, folds his glamour in imaginative prose, enriched with complex meaning and with winking gems that sometimes succeed to distract. These are stories meant to be re-read for deeper meaning (or for high-brow escapism when that proves too difficult!)
This short story omnibus collects The Ice Monkey, Travel Arrangements and a few additional works, all spanning the 70s through the early 2000s, and some periods less identifiable!
Harrison uses a technique in in "The Gift" and "Neon Heart Murders" familiar to Viriconium fans. The city is described identically in each, reinforcing a shared mythological setting:
In the malls fluorescent light skids off the surfaces of hard and soft designer goods: matte plastics, foams of lace and oyster satin,
"Egnaro" is a passage to an ephemeral alternate world (has anyone else spotted the orange?):
Lucas seemed to vanish into his own fiction; and all I could do was stare at my reflection in the cracked plate glass.
The secret is meaningless before you know it: and, judging by what has happened to Lucas, worthless when you do.
"Settling the World" has a world-weary, knowing tone:
"We are too old to play games. So. Take my advice. I have been here for a week, and have seen nothing in daylight but that which is already known. Go at night, go at night."
The rain died off as we walked toward one another. I wish sometimes that I had walked away instead.
An example of wonderfully distracting imagery:
... the sea, ... the gulls like white confetti at some marriage of water and air.
Welcome to a disturbing world where science has engineered mute, but very real golems in "The New Rays":
He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.
"They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define."
Dr. Alexandre is the Frankenstein who has brought these beings into the world 'because he could':
"Matter is cheap in the universe. It is disorganized, but yearns to be of use..." He put the cap carefully on his pen...
“The Quarry” is a fractured retreat where one's physical presence doesn't guarantee being able to see reality, nor being seen by it:
A handicapped couple arrived every afternoon when the quarry was most likely to be deserted. They were shy and strange, easily put off. The woman was blind, the man could not walk; together they made up some sort of organism.
He slept with his hands behind his head in a hollow between some boulders, dreaming vaguely. People parked their cars without ever knowing he was there, and went away again without him knowing they had ever been.
"The Great God Pan" is also inexplicably disturbing. A visitation from the god of chaos leaves strange, residual effects; lost senses are briefly restored:
She watched the steam rising from her coffee cup, first slowly, and then with a rapid, plaiting motion as it was caught by some tiny draft. Eddies form and break to the same rhythm on the surface of a deep, smooth river. A slow coil, a sudden whirl. What was tranquil is revealed as a mass of complications that can be resolved only as motion.
A character in "The Gift" is named Sophia. Is this an intentional reference to classical wisdom? You bet!
It is Ebert's belief that understanding ought to come by epiphany rather than by increments: it has never occurred to him how completely this might limit his intellectual reach.
"The Horse of Iron" is a stand-out piece framing metaphysical questions as an illusionist poses a trick:
This was so essentially disappointing--a striptease by which, by removing veils of strangeness and alien signification, the sculptor revealed a value ordinary and easily understood--that to replace it I turned off the TV and imagined this...
... while the fall of the cards is--or seems--random, the sequence of destinations is--or seems--controlled.
God has deconstructed the Old Universe and has learned too much to be able to build another.
"Anima" is intellectually and visually imaginative:
The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors.
... I can no longer accept a universe empty of meaning, even if I must put it there myself.
"Suicide Coast" puts the individual's control on the road on a speeding motorcycle:
On empty roads the only mistakes that need concern you are your own; every bend becomes a dreamy interrogation of your own technique. Life should be more like that.
You'll find a provocative blend of metaphysics and gum-shoe mystery in "The Neon Heart Murders." The trope may seem familiar, but there's no room allowed for cliches:
The universe now remade itself for him continually, out of a metaphor, two or three invariable rules, and a musical instrument called--for some reason known only to God--the saxophone.
July 7, 2007
This is the book that made me love the short story form. M. John Harrison is brilliant.
September 22, 2021
Reposted from my blog:
http://www.quentinlewis.com/blog/2021...
I've talked about M. John Harrison before. The topline is that he's a brilliant prose stylist, a peerless writer of landscape and the material world, and a keen observer of the complex lengths people will go to avoid confronting their own loneliness and dissatisfaction. He combines all of that with a deeply critical grasp of genre of "the fantastic" and its contradictions. Even the stories of his that don't viscerally grab me are still compelling and engaging.
I recently finished a now-out-of-print collection of his short stories called "Things that Never Happen", spanning the 1970s-1990s, though a new collection that includes many of the same stories, entitled "Settling the World" has recently been published. Here are a few stories from it that did, in fact, grab me:
The Incalling--Two men attend a somewhat hokey mysical ceremony in a house in London, and must deal with the strange and incomprehensible consequences. For my money, the creepiest story in the collection, full of barely coherent magic and the forces it can unleash on our bodies and the world around us.
The Ice Monkey--A very subtle portrait of despair, class inequality, and binding ties in Thatcherite London, painted with a cold detachment that befits the eponymous but invisible monster at the heart of the story. Harrison describes this as a horror story with all of the horrific elements removed.
Egnaro - A bookshop owner becomes obsessed with finding reference to an obscure location or condition that may or may not exist. When I first read this, in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's amazing anthology "The Weird" I saw it as a satire of the typical Lovecraftian protagonist; a person whose search for arcane knowledge devours them as easily as whatever horrors they might find. This time around, It struck me as aiming at a much deeper target, something about the ways that the fantastic allows us to paper over the contradictions of modern life. I thought about America's current obsession with finding clues and patterns in mundane things and purporting vast mysteries, and the terrible consequences that search has wrought.
Seven Guesses of the Heart- A fantasy story a magician and the death of his daughter who tried to follow in his footsteps. It's a story about male self-centeredness, and the things fathers give to (and take from) children. Heart-wrenching and strange, especially as a Dad myself.
I Did It--a funny story about football, masculinity, and hitting yourself in the head with an axe.
All of the stories in this collection are rich and engaging--I read them slowly, enjoying the gorgeous descriptions of London and rural England, wondering about the nature of Autotelia (one of Harrison's many fictional or fiction-adjacent places which pops up in multiple stories), and feeling genuine sympathy (or sometimes enmity) for his narrators and characters, who are all, in some ways, trapped in themselves by the worlds they live in.
http://www.quentinlewis.com/blog/2021...
I've talked about M. John Harrison before. The topline is that he's a brilliant prose stylist, a peerless writer of landscape and the material world, and a keen observer of the complex lengths people will go to avoid confronting their own loneliness and dissatisfaction. He combines all of that with a deeply critical grasp of genre of "the fantastic" and its contradictions. Even the stories of his that don't viscerally grab me are still compelling and engaging.
I recently finished a now-out-of-print collection of his short stories called "Things that Never Happen", spanning the 1970s-1990s, though a new collection that includes many of the same stories, entitled "Settling the World" has recently been published. Here are a few stories from it that did, in fact, grab me:
The Incalling--Two men attend a somewhat hokey mysical ceremony in a house in London, and must deal with the strange and incomprehensible consequences. For my money, the creepiest story in the collection, full of barely coherent magic and the forces it can unleash on our bodies and the world around us.
The Ice Monkey--A very subtle portrait of despair, class inequality, and binding ties in Thatcherite London, painted with a cold detachment that befits the eponymous but invisible monster at the heart of the story. Harrison describes this as a horror story with all of the horrific elements removed.
Egnaro - A bookshop owner becomes obsessed with finding reference to an obscure location or condition that may or may not exist. When I first read this, in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's amazing anthology "The Weird" I saw it as a satire of the typical Lovecraftian protagonist; a person whose search for arcane knowledge devours them as easily as whatever horrors they might find. This time around, It struck me as aiming at a much deeper target, something about the ways that the fantastic allows us to paper over the contradictions of modern life. I thought about America's current obsession with finding clues and patterns in mundane things and purporting vast mysteries, and the terrible consequences that search has wrought.
Seven Guesses of the Heart- A fantasy story a magician and the death of his daughter who tried to follow in his footsteps. It's a story about male self-centeredness, and the things fathers give to (and take from) children. Heart-wrenching and strange, especially as a Dad myself.
I Did It--a funny story about football, masculinity, and hitting yourself in the head with an axe.
All of the stories in this collection are rich and engaging--I read them slowly, enjoying the gorgeous descriptions of London and rural England, wondering about the nature of Autotelia (one of Harrison's many fictional or fiction-adjacent places which pops up in multiple stories), and feeling genuine sympathy (or sometimes enmity) for his narrators and characters, who are all, in some ways, trapped in themselves by the worlds they live in.
June 10, 2021
Settling the World ~ ★★★★
Running Down ~ ★★★★
The Incalling ~ ★★★★
The Ice Monkey ~ ★★★★
Egnaro ~ ★★★★★
Old Women ~ ★★★★
The New Rays ~ ★★★★
The Quarry ~ ★★★★★
A Young Man’s Journey to London ~ ★★★
Small Heirlooms ~ ★★★★
The Great God Pan ~ ★★★★★
The Gift ~ ★★★★
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It ~ ★★★★
Gifco ~ ★★★★
Anima ~ ★★★★
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring ~ ★★★★
Empty ~ ★★★★
Seven Guesses of the Heart ~ ★★★★
I Did It ~ ★★★
The East ~ ★★★★
Suicide Coast ~ ★★★★
The Neon Heart Murders ~ ★★★
Black Houses ~ ★★★
Science & the Arts ~ ★★★
Running Down ~ ★★★★
The Incalling ~ ★★★★
The Ice Monkey ~ ★★★★
Egnaro ~ ★★★★★
Old Women ~ ★★★★
The New Rays ~ ★★★★
The Quarry ~ ★★★★★
A Young Man’s Journey to London ~ ★★★
Small Heirlooms ~ ★★★★
The Great God Pan ~ ★★★★★
The Gift ~ ★★★★
The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It ~ ★★★★
Gifco ~ ★★★★
Anima ~ ★★★★
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring ~ ★★★★
Empty ~ ★★★★
Seven Guesses of the Heart ~ ★★★★
I Did It ~ ★★★
The East ~ ★★★★
Suicide Coast ~ ★★★★
The Neon Heart Murders ~ ★★★
Black Houses ~ ★★★
Science & the Arts ~ ★★★
May 28, 2022
I jumped around this collection of weird short stories that range from good to excellent. "Egnaro," "The Great God Pan," and "Running Down" should really be on every weird buff's favorites shortlist.
July 13, 2017
Wow, this was not for me. Fine writing, yes. But that's about it.
November 23, 2020
OK short stories
March 8, 2008
M. John Harrison's style is somewhat pretentious, but I adore his words. Things That Never Happen is a collection of short stories which have been published elsewhere throughout his career. As such, they are arranged in chronological order, and tend to get more interesting and more sophisticated as the book goes on.
It reads well as a coherent body, though, especially since many of the stories share themes, events, phrases with each other, as well as referencing or prefiguring events and characters from Light, The Course of the Heart, or Viriconium. All of the stories take place in a world very like the one we know, subtly though significantly altered in ways that are never fully explained. Many of them speak of longing for pasts that never were; places that, once glimpsed from a railway car, can never be found again. He has the most amazing way of talking around the pivotal events of a story, leaving you to reconstruct them from the negative space, letting you read between the lines of what is said and what is left unsaid. His characters, like the places in which their dramas are played out, are eccentric, dingy, flawed; but sketched with compassion and evoked so clearly with only a few precisely written sentences.
My favorite stories were: Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring, The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It, Anima, Black Houses.
It reads well as a coherent body, though, especially since many of the stories share themes, events, phrases with each other, as well as referencing or prefiguring events and characters from Light, The Course of the Heart, or Viriconium. All of the stories take place in a world very like the one we know, subtly though significantly altered in ways that are never fully explained. Many of them speak of longing for pasts that never were; places that, once glimpsed from a railway car, can never be found again. He has the most amazing way of talking around the pivotal events of a story, leaving you to reconstruct them from the negative space, letting you read between the lines of what is said and what is left unsaid. His characters, like the places in which their dramas are played out, are eccentric, dingy, flawed; but sketched with compassion and evoked so clearly with only a few precisely written sentences.
My favorite stories were: Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring, The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It, Anima, Black Houses.
November 9, 2011
Starts with a completely amazing China Mieville essay about immanence and transcendence, then the stories themselves start out (chronologically) like clunkier J.G. Ballard with more ripped-off Borges. By the end, though, you're getting glimpses of what might have happened if Dubliners allowed magical realism to seep into its epiphanies just to make the catastrophe ACHE more. (But in Thatcherite England.) Some incredibly powerful sublimity. His idea of women kinda sucks (they'd fit in Fight Club just fine), so be warned.
Anyway, there IS a story from the late 80s in which the main character is named "China" and his lover is a woman who undergoes radical genetic and surgical modification (Remaking?) to grow feathers in hopes of being able to fly. *cough*. Sorry, baby Mieville, we caught you falling in fanlove.
Anyway, there IS a story from the late 80s in which the main character is named "China" and his lover is a woman who undergoes radical genetic and surgical modification (Remaking?) to grow feathers in hopes of being able to fly. *cough*. Sorry, baby Mieville, we caught you falling in fanlove.
March 16, 2011
I seen this authors works in the back of a book and thought i would give him a try.
Most of the stories i kinda breezed thru, not really my style but enjoyed a few.
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Springs: I thought was good, had me laughin @ the end when the lady really took "I want to fly" to the next level.
Empty: This was also good, the author should start a serious with his detective he created.
I gave it 2 stars only because nothing really pulled me in, but im sure others will enjoy his stories. He really paints the picture for visual.
Most of the stories i kinda breezed thru, not really my style but enjoyed a few.
Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Springs: I thought was good, had me laughin @ the end when the lady really took "I want to fly" to the next level.
Empty: This was also good, the author should start a serious with his detective he created.
I gave it 2 stars only because nothing really pulled me in, but im sure others will enjoy his stories. He really paints the picture for visual.
September 9, 2010
Good stories, many of which though were reworked as bits in other things like Nova Swing. I never quite know how to feel about that. With Philip K. Dick it heightened the sense of unreality in his work to read the same thing over with slight differences; here it was interesting as a writer to see some of the scaffolding underpinning Harrison's writing process, but if I had read the stories before the novels it would have spoiled some of the magic Nova Swing and Light had for me.
February 23, 2013
What I've read of this book convinces me that M. John Harrison is among the really great short fiction writers. This is the first I've seen of his. I picked it up at the recommendation of a friend. I look forward to reading the "Viriconium" series, which if available in an omnibus edition by Bantam.
January 17, 2021
Short story collection daring to be anti-fantasy - non-escapist and cognizant of darker realities. God is giant fly living in another dimension; vampires offer their dark escape; man futilely searching for supernatural, peaceful, haven he believes exists peripherally. Good intro to M. John Harrison.
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April 12, 2014YAWN...........A real chore of short stories somewhat interrelated but they never get better or make any sense. Maybe someone smarter than I will be able to figure it out. I wouldn't bother with it.
June 6, 2013
Meh. There is few substance here, mostly vacated chapters from stories already told or partials that will later find their way into more established pieces. Not a disappointment but not an achievement. Only for true fans. The casual may wish to find Harrison elsewhere.
June 25, 2007
A retrospective collection of short stories from Harrison that shows both continuous development and some common themes and perspectives.
April 29, 2017
Too depressing so didn't finish.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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