Speculative Fiction Junkie

Reviews of works of science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, and related genres.

4/12/2010

Review - Beneath the Surface

Simon Strantzas

The second collection of short stories from Simon Strantzas, Cold to the Touch (review here), was my favorite book of 2009. I credit it with ushering in a frenzy of weird fiction reading on my part and my review of that book marked the beginning of a series of reviews of works of strange fiction here at Speculative Fiction Junkie that has continued to this point largely unabated. It was amazingly frustrating, therefore, to find out that his first collection, Beneath the Surface, was out of print and virtually impossible to find. It turns out that the publisher had gone out of business just as the book was being released and so only a few copies made it into the world. It took months to finally locate a copy, and the only book I've ever had to work harder to find was R.B. Russell's Putting the Pieces in Place (review here). I finally managed to track it down, however, and it was definitely worth the wait.


If the protagonists in Cold to the Touch were alienated and dispossessed, this is doubly true of those that inhabit the stories in Beneath the Surface. They are burdened with things far worse than mere alienation and are in many cases more than a little disturbed. The whole collection, in fact, feels far bleaker than Mr. Strantzas's second collection, and his writing is often much more stark.

Several of these stories really stood out. The collection's opening story,"A Shadow in God's Eye," is absolutely fantastic. In it, a man answers a flyer's summons to an unlikely church to hear a sermon about the deteriorating world. The manner in which he is given the power to see the truth is shocking and the truth itself too big for the head, to paraphrase the protagonist's impression. It's conclusion is cosmic horror of the finest sort.

"Behind Glass" is another wonderful piece. This one is freely available online and it was the first story by Mr. Strantzas that I ever read. It is as compelling a tale of corporate horror as you're likely to find and immediately brings to mind similarly toned stories by Thomas Ligotti. In it, we follow a man named Hawksley as he starts a new job with the company that bought out his former employer. If you've ever worked in a corporate environment and if you're the sort of person who enjoys weird fiction, you're going to love this story.

Also excellent was "In the Air," even if I still don't fully understand it. It is the story of a widow who returns with her sister-in-law to the small town where her husband's plane crashed. Once there, she gains a peculiar insight into the nature of existence and a glimpse similar to what her late husband must have seen from the sky.

Finally, I also thoroughly enjoyed "The Autumnal City," a tale with a feel reminiscent of The Matrix in which a worker in a monotonous city glimpses what he thinks is a chance at freedom in the form of the fleeting image of a woman dressed in white, as well as "The Constant Encroaching of a Tumultuous Sea," which displays a particularly interesting form of alienation towards the city.

The remainder of the stories in Beneath the Surface are solid even if in my opinion they lack some of the variety of tone and content that Cold to the Touch displayed. All of the stories in this collection share a similar feel: they are, at least in a sense, different aspects of a single nightmare. And while it is a compelling and fascinating vision, I think this sharper focus ends up causing this debut collection to lack some of the depth that Cold to the Touch possessed.

Nevertheless, this book is definitely one of the better collections I've read recently. Like Richard Gavin's The Darkly Splendid Realm (review here), Beneath the Surface is a strong collection punctuated here and there by near perfect stories. No one is better at writing compelling nightmares than Mr. Strantzas.

That's why it's absolutely mind boggling that the book is out of print. I don't know how the publishing world works but I can't think of a satisfactory reason why this book is still out of print.

Rating: 9/10

The True First

Beneath the Surface was originally published by the now defunct Humdrumming Press in 2008. Estimates I've heard from various sources put the number of copies at around a mere hundred.

[This review was not based on a review copy]

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