Conjunctions: 39, the New Wave Fabulist [Paperback]

I've been a big fan of Peter Straub's since I was totally captivated and transported by his novel GHOST STORY the summer I was 14. Peter Straub has made a name for himself over the years writing dense, deeply textured, and psychologically compelling horror novels that often deal with the dark conflicts that flow between the broken rocks of the past into the deceptively quiet flatlands of the present.

Although Straub's area of expertise is undoubtedly the novel, he's no stranger to short fiction. He's published two collections of his own shorter work, and edited a previous anthology called PETER STRAUB'S GHOSTS.

CONJUNCTIONS is definitely superior to GHOSTS, which had its moments--both good and not so good. In this latest anthology, which is consistently edgy, smart, and entertaining, Straub weaves together shorter works by some of the most talented writers working today into one impressive quilt.

CONJUNCTIONS is admittedly something of a mixed bag. The poetic musings of "serious lit" authors share the page with more plot-concerned stories from popular genre writers. I think it's all for the good, though. What you get in CONJUNCTIONS is a trick or treat pillow case stuffed with fancy rich truffles and plenty of Snickers and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. It's an interesting mixture, and you're never sure what you'll bring up next.

Of the twenty stories, only one or two are duds (the requisite black licorice-apologies to anyone who likes it.)

Stand out stories include John Crowley's wonderfully John Irving-esque "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines," Jonathan Lethem's wickedly sharp "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door," Straub's own jazz-tinged "Little Red's Tango," and Elizabeth Hand's amazingly good "The Least Trumps."

If you like reading horror stories, if you like reading "modern lit," and you're looking for something to blur the borders nice and good, this is the book to do it.

Straub's introduction doesn't tell one what a New Wave Fabulist is, but the stories do. The anthology features Crowley, Link, Harrison (M. John, not the other guy), Straub, Morrow, Hopkinson, Lethem, Haldeman, Mieville, Duncan, Wolfe (Gene), O'Leary, Carroll, Kessel, Fowler, Hand, Park, Gaiman, Wolfe (Gary) and Clute, the last two being essays. Most of the stories are slipstreamy, as I'd define it; in fact Gene Wolfe's
apparently traditional otherworld fantasy was the only exception. The majority are set in real world/present day; most are literary and sophisticated in diction; several, rather than traditional "character with a problem" plot structures, have alternative structures such as character sketches (Straub) and nested interlocking narratives (Link). The essays, of which I found Wolfe's more understandable, discuss the "New Wave Fabulist" movement in terms that sound like slipstream: authors who use tools from many different genres to produce something generally speculative-feeling, but conforming to few or no traditional genre standards.

NWF, slipstream, whatever it's called, it is certainly one, though not the only, cutting edge in SFF today, and I'd think that anyone really interested in professional publication as an SFF author would want to have a look at the book. Although I enjoyed a fair number of the stories (particularly the Duncan, Carroll and Mieville), I found a few of them a bit short on plot and conflict, too self-consciously literary.

Overall, this seems like an important anthology to me and I recommend it.