Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales by Mark BeechMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Anthologies are a hard sell. Meaning they hardly sell. I know a bit about this, having edited several volumes myself. Heck, I even won an award for editing one, a long time ago. Note that it's been a long time since I've edited a fiction anthology. I love short fiction, but editing a short fiction anthology is hard work, if you're doing it right. And it's often thankless. I remember speaking with author Stepan Chapman years ago about editing anthologies and his comment was "something for everybody to hate"! Truth.
A great anthology is one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A careful balance has to be maintained for this to work. A theme needs to be strong, but not overwhelming. And there needs to be a variety of voices, but not so varied that they all become a choir of chaos.
Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales is an anthology that could easily fall out of balance in this regard. But it largely (though not completely) succeeds. Mark Beech, the editor, thankfully took a broad approach to the theme, though there is a preponderance of stories about "poison gardens". Of course, it might be difficult to winnow down the the absolute best stories about poison gardens, but that is an editor's job - to build a collection, then hack it down to the best of the best.
The presentation is nothing short of amazing. This is a book you want to have in your collection to show off to your friends. It is beautiful, well-built, and smartly-designed. This is typical of Egaeus Press books. You know you're getting a quality artifact when buying an Egaeus volume.
Some of the stories herein are outstanding. I guessed this would be the case after looking at the table of contents. Many of my favorite contemporary authors had stories in here, and they did not disappoint. There were other authors unknown to me (which is, actually, something I always look for in an anthology - including "unknown" authors was something I prided myself on while editing), some of whose stories succeeded, some of whose didn't quite. If you're on Goodreads, you'll note I gave the anthology a four-star rating. Not because most of the stories were four-star stories, but because many were five-star stories, and a not-insignificant amount were three-star stories. With that, here are my notes on the stories:
"A Night at the Ministry" is as crisp and decadent as one should expect from
Putting the "decay" back in "decadence," the story "The Blissful Tinctires," by Jonathan Wood, marries the grinding post-grandeur of Peake's novels or Wilde's Dorian Gray with the banality of Great War England (and France, for a critical few short moments). It is a grueling, lustrous, dirty, pathetic, and triumphal read, all at once. This is Wood at his hollow, beautiful finest, mixing glory and defeat. It's a tricky story, one that you think you have figured out in the split-second before you figure out you were completely (and delightfully) wrong. I like being tricked in this way.
"Delightful" isn't the first word one would use for a story about poisoning, but Rose Biggin's "The Tartest of Flavours" is light-hearted. This tale, set in the universe of Alice in wonderland (in a slightly different guise) is, shall we say, "frivolous"? I didn't dislike it, but, at times, it seemed to be trying too hard to be cute (in a grim sort of way). Still a nice change of pace, but the weakest story to this point of the book.
Timothy Jarvis' "The Devil's Snare" is everything I would expect from his pen: carefully-crafted mythic storytelling with a limning of dry-humor and dark beauty. What I was not expecting was the ending. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming - but should the townsfolk. Alas, they are in for a big surprise. I love the mix of rather ordinary people moved to extraordinary visions here.
Rosanne Rabinowitz hits a simultaneously melancholic and celebratory mood here with "The Poison Girls". It's a long story, grazing over many years, and the main character, Marla is a complex and interesting person. The story blurs the line between the nostalgic and the imaginal, "breaking" chronological constraints in an emotionally-satisfying story of joy and grief, healing and pain. Beautiful.
I greatly enjoyed "The Invisible Worm" by Ron Weighell (if one can call cringing discomfort brought on by masterful writing "enjoyment"), but I fail to see how it fits, thematically, with the rest of the volume. I suppose it is, loosely speaking, a "poisonous" tale, but it involves no poisonous substance outside of religious fanaticism. Still, it's a great story, though it reads like an introduction to a novel.
A nice, evocative poem with a deeper story between the lines in "Chatterton, Euston, 2018" by Nina Antonia.
"Out at the Shillingate Isles" is a tragic story of a socially-rejected woman named Gert making a living in a harbor fishing village. She meets a new friend, "Low-key," who has compassion for her and her plight. He has a flair for performing strange tricks of magic. They go together on a scheme to give Gert the upper hand against her enemies, and things seem to be going great. Seem to. Four stars to Lisa L. Hannett.
When George Berguño is at the top of his game - and he is at the top of his game in "The Other Prague" - there are very few who can match his writerly voice. Calvino, Borges, Schwob . . . he stands in good company. And this story is polysemic, not content to settle on one meaning . . . or the other. All is one. And none is all.
I don't know that I've read Sheryl Humphrey's work before, but if "The Jewelled Necropolis" is an indicator of the quality of her writing, I will read her work again. This is part of the joy of reading an anthology: discovering a new (to me) author whose work I can continue to explore. I love the framing piece of an anonymous manuscript found as a result of the Federal Writer's Project, and the way Humphrey leverages it is more than just clever. It's a dreamlike tale of searching and finding a glimmer of paradise.
"Not to be Taken," by Kathleen Jennings begs the question "who is who's victim"? Or, more properly "who is the real perpetrator"? It's a story of disturbed individuals who happen to meet and orbit around each other, further disturbing the universe around them. It's a touching piece, in Its own perverse way, with very distant echoes from the decadent tradition. Four stars.
With a writerly voice reminiscent of Sarban, yet with a cuttingly-clever humor very unlike the staid Sarban, Louis Marvick, in his uniquely Marvickian way, immerses the reader in a sea of poisonous plants with "The Garden of Dr Montorio". But he takes it a step further, not only trapping the protagonist in a presumably lethal maze, but by trapping readers in a deadly story within a story. Marvick continues to amaze.
I've been effusive in my praise of Stephen J. Clark's writing. "Of Mandrake and Henbane" does nothing to quell my enthusiasm. Here the triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone are tied to The Green Man (under a slightly different guise) by a "sacred unguent" that binds them all together. This is a beautiful story of loam, love, and loathing that blossoms under Clark's deft pen.
There's a kernel of what could be a good story in Joseph Dawson's "Beyond Seeing," but it appears to me that this is a rough draft in need of serious revision. I was willing to cut some slack, but with an awkward writerly voice that is too terse and too verbose in all the wrong places, I had little patience with such a predictable plot. This is harsh, but the anthology would have been stronger without this story.
For some reason, I sometimes greatly enjoy stories that obliquely or peripherally toy with the theme of an anthology (though I do like some connection). Such is the case with Yarrow Paisley's excellent "I in the Eye". Poison plays a part, but only a small part in the larger narrative of dissociation with self and family. The writing here is fantastic, and this is one of the darkest stories in the volume. Five stars.
Jason E. Rfe's "Canned Heat" was quaint, in a disturbing way. It feels like there could have been so much more to this story; should have been more. It felt like a pedestrian effort to me.
Alison Littlewood's "Words" is a weak story, strongly told. But I'm afraid that the eloquence, in this case, doesn't outweigh the inevitability of the plot. There may be something to "tried and true" stories (I'm certain I've written a few myself), but when one can determine what's to happen when one is only a quarter of the way through the story, no amount of good writing can save it, ultimately (and unfortunately).
The tone of Carina Bissett's story "An Embrace of Poisonous Intent" is strikingly different from the rest of the book. This is high sorcerous fantasy replete with unicorns and griffins. The mythic element here is powerful, and the story excellent. It stands on its own strength, meaning it contrasts, somewhat jarringly, with the rest of the volume. But I can't fault the story itself. Viva la difference!
So overall, an excellent anthology. It has it's weaknesses, but every anthology does. The strongest stories (Murphy, Wood, Jarvis, Berguño, Humphrey, Marvick, Clark, Paisley) will infiltrate your veins and seize your brain, just as one would expect from the theme. Cheers and bottoms up!
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