The WEIRD (29)

Real-Time Review continued from HERE.

The WEIRD:  A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
First published in Great Britain 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

29/11/11 – another two hours later

Yellow and Red – Tanith Lee

“- again, again, like some awful pet.”

I am in two minds about this journal real-time narration (“Perhaps I shall tear out these pages“) – or in two spirits, more like.  In many ways, this is an enjoyably workmanlike inherited house story with a curse, semi-MRJamesian.  Yet, I sense something that may have left its stain or watermark or scorch upon me.  Aickman wrote a story called ‘Stains’. This story is not up to his standard, and I wonder why it has been included as a prime example of weird fiction.  However, the image of the photographs and the result of dropping whiskey on to them have left a burr of an image stuck to my mind. A negative or a positive, from the time when things weren’t digital – I’m not sure which. Maybe it will grow on me.  It is as if a symbiotically siamese-twin rorschach has grabbed the boy from the tree “writhing, flailing, screaming-” — “as if it loved him…” (my vision, not necessarily the story’s). Difficult to tear out pages from an ebook or blog…and even deletions never quite reach the deepest archive cache of all. Box-Brownie (yellow and red = brown) snapshots hold the sepia genie, a photo-genie “always too clever for me.” Perhaps like this eventually intriguing story that punches above its weight. As does this brief critique about it!

Continued as The WEIRD (30) page HERE.

Index of this whole real-time review HERE.