The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories
The Story Until Now
Also by Kit Reed
NOVELS
Mother Isn’t Dead She’s Only Sleeping
At War As Children
The Better Part
Armed Camps
Cry of the Daughter
Tiger Rag
Captain Grownup
The Ballad of T. Rantula
Magic Time
Fort Privilege
Catholic Girls
Little Sisters of the Apocalypse
J. Eden
@expectations
Thinner Than Thou
Bronze
The Baby Merchant
Enclave
SHORT STORIES
Mr. Da V. and Other Stories
The Killer Mice
Other Stories and The Attack of the Giant Baby
The Revenge of the Senior Citizens *Plus*
Thief of Lives
Weird Women, Wired Women
Seven for the Apocalypse
Dogs of Truth
What Wolves Know
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2013 Kit Reed
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Katherine B. Kimball
Typeset in Minion by A. W. Bennett, Inc.
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reed, Kit.
The story until now: a great big book of stories / Kit Reed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8195-7349-0 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8195-7350-6 (ebook)
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3568.E367S76 2013
813′.54—dc23
2012026804
5 4 3 2 1
For Joe,
who’s been in this with me from the beginning
with much, much love
Contents
Scoping the Exits: The Short Fiction of Kit Reed
GARY K. WOLFE
Denny
The Attack of the Giant Baby
What Wolves Know
Automatic Tiger
Wherein We Enter the Museum
High Rise High
Piggy
Song of the Black Dog
Weston Walks
How It Works
Precautions
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Family Bed
The Singing Marine
In the Squalus
Perpetua
Pilots of the Purple Twilight
Sisohpromatem
On the Penal Colony
The Food Farm
In Behalf of the Product
Songs of War
Winter
The Weremother
Voyager
Old Soldiers
Incursions
The Bride of Bigfoot
The Zombie Prince
Grand Opening
Special
Monkey Do
The Outside Event
The Legend of Troop 13
The Wait
Scoping the Exits
The Short Fiction of Kit Reed
GARY K. WOLFE
There has always been an oddly passive-aggressive relationship between American literature and the fantastic. Almost from the beginning, a familiar myth has been the notion of bringing order to wilderness, of subduing chaos, of constructing a rational society and rational institutions, of building roads and cities and eventually suburbs and high-rises and shopping malls. But the unsubdued aspects of wildness have an unsettling way of reasserting themselves; the cities and suburbs can become their own sort of wilderness; the roads can seem to lead nowhere; the rational society can become a dystopia. Fantastic literature, whether it takes the form of the Gothic, of science fiction, or of fantasy, is at its best a literature that explores implications, that aggressively excavates the assumptions behind our sunny plans and rational dreams and shows us where they might really lead. This is one reason the fantastic has been such a persistent strain in American writing, from Hawthorne and Poe and Melville through Twain and L. Frank Baum up to H. P. Lovecraft and Robert A. Heinlein.
By the time we get to the last two writers on that list, however, an odd thing had begun to happen to American fantastic literature: it had begun to calve off genres, modes of writing that appealed to specific audiences and markets with particular tastes and desires. Usually, when we think of fantastic literature today, we think in terms of those genres, particularly science fiction, fantasy, and horror. But at the same time, there has been a persistent tradition of fantastic writing that doesn’t easily fit into convenient categories, but that makes use of their unique resources. This is a broader tradition than we might at first think, and has deeper roots; it’s one of the reasons we can find the occasional fantastic tale by Henry James, Edith Wharton, or Willa Cather. Even after the rise of the pulp magazines and paperbacks that helped define the pop genres, this kind of free-range fantastic continued to appear in the literary or general-interest magazines and mainstream publishing lists, and as late as the 1940s we can find examples of it in the work of writers as diverse as John Collier, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Robert Coates, Roald Dahl, and Shirley Jackson.
This, I think, is the sort of literary space that much of the work of Kit Reed occupies. She has not been averse to publishing her stories in genre magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction or Asimov’s (along with venues such as The Yale Review or The Village Voice Literary Supplement—all are represented in this collection), but by the time her career began, toward the end of the 1950s, some of those genre-based magazines had begun to broaden their scope to include the literary fantastic, while many of the mainstream fiction markets either folded entirely (Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post) or turned to what Michael Chabon has described as “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” It may be no coincidence that Shirley Jackson published her last New Yorker story in 1953 and her first in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1954—or that it was the latter magazine which published Reed’s first story, “The Wait,” in 1958. This disturbing tale of a mother and daughter trapped in a strange town with an even stranger ritual might well have appeared in The New Yorker nine years earlier, when it published Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a tale with which it clearly resonates, but by 1958 The New Yorker had largely moved away from any trace of the fantastic.
Reed’s near-legendary reputation may have to do in part with the simple fact that her career began with such an accomplished story more than a half century ago, but it has more to do with how she has continued to produce such stories with astonishing regularity ever since, never quite falling into any particular genre but never quite getting trapped by mainstream literary fashions such as the quotidian moment-of-truth tradition that Chabon describes. She has never stopped being a bit of a rebel with a unique and sometimes quirky voice, and this may occasionally have landed her in the interstices between various fictional categories (the term she uses for herself, and possibly invented, is trans-genred). It was probably to her advantage that some of the most visionary editors in science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s were actively on the prowl for such distinctive voices—not only Anthony Boucher, Robert Mills, and Avram Davidson at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but Michael Moorcock at New Worlds, Damon Knight in his series of Orbit
original anthologies, Harry Harrison in Nova, and others.
Reed’s mordantly satiric and sharply funny take on beauty pageants “In Behalf of the Product,” with its devastating final line, was written for an anthology edited by Thomas M. Disch, a writer whose acerbic sensibility and finely tuned prose sometimes resembled Reed’s. He must have found the story absolutely delicious, because up until then no one would have expected a dystopian tale about beauty queens, just as no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. But story after Reed story comes blustering into the room like those Monty Python characters, frequently offering the same sort of ominous-but-absurd comic edge. For a while in the 1960s this sort of thing was called Black Humor, another movement in which Reed both does and doesn’t belong. Even some of her more recent stories take such delirious riffs on popular culture and current events that parts of them would hardly be out of place in stand-up comedy. The Sultan of Brunei buys a bankrupt Yankee Stadium in “Grand Opening” (after Americans finally came to realize that baseball is boring) and turns it into a gigantic mall whose grand opening features a ritualized tribute baseball game with an aging Salman Rushdie throwing out the first pitch while being stalked by an equally ancient assassin, apparently the only one who didn’t get the memo about the fatwah being over. “On the Penal Colony” similarly rams together wildly disparate elements such as ill-conceived correctional systems and tacky historical reenactment tourist traps, with nods to both H. P. Lovecraft and the Kafka story whose title it nearly borrows: here, prisoners are sentenced to serve as historical actors in a Salem-like historical village called Arkham, though some particularly gruesome punishments are part of the system as well. “High Rise High,” one of her most famous stories, borrows elements of every school-rebellion move ever made, from Zero for Conduct to Rock ’n’ Roll High School, with elements of Escape from New York thrown in: the school of the title is essentially a maximum security prison sealed from the outside world in order to let intransigent students run wild apart from society—until they start in on hostages, kidnappings, and raids into local neighborhoods.
Reed’s association with editors and writers such as Moorcock, Knight, and Disch, along with stories that ranged from her similarly dark comic take on weight-loss farms in “The Food Farm” (in Knight’s Orbit) to an absurdist fable about a poetry-generating pink colt (“Piggy”) to a literary jape on Kafka (“Sisohpromatem”). The latter appeared in the British New Worlds, and led to her occasional association with science fiction’s “New Wave” of the 1960s, a movement spearheaded by Moorcock whose basic purpose, notwithstanding various barricade-storming manifestos and editorials, was simply to expand the scope of what could be done in science fiction. Reed had been doing this quite on her own before the New Wave had taken shape, of course, and would continue to do so long after, but it’s not an unreasonable association, and Reed remains one of a handful of still-practicing American writers associated with this influential movement (and one of an even smaller handful of American women; the only others who quickly come to mind are Carol Emshwiller and Pamela Zoline). Both her first collection, Mr. Da V. and Other Stories (1967) and her first science fiction novel, Armed Camps (1969), with its grim view of a decaying near-future America, appeared when the movement was in full flood, and seemed fully in keeping with its dual interests in literary experimentation and (mostly pessimistic) social consciousness.
As the New Wave either receded or was assimilated—depending on whose view of literary history you accept—the feminist movement in science fiction, at least as an identifiable movement, came close on its heels. But here again Reed both does and doesn’t quite fit. Clearly a feminist who often focused on questions of self-image and constructions of gender identity, she wrote about body images not only in that beauty pageant story “In Behalf of the Product,” but in “The Food Farm,” with its simultaneous satiric takes on fat farms and the cult of celebrity (which she later revisited in stories like “Special” and “Grand Opening”). She could powerfully depict the alienation and sense of entrapment of a suburban housewife in “The Bride of Bigfoot” (which has something in common with James Tiptree, Jr.’s famous story “The Women Men Don’t See,” with its protagonist making a radical choice in the end). The lonely elderly sisters in “Winter,” worried about surviving another harsh winter in their isolated home, may both moon over the promise of lost youth offered by a young deserter who stumbles across their cabin, but in the end a far more practical decision prevails. But Reed’s feminism is seldom overtly political and never doctrinaire, and she is as apt to take women to task for their own passivity as men for their insensitive cluelessness. The men are offstage entirely in “Pilots of the Purple Twilight,” in which a group of women of different generations endlessly wait in a kind of limbo near the Miramar Naval Air Station for their husbands to return from various wars, until the oldest realizes, “It was all used up by waiting.” Probably Reed’s most famous treatment of gender alienation is the much-anthologized and controversial “Songs of War,” in which the women simply decamp to the hills and set up their own society. While the overreaction of the distraught husbands more than borders on the ridiculous, and the situation escalates into a national crisis, Reed won’t entirely let her women characters off the hook, either; internal squabbles break out between different groups (stay-at-home moms at odds with those who put their kids in day care, for example), and eventually most of the women drift away and return to their homes. What emerges from the story is a satirical voice so complexly ambiguous that while many readers view the story as a satire of the extent to which a military-happy male society might go to keep women in their place, at least one feminist critic found herself, because of its ending, unable to view the story as anything other than an anti-feminist parable, with the women’s revolution simply dissipating at the end.
If Reed can so unsettle proponents of both sides of a debate at once, she might be doing something right.
Perhaps partly because of her own childhood experiences as a self-described “military kid”—her father was a submarine commander who died in World War II—her attitude toward militarism is equally ambivalent, neither uncritical nor unsympathetic. The title character in “The Singing Marine,” haunted by an ill-fated military exercise that left most of his platoon drowned or mired in a marsh, finds himself compulsively singing a song from a Grimm’s fairy tale, trying to come to terms with his own possible court-martial and his sense of having been “born in blood and reborn in violence.” A similar event—or possibly the same one—haunts the memory of an aging veteran trying to come to terms with his wife’s mental deterioration in “Voyager,” one of Reed’s most moving explorations of loss. “In the Squalus” describes how that actual submarine disaster in 1939 shaped and shadowed the entire subsequent life of a survivor, while the apparently demented old veteran in a nursing home in “Old Soldiers” is actually coming to grips with a horrific experience that has kept him psychically trapped for decades. And we’ve already seen her take on the fates of military wives in “Pilots of the Purple Twilight.”
The eclecticism of Reed’s themes and preoccupations is such that at times they can seem prescient. A trending topic in literary scholarship over the past few years has been animal studies—broadly concerning the role of animals and their relations with humans in literature—but Reed has notably returned to animals and animal imagery in her fiction for many years, from the pink, poetry-producing pony in “Piggy” (whose poems are mashups of everyone from Longfellow to Dickinson) and the robot tiger that gives its owner self-confidence in “Automatic Tiger” to the bug that finds itself made human in “Sisohpromatem” and the pet monkey that writes best sellers in “Monkey Do.” Reed revisits the child-raised-by-wolves motif in “What Wolves Know,” a story whose title may give us a clue to what Reed finds appealing in animals (the boy’s father, determined to make a media sensation out of him, clearly does not know what wolves know, but finds out). A werewolf mother shows up in “The Weremother,” Bigfoot sho
ws up in “The Bride of Bigfoot,” and in “The Song of the Black Dog” the title animal has the unusual talent of being able to sniff out those about to die, or most in need of attention, during major disasters. All these seem to suggest a world of hermetic knowledge we can access only through our contacts with animals, if we can access it at all. But easily the most bizarre of Reed’s animals-as-conduits is the huge alligator that is the title figure in “Perpetua,” inside whom the narrator and her family ride out an unspecified disaster in their city with all the comforts of a private yacht, until the narrator makes her own accommodation with Perpetua.
Despite its unusual setting, “Perpetua” also is a kind of family drama, with a father taking drastic steps to protect his family from the outside world, and this brings us to what is perhaps the most consistently recurring theme in Reed’s short fiction, which is simply families, and in particular families under stress. This is a concern that Reed has explored through widely different angles, from the essentially realistic fiction of “How It Works” (in which a skeptical daughter must deal with her mother’s new fiancé as well as his own mother issues) and “Denny” (in which parents are concerned about their rebellious son turning violent) to the marginally speculative (a son tries to come to terms with his survivalist father in Nebraska in “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) to the vaguely macabre (“The Wait,” in which a daughter is trapped in a strange town’s rituals because of her mother’s possible illness) to a kind of horror (as when the exploitative father gets a comeuppance in “What Wolves Know”) to science fiction (an overprotective mother during a virulent plague leads her family to tragedy in “Precautions”) to pure absurdity (“The Attack of the Giant Baby,” in which a baby eats something from its father’s lab floor and rapidly grows to the size of architecture).