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The
early 21st century zeitgeist is one of blurred boundaries.
Actors in their 20's perform scripted vlogs on Youtube while
pretending to be 16 years old. In literature, readers were
angered by James Frey's prevaricating, but they were comfortable
with the truth-stretching inherent in the humor of David Sedaris.
Other boundaries are straddled by people—we are Mexican-Americans,
we listen to goth/industrial or screamo/hip-hop. Culturally,
we celebrate the forward-slash itself where many of us stand,
in the spaces between things, interstitially. Identifying
as interstitial is, perhaps, the truest one can be when refusing
to abide by arbitrary rules.
Interstitial
art defies categorization, transcends classification, and
bucks genre conventions. The Interstitial Arts Foundation
is identifies this trend as a specific movement. Authors like
Angela Carter, Jeff Noon, and Kelly Link are claimed by the
interstialists. Interfictions is the Interstitial Arts
Foundation's literary answer to this art movement; Delia Sherman
and Theodora Goss selected nineteen fiction stories to characterize
this non-genre.
Many
of the stories have a Twilight Zone feel to them; they
tend to make a reader feel unsettled. But these stories offer
much more than a few paragraphs of eeriness and a shock-surprise
ending. The stories in Interfictions are layered and
complex, told from unusual viewpoints or slightly alternate
worlds.
Joy Marchand's
"Pallas at Noon"—one of the more realistic stories in
the collection—is a prose poem to domestic discontent,
and dreams crushed by time and circumstances. Chloe, a writer,
has not been able to write and has developed both a stutter
and an intense fear of people. Sadly her condition is aided
by her well-meaning but co-dependent husband who, while trying
to persuade her to write, manages to encourage her psychosomatic
maladies. Chloe continues to retreat further and further into
herself, hiding her body under layers of oversized clothes.
Marchand relates Chloe's plight to that of Pallas, an ambiguous
figure in Greek mythology who is sometimes male and sometimes
female. "Pallas at Noon" is a lyrical story with roots in
epic poetry about a woman existing in the area between artist
and wife.
Other
stories tend to be more fantastic, straying beyond even Marchand's
atypical treatment of the short story. Jon Singer's "Willow
Pattern" is a simple description of illustrations on porcelain
that seem to be windows into other worlds. In "What We Know
About the Lost Families of _____ House" by Christopher Barzak,
a town tells a story of a woman who falls in love with a haunted
house, making this tale a reflection on schism of inner and
public life. In Leslie What's "Post Hoc" (a sort of homage
to Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O."), a pregnant woman
mails herself to her unresponsive ex-boyfriend, only to end
up in the dead-letter office.
There
are a few stories that, in the grand post-modern tradition,
are retellings of older stories. Rachael Pollack's "Burning
Board" is a very non-traditional rewrite of the story of Joseph
ben Jacob, the Old Testament Hebrew prophet. In "Rats," Veronica
Schanoes re-imagines the life of Sid Vicious's girlfriend
Nancy Spungeon as a bittersweet fairy tale. Many of the stories
seem spooky and mysterious, and all are multi-leveled. Pithy
and meaty, even the shortest stories in this collection convey
a multitude of ideas.
Interfictions
is a phenomenal collection, containing ghost stories, fairy
tales, romances, and realistic tales, none of which are precisely
what they seem. The stories are as slippery as eels, and are
engrossing and provocative. Interfictions will appeal
to readers of genre fiction, readers of experimental fiction,
and any reader looking to be engaged and challenged.
(May,
2007)
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