A Very Dark Ride: Three Ways of Looking at the Short Fiction of John Kessel

a review essay by Dale Bailey

It’s not customary to begin a review with a confession. Nonetheless:

In reviewing The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel,* I have sinned against the general rule (and personal principle) that one should not review books by people one knows, much less people one knows well enough to shoot an occasional text. But I have occasionally texted John Kessel, and while I would not put him in that inner circle of close friends with whom one shares confessions of a more personal variety, I do call him a friend and believe that he would call me one, as well.

Yet I undertook this review all the same. Why not?

The quality of the work was a foregone conclusion. I began reading John’s fiction – especially his short stories – two decades before I met him, so I knew in advance that in gathering his best short fiction, The Dark Ride would assemble in a single volume some of the finest speculative short fiction written in the last few decades. Re-visiting these stories affirmed that conviction – and vastly enlarged it. When I read Kessel’s stories in aggregate, it became clear to me that far more than a simple review was in order. Here’s why:

The stories in The Dark Ride are not merely among the finest speculative stories of the last few decades. They are among the era’s finest short stories of any kind. Period. That’s a grand claim, and

* John Kessel, The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel (Subterranean Press, 2022); quotations from this collection will be cited parenthetically.

I don’t pretend that it’s based on a comprehensive survey. But I’ve read a lot of stories in the last forty years, and I can say with confidence that many of Kessel’s stories stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of them. His work warrants sustained attention, and not alone because of its uniform excellence.

A closer look at the way his stories complicate, challenge, and embrace science fiction has much to say about how our assumptions shape the way we read, misread, and too often fail to read some of our finest writers – which is why the paragraphs that follow comprise not just one, but three reviews of this long-deserved career retrospective. Let’s dispense with the easy one first.

DALE BAILEY ’s third short story collection, This Island Earth: 8 Features from the Drive-In, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He is the author of eight previous books, including In the Night Wood (Harper, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019) His fiction has been adapted for Showtime Television, has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker Awards.

Review # 1 (An Exhortation)

See the aforementioned claims about the quality of the stories in The Dark Ride, fork over the cover price, and start reading. Seriously.

Review # 2 (An Anecdote)

I first encountered the fiction of John Kessel when I read his novella “Another Orphan” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction all the way back in 1982. The story took the top of my head off (not gently) and gave the contents inside a thorough stirring. They needed it.

Flash forward twenty years or so to the first time I met Kessel in any meaningful way. I’d been introduced to him once or twice, but I’d never really had a conversation with him. Now that I had the opportunity, I was determined to clear some things up. See, I’d read “Another Orphan” two or three additional times over the years; each time the story did exactly the same thing to me: it took the top of my head off and gave the contents inside a thorough stirring. I wasn’t sure why the story always had that effect, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t fully, or even fractionally, parse the damn thing’s meaning.

I was then under the lamentable influence of an idea that too many English teachers of indifferent quality had knuckle-pounded into me: that stories were mostly about “theme,” and that they could (and should) be decoded like the “secret” messages that used to appear on the backs of cereal boxes of the tooth-rotting variety. All you had to do was lay hands on a secret decoder ring. I didn’t have such a ring handy, but I did have the author, and I was determined to sort this business about “Another Orphan” out.

So I said, “John” (let’s dispense with the pretense that I address John Kessel as Kessel) “I’ve been reading ‘Another Orphan’ since I was a kid, and I was wondering if you’d mind telling me what the story means.”

John said, “I wrote that story a long time ago.”

And that’s all he said.

What I learned that day was that Kessel would not explain his stories. And as you read The Dark Ride, you’ll discover that Kessel’s stories do not often explain themselves either. They are elegant models of mystery and ambiguity, freighted with a significance that can’t be reduced to “theme.” I also learned that good stories can’t be decoded like the messages on the back of a box of Cap’n Crunch. Good stories aren’t secret messages. They’re stories. Which brings me to –

I first encountered the fiction of John Kessel when I read his novella “Another Orphan” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction all the way back in 1982. The story took the top of my head off (not gently) and gave the contents inside a thorough stirring. They needed it.

Most of these stories are indeed dark rides, but they are also wildly entertaining rides.

Review # 3 (An Analysis)

Another wrongheaded idea those English teachers of indifferent quality infected me with was that writers must be pigeonholed. Surely no one but Linnaeus values taxonomy more than the average literary critic (and even then, it’s a close thing). Too many of us have learned to shove every writer we read into one box or another, even if it requires dismembering them a little. We have also been taught that some boxes are more important than others – and that some boxes are altogether beneath the notice of any right-thinking person. Merely opening such a box is likely to infect the room with a faint miasma.

One such box is science fiction, and science fiction is the box Kessel has been shoved into. There are lots of reasons for this. If anyone was ever built to write science fiction, it is surely Kessel, who holds undergraduate degrees in Physics and English, as well as an MA and a PhD in English; who taught for many years in the MFA program at NC State, which he also directed; and who published more than half of these stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Ergo: John Kessel is a science fiction writer. Which, okay, he is, nor would he deny it. Except –

Except even the most cursory reading of The Dark Ride will show that many of Kessel’s stories require considerably more than minor surgery if we are going to cram them into the little box called science fiction. Not that the book doesn’t include conventional science fiction stories.

“Clean,” for instance, examines the emotional and philosophical implications of using memory wipes to treat Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a classic science fiction gambit: literalize the metaphor. The metaphor here is apt – if Alzheimer’s isn’t a memory wipe, what is it? – and the story pays it off with an emotional gut-punch. But it also complicates the dire truth that this person you most love – your mother, your father; your friend, spouse, and lover – is going to forget you utterly. What does it mean to lose someone when they are still very much here? What does it mean to lose yourself? What does it even mean to be “yourself”? The story is a quintessential example of what a great writer can do with the tools in science fiction’s toolbox. But it runs counter to Kessel’s primary mode, for while he often employs science fiction conceits, he rarely plays them straight. Instead, he dives into them with a gonzo enthusiasm that is infectious. Most of these stories are indeed dark rides, but they are also wildly entertaining rides.

For example, “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” envisions a future in which families spend their entire lives on a Westbound highway, leaving their cars only to gas up, get repairs, and so on. We never know where this highway is, only that it is separated from an Eastbound highway by a Median seeded with land mines and defended by mechanized watchtowers armed with automatic rifles. When our protagonist, sixteen-year-old David, abandons his family to cross the Median, he meets a robot with whom he has a philosophical conversation about God and free will. By the time David is rescued by his father, the robot has gone full-on Biblical, echoing the perverse God of Job. “Where were you when He laid the asphalt of Westbound?” he asks David. “Who set up the mileage markers, and who painted the line upon it?” (30).

As extrapolation – one of the nails often said to hold the little box called “science fiction” together – this is all pretty ridiculous. Where on earth or off-earth, in the universe or the multiverse, is such a world likely to develop? The answer, of course, is nowhere except in the imagination of John Kessel. Yet the story maps the spiritual terrain of both a culture (our culture) and the human beings trapped inside it (us) with the clinical accuracy of a master satirist who is also (as most master satirists are) a deeply humane writer. Can you reduce this story to a “theme”? I don’t think you can. It’s not a story about any one thing (what great story is?). It’s a story about growing up, about family, about the often-dehumanizing nature of technology, about free will and God and the problem of evil, courage and fear and loss and longing, dreams stifled and dreams fulfilled – among other things. More important, it’s not a story that tells you what to think about any of these things. It’s a story that requires you to think about them for yourself.

In short, Kessel isn’t much interested in putting things – including short stories – into boxes. His primary interest seems to be in smashing those boxes and tossing the shards out the window, because what little boxes do is constrain the intellect, the imagination, and the human capacity for empathy that we don’t see nearly enough of – by which I mean not even close to enough of, a proposition perhaps more clearly stated as a question: Why can’t we just get our shit together and be kind to one another? This seems to be one of the principal questions, perhaps the primary question, John Kessel asks. Dark? These stories are dark, all right – because the world is dark. But there is also light, and Kessel’s work is very much about helping us find that light.

Kessel describes how he goes about that task in the Story Notes at the end of his Selected volume, which largely (and wisely) adhere to the “I-wrote-that-story-a-long-time-ago” response to questions of meaning. But he does note that his impulse throughout his career “has been to cross the sensibilities of literary fiction with those of pulp fiction” (567) – which is to say that he finds both boxes cramped. Kessel’s self-awareness is telling, the accuracy of his observation evident throughout the collection. Kessel employs science fiction’s central tropes. The Dark Ride gives us stories of alien invasion (“Invaders”), time travel (“The Miracle of Ivar Avenue” and others), far future space opera (“Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance”), alternate history (“Buffalo”), and moon colonization (“Stories for Men”). But he often works against those tropes in complex ways.

“Invaders,” for instance, weaves multiple narratives into a challenging metafiction that raises, but does not answer, questions about the dangers, rewards, and moral consequences of escapism. One narrative thread depicts in disturbingly realistic terms Pizzaro’s 1532 invasion of the Inca Empire. Another presents in comic terms a contemporary alien invasion in which the would-be invaders seek not earthly dominion, but, as the first alien to stagger out of the flying saucer says, “Cocaine.” Juxtaposed with these two storylines are the firstperson musings of “a tall, thin man wearing jeans” – a man not unlike the very tall, very thin John Kessel – who is “writing a science fiction story” (342). The “tall, thin man” is ambivalent about his craft, noting that “[s]cience fiction may . . . be considered as much an evasion of reality as any minddistorting drug” (360). He qualifies this position three or four paragraphs later: “living in a world of cruelty,” he reflects, “immersed in a culture that grinds people into fish meal like some brutal machine . . . I find it hard to sneer at the desire to escape. Even if escape is a delusion” (361).

Significantly, the next and final scene opens a new narrative thread, set among the Incas in 1527, five years prior to Pizzaro’s invasion. Into this yetunspoiled world strides a tall, thin man wearing blue jeans, escaped, it seems, into the delusory paradise of his own fiction, where he averts Pizzaro’s brutal invasion by warning the Incas of their impending fate. The Incas, naturally, “slaughter” the invading Spaniards “to the last man, and everyone lived happily ever after” (362) – except, of course, for all the dead Spaniards, many of whom, the story makes clear from the first, are terrified foot soldiers who’d just as soon not be there at all. The irony of that final line is savage.

Kessel’s comic treatment of alien invaders as cocaine addicts is characteristic of the way he subverts core science fiction tropes. In “The Pure Product,” which calls to mind Shirley Jackson’s 1955 classic “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” we encounter a time traveler (or Canadian, or both) who has arrived from the future (or Canada, or both) with no desire to save the timeline from paradox or warn humanity of the imminent ascent of the machines. He is instead an agent of random violence, Charlie Starkweather with a time machine. “Buffalo,” in which Kessel’s father meets H.G. Wells, would be alternate history in a very minor key – except that Kessel acknowledges from the beginning that it “never happened” (389). By revealing himself as the man behind the curtain, Kessel turns a coincidence that wasn’t into a moving meditation on the consolations and constraints of art, the gifts and curses fathers pass on to their sons, and the world of “limitation and loss” that we must all enter into (391).

Many of the stories go further. They resist science fiction’s fundamental assumption that the world can be understood, veering into the slippery territory inhabited by writers such as Karen Russell and Steven Millhauser. “The Lecturer” introduces a centuries-old academic windbag who holds forth – ceaselessly, day and night, in all weather – from atop a “truncated Greek pillar” in front of a university library (364). He is exactly as boring as the worst professor you ever had. No one seems to know who (or what) he is or how he came to be there, and Kessel never explains.

Nor does he explain the fantastic elements of the title story, a meticulously researched novella about Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated William McKinley at the 1901 Pan-American exposition in Buffalo. Leon may or may not travel to the moon on one of the exposition’s rides, “The Trip to the Moon,” in which ticketholders board an airship equipped with “twelve red canvas wings” for their journey (506). The journey itself, however – whether it is real or a product of Leon’s unraveling mind – is not as important as Leon’s adventures among the oppressed Selenites, which enable Kessel to explore the issues of economic inequity, social injustice, and political violence at work in the parallel assassination narrative. Other pieces here – most notably “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence” – work the same way. Science fiction’s postulate that reality makes sense simply isn’t germane.

In his synthesis of literary and pulp sensibilities, however, Kessel does more than critique science fiction’s core tropes and assumptions. He also takes on works long since enshrined in the canon, re-imagining them or situating his own characters within them. “Pride and Prometheus” is an ingenious conflation of Frankenstein (1818) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). “Gulliver at Home” takes on Gulliver’s Travels (1726), focusing on the economic and emotional travails of Gulliver’s wife as she copes with her peripatetic husband’s eccentricities – and ultimate descent into madness. Both stories are so engaging that it’s easy to overlook how deftly Kessel raises questions of continuing relevance about the ways gender, class, and marriage intersect with economic and intellectual autonomy.

However, the real monster here – the white whale that I’ve been chasing – is “Another Orphan,” Kessel’s take on Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, Moby-Dick. In his tale of Fallon, a Chicago broker who wakes up one morning to find himself aboard the Pequod, Kessel once again refuses to explain the mystery: how is it that Fallon has been transported into a novel, and what can he do about it? As a fourteen-year-old, I found this elision enormously frustrating. It left me in the same existential quandary as Fallon, who compares himself to the “soldier in the movie [who] always managed, despite the impediments of his amnesia . . . to find the rational answer to his mystery” (418).

The story doesn’t tell us how to feel and think. Absent an authorial surrogate, we must sort out the issues in play for ourselves.

Fallon is not so lucky. He soon realizes that “[a]ny logic he brought to bear on his situation crumbled under the weight of [its] absurdity” (422). The reader’s position is even more complex. Fallon believes himself to be a real man who has been transported into a fiction. The reader knows him to be a fictional character who has moved, somehow, from one fictive world into another one. Yet Kessel resists the obvious paths. The story certainly investigates the nature of stories and their significance, but it is not metafiction in the same way that “Invaders” is: Kessel never appears on stage. Nor is it an absurdist exercise in the manner of Beckett or Kafka. Finally, there is no hint that Fallon’s mind is disordered. He has simply fallen into a book, and from that premise the story proceeds with persuasive coherence and tactile detail.

Returning to the story – yet again – forty years down the road, I felt better positioned to handle these complexities. I understood that Fallon’s inability to make sense of his plight – or to escape it – was at least part of the point. And by this time, I had read Moby-Dick. The last thing I expected the story to do was take the top of my skull off and give everything inside a thorough stirring – which is exactly what it did, of course, because at some level, even now, I expect stories to adhere to a set of conventions that domesticate the fantastic. If you want to go to Narnia, you had better find a magic wardrobe. Even Mark Twain’s time-displaced Yankee has the courtesy to take a whack on the head before showing up to mismanage King Arthur’s court into apocalypse.

Kessel’s reluctance to indulge these expectations contributes to the power of “Another Orphan.” This is a story not about solving the problem of the world. It’s about figuring out how to live inside of the problem. “Put aside your fantasy,” Ahab implores Fallon, “and admit that you are alive, and thus may momentarily die” (460). This is the truth that Fallon must face. A broker in futures, he believes himself safely beyond the reach of present perils, emotional, mortal, and existential, “protected, in the final analysis, by that great indifference he held to his breast.” He claims that he’s not a hypocrite because “[h]e said nothing he did not believe in” (433). The problem is, he doesn’t seem to believe in anything. Kessel – whose central question has to do with our manifest failures of empathy, love, and compassion – isn’t about to let him get away with this. The story doesn’t let us get away with it, either. It doesn’t tell us what to believe, but it insists that we believe in something. We, like Fallon, are fallen human beings on a dark voyage into oblivion.

“Another Orphan,” like so many of Kessel’s stories, challenges us to find a light in that darkness, or to make one.

Ergo: John Kessel is clearly not a science fiction writer. Except –

Except he is a science fiction writer, of course. “Stories for Men,” the sprawling novella that anchors The Dark Ride, makes that abundantly clear. This is hard science fiction of the first order, set in a lunar colony imagined with remarkable extrapolative rigor. Its functional reality is never in doubt. I know very little (which is to say nothing) about hydroponic farming, genetic engineering, dome construction, or the dangers of solar flares. I’m convinced that Kessel does. What’s most impressive is how adroitly he manages these issues. The pace of the story never flags for exposition.

That story unfolds among the Society of Cousins, a matriarchal culture established on the moon in explicit repudiation of patriarchal systems. The Cousins value consensus over authority and community over property. Men are exempt from work, but they have little power. They live among – but not necessarily within – extended matriarchal families, where they are prized “for their potency” and their skill as lovers. As the narrator points out, “the sex is great” (217) – except when, like the protagonist, Erno, you possess a “clumsy, earnest intensity” that precludes much interest from women (199). When Erno comes into possession of Stories for Men, an anthology of twentieth-century short stories, he finds himself drawn into the circle of a prankish advocate for men’s rights named Tyler Durden. In borrowing Durden’s name from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), a cult favorite about imperiled masculinity, Kessel opens an illuminating dialogue about what it means to be a man. In both works, the charismatic Tyler Durden’s machinations plunge the world around him into chaos.

“Stories for Men” is very much the examination of gender the title promises. It is also a nuanced and provocative study of art’s unsettling power to shape identity and ideology, of cancel culture, and of political violence. In some ways, it’s not unlike Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon, a thought experiment about how a society works and how it might work differently. Butler’s title, however, acknowledges his story’s status as an intellectual exercise. His characters are instruments of his satirical and ideological aims; they have no existence beyond the page. In a place that is no place, there can be no human cost.

Kessel refuses these terms. His allusion to Erno’s reading of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) highlights his critique of the utopian tradition and its dimensionless characters. The Society of Cousins is depicted with layered ambiguity. And here, as he does in “Gulliver at Home,” Kessel forces us to reckon with the emotional wreckage of his characters’ lives. Utopias are usually anchored in the perspective of an outsider. Kessel shows us the Society of Cousins from the inside. We share Erno’s confusion, anger, and longing. The story doesn’t tell us how to feel and think. Absent an authorial surrogate, we must sort out the issues in play for ourselves.

It may be – it is likely, I think – that Kessel refuses to explain his stories because they do not fully explain themselves to him. He’s traveling the same road we are, and it’s a very dark ride. Though he has a clear command of the questions, he doesn’t claim to have the answers. His stories are his assays at finding them, his way of making sense of a world that makes no sense. Like Fallon, like Ahab, like all of us, Kessel is another orphan. In his willingness to admit that truth, he proves himself a vital and necessary writer, the kind of writer who shows us just how cramped and pinched our little boxes are. They are prison cells for the mind and heart. His career is an implicit argument that we’d be better off without them. The stories in The Dark Ride aren’t science fiction stories. Nor are they literary stories. They’re just stories – the very best kind of stories: Good ones. n

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Semifinalist

BY ERIC WEIL

Cosmic Background Radiation

In our garage, the cans of drying paint stood like neglected funerary urns on a three-shelf wooden rack some sophomore in shop class had made for his band teacher, my father. I found music in the cans, their varying degrees of emptiness, percussive tings and tonks of tops I whacked with a dowel rod during a Saturday afternoon as he watched a college band marching at halftime on TV, and planned his own band’s program with small lead figures on a cardboard field well before PCs. My concerto for paint cans in D-flat minor filled the garage with random notes and echoes until the den door opened like a jump cut in a horror movie: “What in the hell are you doing out here?” One boy’s music, his father’s noise. I climbed thirty feet up the backyard sycamore; between hand-like leaves I watched a buddy on his bike delivering the paper on our suburban horseshoe street, first guy I knew that got his hands on a Playboy, showed off delightful Miss July hiding in his trombone music. So I forgot my clarinet practice that day. A girl I had a crush on challenged me later for first chair and won; a comparison was unfair to Miss July. I climbed down the sycamore, its thin bark peeling off like my interest in junior high band, but leaving the solid bole of music. Time for dinner in our Father Knows Best home: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas, listening to Count Basie, chocolate cake for dessert. My father’s been dead for decades; my friend is who knows where; the girl is somebody’s twice-divorced grandma, but tonight I tapped my toothbrush absently on the faucet and sink, then heard, the way cosmic background radiation reveals the galaxies speeding across the early universe, the music trembling in memory’s air.