Experience is the Only Kind of Story: he Fiction of J. M. McDermott Article by John H. Stevens
“he point of all this is to say that in writing a world, the experience of that world is tied not to the size and shape of stones, hills, but to the experience of them.” — J. M. McDermott
unease and irritation. I couldn’t see where the story was going and I found that the combination of short sections and ruptured narrative made it diicult to follow the story that was being laid out before me. I eventually took a deep breath and put the book down. I sat for a few minutes and tried to igure out what was exasperating me. I was briely tempted to put the book aside and come back to it later, but there was something lingering at the edge of my thoughts that I could not pin down, and I needed to understand it. So I went back into the book, stuck with it, and inished it over the course of several days. When I inished the book, I did not know how to feel about it. When I wrote my review of the book, I was still dealing with that:
“J. M. McDermott’s Last Dragon starts of by making you worried. After the irst several pages you wonder if you have entered into a metaictional puzzle, some sort of stereotypically-postmodern labyrinth that wants you to feel lost, worried, and perplexed.”
Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott Apex Publications, January 2011
M
y irst memory of reading J. M. McDermott’s iction is of being about 40 pages into Last Dragon and getting ready to put it down. I had come to the novel knowing very little about it, having heard it recommended highly and seeing it on Amazon’s Top Ten Science Fiction and Fantasy list of 2008. I knew that it was secondary-world fantasy but little else, and did not know what to expect from it. I began reading the brief chapters, headings and margins crawling with images of ants, and after several chapters I felt some 48
his is not, however, what the book is about, and is not what McDermott’s iction focuses on, either in short or long form. While sometimes enigmatic, looping, convoluted, eerie, and tenebrous, McDermott’s writing is mature, abrasive, audacious, and sobering in both its themes and expressions. Sometimes it is labyrinthine, like Last Dragon or stories such as “Charybdis and Scylla” (from his recent short story collection Women & Monsters), but McDermott’s work is not about obfuscation or trickery, and while it is designed to unsettle and sometimes irritate the reader, this is done in the service of both entertaining the reader (odd as that may sound) and provoking her to think about how we narrate and experience our lives. J. M. McDermott has, in less than a decade, published four novels, several dozen short stories, and poetry, with Last Dragon being his best-known work. He is an energetic writer who has garnered praise for the powerful mix of insight and complexity of his iction. As Jef VanderMeer put it in his review of Last Dragon, “[a] rare kind of clarity inhabits McDermott’s prose.” When I asked Apex Publications publisher Jason Sizemore about McDermott’s work, he wrote, “I’m fascinated and entertained by Joe’s work because he brings a unique style to two distinct areas of writing: narrative and voice. His novels aren’t linear. hey’re broken into pieces with a purpose that when read coalesce into something identiiable (epic fantasy, urban horror, and so on). Furthermore, he gives his characters a memorable voice, yet they remain detached (to a small degree) from the proceedings. he writing is such that you empathize with the characters, but as a reader, you are given an unbiased position to watch the story unfold.” his kind of praise appears in many reviews of McDermott’s work, even as others seem confused by his style and focus. On the Green Man Review blog, the reviewer’s conclusion was that “Last