THE RIVER KNOWS ITS OWN by JAY LAKE
Wheatland Press paperback, pp263, RRP $19.95.

Reviewed by PENNY HILL

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“Tommy “Leviathan” Hobbes was short, nasty and reeked of Brut.”

This is my favourite opening line in The River Knows Its Own, Jay Lake’s bohemian collection of short stories; simultaneously an homage to a cliché and a swift character sketch.

This enjoyment and playfulness exists throughout the collection; I particularly enjoyed the way Lake played with ideas of genre. I perceived a gradual movement through the collection from initially realistic accounts to fantastical explanations, both within individual stories and in their arrangement within the collection.

Many of the stories are interstitial – a mixture of realism, fantasy and horror. Few of them could be described as anything as concrete or defined as sf.

Ellen Klages’ cover blurb says this is “not your mother’s Oregon” and these stories are certainly not set in the version of America we Brits know from TV. Both rural and urban life are explored, with neither given preference. Lake’s rural landscapes give a great sense of emptiness and potential whilst covering the usual tropes – rivers, forest, mountains.

In the urban stories, we see homelessness, madness and magic, but this is not Charles de Lint’s optimistic humanism with its patronising refrain of “only the artistic life is worth living”. Lake’s characters are ordinary - even mundane - people, whose lives are caught up in and transformed by the events around them. We (and they) know that, after these events, they can never go back. And be warned - these stories can invade your dreams.

“Adagio for Flames and Jealousy” is a challenging story with which to open the collection. It sets the tone effectively, starting mimetically with the archetypal American image of a man driving alone across the States. It then slides into the fantastic with references to “ghosts” and the “the endless stream of minie balls, uniform buttons, mining tools and arrowheads that Mahoney seemed to find everywhere he went”.

This narrative is intercut with the diary of the unknown Victorian miner, hinting at past events of ghosts and homosexuality - “some men love their wives less than I love Mahoney” and “I reckon he misses Little Finney more than a man ought to miss another man”/ “I don’t know if Mahoney was more mad that Little Finney came back or that he left again”. The present day story is underpinned by the timing and tension of the approaching fire. A resolution is found through the dance of death.

The intercutting is risky – it makes the reader do the work of trying to relate the two narratives before explaining them in the last two paragraphs of the story. It is not an easy start to the collection and may put off the casual reader – but do single author collections presume some familiarity with the author? I liked the chutzpah of beginning a collection with a story that is all about endings.

“Iron Heaven”, despite its deliberately coarse language and grime-and-concrete setting, is a much more ethereal mood piece. Here the struggle between the mimetic and the fantastic is in the contrasting descriptions of the outward appearance of this industrial wasteland and its powerful modern mythological meaning. We explore the hope and a new beginning of “the iron heaven reserved for railway men”against a grim reality of “two vultures fighting over half a dead cat” – the detail of “half” making this image more gruesome.

I enjoyed the mundane signs and oracles our hero had to follow on his quest - a burned out electrical rail car and a sock monkey. Another link with the previous story is the overt reference to one of the invisible parts of America’s immigrant history – the Chinese cooks and China Po, both of whom have played their part in “tying down the west with steel ribbons”.

“Heading West” is a road movie of a story, and just as rambling. I felt that Lake was more interested in the journey than in the ostensible reasons he had created for it – a case where the mundanity of describing travelling through a breaking-down society wins out over the big science-fictional idea of the golden sky signifying the end of the world. Of course, it links back to the collection’s opening image of a man driving across America.

By contrast, “Hard Times in the State Of Nature” is a theological fantasy in a film noir setting. This is an enjoyable pleasantry of an idea – someone’s taken out a contract on God - but it is sadly undeveloped, despite having that favourite opening line (see above). I would be interested to see what more Jay Lake could have done with this idea.

“Green Grass Blues” is an extended short story I liked, where the magical elements are hiding among the pleasantly rural mundane and T.R’s painful rite of passage teaches him the cost of true learning. In “Eye Teeth”, Lake revisits the noir genre with an enjoyably silly sf premise of snake aliens clashing with union workers. There’s also considerable homage to Pat Cadigan’s sf, with augmented eyes as the McGuffin. In “Fading Away” a small boy pragmatically describes what we recognise as the ghost of Elvis helping a sick woman come to terms with her death.

In the title story “The River Knows Its Own”, Lake again starts with the mundane and moves onto more fantastical elements. I loved the dragon for its power, for the sheer joy of flight and the audacity of using a fantasy cliché to such effect. There are sneaking new-Agey hints about earth magic and how we should relate to the world around us, including a disconcerting use of sex and the power of jealousy. At fifty-three pages this, the longest story in the collection, was perilously close to being self-indulgent. It was quite enjoyable at the time but I have no desire to re-read it – which, for me, separates the good short story from the great.

“Of Stone Castles and Vainglorious Time” is a fascinating time travel story containing what I am sure are circular loops and incestuous hints. I liked the steampunk trappings; this was one story I particularly enjoyed re-reading.

“Partitioned” is a glimpse into a world of homelessness, madness and imperatives other than our own. It is a short flash of a story that leaves us to impose our own meaning and consider it for a while. I was left sad at Cedric’s delusion, but aware that this was an interpretation that I had brought to the piece. This was one of the more successful very short pieces.

“Hayflick Limit, 12 Miles” is another mood piece, about the passing of life, aging and death. Presented as it was without commentary or explanation, however, I felt it didn’t have quite the impact the author expected it to. I also felt cheated by “The Black Back-Lands” – the rural sf trappings were promising, but in the end there wasn’t quite enough substance to the story.

As well as the dance of the mundane and the fantastic, The River Knows Its Own has a series of retrospectively discovered themes meandering through it, linking pairs of stories together.

I enjoyed the idiosyncratic magical grandfathers providing the driving force behind “Adagio for Flames and Jealousy” and “Iron Heaven” whereas the plaintive flower-entwined corpses in “Tiny Flowers and Rotten Lace” and “Boiled Bones” bring a delightfully macabre flavour to those tales. The powerful effects of bullying – both as perpetrator and victim – resonate equally through the brash comically fantastical “Eye Teeth” and the quietly serious and mimetic “Bringing It On Yourself”.

On the other hand, I was less impressed with the clichéd use of destructive angels in “Hunting Angels” and “The Algebra of Heaven”, and I found that a couple of the shorter stories were little more than fragmentary images or existential mood pieces. On the whole, these shorter pieces were less successful; “The Philosopher Clown”, for example, felt like an undeveloped idea that should have gone back in the drawer until Lake found the story he wanted this image to tell.

The tone varies considerably through these stories – with greater and lesser degrees of effectiveness. While it was good to see a single author collection striving for such variety, I felt Lake was less successful when he attempted to tell stories from a female perspective – such as “Eggs for Dinner”, with its predictable downtrodden heroine rescued from grimness by a wise (male) magical salmon. I also found the nipple fixation some of his male narrators had a bit off-putting.

Overall I enjoyed The River Knows Its Own and I look forward to reading more of Jay Lake’s work in future. It wasn’t the wonderful collection I had been hoping for, though – perhaps, once Lake takes more control of his material, he can eliminate the occasional uneven and undisciplined threads and use his natural variety of inspirations to produce a more coherent, effective collection.

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Penny Hill is currently a Senior Functional Analyst for a multinational company. She has been a regular reviewer for Vector: The Critical Journal of the BSFA since 1997, and she has contributed to collections of essays on Terry Pratchett and the Arthur C Clarke Award. She is married with various cats and is a compulsive reader.

Tags: book • collection • Fantasy • Jay Lake • review • Science Fiction • short stories • slipstream • The River Knows Its Own