Islington Crocodiles by Paul Meloy
TTA Press presents the 2006 British Fantasy Award Winners first book
Sep 30, 2008
Paul Meloy's Islington Crocodiles (ISBN 9780955368318, 192pp) is published by TTA Press.
The premise of Paul Meloy's first book, a mosaic novel of interlocking stories, is simple: There are creatures that feed on human despair. There are those amongst us who would stop them.
So are the battle lines drawn.
Over half the stories first appeared in The Third Alternative, which has now become Black Static, its title taken from the British Fantasy Award-winning story, which is now a part of Islington Crocodiles.
Lenny Bruce
"The Last Great Paladin of Idle Conceit," opens with
Lenny Bruce died the year that I was born.
A week ago I woke up in the middle of the night, and there he was, in the moon shadowed corner of my bedsit, pissing in the sink.
"Are you pissing in my sink?" I asked...because I assumed that I was dreaming.
When a second-rate comedian gives up his slot to Bruce, he knows that he is sacrificing his own career, but is convinced that Bruce has returned to fight a rearguard battle to keep the forces of despair at bay. Sadly, when Bruce goes on stage, he bombs.
From the start, the conjoined twins of precision and profanity run throughout Meloy's prose. The despair of "Paladin" deepens in "Raiders" when barwise's girlfriend leaves him, and he is seduced into exacting a terrible revenge.
"Don't Touch the Blackouts" takes the reader to an edge-of-dreamworld, and introduces Bismuth, the Firmament Surgeon who fights the devil-in-dreams and autoscapes, those who have turned against God.
"Running Away to Join the Town" is a nightmare version of Bradbury. The reader knows that there is a nasty fate awaiting fat, spoiled little Marcel, but if anything that only heightens the foreboding that stains Meloy's beautiful, haunting vision.
Until "Black Static," none of the characters overlap from story to story, but as the book becomes most hallucinatory with the little girl in the balloon and her tiger companion fleeing the sinister Nurse Melt, so Bismuth reappears and the narrative slowly, painfully slowly, pivots toward meaning and hope.
British Fantasy Award
"Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow," opens with genetically modified pandas escaped from captivity munching on the narrator's garden furniture, and turns into a surreal version of The Magnificent Seven on speed. The mixture of comedy and pathos, violence and social commentary at times makes "Jean Harlow" maybe -just maybe- one of the finest pieces of speculative fiction written in the last few years.
"The Vague" is even more surreal, a town perched on the edge of a black hole, where werewolves try to leap the garden fence at night, held at by only by silver knives embedded in the lawn. But this is no idle surrealism; the menace is linked to all the other stories, but there is real relevance too, in the couple fleeing the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings.
A bank heist gone terribly wrong and the return of Nurse Melt and the cast of "Jean Harlow," brings together the disparate elements in "Islington Crocodiles." The reader is left with a sense that entropy has been held at bay, but only for a time, for this is a battle that can never be over; Meloy takes his readers back to the town of dreams on the edge of reality, for one last moment of warmth in the darkness.
Islington Crocodiles is a challenging work -- some stories will need to be read, two, even three times as their meaning subtly shifts, especially when considered in relation to the rest of the book in which they fit. But like all the best things in life, Islington Crocodiles rewards those who are prepared to put the work in.
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