There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we're on today is bad. Several miles inland from California's foggy coastline, we're driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late '60s and '70s: Table Mountain Ranch.
The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who'd fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he's one of Table Mountain Ranch's last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he's wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I'll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load.
Over almost half a century, in five collections of short stories and five novels, Joy Williams has been drawn to the details of final things, too. Her writing wears the trappings of realism: Her characters have unsatisfying jobs and love affairs; they go on long road trips and drinking binges. But she’s always been most interested in endings. Almost everything she has written has been haunted by death. With Harrow, her first novel in 21 years, she imagines the death of the world itself.
Equally adept with literary and historical fiction, Stephen Graham Jones is also acclaimed for tales of dark fantasy and horror suffused with slashers, monsters, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, and other creatures that go bump in the night. For Jones, a writer who also teaches courses on these figures, it seems that every day is, indeed, Halloween. His enthusiasm for such storytelling is on display in his recent full-length novel, The Only Good Indians (2020), the winner of two Bram Stoker Awards and a Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. It joins a quickly expanding body of work that makes readers recoil at what may be hiding out there in the shadows, watching from the edge of the forest, lying in wait beneath the floorboards, lurking beyond the next turn in the road, or haunting the voided spaces of colonial history. The anticipation and dread Jones’s stories provoke are amplified in his unique take on the slasher by associations with holidays such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, presented with their colonial entanglements so that the arrival of Columbus in 1492 is not seen as an occasion for historical celebration but “a storm so bad it eats the world.” Yet, whatever form the monstrous takes in Jones’s work, he is a master at creating a storied presence that settles deep into our psyches.
You might know this story, but you don't yet know it in the hands of Cassandra Khaw. They transform one last heist into The All-Consuming World: a visionary, foul-mouthed, gory sci-fi adventure, dripping viscera, violence, and beauty in equal measure.
Themes of love, fate, running away from it all and history – both family history and broader kind - are captured in Bridget van der Zijpp’s new novel, I Laugh Me Broken.
In the manner of "The Master," his celebrated 2004 novel about Henry James, Colm Tóibín has produced a fictional account of German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann — the Magician, as Mann's children sometimes called him. The novel at first seems curiously flat, biographical reportage with dialogue often sounding like stiff translations from the German; but little by little the inexorably accumulating details make Tóibín's Mann more interesting than the mere facts of his admittedly larger-than-life story.
Piesing alludes to an odd parallel between the airships and the explorers of that time. Like the hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the men pining to be “the first” have inflated senses of destiny and combustible egos. The fates of both machine and men were at the mercy of the elements: for airships, it was unpredictable weather; for explorers, it was politics, pride and jealous rivals.
When the doctor sliced open the body,
soft still to the touch, apprenticed
to expression, when the flesh