Booknotes: Things That Never Happen by M. John Harrison

I’ve talked about M. John Harrison before. The topline is that he’s a brilliant prose stylist, a peerless writer of landscape and the material world, and a keen observer of the complex lengths people will go to avoid confronting their own loneliness and dissatisfaction. He combines all of that with a deeply critical grasp of genre of “the fantastic” and its contradictions. Even the stories of his that don’t viscerally grab me are still compelling and engaging. 

I recently finished a now-out-of-print collection of his short stories called “Things that Never Happen”, spanning the 1970s-1990s, though a new collection that includes many of the same stories, entitled “Settling the World” has recently been published. Here are a few stories from it that did, in fact, grab me:

The Incalling–Two men attend a somewhat hokey mysical ceremony in a house in London, and must deal with the strange and incomprehensible consequences. For my money, the creepiest story in the collection, full of barely coherent magic and the forces it can unleash on our bodies and the world around us.

The Ice Monkey–A very subtle portrait of despair, class inequality, and binding ties in Thatcherite London, painted with a cold detachment that befits the eponymous but invisible monster at the heart of the story. Harrison describes this as a horror story with all of the horrific elements removed.

Egnaro - A bookshop owner becomes obsessed with finding reference to an obscure location or condition that may or may not exist. When I first read this, in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s amazing anthology “The Weird” I saw it as a satire of the typical Lovecraftian protagonist; a person whose search for arcane knowledge devours them as easily as whatever horrors they might find. This time around, It struck me as aiming at a much deeper target, something about the ways that the fantastic allows us to paper over the contradictions of modern life. I thought about America’s current obsession with finding clues and patterns in mundane things and purporting vast mysteries, and the terrible consequences that search has wrought.

Seven Guesses of the Heart- A fantasy story a magician and the death of his daughter who tried to follow in his footsteps. It’s a story about male self-centeredness, and the things fathers give to (and take from) children. Heart-wrenching and strange, especially as a Dad myself.

I Did It–a funny story about football, masculinity, and hitting yourself in the head with an axe.

All of the stories in this collection are rich and engaging–I read them slowly, enjoying the gorgeous descriptions of London and rural England, wondering about the nature of Autotelia (one of Harrison’s many fictional or fiction-adjacent places which pops up in multiple stories), and feeling genuine sympathy (or sometimes enmity) for his narrators and characters, who are all, in some ways, trapped in themselves by the worlds they live in.