Roadkill/Siren – Novel Review
- Roadkill by Rob Shearman
- Siren Beat by Tansy Rayner Roberts
- Twelfth Planet Press
Anyone hanging around this site for a while might remember that a while back I reviewed a very unusual novella called ‘Horn’, also from Twelfth Planet. Well, the Twelfth Planet people have been busy, and they’ve just offered up a new novella-length book which harks back to the glory days of Science Fiction and the old “Ace Doubles”, in which two novels were printed in one book. The Ace Doubles featured two shorter-length novels by two separate authors. They were printed back to back and upside down to one another, so that each story got its own separate cover, and could be read just as comfortably as the other.
Been a long time between drinks, but the Twelfth Planet Press folks have seen fit to revive the old format — and I have to say, I’m glad they did.
‘Roadkill’ by Rob Shearman is a horror story, but not in the conventional sense. This is not a horror story of monsters, teeth, claws in the night. This is a story which explores the horror of banality, the soul-killing terror of the unadorned human condition. Rob Shearman is an interesting writer, very much on the way up. He first drew attention to himself with a script for the first season of the revived Doctor Who series: the episode which first brought one of the iconic Daleks back to the screen. Next thing I heard, he had a nice little anthology called “Tiny Deaths” out, and in short order, he’d picked up a well-deserved World Fantasy Award.
‘Roadkill’ is a brave work from a genre writer, and an inspired gamble from a new publishing imprint. It’s a simple story: two people who work together drive off for a clandestine naughty weekend. The weekend goes poorly; the couple discover they are ill-suited. The woman has issues in her own marriage which she may be trying to exorcise, and the man is simply a graceless, clueless, hapless, emotionally clumsy git. He’s a decent enough person at heart, but is way out of his depth in attempting anything so socially complex as a weekend of unconditional carnal gratification.
And so, driving back from their ill-fated weekend, the pair find themselves deep in uncomfortable silence when the car hits some kind of animal.
The animal itself is the only ‘fantastic’ element to the story. It’s some kind of winged rabbit/bat thing, which turns out to be rather unsettlingly pregnant. But in truth, the beast serves only as a metaphor for the uncomfortable, unsettling, mismatched relationship between the two main characters. Its interactions with them are almost peripheral. Yet this element of strangeness, inserted without warning into the ordinariness of the weekend and the British countryside, serves to throw into relief the appalling, desperate, stultifying nature of the middle-class lives of the main characters.
In another story, this unexpected intervention of the magical and strange might have become a catalyst for change, a jewel-bright moment of revelation allowing the characters entry to a greater world. In Shearman’s hands, it becomes the embodiment of the lost opportunity, the lottery prize that turns out to be a dud. The magic wishing ring is a tarnished plastic toy from a gumball machine, and there is no escape from the grinding, awful pettiness of human existence. In ‘Roadkill’, the creature hit by the car gives birth to its uncanny offspring, and is finally carried away to an uncertain fate by the male lead character — but the possibility for change and happiness is killed stone dead.
This isn’t your typical genre-fic story. It won’t satisfy the gore-horror afficionadoes. Nor will it enthrall the urban fantasy lovers. But personally, I loved it. ‘Roadkill’ is the first story I’ve seen in a very long time which attempts to encompass the true horror of the human condition, and through the pitilessly sharp and vivid portrayal of its clumsy, desperately ordinary protagonists and their sorry goddam efforts to escape themselves, it filled me with a bleak, shuddersome dread.
Stephen King and Dean Koontz have never even come close.
Flip the book over, and you get “Siren Beat” by Tansy Rayner Roberts. Here, we’re back in slightly more familiar territory, though definitely not into the realms of cliched fantasy. Nancy Napoleon is a Guardian, one of a group of ‘numina’ — strange, magically empowered persons scattered throughout the world, tasked with keeping the terrible magic of the sea and its dread creatures from destroying human life on land. Nancy is a wounded Guardian, walking with a cane and a limp, having lost her sister Sylvie to a battle with a Kraken three years ago. Thus, when she discovers that two powerful and deadly Sirens have emerged from the ocean to stalk the streets and nightclubs of Hobart, Tasmania, she finds herself doubting her own ability to handle the situation.
Worse still, Sylvie’s one-time lover Nick Cadmus, a hyper-attractive man/beast called a Kelpie (from Scots myth) has reappeared, bringing with him unresolved emotional business. As the Sirens exert their hypnotic song over the young night-clubbers of Hobart and the body count rises, Nancy has to find a way to overcome her own weaknesses, compensate for Nick’s shattered psyche, and even deal with the resurgent spectre of her own beloved sister in order to save the city, and herself.
Anyone familiar with Roberts will recognize some of her favourite tropes: pretty clothes, prettier men, and the Right Shoes For The Occasion. And why not? It’s a story set in and around nightclubs, drawing on a classical myth of lethal sexuality and fatal attraction. Roberts’ enjoyment of the material serves only to strengthen the characterisation and give an all-important human dimension to the otherwise inexplicable and unhuman Guardians and their ilk. As for the rest of the tale — the bad guys are more than sufficiently bad. The good guys are bad enough to be interesting and sympathetic, but good enough for us to cheer for them. There’s plenty of action, a dose or two of hot, sweaty sex, a fillip of something like romance, and a good time to be had by all.
It’s a strange pairing, this set of stories. Either one of them is worth the price of the book: Shearman’s terrifying exploration of human hollowness, or Roberts’ deft romp through a neatly realised fantasy of the sea and modern Hobart. Both are well written, satisfying tales. Yet they are so very different in tone, style, content, theme and technique that it’s hard to reconcile them under one cover. My take? This is two for the price of one. Snap it up. Twelfth Planet Press is taking risks here — risks which big, well-heeled publishers have long since stopped taking. With stories of this quality as a result, we need to move fast to show that big goddam fat-assed fantasy trilogies about princes on horseback, or brainless tales about pretty glittery vegan vampires are not the mainstay of modern fantastic fiction. Who knows? If Twelfth Planet can keep doing this, maybe we’ll start seeing some interesting stuff from the big presses again one day.
http://twelfthplanetpress.wordpress.com/publications/roadkillsiren-beat/ will take you to an online purchase point.
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