Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand ( A Review by Helen McClory)

286 pgs/$16.00

There’s a sense of wholeness to Errantry: Strange Stories which makes it appear, at first, easy to discuss. The subheading is ‘Strange Stories’ and strange they are. Ten stories make up this collection, ten distinct but obviously blood-related kin. Each populated by wonderstruck onlookers or sinister, eccentric figures. Each set in places – Woodlands, coast, mountains, cityscapes – that are uncertain grounds, warped by mysterious forces, but rich in realistic detail. There is a sense of accrual in each story. But what is being accrued is a sense of long lasting dis-ease. An enthrallment that is hard to shake or find out the edges of.

It’s no wonder that one of the stories in the collection won the Shirley Jackson Award. Like Jackson’s work, there is a claustrophobic creepiness to almost every story, despite the wonders. Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky. For the scope of this review, I’d like to focus mostly on the award-winning story above, my favourite of the ten, ‘Near Zennor’.

In ‘Near Zennor’, an American widower discovers some letters his English wife wrote in childhood to children’s author who was later revealed to be a paedophile. The letters are at first civil, then warm, and then angry. What could have occurred? And who can he ask for clarification, now that Anthea is dead? Jeffrey is presented as a methodical man, not one to be comfortable feeling at a loss:

Now he sat and stared at the five letters. The sight made him feel light-headed and slightly queasy: as though he’d opened a door and found himself at the edge of a precipice, gazing down some impossible distance to a world made tiny and unreal. Why had she never mentioned any of this? […] He knew it wasn’t rational; knew his response derived from his compulsive sense of order, what Anthea had always called his architect’s left brain.

“Jeffrey would never even try to put a square peg into a round hole,” she’d said once at a dinner party. “He’d just design a new hole to fit it.”

He could think of no place he could fit the five letters to Robert Bennington. After a few minutes, he replaced each in its proper envelope and stacked them atop each other. Then he turned back to his laptop, and wrote an e-mail to Evelyn.

The language is direct and fitting for the character they are concerned with: We are told what Jeffrey’s emotions are, and an image, rooted in architecture is appropriately paired to them. His actions are tight, with the repetition of ‘each’ in ‘replaced each in its proper envelope and stacked them atop each other’ highlighting the slightly mechanical aspects of a man stricken in grief and confusion. Evelyn is Anthea’s friend from her school days, and was involved in the Bennington incident. Jeffrey travels to England to meet with her and discuss the letters, but what she tells him only serves to steer the story deeper into murk: rather than being a tale of abuse, what happened involved a strange, high-hedged garden in Cornwall, a moonlight ritual cooked up by three schoolgirls, three unnatural lights coming nearer across the fields, and the later disappearance, forever, of one of the party.

Once Jeffrey, as he must, arrives in Cornwall, the story becomes one embedded in a landscape that is for me strongly evocative – I spent many summer holidays in that part of South-West England as a teenager. It’s a place that carries with it a sense of legends and myth, married to a landscape of rocky cliffs and hidden beachy coves, prehistoric burial sites and standing stones. And eerie names – the Zennor of the story is a village, not too far from the strange, cliff-suspended Bed and Breakfast where Jeffrey stays while on his search.

He could hear but not see the ocean, waves crashing against rocks hundreds of feet below. Now and then he got a skin-crawling glimpse of immense cliffs like congealed flames – ruddy stone, apricot yellow gorse, lurid flares of orange lichen all burned to ash as afterglow faded from the western sky.

He wrenched his gaze back to the narrow strip of road immediately in front of him. Gorse and brambles tore at the doors; once he bottomed out, then nosed the car across a water-filled gulley that widened into a stream that cascaded down the cliff to the sea below […]

“We thought maybe you weren’t coming,” someone called as Jeffrey stepped shakily out onto a cobblestone drive. […] “Some people, they start down here and just give up and turn back,”

Jeffrey, as he was at the beginning of the story, is suspended, clinging, above a void, here hellishly licked by flame-substitutes and the hungry unseen sea. But the landscape is rooted in fact – the south-western coast of Cornwall is just that way, and the Bed and Breakfast itself is a charming, utterly un-scary English cottage full of bread, books and bathtubs.

Throughout the other stories of the collection, Hand provides us with vivid and never wasteful scenic description – In fact, I would have relished if she had been more diversionary, as I could have read an entire book centred in the lakeside and woods of ‘The Far Shore’, or the South Carolinian coast in ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon’. But working within her discipline, Hand writes for equal balance of story, character, murk, and scenery. I won’t spoil too much of ‘Near Zennor’, suffice to say the search for answers leads Jeffrey further into the landscape, slipping from the reigns of time and the ration, down into liminal spaces under the ground.

Each reader will be tugged at by some pieces in this collection and left perhaps a little bewildered by others – it’s the nature of dis-ease to be set off by something one finds kinship with, subconsciously or not. One might be unsettled by under-populated islands, their borders so defined, yet their interiors left vague as forests at night. Or by a landscape familiar from childhood, distorted by memory and grief. Errantry: Strange Stories is not a book that is simple to disengage from, to settle down with delineating adjectives. Like all the best fantasy stories it has roots in realism it then undermines, thus calling it all into question. A book to take slowly, appreciating the finesse, watching where you tread.

Helen McClory was raised in both rural and urban Scotland. She has lived in Sydney and New York City and is currently to be found in the South Side of Edinburgh overlooking a prehistoric cliff face. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.com/