introduction by Garry Kilworth
It’s always difficult writing an introduction to a collection of short stories that have excited your reading buds and satisfied your taste for good literature. You want to pass on the enthusiasm you feel for the tales, yet are aware that you mustn’t give too much away or readers will curse your name for destroying the dénouement. Two aspects were clear to me at the end of my reading: one, the writing is of the highest excellence and two, the stories are original. The writer has mastered his own voice and he uses it to tell tales – almost always sinister and soul-scouring tales – that unfold smoothly and menacingly.
The first two stories in the section entitled ‘Shades of Noir’ are about obsession. In ‘Ted’s Collection’ that obsession spirals downwards into madness and it is the madness of two people. Stories of this nature need both positive and negative terminals to make them work and ‘Ted’s Collection’ has these essentials and indeed some dark electricity flows. In ‘Secretly Wishing for Rain’ (what a beautiful title!) the obsession is as old as the human race itself: love. Love that is lacerated by both acceptance and rejection. A tale with crossed and tangled lines that are impossible to unravel. This is my favourite story in the volume and though the plot has nothing in common with Carson McCullers’ ‘Ballad of the Sad Café’ it raised the same dark liquid emotions in me which I felt when I read the latter. ‘Secretly Wishing for Rain’ is truly a story of the highest quality and as a writer myself I admire it greatly.
The third tale in the collection is almost the opposite of a story about obsession, the latter requiring at least one proactive character to make it work. ‘She Watches Him Swim’ is about sitting on a stool and knitting while the guillotine drops and slices through the victim’s neck. It is about waiting for someone or something else to make your decisions for you. If I say any more I will indeed be cursed by future readers. Suffice to add that it is the smoothness of the story, if not a stream of consciousness a flow of uninterrupted thoughts, which carries you along. It is a dream-like tale that drifts gently towards its disturbing end. ‘Diptych’ is a beautiful little cameo, after which comes ‘Dead’, the strangest and probably the deepest of the stories that remain within the blurred boundaries of reality in this collection. Again it is a story of love, but this time of a family love scarred by anguish.
From this point onwards there is a pleasure-jolting shift into the ‘Nocturnes’: short mythical histories heavily loaded with metaphor. They are well crafted and to my knowledge completely original tales. I loved them – and here comes one of the highest pieces of praise from a fellow author, I wish I had written them. These are magical vignettes which are impossible for me to foreshadow in this Introduction. They must be left to the reader to absorb with all the wonder of coming to a set of stories splashed with colour and light which lead the reader down marvellous and unfamiliar tracks. If I am reminded of anything, it is the Oceanian folk lore myths of the Polynesians, but only in the method of telling and the width and depth of the language.
With the final sub-collection ‘Strange Tales of Sex and Death’ as a reader and writer of science fiction and fantasy I am in more familiar territory, though the stories here by no means fit comfortably into either of those genres. These are uncanny entities: Kafka-esque tales which, like many others in this book, focus mainly on the turbulent problems and raw emotions of individuals rather than scanning any wider world. ‘Being Here’ stands out amongst them, a nightmare tale where the victim has lost all control over himself and his destiny. There is, as the title of this section suggests, a great deal of sex and death in the stories. Indeed, the whole volume is inhabited by protagonists who struggle emotionally and physically with these two basic experiences. In Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes Claude Lalumière plumbs the deep trenches of yearning, fear and the agonies of unfulfilled needs with the accomplishment of a talented writer.
Garry Kilworth, 2013