SHADES OF NOIR
I tend to write what my favourite author, J.G. Ballard, summed up us as “imaginative fiction”; most of the time that means that I play with the tropes of fantasy and science fiction. But imaginative fiction, as Ballard meant it, encompasses a greater swathe of storytelling modes.
The five stories in this section contain no fantastical or speculative elements, and yet they still (to me, at least) feel like imaginative fiction. Much like, say, Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island, Cocaine Nights, and Super-Cannes remain imaginative novels in the Ballardian mode even without the more overt sciencefictional elements of his earlier works, such as The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Vermilion Sands, and Hello America, these stories feel like they belong in the same imaginative multiverse as my more explicitly fantastic fiction. In fact, I end this section with my personal favourite among all my stories: “Dead.”
I greatly admire the work of American novelist Jim Thompson, with his unforgiving and lyrical noir portraits of the mid-twentieth-century postwar United States. I can see his influence all over this particular set of stories. The neogothic crime stories of Joyce Carol Oates also informed how I approached composing these quasi-crime stories.
Quasi-crime? These stories flirt with noir and crime (and also with erotica): there are within them murders, femmes fatales, amoral predators, missing persons, desperate lust, and con games. But I’m not quite sure if they’re actually crime fiction. Then again, maybe they are.