Introduction:
New Maps Out of Hell
by Bruce Holland Rogers
Welcome to the world of James Van Pelt, a world of invisible shotgun-toting dwarves, psychic baseball consultants, sharks under the carpet, and giant spiders. The world of “imaginative literature.” Or, to put it another way, welcome to heaven, hell and assorted realms in between.
Of all the territories you’re about to enter, the ones that may linger longest in your memory are the infernal ones. That’s not because Van Pelt is a particularly dark writer. In fact, it’s his treatment of light-in-darkness that makes him so worth reading.
Thus, it’s thoroughly unfair of me to stand at the gates of Van Pelt’s fiction with the word hell on my lips. First, the territory that I have in mind is more akin to Ray Bradbury’s October Country than Dante’s Inferno. Second, most of these stories aren’t the least bit infernal. “The Death Dwarves” may be darkly funny, but funny it is. “The Comeback” is a baseball tall tale. “Nor a Lender Be” is about that rare sort of teacher who makes the classroom a little bit of heaven for the lucky few who find themselves enrolled with him. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that reading these stories is going to be a torment. No, you have hours of pleasure ahead of you. But some of your enjoyment may come from the special pleasures of Things Gone Very Wrong.
One of the first important critical works about science fiction was a collection of lectures-turned-essays by Kingsley Amis called New Maps of Hell. Up until this 1960 book, the thinking was that science fiction was a literature about technology. Amis pointed out that science fiction was more a literature about society, especially about society gone wrong. SF is largely dystopian. It is the literature of alienation, changes for the worse.
Most of the stories in this collection are more fantasy than SF (and some are neither). And not every story in this collection is about things gone very wrong. But by my count nearly half of them are—things gone wrong in a great variety of ways. “What Weena Knew” borrows its dystopia from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. The dystopia of poor Miss Hathaway and her spider is a bureaucratic one. The purgatories of “Happy Ending,” “Eight Words” and “Voices” are the interior realms created from regret. Owen’s unhappy neighborhood in “The Diorama” is unhappy because Owen is unhappy and does his best to drag his neighbors down with him. Of these dystopias, “Parallel Highways” is the one nearest to a true hell of demons and brimstone, but the demons drive big rigs and the brimstone vapors are really diesel exhaust. These stories may have a common dystopian theme, but it’s a theme worked with variety and surprise—the sort of variety and surprise that Ray Bradbury dished up. In fact, “The Diorama” reminds me a great deal of Bradbury’s classic story, “The Veldt,” but with one key difference.
That difference is where Van Pelt shines. Lots of writers explore the territory of dystopia, but don’t imagine that all you get with Van Pelt is a tour of hell. While there may be some value in simply mapping the infernal regions, where would that leave the reader? No, Van Pelt cares about his readers too much to just give us a tour of the dark places. Ultimately, this collection is more about emerging from the darkness.
One of the great movie moments of all time is in the biopic, Ghandi. In the midst of the violence surrounding India’s partition, a distressed Hindu man tells Ghandi, “As for me, I am going to hell.”
“Why are you going to hell?” the mahatma asks him.
“I killed a Muslim child. A little child!”
“There is a way out of hell,” Ghandi says. He instructs the man to find another Muslim child, one who has been orphaned in the violence, and bring him up in his own home as a Muslim. And the man leaves to find that child. He recognizes the road to redemption when it is pointed out to him.
For someone in a living hell, what gift could be greater than a map with the escape routes marked? Whatever the ultimate realities of heaven and hell may be, hell can be present for us here and now. One of the things fiction does is help us understand the path to here-and-now redemption. My favorite stories in this collection do just that. They aren’t new maps of hell. They are new maps out of hell.
Not half of these stories are about the dark regions of imagination. Of that minority, not every one ends with redemption. (Some characters who have made terrible choices are still living with the darkness of those decisions at the story’s end, but there’s a least a hint that the exit light is visible —if not to the character, then to the reader.) But these maps out of darkness are the essential James Van Pelt, the trait that makes him an inheritor of Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.” Both the Bradbury story and Van Pelt’s “The Diorama” cover similar imaginary ground, but Bradbury’s story ends in terror. Van Pelt’s tale ends in hope.
There are other pleasures on these pages. Van Pelt can dazzle with technique or tantalize us with a mystery, but there’s more to his stories than showmanship. Experimental fiction is too often only about experimentation itself, but “Happy Ending” is a morality play that is effective because of its experimental form. “Voices” is a mystery about more than solving a puzzle.
So welcome to these assorted territories of James Van Pelt’s imagination. Here you’ll encounter the popcorn and peanuts smell of the stadium, the perfume of a beautiful woman you can’t get out of your mind, the chalk dust of classrooms, and an office that smells of the sea. Don’t mind the occasional tang of brimstone. You’ll be glad you came.
“All strangers and beggars are from Zeus,
and a gift, though small, is precious.”
—Homer, The Odyssey