INTRODUCTION
by Andy Duncan
What a pleasure to hold in my hands a fiction collection by F. Brett Cox! Reading it, even scanning the contents, is for me like visiting a family album. Brett is a brother of mine, in the sense of the families we choose for ourselves.
Brett and I have been friends for almost a quarter-century, and would have met a decade earlier, when we both were students at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, had our aim been better. I was a journalism undergraduate, not an English graduate student like Brett, but I went to a number of author readings and other English-department events, and he and I were in the same room at the same time more than once, but just missed one another. Clearly the world was not ready.
In our timeline and, I trust, yours, Brett and I finally met at one of John Kessel’s parties in Raleigh, North Carolina, circa 1994. I was one of John’s master’s students at North Carolina State, while Brett was a Ph.D. student at Duke. But our first extended conversation took place in January 1995 at a regional science fiction convention, Chattacon in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Most of the attendees were there for gaming, or for media fandom, but four or five of us dutifully trooped from one author reading to another, and bonded pretty well by weekend’s end. (Another in that group was Christopher Rowe, whose own splendid collection, Telling the Map, came out in 2017.)
Brett and I quickly realized that though we grew up about 180 miles apart, me in rural South Carolina and him “up north” in rural North Carolina, we had basically the same upbringings, the same extended, fitfully genteel families (in the sense of blood kin and married-in kin) and the family secrets to go with them, the same pushmi-pullyu relationship to the American South, and certainly the same obsessive, all-encompassing reading habits; as a result, we both were determined not to turn out like Quentin Compson. (So far, so good!) In conversation, we frequently tell one another, “We are the same,” a sentence we usually deploy as a transition device, where others might say, “I can top that one.”
But Brett discovered science fiction fandom at a much younger age than I did. As a teenager, he briefly corresponded with Richard Shaver, a thought that has kept me awake nights. Brett’s collection of first-edition UFO books inspires awe, and wherever he lives, he erects monumental towers of science fiction paperbacks and digest magazines that tease the visitor out of thought, like the moai of Rapa Nui. Sometimes (I can attest) these topple onto visitors as they sleep, and enrich their dreams.
Unsurprisingly, we have spent countless hours together at science fiction conventions, and we have shared many mild adventures on that circuit, for example our brief encounter in a hotel bar with a morose Scottish Highlander, dressed as for battle, who responded to our cheery greeting by snarling, “Don’t touch me sword.” Our panicked retreat can be imagined. At the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held each March in Florida —Y’all come!—Brett and I often wind up as co-stars onstage, I suppose because we’ve had so much opportunity through the years to perfect our timing, like the Sunshine Boys. We’ve played astronauts in zero-g; we’ve played fawning minions at the feet of Brian W. Aldiss (typecasting); we’ve played Frankenstein’s creature and a rampaging villager (further typecasting).
But enjoyable as all that has been, I value more all the time we’ve spent together not wearing name tags: visiting the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio; rescuing a snapping turtle in Georgia; attending a production of Julius Caesar at London’s Globe Theatre; having dinner with Fannie Flagg. (I’m unclear how that last one happened.) We’ve prowled through a number of cemeteries, for example the stonemasons’ graveyard in Barre, Vermont. We both married well, better than we deserve; Sydney and I were present for Brett’s wedding to Jeanne Beckwith, and we have spent a lot of time with that brilliant, lovely couple since, though never as much as we’d like. Sydney and Jeanne are good at getting Brett and me to talk about something other than, say, the 19th-century rat trap that Tom Waits demonstrated (sans rat) to David Letterman, which for Brett and me was a sort of apex of television.
A longtime member of the Cambridge Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and a tireless supporter of other writers’ work, Brett has helped a lot of colleagues improve their manuscripts. I’m one of them. For example, during a conversation in the car, I believe en route to Moonrise Kingdom at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, Brett suggested the crucial plot twist of my novelette “New Frontiers of the Mind.” My favorite example of Brett’s story-doctor skills came at ICFA one year, after John Kessel read aloud a chunk of his Mary Shelley-Jane Austen mash-up then in progress. John confessed, “I have no idea what to title this thing.” In the audience, Brett calmly raised his hand and said, “Pride and Prometheus”—and that is, indeed, the title engraved on the base of John’s second Nebula Award.
Looking over this remarkable assemblage of stories, however, I cannot recall being a damn bit of use to the drafting of any of them. I was sort of present at the dawn of “Road Dead,” as I remember exulting long distance with Brett, right after he moved to rural Vermont, at his discovery that the town’s only decent cell-phone reception was in a hilltop cemetery. But the funny, terrifying, fully inhabited and immersive story that resulted, which takes up barely three pages in this volume, was all Brett.
This whole book, in fact, is all Brett: his fascination with the sucking undertow of history, his determination to defy the sanitized, Convention and Visitors Bureau view of community, his keen sense of the grotesque in daily routines and everyday people. Consider, for example, the story that accompanies the matter-of-fact title “Maria Works at Ocean City Nails,” in which nothing fantastic happens, other than everything. One gets the sense that for Brett—should I use his last name, now that I’m in literary-critic mode? Nah—the whole United States is a Gothic construction, and the overhead vaults are beginning to crumble.
As I re-read these, I think of course of Shirley Jackson (whose memory Brett has done much to sustain, as a co-founder of the Shirley Jackson Awards) and of Flannery O’Connor (who shows up as a character in this volume, along with Herman Melville, Geronimo, Madeline Usher and multiple Bette Pages), but also of the late Irish writer Frank O’Connor, who kept throwing his cap over the wall of his childhood and jumping after it, no matter what he found on the other side.
You will meet some of my favorite fictional characters here, including the young air-raid warden in “Suspension,” the angry villain who vents, Sam Hall-like, throughout “The Last Testament of Major Ludlam,” and, well, just about everyone in “The Light of the Ideal” and “The Amnesia Helmet,” both of which should have been awards contenders, both of which were published by zines that folded moments thereafter, in time-honored fashion.
For that matter, “Madeline’s Version” was written for Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, an anthology co-edited by Brett and me, commissioned by a publisher that folded before the book came out. Tor came to the rescue, somehow persuaded by agent Shawna McCarthy, but it was a near thing. Short-fiction publishing can be precarious, like America. (Heads up! Another chunk of the vault just fell.) Still, we’re very proud of Crossroads, which was animated from the start by Brett’s determination to include genre authors and mainstream authors, the traditional and the experimental, science fiction and fantasy and horror and magic realism—all broadly defined, or not so much defined as half-remembered, like a joyous evening among friends. Brett does not believe that good fences make good neighbors; he loves genre fiction too much to isolate it.
The same eclecticism animates this volume. Sure, you will find zombies, UFOs, sea serpents and so forth, but they are seldom deployed in the way you expect. A Brett Cox character is likely to respond to an intrusion of the marvelous, the supernatural, the horrific by walking away and trying to forget about it, which of course is just the way we handle them in daily life.
In format, too, these stories would be all over the map, if there were a map. Some of them may be poems; a couple are definitely songs. At least one is a stage monologue, but several others are performance pieces: I’ve heard Brett perform them, though the convention program promised only a “reading.”
I can’t help wondering, with happy anticipation, what the fantastic Mr. Cox—no, sorry, Dr. Cox—no, sorry, Colonel Cox, Vermont State Militia (you’ll have to ask him about that)—will come up with next. The title notwithstanding, I’m sure these are not the end of all his exploring.
In the meantime, enjoy these stories—and watch your step!
Andy Duncan
Frostburg, Maryland
May 2018