Short Fiction Review # 20: “Unbound” from GUD 4
For this edition of my irregular review of the latest (more or less) short fiction, I thought I’d try something a little different. Usually I try to focus on the stories that worked the most for me, with maybe some attention on those that didn’t and why; at the same time, I also try to convey a flavor of everything else, if only just to alert you that an author is in the publication without, for any number of reasons, wanting to get into discussing the story to any great length. Note the use of the word “try.” One of the challenges here is to provide some substantive, possibly even useful, discussion to an audience that I’m assuming hasn’t already read the material. As noted elsewhere here in the Black Gate blog, that’s a distinction between literary criticism, which assumes knowledge of the work and doesn’t worry about spoilers, and a review, which is still critical (not just in the sense of pointing out flaws), but, out of necessity, less fully detailed.
The job as I see it is to do justice to two or three stories of note for how good — or bad — they are, while at least acknowledging the existence of other contributions in a publication that might contain works from five, ten or even more writers. Consequently, the “hit and miss” approach is unavoidable. Frequently, I feel that in trying to do justice to the entire publication, I short sheet individual content. So, this time around, I’m going to focus on just one story, “Unbound” by Brittany Reid Warren, which leads off issue four (really the fifth, since the inaugural issue was #0) of the twice yearly GUD (aka Greatest Uncommon Denominator), as exemplifying the pub’s literary new wave fabulist, paraspheric, interstitial, elves-need-not-apply ethos.
Fans of Tom Waits are often divided into two camps: those who favor the early boozy Kerouac, be-bop inspired crooner of life’s derelicts and losers up until he transmogrified beginning with the “Heartattack and Vine” album and “crossed over” into Kurt Weill cacaphonous orator of the absurd; fans of the later period sometimes disdain the earlier, and vice versa, despite the obvious connections. Me, I’m in the third camp as a huge admirer of both milieus. (I suppose there’s a further quarter of people who can’t stand Waits at all, but, much like the folks who still tiresomely maintain Dylan hasn’t done anything since his protest days, aren’t worth serious attention.)
The much anticipated — and feared — “reimagining” of Patrick McGoohan’s classic cult TV series The Prisoner is scheduled for release on AMC in November. One good sign is that Ian McKellen is cast as Number Two (a role which, unlike the original series, will not revolve among multiple actors) and is (like the original) of fixed duration. James Caviezal is Number 6 and there are some interesting parallels here. Caviezal played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s (who was rumored to be a candidate for Number 6 in the various movie proposals over the year) The Passion of the Christ, controversial for its brutal, some would say sado-masochistic, portrayal of the Gospel stories. Like McGoohan, Caviezal is an observant Cathloic. Caviezal has made public stands on such issues as stem cell research and it is not inconceivable this might have affected his career in an industry that for the most part tilts left; McGoohan reportedly turned down the role of James Bond for moral reasons and insisted in his contract that he would not kiss women on-screen, particularly ironic given that The Prisoner was embraced by the sexual liberation advocates of the Sixties counter-culture for the program’s non-conformist ethos.
Intriguing premise — and something quite different from his previous work, which is always good to see in a favorite novelist — where two presumably East European cities somehow physically co-exist, with the inhabitants following strict protocols to avoid one another whenever their separate realities intersect. Grossman would be happy that it has compelling plotting; however, as a “police procedural,” Miéville doesn’t quite play fair. Part of the game in these kind of things is to at least give the reader a chance of figuring out the mystery of “whodunnit,” which I doubt anyone would be able to, although I’m guessing this isn’t Miéville’s concern here. I think he’s aiming at something more metaphorical along the lines of the existential spaces we all tread among the various realms of social interaction. Nonetheless, the unfolding of the mystery struck me as a little forced. Potentially, this could be the start of a series.
I tend to go through my “to be read pile” looking for themes as an approach to wend my way through and choose what I want
to attack next. These two are about the realities of war and the casualties of those who manage to survive. The first, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is a novel about the Vietnam war fiasco; the other is non-fiction, The Forever War 
Regarding two earlier posts: