Post
This is a book bursting with monsters - the final novella, "The Secret Diary of Mina Harker," is a beautiful vampire tale that remixes Dracula to great effect - food, humor, subtle emotions and beautiful premises. It's got Oz, and Burroughs' Barsoom, and King Arthur, and so much else besides.
This was my introduction to Goss's work - I'd heard great things, but the TBR pile is always 50 times bigger than I can possibly tackle. I'm off to read a *lot* more of it.
17/
This is a *very* fun game at the best, but it's also *work*. It's one of the reasons that sf/f short story collections can feel difficult: every 10 or 20 pages, you're solving a new puzzle, just so you can understand the stakes and setting of the story. Sure, you're also getting a new (potentially) super-cool conceit every few pages, and ideally, the novelty, the intellectual challenge and the cognitive load of grasping the situation all balance out.
6/
One way to reduce the cognitive load on the reader is to build a world that hews more closely to the mundane one in which we live, where the conceit is simpler and thus easier to convey. But another way to do it is to just be REALLY! FUCKING! GOOD! at incluing.
That's Goss: really fucking good at incluing. Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories *and* she slides you into them like they were a warm bath.
7/
Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're *that good*.
Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA.
8/
She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of *Dracula*. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.
With all that erudition, you won't be surprised to learn that formally, *structurally*, these are very daring stories. They take many narrative forms - correspondence, academic articles, footnotes, diary entries.
9/
But not in a straightforward way - for example, the title story, "Letters From an Imaginary Country," consists entirely of letters *to* the protagonist, with no replies. The protagonist doesn't appear a single time in this story, You have to infer *everything* about her and what's happening to her by means of the incluing in these letters (some of which are written by people whom the protagonist believes to be fictional characters!).
10/
All of this should add to that cognitive loading - it's flashy, it's writerly, it's clever as hell. But it doesn't! Somehow, Goss is setting up these incredibly imaginative McGuffins, using these *weird-ass* narrative building blocks, and unless you deliberately stop yourself, pull your face out of the pages and think about how these stories are being told, you won't even notice.
11/
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
