beginning Interfictions

Interfictions gave me high hopes, because Small Beer Press had yet to disappoint me, but i'm annoyed. A couple of the stories so far are quite solid, making me curious about the other work of certain authors, but some of them... some of them are true clunkers. One of them actually enraged me with its inept rehash of stringing together New Age cliches. The original intent of this post was to launch into a lengthy diatribe on how much i loathe this person's writing, but once i found the person online, the venom left me.

The story is still awful though.

In the future, i'll probably steer far, far away from anything with this "interstitial art" label. The Wikipedia entry is craptastic, as it has the same insecure preening that flavors some of Interfictions. Books like Magic for Beginners, Cold Skin, Shriek, When They Came... these escape the fantasy ghetto for me, and demand some consideration other than the pulp that they are lumped in with. Writers who are looking for a boost to cross-market their books, to become the next Laurell K. Hamilton are hacks who are looking for new ways to market themselves into different areas of the bookstore. Interfictions is giving me this impression.

Ach. Some of these people in Interfictions are exactly why i loathed anything connected to fairy tales for decades. Fairy tales are simply not interesting when they are mere wish fulfillment. Italo Calvino's Italian Folk Tales captures this far better, demonstrating how weird and capricious the stories people tell their children. I tricked myself into believing that more people grasped how creepy the human subconscious is revealed to be in these stories. Nope.

I'll still finish the remainder.