TITLE: Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites
AUTHOR: Hal Duncan
GENRE: Fantasy/Spec Fic anthology
PUBLISHED: 01/04/2014
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: N/A
Review:
–I’m not like that, he says. I’m not a…
Fairy?
–Every time you say that, I whisper, a little part of you will die.
I’ve been a fan of Hal Duncan ever since I got my hands on a copy of Vellum, a genre-bending work of neo-myth that mixed parallel universes with Sumerian myth and served it up with an apocalypse. It is, to say the least, magnificent. So, even though I’m usually wary of short story collections, I snatched up Scruffians! the second I could get my hands on it.
And I’m very glad I did.
Duncan is one of those writers who takes no prisoners: he makes no effort to accommodate the understanding of his readers, jumping straight into the deep end with every work and expecting you to jump in after him. His style is strikingly original and his word-play breathtaking – but there’s no denying that his stories can, at times, be incredibly confusing. One of the issues many readers had with Vellum was that it was difficult to keep track of the characters when the story jumped from one parallel universe to the next. Some of the stories in this collection are the same, leaping from thread to thread without warning. They’re beautiful without a doubt, thick with imagery and beauty and the remastering of myths, but some readers are just going to end up dizzy and give up.
You have been warned.
Scruffians! is a collection of fifteen stories, the first six of which deal with the eponymous Scruffians – children and teenagers who have been ‘Fixed’ by the Stamp – a device which freezes them in their bodies, eternally young, ever-healing and never-aging. By editing the stamp left on their chest, Fixed individuals can alter their appearance and even give themselves extras like Wolverine claws or neon-coloured hair. Over the course of the Scruffian tales, we are introduced to their origins – originally, the Stamp was meant to produce a never-ending workforce of child slaves (think the chimney sweeps of Victorian London), until the scruffians made off with the Stamp themselves. These wild, crazy children have their own mythology, clearly nicked from familiar stories like Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and the tale of the Fisher King, but rewritten to give a very different slant. Duncan is not an author who believes in the prim and proper, and the scruffians in particular embody that, with little time for serious pursuits and no respect for authority. (They call adults ‘groanhuffs’. I think that’s all you need to know, really!)
The other stories cover a wide range. My favourite was the last in the collection, the bewildering Oneirica, which I don’t dare attempt to describe but was full of such beautiful images...
a shadow by the name of Uther, his skin the royal blue of the night sky, filigreed with pin-pricks of light and sigils scratched between them, a luminous tattoo of constellations we do not recognise.
But thrown in amongst the gorgeous descriptions and fairytale retellings are moments of sharp wit; some humourous, some chilling, and all brilliant...
Others say it contains not the body of the Dead God but His Law, that it is the Ark of His Covenant. (Some say that this is the same thing.) Still others say it is Pandora’s Box, the chest that when opened released all the ills humanity has ever known upon the world.
(And some say that, again, this is the same thing.)
My second favourite story has to be the penultimate story, Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill!, which is a vicious parody of the one and only Twilight. In this story, vampires are disgusting monsters whom the werewolf protagonist and his handler hunt down and destroy. Their current target happens to be glittering away in a high school… Even in so few pages, Duncan brilliantly manages to convince us of his characters, deftly sketching out unique voices and relationships that feel so real after just a few lines.
I knew it from the first day he came to the Pound, the way the truth didn’t even faze him. I mean whatever run-ins they’ve had with the nasties we track, they always come out of it with a fucking iron will, else they’d wouldn’t be looking to join the cause, but usually the whole secret-agency thing leaves them at least a little what the fuck? But he just strolled down the line of pups and returnees till he came to me. I saw it in his eyes.
–What’s your name? he said.
–You decide, I told him.
It’s a delicious cocktail of blunt language, satire, emotion, and laugh-out-loud humour, and I adored it.
As he pulls the car up at the gates of the school, I bring my head back in from the window, grin at him and throw my hands in the air.
–Rub my tummy!
–Behave, he says.
I give him my best puppy eyes.
–Not. Now. You have a job to do, so go on. Git.
I climb out of the car, bath-time slow. When he drives away, he’ll be abandoning me, like, forever. He sighs, knowing what I need.
–Where’s the vampire? he says. Go find the vampire, boy!
And suddenly I’m as keen as his voice.
Really, all of the stories are like that, from the kid Jack who determines to be a knight by stealing away in a jester’s outfit to the guns of the Pirate Gods that will either kill you or strike you down with love, there’s an element of the ridiculous to nearly every tale. But there’s unabashed brilliance, too. The Behold of the Eye is a story about a fairy who takes up residence in a baby’s imagination, but it becomes something much darker and richer and more painful by the end of it. And yes, as you may have guessed from the title, every story features gay characters. That would get it major points from me even if this book didn’t wring my heart out and make me burst out in giggles, occasionally both at once. It’s touching and wicked and wonderful, and yet again, I’m left anxiously waiting for Duncan’s next work. It had better not take so long next time!