Revelations | |||||||||||||||
edited by Douglas E. Winter | |||||||||||||||
HarperPrism Books, 450 pages | |||||||||||||||
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A review by Alex Anderson
It's a fact that the millennium is coming to an end, and that is spawning
all kinds of paranoia about time, specifically that time has run out.
It's probably a safe assumption that we haven't achieved the state of grace
we were set here to. The Middle East is, as ever, in crisis, the spiritual
state of the western world is in decline, we consume the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge at an ever increasing rate (Silicon Valley has a special delivery
schedule arranged) and that nasty bitch, The Third Sister, is running around
somewhere stirring things up.
Of course, no one is focussing on the coming End more than our entertainers.
The market is being glutted with apocalyptic subject matter.
Strange Days hit the big screen and is now out on video, Chris Carter's
aptly named TV show Millennium (which co-opted the original working title
of this book) is reviving Lance Henrikson's otherwise forgettable acting
career and a small army of writers are putting The End down on paper for
our reading enjoyment. The theory must be that if the world's going to
end we might as well enjoy it while it happens. Everyone knows we all
love a good, morbid End-of-the-World story, after all it balances out
all that rosy Gene Roddenberry stuff.
Of course, anyone who's read Neville Shute's On The Beach knows the same
thing happened in the fifties and sixties. The inevitable outcome of an
all-out nuclear exchange was publicized and people realized, with a shock,
that we'd become powerful enough to destroy ourselves, a somewhat godlike
ability, really. Of course, we could control that, and we did. We chose not
to blow ourselves up. Not yet anyway. The situation we are faced with today
isn't of our own making, and not under our control. If the prophets are right
an alarm clock is going to wake up God who will then give us our final
exam, and MAD policy just isn't going to help.
Revelations, edited by Douglas E. Winter is one of the better offerings
available. A weird kind of anthology/novel where 11 writers of dark
fantasy/horror contribute stand-alone stories, short novels more than short
stories really, that combine to tell a larger tale, a tale of mankind's
final century, one decade at a time.
The first tale, by Joe R. Lansdale "The Big Blow" tells us about a vicious
boxer, race-hatred and a devastating hurricane that wipes out Galveston
Island, Texas, in 1900. This is followed by contributions from the man who
brought us Rambo. David Morrell describes a plague that makes the Black
Death pale in comparison, F. Paul Wilson writes of a Jewish mystic who attempts to
assassinate Hitler in 1923, Whitley Strieber examines the guilt of a
cancer-ridden Manhattan Project scientist. Other contributors include Richard Christian Matheson,
David Schow and Craig Spector.
Revelations is a strong piece of work by all the authors involved. Each story
is unique in style and voice, standing apart from its comrades. For that
reason more than anything else, the anthology is captivating, successful,
and brilliant. All the pieces I've described stand out, but of particular
note, and full value for the cover price on it's own is Clive Barker's
contribution: "The Chiliad", which wraps around the other stories, both beginning
and ending the anthology. In his afterword, Winter describes it as "majestic"
and I wonder if this is understating things. I've never been a fan of Barker's
work before now and I'm wondering if I've been missing something... something
grand. Something I definitely want to get a piece of before Gabriel sounds his
horn announcing Gehenna, the final Doomsday.
Of course if the world really is coming to an end, there can be only one thing
left to do: Make sure you're on good terms with Granny's poodle and give
money to your local animal shelter.
Alex Anderson is a long-time SF reader just pompous enough to believe other people may want to read the meanderings he scribbles down between fits of extreme lethargy he calls contemplation. |
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