A fun trip down to Austin to see old friends, attend Armadillocon, make new friends, eat good vegan food, and, as usual, look at books. (This is one of those postcards that gets mailed after leaving the place.) I hadn’t been to Austin or Armadillocon for several years, so it was good to be back. A curator friend recommended a vegan sushi place Nori. I headed there after our meeting and was impressed by the Katana-ya (deep-fried nori roll with avocado, cucumber, kanpyo, shoga, surimi mix; topped with wasabi mayo, unagi, ponzu green salad, jalapeño, red onion, and cilantro). The convention was in the same hotel as before, an odd, anonymous late 1970s exurban architectural mode that could have been at the edge of Anywhere, USA. Inside, though, it was all Armadillocon, a small friendly convention with a good mix of panels and readings (even sometimes forcing one to make hard choices).
One of the reasons I went was to show up at the Howard Waldrop celebration, a panel moderated by Scott A. Cupp and also including Sanford Allen, Robert Taylor, and Don Webb: all friends who knew Howard for decades. I hadn’t been able to attend the Waldrop Memorial in June; I was glad to attend this gathering. Towards the end of the allotted hour (the anecdotes and yarns could have gone on for hours), when the floor was open for comments, I stood up and said something like this:
My name is Henry Wessells and I’m from New Jersey, where we also esteem Howard Waldrop. He excelled at integrating incompatible ideas into improbable fictions that suddenly reveal truths about life, literature, and America; and the stories equally suddenly show themselves to be inevitable and essential parts of American literature. If “The Ugly Chickens” is often mentioned as Howard’s best known story, for me his masterpiece is “Heart of Whitenesse”, where the ambitious conceit is executed with perfect skill. Not a word out of place, and the madcap humor is controlled in the service of the tale.
I have it from a reliable source that as an angler Howard practiced catch and release, and thus understood the impossibility of clinging to things. And so we now mark his departure; the stories, and the ideas, remain.
I went to several interesting panels and readings by a variety of writers. And of course there were many pleasant conversations along the way. I came back with a few books:
— Christopher Brown. Field Notes. September 2024. [Austin, 7 September 2024]. Gift of the author, inscribed, one of the first copies out of the box. Two essays, two reading lists, and twelve photos. Newsletter for advance orders to his new book.
——. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024]. Advance copy, inscribed.
Live to Build a Better World. Despair, Survival, and Hope in Science Fiction’s Response to Environmental Change. [Introduction by Jeremy Brett]. Texas A&M University Libraries, 2021. Illustrated catalogue for the exhibition at the Cushing Memorial Library (January to June 2021). An interesting selection of mostly twenty-first century books and films, with the earliest titles being The Lorax (1971), by Dr. Seuss, Brunner’s The Sheep Look up and Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (both 1972), and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993).
— Avram Davidson. The Avram Davidson Treasury. Tor, [1998]. Book club edition which I hadn’t known existed. The copyright page is altered, the dust jacket carries no price and has a number slug on the back panel, and the black boards are smooth.
— Delilah S. Dawson. Bloom. Titan, [2023].
— Joe R. Lansdale. Things Get Ugly. The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. [Introduction by S. A. Cosby]. Tachyon, [2023].
— Josh Rountree. Death Aesthetic. Underwood, [2024].
——. The Legend of Charlie Fish. Tachyon, [2023].
— John Varley. The Persistence of Vision. [Introduction by Algis Budrys] [1978]. Dell [Quantum Paperback], [1979]. Varley was the first Armadillocon guest of honor.
— Howard Waldrop. Howard Who?. Stories [1986]. Peapod Classics. [Small Beer Press, third printing, 30 March 2024] [replacement copy].
Went out for an early morning walk for a little time away from the air conditioned hotel. Down to Onion creek, a greenbelt park in the floodplain, crossed by two pipelines buried under a cut across the steep sedimentary banks. It is a heavily used park, with some folks living out of their cars along the access road. Along the creek there are signs of deer, dogs, dog walkers, egrets wading or in flight, fishermen (one midstream in waders, and the chairs set up for absent anglers), tree climbers, and above all the waters: all through the trails and scrub there are signs of past flooding, water-tossed logs, a mulch of branches, twigs, and man-made detritus large and small.
I came upon two forest giants, bald cypress trees on opposite banks of the creek that must have been — even a century ago — too big to extract. A knotted rope dangled from the giant of the north bank, the ladder of some ascended sentinel of the creek.
I have known Chris Brown for many years, first through reading his essays in the pages of The New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications, and then in person at Readercon and in a few larger cities. We share an interest in the ragged edges of the planet and in science fiction, and we’ve walked together to one or two of the green worlds you can find just a few steps from the usual paths. His novel Tropic of Kansas was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”, and he was a good person to talk to when I was writing A Conversation larger than the Universe. His Field Notes newsletters are always interesting and fun. Disqualified by such ties of friendship from writing a review of A Natural History of Empty Lots, a book that grew from his years of walking and thinking around in his neighborhood, I asked him the only question that needs asking, and his answer in this singular interview (from A Natural History) is elegant and definitive.
Henry Wessells : Have you ever seen a chupacabra ?
Christopher Brown : Almost a decade after I went on the Bigfoot watch, I had a close encounter with a chupacabra. It was May 2015, on the Sunday night before Memorial Day. We were in Marfa, Texas, where we had taken our visiting friends, Henry Wessells and Mary Jo Duffy, native Philadelphians who live in New Jersey and work in New York. After dinner on our last night, we headed east on Highway 90 to check out the Marfa Lights. It was around 9 p.m. The radio was tuned to the local public radio station, which was playing its “Space Music” show-ambient instrumentals that suited the mood. About two-thirds into the nine-mile drive, a ghostly creature crossed our path, walking right across the road, rather slowly.
Slow enough that we got a long look as it passed through the beams of our headlights. Four-legged, definitely not a deer, a figure of ethereal white. Bigger than a dog, different than a coyote — even though that’s probably what it was. They say most chupacabra sightings are really just coyotes with mange. We all saw it, were similarly baffled, and agreed that it was both something that had a rational explanation that the brevity and circumstances of our sighting would not let us figure out, and that we also had just experienced an encounter that had an authentically paranormal frisson. It was definitely a chupacabra, we understood, as we also understood that a chupacabra is simply a creature you encounter that does not follow the taxonomic indicators of its species, looking so strange, in the moment you see it, as to provide you an experience of the alien and a welcome excuse to make up your own legend.
— — —
— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, forthcoming 17 September 2024 from Timber Press.
— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places.
Forthcoming from Timber Press, September, 2024.
So excited to have this to read, from an excellent writer (and friend!) whose explorations forming the core of this book have been chronicled in his Field Notes, and whose Tropic of Kansas was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”. That’s it for now. There will be more about this book.
— Robert Freeman Wexler. The Silverberg Business. [vi], 269, [1, blank], [1, about the author], [5, blank], [4, ads]. Small Beer Press, [2022]. Wrappers with illustration by Jon Langford.
The Silverberg Business follows Shannon, a Jewish private detective who has come to Victoria, Texas, in late October 1888, in search of information about a missing man and the large bank draft he carried, representing funds raised on behalf of a Romanian Jewish refugee settlement plan. Shannon, a Galveston native with a talent for finding bodies, uncovers fraud and murder, and indications of concerted sinister activity in and around southern coastal Texas. We get a clear sense of the “feel of a frontier town” in Victoria, and the people living there. Shannon gets knocked over the head on several occasions. He works for a Chicago agency and has considerable autonomy. The detective talks, and listens to people from all walks of life, bankers and bank clerks, railroad conductors and bartenders, laundresses and rooming-house owners, marshals and horse dealers, gamblers, whores, and rabbis. In the course of his narration, Shannon drops elements of his own history and character. His tenacity of purpose leads him into strange places, and the reader goes with him, out into sparsely populated terrain, and elsewhere.
August Miller Store, Victoria, Texas. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
Shannon’s first-person narrative voice is matter-of-fact, smart and aphoristic, and keenly observant of his surroundings. He is Hammett’s Continental Op on the ground in 1880s Texas, which would be interesting enough, but Wexler also reappropriates the Western as a literary domain, and goes farther even than William S. Burroughs did in The Place of Dead Roads. Wexler’s achievement is to have created a formally innovative fiction that moves seamlessly, and beautifully, from dream to waking to sensory hallucination and then back to the mug of coffee the waitress has set before Shannon in the dining room at the Delmonico Hotel. He soon discovers that Silverberg, an Easterner, was seen in the company of a well-dressed Westerner with bad teeth and a gambler named Stephens. A conductor describes Stephens: “whitish hair, somewhat taller than average, red-brown eyes, a tendency toward fancy dress.”
Shannon muses:
Was Stephens the man who walked past the hotel restaurant and stared in at me? White . . . blond . . . storm of white-capped waves gouged the coast . . . an oak that had stood for centuries screamed and gave up its life . . . nothing remained, nothing but naked earth twisted into shapes of the dead and dying. I cried for the land, but what use are tears?
Stephens wears an onyx ring with a Greek god carved into it, and demonstrates a capacity to come and go as he pleases. There is often a stench of sea rot as the mark of his passage.
Indianola, Texas after the August 20, 1886, hurricane that destroyed the city. The residence of Peter Clement showing driftwood against it. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
Pursuing the gambler, Shannon saddles up his horse, Blue Swamp, and rides out of Port Lavaca towards the ruined town of Indianola, which had been flattened by an earlier hurricane. He spends a couple of nights camping, fishing and shooting ducks for his meals, befriending a one-winged bald eagle, and has strange dreams. The next day as he gets near Matagorda Bay, the noon sky turns dark. “Reddish light washed the salt-cedars and cactus.” When his Blue Swamp refuses to move further, Shannon goes ahead on foot and finds an unexpected sand hill on the barrier island.
Sand hills form, blow apart, re-form, eventually becoming immobilized by growth of sea oats, goateed, and other plants. This one was crusty, bare, more like sandstone than sand, and the front looked sculpted, carved into features . . . curl of lip, open mouth, deep eye holes. A rotting animal festered in the mouth.
Then I found the body.
It is the murdered Silverberg. When the weather turns inclement, Shannon passes the night at the farm of Ratface Conroy. Out in the tumble-down barn, “a lean-to strung together from broken parts of other structures,” Shannon’s sleep is interrupted when his hosts attempt to murder him. Shannon shoots the husband and goes after Mrs. Conroy, who is armed. Pushing through a curtain in the sod farmhouse, Shannon enters a giant, ruined stone mansion. He shoots her dead, and returns to find a zombie “skull-head” Conroy armed and awaiting him. Shannon is faster at the draw, and sets the house ablaze as he leaves. This is not the last of the skull-heads Shannon will encounter.
— — —
Though I wasn’t playing poker, the same rules applied — watch, wait, calculate the odds.
There’s a lot of poker in The Silverberg Business, stud poker where only the first card is dealt face down to each player, and all the other cards are visible upon the table as they fall. This is emblematic of Wexler’s narrative method, for the reader sees what Shannon sees, and patterns are deduced from evidence visible and from inferences about what remains concealed.
Time is a hill, a hill that grows as you climb, grows to mountainside. Wind and rain alter the mountain, exposing rock, minerals. Looking back the way you came gets harder. Sometimes, all you can see is the rising path ahead of you. You get to the top. Everybody does. Sometimes sooner than we expect. The journey is what matters. Here in skull-head land, time means nothing.
These fugues and hallucinations and strange dreams are integral to the way Shannon gains knowledge of the strange world he enters. And the reader enters with him, for his voice is supple enough to take in this space outside of time, poker-playing zombies, and a daring escape in the Flying Kestrel, a contraption from the Sonora Aero Club, across a landscape of perpetual intertemporal war. Abandoned in a Louisiana swamp by the pilot of the Kestrel, he finds that months have passed.
Schultz tank at the O’Connor Ranch on Copano Bay. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.
The measure of Shannon’s persistence is seen in the way he makes his return to Victoria and resumes his investigation of the gambler, no matter the cost. Among further clues are strange manuscript account in Spanish recording the indigenous culture of the region, and a pattern of inexplicable land purchases on barrier islands. On a visit to the prison in Huntsville. Shannon finds the prisoner he expected to interview has been murdered. Chasing Stephens down a stairway that couldn’t exist, Shannon finds himself again in the land of the skull-heads, and the poker-playing begins in earnest. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
— — —
In a review of an exhibition of paintings by J. M. W. Turner, critic Jackie Wullschläger usefully articulates the notion that Turner’s work began to push “beyond realistic description”. As readers and writers, all we have are words, but sometimes that is sufficient. The Silverberg Business is a book that demonstrates what fiction is all about.
Continuity is a convenient illusion. The discontinuities of Shannon’s subjective experience — dream, beautiful maritime interludes, fugue states, hallucination, or return to consciousness after getting clobbered on the head — are as cut-up as anything from Burroughs, and the psychological and geographical terrain of the novel are vast spaces, but Shannon is unflappable, no matter how weird it gets. The Silverberg Business is linear and direct in its narrative line even as the words dance across time and space from sentence to sentence within a single paragraph.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to function . . . I . . . Stephens, looming gigantic , his red eyes roasted my flesh. Shriveled strips floated on the waves, adhered to the sides of the boat, and the ocean, all its weight above, squeezing me into nothingness. I swam into a cave, a cavern so vast it held the world, and beyond, the sparkling Mediterranean of Salonica’s harbor. Captain Bellis gave the order “Moor ship!” and our boat thumped into the remnants of a Galveston pier.
Wexler’s prose is shocking, funny, and vivid, and can go anywhere, and he goes to some very strange places (the summary above leaves off about halfway through the book, so buy the book and read it).
Galveston beachfront after the 1900 hurricane. Courtesy of the Galveston and Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library.
In The Silverberg Business, there are also countless playful allusions to elements of American literature high and low, among them Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo; Dashiell Hammett and William S. Burroughs, as noted earlier; and, though his name is nowhere mentioned, H. P. Lovecraft, especially in the sense of menace and the notion that human actors would be serving malign powers and non-human entities. The Silverberg Business is also a notable evocation of Jewish life in late-nineteenth century Texas. Wexler’s narrator unifies all these many fissiparous elements, and the concluding passages are tragic, deeply earned, and very moving. An outstanding work, the best book I’ve read this year.
