Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites
by Hal Duncan
Lethe Press
978-1590211939
210 pages, paperback, $15
Hal Duncan's first two novels, Vellum and Ink, making up the duology The Book of All Hours, carved him something of a niche into fantasy fiction: a queer punk approach to speculative fiction that fuses layers of story on top of each other, built around a set of archetypes that he's elevated into his own iconic characters: Puck, Jack and the Fox. The conceit of The Book of All Hours neatly ensures that any story—and this anthology takes in everything from pirate gods to a gunslinger messiah—they're canon, because The Book of all Hours is all stories.
Scruffians! collects together a scattered collection of short stories into one volume. Besides being canonically linked together, they all share the signature Hal Duncan style—this is a chain-smoking, straight-talking, mythology-munching, head-scratching right-hook of a book—that I'm coining, here and now, as 'Hal-punk.' And there really does have to be a word for it, because what makes all of Duncan's oeuvre worth reading is the giddy delight of watching him take a scalpel to genres and tropes and reassemble them into something that is always unmistakeably his own.
The jumping off point of the anthology is a teenage runaways induction into the Scruffians—think Dickensian rabble of urchins. But Hal-punked—so they're now a queer bunch of bioengineered queers and misfits, simultaneously contemporary and timeless as gods. The rest of the anthology is framed as their own version of campfire stories, most of them reiterations of the same characters. So Vellum's Jack Flash is recast as the faerie Flashjack, living out his life inside the mind of a boy as he grows up in The Behold of the Eye; in Jack Scallywag we have a Hal-punked Jack and the Beanstalk, and in The Island of the Pirate Gods, he's a deity of the sea, brandishing the twin pistols of the pirates.
The stories are often at their strongest when they have Jack at their centre. The opening stories that give a runaround of the Scruffians are stylistically superb—inventive, witty and dirty—but they're in the manner of snapshots, local colour. The Behold of the Eye is the first story that seems completely self-contained, and it is a beautiful story that takes all the trappings of Hal-punk and wraps it around what is actually a poignant coming of age story, that stands as my favourite of all of Duncan's writing. Other highlights are The Disappearance of James H---, which reinvents Peter Pan and Hook within the mise-en-scene of a boarding school, and is an elegant, bold story. The Island of the Pirate Gods is a riot, bristling with the kind of energy that a pirate story really should have (and, yes, Hal-punked pirates is exactly as good as it sounds.) A close runner behind Behold for highlight of the anthology, Origin of the Fiend uses the saga of a fictionalised superhero a sidestep away from Superman to tell a coming of age (or coming of villainy) story in a way that (yes, I've coined it, so I'm going to get my money's worth) is Hal-punked as only Hal Duncan can.
Of course, any anthology inevitably has weak spots, and Scruffians' occurs where the signature style isn't matched by an emotional heart to the story: The Shoulder of Pelops, Bizarre Cubiques and The Angel of Gamblers are all stylish, well-constructed, but don't quite connect past the level of admiration of wordsmithery. Somewhere between the two camps is Sons of the Law, which recasts Jesus and the apostles as Wild West gunmen, an audacious feat of genre and language.
Overall though, Scruffians! is a superb collection of stories—inventive, rebellious and queer in a way that very little fiction, let alone speculative fiction, manages. It's the kind of collection that, if it's your first outing into Duncan's fiction, is liable to inspire a rabid devotion. If, instead, you've been eagerly salivating for this release to grace your book-shelves, then you should probably go for the Deluxe Edition instead, which is a hardcover with full-colour illustrations featuring some superb photography (and, if you're of that mind, some very pretty models with not a great deal of clothing) that sets off the prose like a charm. Highly recommended.
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Matt Cresswell is the editor of Glitterwolf Magazine, a literary and arts magazine for LGBT contributors. His short fiction has been published in various places, including Icarus Magazine and Shenanigans: Gay Men Mess With Genre. He is also the creator and co-illustrator of End of the Rainbow Web comic, with the print omnibus coming out in June 2014.
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