Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  KNIFE

  FIGHT

  AND OTHER STRUGGLES

  DAVID NICKLE

  Introduction by Hugo Award-

  winning author Peter Watts

  ChiZine Publications

  PRAISE FOR

  DAVID NICKLE

  KNIFE FIGHT AND OTHER STRUGGLES

  “Knife Fight and Other Struggles is a remarkable collection that drops some hi-fidelity weirdness on the scene. Nickle’s prose has gorgeous lines of symmetry and a steel spine.”

  —Laird Barron, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “David Nickle is my favourite kind of writer. His stories are dark, wildly imaginative, and deeply compassionate—even when they’re laced with righteous anger. He’s at the top of his game in this new book of short stories, and that’s about as good as it gets.”

  —Nathan Ballingrud, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of North American Lake Monsters

  “David Nickle is Canada’s answer to Stephen King. His writing charms even as it slices like a blade between the ribs: sharp, subtle, and never less than devastating.”

  —Helen Marshall, British Fantasy Award-winning author of Hair Side, Flesh Side

  “David Nickle’s Knife Fight and Other Struggles is a collection of twelve unique glimpses into the weird. Dynamic imagination, masterful writing of both the every day and the nightmare, characters that breathe, and a dark sense of humour make this a keeper. If you’ve not yet read Nickle’s fiction, Knife Fight is a great place to start. If you have, you’ve no doubt already bought this book.”

  —Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Crackpot Palace: Stories

  THE ’GEISTERS

  “Anyone who enjoys ghostly yarns or supernatural dark fiction should add this perverse, spine-tingling tome to their collection—stat!”

  —Rue Morgue

  “The language of The ’Geisters does an exquisite job of capturing the struggle for language in the face of horror and violence, the way that the brain can fail to interpret what the eyes are seeing. . . . It is this groping towards making sense of what the characters are seeing and experiencing that makes The ’Geisters succeed in its most wrenching and visceral moments, as horror or fractures in logical reality gradually take shape in the mind of the reader and the characters together. These dawning moments of horror, or spookiness, or dread, or simultaneous arousal and disgust, are what make The ’Geisters at once so desirable and so deeply uncomfortable. This is a book that buzzes in your ears, climbs your crawling skin with multiple barbed feet, feeling with exquisitely sensitive antennae for the next new and terrible revelation.”

  —The National Post

  “Few writers do psychosexual horror as well as Toronto’s David Nickle, and with The ’Geisters he’s back with another tale of voluptuous terror and the supernatural.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “The book doesn’t just explore the attractiveness of terror—it embodies it in a narrative that demands (excites even as it repels) your attention. It’s a(nother) strong novel by one of the best, most interesting horror writers working today.”

  —Bookgasm.com

  RASPUTIN’S BASTARDS

  “This novel is supernatural eeriness at its best, with intriguing characters, no clear heroes, and a dark passion at its heart. Horror aficionados and fans of Stephen King’s larger novels should appreciate this macabre look at the aftermath of the Cold War.”

  —Library Journal

  “Rasputin’s Bastards is a testament to the fact Nickle can write anything.”

  —The Winnipeg Review

  “A plot so dissected is not easy to get right, but Nickle juggles it incredibly well. And it’s just the right kind of style for this book.”

  —Newstalk 1010

  “Rasputin’s Bastards is a book with such a vast canvas and sweep, handled with such command and care by Nickle, that it is a must-read for anyone who wants to know what amazing things can be done with dark historical fantasy.”

  —Tony Burgess, author of People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

  “To read David Nickle is to be reminded what the best storytell-ers can do, and to glory in unbridled imagination released on the page. David’s achievements in Rasputin’s Bastards are innumerable. He reminds me of no one so much than maestro Dan Simmons, another writer unconstrained by the limits of genre. When it comes to narrative, David dances where others plod, and dares where others play it safe. This is all to say, David Nickle takes no prisoners, and leaves a magnificent bruise as a reminder of the encounter.”

  —Corey Redekop, author of Husk

  EUTOPIA: A NOVEL OF TERRIBLE OPTIMISM

  “Toronto author David Nickle’s debut novel, the followup to his brilliantly wicked collection of horror stories Monstrous Affections, establishes him as a worthy heir to the mantle of Stephen King.”

  —The National Post

  “A dark, complicated and frequently harrowing read . . . Eutopia is a compelling exploration of the horror of good intentions.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “It’s straight-faced, laconic, and quite brilliant.”

  —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Eutopia is the kind of book I’d recommend to literary snobs who badmouth the horror genre while completely ignoring the multitudes of splendid books on the shelves. Nickle comes from a different cut of cloth than a lot of current horror authors. He’s created a unique world that’s a far cry from any of the current trends in horror fiction. In fact, his style seems generations removed from all the apocalyptic zombie and vampire novels on the market. Thankfully, he understands that the most important ingredients are strong characters, originality, and a compelling story. That his novel is also dark, frightening, and beautifully written is just icing on the cake.”

  —Chris Hallock, All Things Horror

  MONSTROUS AFFECTIONS

  “[L]ike the cover, the stories inside are not what they seem. But also, like the cover, the stories inside are brilliant. . . . You’d think that you were reading a book full of what you had always expected a horror story to be, but Nickle takes a left turn and blindsides you with tales that are not of the norm, but are all the more horrific because of surprise twists, darkness and raw emotion.”

  —January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009

  “Bleak, stark and creepy, Stoker-winner Nickle’s first collection will delight the literary horror reader. . . . Thirteen terrifying tales of rural settings, complex and reticent characters and unexpected twists that question the fundamentals of reality. All are delivered with a certain grace, creating a sparse yet poetic tour of the horrors that exist just out of sight. . . . This ambitious collection firmly establishes Nickle as a writer to watch.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “David Nickle writes ’em damned weird and damned good and damned dark. He is bourbon-rough, poetic and vivid. Don’t miss this one.”

  —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother

  “Rich characters and a love of unique twists top off a captivating and sometimes gruesome collection of nightmares.”

  —Corey Redekop author of Husk

  OTHER CZP BOOKS BY DAVID NICKLE

  Monstrous Affections

  Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

  Rasputin’s Bastards

  The ’Geisters

  DEDICATION

  For Lawrence Nickle

  1931–2014

  TABLE
OF CONTENTS

  Praise for David Nickle

  Other CZP Books by David Nickle

  Dedication

  Introduction: Death Threats and Love Letters by Peter Watts

  Looker

  The Exorcist: A Love Story

  The Radejastians

  The Summer Worms

  Knife Fight

  Basements

  Love Means Forever

  Wylde’s Kingdom

  Oops

  The Nothing Book of the Dead

  Drakeela Must Die

  Black Hen à la Ford

  Orlok (a prelude to Volk)

  Publication History

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DEATH THREATS AND LOVE LETTERS

  An Introduction by Peter Watts

  I’ve always been a little jealous of David Nickle.

  Actually, scratch “a little.” And add a noun: I’m not only jealous, I’m afraid—afraid of the inevitable day when word gets out how good a writer the man really is. That day will be as the breaking of a dam: there will come fame, and single-digit rankings on bestseller lists, and movie options with whispers of Guillermo del Toro as director. None of those movies will ever get made—which is just as well because most directors would fail miserably at doing justice to Dave’s words—but it won’t matter because he’ll be rich and famous and I’ll still be stuck behind in this midlist genre ghetto where publishers bitch-slap you for the sheer sadistic fun of pulling the wings off flies.

  I’m actually a bit mystified as to why this hasn’t happened already. After all, the man has three novels, two collections, a TV adaption, and a fistful of awards under his belt[1]. The reviews have been rhapsodic; critics have compared Nickle to Stephen King (Library Journal, The National Post), Alice Munro (Quill & Quire), Lovecraft and Mark Twain (The New York Review of Science Fiction). I suspect the reason for his continuing relative obscurity may have something to do with the horror ghetto with which he’s associated—a ghetto he quite happily embraces while still acknowledging that he bleeds beyond its boundaries.

  Horror gets its fucking tentacles into everything. It’s not even a genre, really; it’s a state of mind. Its defining characteristic isn’t science or romance or the supernatural—horror is, quite simply, any literature that hacks the brainstem. Horror can’t even be bothered to “transcend genre,” as the tweedy elbow-patched literary types like to say when forced to concede the merits of a genre story even though they can’t bring themselves to admit that it is one. Horror subverts genre. It tunnels underneath the borders, eats the foundations out from wherever you are, be it generation starship or nineteenth-century saloon. The first clue you have is when the floor collapses out from under you and pitches you headlong into a suffocating morass of roots and worms. Horror can sneak up on you anywhere.

  So it is with David Nickle.

  And yet—dammit, the man is not just a horror writer. Sure, his debut novel Eutopia (and Volk, its upcoming sequel) has all the trappings—dark woods, creepy denizens of hidden towns, monsters right out of Lovecraft—but it’s pure biology-based science fiction.[2] Wipe the dust off its sepia-tinted 1911 context and you’ll see some pretty savvy speculation on genetics, parasite-host interactions, and the origin of the religious impulse. Rasputin’s Bastards is equal parts Jules Verne, cold-war paranoia, Tony Soprano, and Bioshock. And The ’Geisters—

  Okay, I’ll give you The ’Geisters. That’s pretty much straight-up supernatural horror. But I’m not claiming that Nickle never writes horror; I’m just pointing out that that’s not all he writes, that in fact it might not even be most of what he writes. If the CanLit crowd realized that fact—well, he’d still be pretty obscure, because CanLit.

  If the rest of the world realized it, though. . . .

  Take the stories in this collection. Sure, some are horror; one creeped me out enough to leave me impotent for a week. (I won’t tell you which—but one of Stephen King’s seventies-era shorts played around with a similar premise, and Nickle’s take bothered me way more than King’s did.) “The Exorcist: A Love Story” is a brilliant tale of demonic possession, told by the demon. “The Nothing Book of the Dead” is the ultimate epistolary ghost story. “Black Hen a la Ford,” “The Radejestians,” “The Summer Worms”—straight-up horror, all of them.

  But then there’s “Knife Fight,” a story which—for all the horrific feel of the thing—is an utterly mainstream, entirely plausible and astonishingly prescient tale of municipal politics starring Toronto’s most infamous mayor. (Let us take a moment to hope that I have not said anything legally actionable by said mayor—or that if I have, Dave’s editor will have caught it.) There’s “Love Means Forever,” an unholy tongue-in-cheek (please God let it be tongue-in-cheek) love child of Analog and True Romance. “Oops” is a brief bright nugget of fundamentalist Christian theology, as only Nickle can do it. “Wylde’s Kingdom” is giddy epic satiric squid porn. And “Basements”—

  Damn, “Basements” almost defies description. It’s like reading a dream: languid, arbitrary, beholden to no logic but its own. You watch yourself do things you don’t really understand, in environments that grow stranger by such infinitesimal increments that, looking back, you’ll never be able to put your finger on just when the reality segued into the nightmare. It’s a quiet love letter to the heat death of the universe.

  One or two of these stories teeter on the border. “The Summer Worms” doubles as political commentary, perfectly capturing the essential ugliness of nature and presenting a powerful argument for destroying it at all costs. “Drakeela Must Die” might be horror, or it might not—and the latter interpretation is by far the more horrifying of the two.

  All this might lead you to conclude that Nickle is a chorus unto himself, that he has narrative range, that each of his stories speaks with its own unique voice. That is true. And yet at the same time there’s something characteristic about the man’s prose. If I had to conjure up a musical analogy I’d point to Jethro Tull: a group whose stylings covered the gamut from Blues to hard rock, folk to electropop, yet whose work remains instantly recognizable thanks to the distinct nasal vocals of front man Ian Anderson (and to his cerebral and frequently vulgar lyrics). Nickle’s voice is something like that: there’s a certain definitive resonance underscoring every voice he takes. I’m not quite sure how to best describe it. It can be warm and freezing at the same time. It’s somehow humane, even when speaking through the mouth of a parasite embedded in unwilling flesh. It’s evocative: you can smell the stale piss in every dark old house he leads you into, you can feel the piercing stare of that cold invertebrate eye, the size of a hubcap, as the thing behind it drags you down into the freezing abyss. If the Group of Seven had worked in prose instead of oils—and if they’d been raised on a diet of Lynch and Cronenberg—they might have come close to what David Nickle fishes from his id for our edification.

  If you’ve read him before, you know this already. If you haven’t, then get started; you’ll discover soon enough why I fear his breakout success. You’ll understand why I may, out of sheer irrational jealous resentment, hunt him down and kill him before that happens.

  But probably not. Because then I wouldn’t be able to read any more of his stories.

  —March 2014

  * * *

  1 A Stoker, an Aurora, and a Black Quill. But who’s counting?

  2 And I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but Lovecraft regarded himself as a science fiction writer.

  LOOKER

  I met her on the beach.

  It was one of Len’s parties—one of the last he threw, before he had to stop. You were there too. But we didn’t speak. I remember watching you talking with Jonathan on the deck, an absurdly large tumbler for such a small splash of Merlot wedged at your elbow as you nodded, eyes fixed on his so as not to meet mine. If you noticed me, I hope
you also noticed I didn’t linger.

  Instead, I took my own wine glass, filled it up properly, climbed down that treacherous wooden staircase, and kicked off my shoes. It was early enough that the sand was still warm from the sun—late enough that the sun was just dabs of pink on the dark ocean and I could imagine I had the beach to myself.

  She was, I’m sure, telling herself the same thing. She had brought a pipe and a lighter with her in her jeans, and was perched on a picnic table, surreptitiously puffing away. The pipe disappeared as I neared her. It came back soon enough, when she saw my wineglass, maybe recognized me from the party.

  I didn’t recognize her. She was a small woman, but wide across the shoulders and the tiniest bit chubby. Hair was dark, pulled back into a ponytail. Pretty, but not pretty enough; she would fade at a party like Len’s.

  “Yeah, I agree,” she said to me and I paused on my slow gambol to the surf.

  “It’s too bright,” she said, and as I took a long pull from my wine, watching her curiously, she added, “Look at him.”

  “Look at me,” I said, and she laughed.

  “You on the phone?” I asked, and she dropped her head in extravagant mea culpa.

  “No,” she said. “Just. . . .”

  “Don’t fret. What’s the point of insanity if you can’t enjoy a little conversation?”

  Oh, I am smooth. She laughed again, and motioned me over, and waved the pipe and asked if I’d like to share.

  “Sure,” I said, and she scooted aside to make room on the table. Her name was Lucy. Lucille, actually, was how she introduced herself but she said Lucy was fine.

  I introduced myself. “Tom’s a nice name,” she said.