In our recent preview of John Darnielle’s forthcoming novel, Universal Harvester, we described how his work exists on the “sad/frightening axis”, combining B-movie terror with real-world suffering. Anywhere Out Of The World, the latest work from Swansea-based author Alan Bilton, occupies another such intersection. In line with surrealist works of literature and cinema, he works on the thin line between horror and comedy, poised between what publisher Cillian Press describe as “the deeply mysterious and the utterly absurd”.
And absurd Bilton’s stories certainly are. Take for example the entirely fictitious trip to Walla Walla by one Professor Milton, a scholar seemingly determined to aggravate his own misery through bumbling perseverance, or ‘Two White, One Blue’, where a man with heart trouble becomes convinced someone has stolen his tablets, displaying all the indignation and paranoid anger of Ignatius J. Reilly. ‘Filing’ joins a dentist who, upon finding the word ‘help’ marked inside a patient’s mouth, begins to look a little closer at the throat before him, the situation growing more and more peculiar with each passing second, and ‘Love in the Time of Austerity’ finds a new couple biting off more than they can chew in an expensive restaurant, knowing they’d never have to pay if only they can keep eating. Though maybe you’d prefer runaway dogs, orchestral massacres and haunted swimming pools? Or frustrated postmen and eternal bridge-building in rural Russia? Think of the oddest thing you can imagine and its likely Bilton has gone odder still.
However, the strangeness does not end there. ‘Flea Theatre’ finds the whole thing closing in on itself, as if a map of Bilton’s marvellous world has been origamied into an inward-facing cube, leaving you trapped to study the walls. There are further examples of interconnectedness through each piece, with a (semi-)recurring time/place and set of characters, though quite how and why they fit together is left up to the interpretation of the reader. The closest thing you’ll get to an answer here is the nagging itch that the next clue might just be around the next corner. Indeed, the book is something akin to a fevered anxiety dream, the true horror not so much the lack of clarity but rather the nagging feeling it might arrive all too suddenly.
It’s not always easy to make musical playlists to accompany books, especially not for short stories collections as varied as this, but we’ve tried to select songs that in one way or another capture the dream-like atmosphere that shrouds Alan Bilton’s work. They’re not 100% appropriate because they miss the comedic edge, so feel free to replace them with a silent film score of your choice.
Tracklisting:
1) Wilds – Blast Furnace
2) Deserter – Siskiyou
3) Rain Days For Bad Songs – Fanpage
4) 3 – Old Earth
5) Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping – Grouper
6) Never a Joke – Krill
7) Full of Minnows – Happyness
8) God Save the Man, Who Isn’t All That Super – BOAT
9) Dog Years – Fog Lake
10) October Mirage – Island Eyes
11) The Place Lives – Mount Eerie
12) Dance of the Dream Man – Xiu Xiu
Anywhere Out Of The World is out now and available from Cillian Press.