Reintroducing the World to Lafferty - Ideas on a Mass-Market Collection

If I were involved in the republication of Lafferty’s work, here are some thoughts I have about a first collection of short stories to reintroduce his work to the world. I have no say in the matter, but I don’t see why that should stop me from saying.

First an analogy. There are two great collections of Cordwainer Smith’s short stories that share the same name: The Rediscovery of Man published by Gollancz as part of their SF Masterworks series and The Rediscovery of Man published by NESFA Press. The Gollancz book is a greatest hits kind of collection. It contains 12 very strong stories in chronological order (by the order of events in the stories, not by writing date). The NESFA Press book contains the complete short fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

In my opinion, the Gollancz book is the much stronger book. It is the one I force into the hands of friends and co-workers when I want to get them hooked on Cordwainer Smith or at least to understand what I am talking about. The NESFA book is not as good an introduction to his work. It is far better for a new reader to start with “Scanners Live in Vain” than “No, No, Not Rogov!” or “War no. 81-Q.” Not that those aren’t good stories, they are, but they do not introduce readers to the power and strangeness of Smith’s world of the Instrumentality of Mankind as forcefully. The NESFA book is a book for hardcore fans and Cordwainer Smith Completists.

The same analogy could apply to republishing R. A. Lafferty. Not everything he wrote possesses the same power to grab you and make you look at the world in entirely new ways. To grab new readers--to introduce them to a deep appreciation of Lafferty’s work, we need not to hit them with everything at once, but to dazzle them with those stories that simultaneously soar high and reach deep. This is how I developed my Lafferty habit and I assume this is how most of us discovered his writing--a great story here, an amazing story there, hey there’s a pattern, time to start seeking him out, Orbit anthologies (those were almost all great stories, and showed them balanced with other well done, progressive work), Nine Hundred Grandmothers, jackpot and addiction.

So I think the first thing that needs to be published is a collection of the most masterful of his most approachable stories. For me, this list is similar to but not identical to my list of favorite stories. Several of the ones I love are pieces of virtuoso writing, but perhaps better for the second course rather than the appetizer. Here is my proposed first course of Lafferty:

1. “Narrow Valley” - The Great American Short Story. This has it all: homesteaders, a sheriff, Indians, eminent scientists complete with scientific babble, precocious children, and a joyous hopeful ending.
2. “Slow Tuesday Night” - Somehow more relevant today than when he wrote it.
3. “Eurema’s Dam” - Perhaps the greatest example of Lafferty’s madness and tight storytelling.
4. “Through Other Eyes” - His perfectly structured pure science fiction story--Lafferty style.
5. “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” - Pure tour-de-force SF. Pure fun.
6. “Ride a Tin Can” - Beautiful, sad, devastating, cautionary.
7. “Hog Belly Honey” - The most joyous of romps after the sadness of the previous story.
8. “Funnyfingers” - Beautiful, sad, devastating, and proof that Lafferty can write about love.
9. “In Our Block” - Provide a sense of how fantastical the everyday world can be.
10. “Snuffles” - About the right place in the collection for a novella. It’s a hard one to read, but shows his immense power. This story is hard, not because of the prose, but because the characters grab you and their deaths devastate you--because they represent parts of you.
11. “Marsillia V.” - Keeping up the sustained horror theme here.
12. “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” - Transmuting the horror into a sense of wonder.
13. “Frog on the Mountain” - Lafferty does Hemingway, much in the same way that Zelazny did with “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.”
14. “Hole on the Corner” - Essential Lafferty reading--pure madness and pure fun!
15. “Continued on Next Rock” - A great mix of personalities and science and myth.
16. “The Tongues of Matagorda” - Remind the reader that storytelling and mythmaking are essential elements of Lafferty’s work.
17. “One at a Time” - The essential Laffertian Irish brawler and essential Laffertian wordplay.
18. “Encased in Ancient Rind” - Topical today! Climate Change with a different vengeance.
19. “Golden Gate” - Has the greatest opening paragraph in short fiction.
20. “Been a Long, Long Time” - Go out with a (big) bang.

There are about a dozen more I’d love to include--there are no stories here about Austro and the men who know everything and Laf, I’d love to include both the Phosphor McCabe stories, and more of Epict and the Institute. I’d love to add “The Ugly Sea,” “Sky,” “Land of the Great Horses,” etc, etc, etc! However this collection seemed intuitively right to me. It is what I’d put on the menu if I wanted to hook people with a sample, and make them crave to come back for more.

Please chime in with how you would like to reintroduce the world to Lafferty. I have no say in the matter, but the conversation is fun, and who knows, it might just help.

         

-------------------------------------------

My Laffety Bookshelf

I realize it is bad form to brag. However, I recently worked with a Very Nice bookseller to buy copies of Through Elegant Eyes and Golden Gate and Other Stories. This caused me to stop and think about my Lafferty Library. I’ve been slowly adding to it for about 30 years and gradually collected quite a bit:

• The Reefs of Earth (1968)
• Space Chantey (1968)
• Past Master (1968)
• Fourth Mansions (1969) (3 copies, so I can force them into peoples hands)
• Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970) (Collection)
• The Devil is Dead (1971)
• Strange Doings (1971) (Collection)
• The Flame is Green (1971)
• Arrive at Easterwine (1971) (loaned out to a co-worker)
• The Fall of Rome (1971)
• Okla Hannali (1972)
• Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (1974) (Collection)
• Not to Mention Camels (1976)
• Funnyfingers and Cabrito (1976) (Collection) (Chapbook)
• Apocalypses (1977)
• Aurelia (1982)
• Annals of Klepsis (1983)
• Golden Gate And Other Stories (1983) (Collection) (ordered)
• Through Elegant Eyes (1983) (Collection) (ordered)
• Laughing Kelly and Other Verses (Poetry) (1983) (Chapbook) (Arrived WOOHOO! August 12, 2013)
• Ringing Changes (1984) (Collection) (I have one extra copy in case anyone wants to borrow it)
• It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (Nonfiction) (1984) (Chapbook)
• The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories (1984) (Collection) (Chapbook)
• Slippery and Other Stories (1985) (Collection) (Chapbook)
• My Heart Leaps Up - Chapters 1 & 2 (1986) (Chapbook) (Arrived WOOHOO! August 12, 2013)
• My Heart Leaps Up - Chapters 3 & 4 (1987) (Chapbook)
• My Heart Leaps Up - Chapters 5 & 6 (1987) (Chapbook)
• My Heart Leaps Up - Chapters 7 & 8 (1987) (Chapbook)
• My Heart Leaps Up - Chapters 9 & 10 (1987) (Chapbook)
• Serpent's Egg (1987) (Morrigan Press (UK) edition)
• East of Laughter (1988) (Morrigan Press (UK) edition)
• Sindbad: The 13th Voyage (1999)

That’s 28 books and chapbooks sitting on my bookshelf and 4 more ordered and on their way. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t made my way all the way through Not to Mention Camels, Aurelia, and East of Laughter, and I haven’t even started Serpent’s Egg yet. Everything else, though, I’ve read anywhere from one to a half a dozen times. Some of his stories I just have to return to and re-read from time to time. Okla Hannali bears frequent re-readings. I gain something new every time I read it. For some reason, I re-read Fourth Mansions every year or two. Something will remind me of a passage from it, and I pick it up and restart at the beginning--marveling anew at the tricks he pulls on us every time.

There are still a lot of hard or impossible to find Lafferty books I would love to track down (and be able to afford):

Cosquin Chronicles

• Half a Sky (1984)

The Devil is Dead Trilogy:

• Archipelago (1979)
• More than Melchisedech

   1 Tales of Chicago (1992)

   2 Tales of Midnight (1992)

   3 Argo (1992)

Novels:

• How Many Miles to Babylon (1989)
• The Elliptical Grave (1989)
• Dotty (1990)

Collections:

• The Early Lafferty (1988)
• The Back Door of History (1988)
• Strange Skies (Poetry) (1988)
• The Early Lafferty II (1990)
• Episodes of the Argo (1990)
• Lafferty in Orbit (1991)
• Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) (1991)
• Iron Tears (1992)
• The Man Who Made Models (2014 - Anticipated)
  Amazon first had the title as From the Thunder Colt's Mouth. What changed?

Chapbooks

• Four Stories (1983)
• Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories (1983)
• Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories (1983)

• Horns on Their Heads (1976)
• Promontory Goats (1988)
• Anamnesis (1992)
• Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas (2007)
• The Six Fingers of Time (2010)
• True Believers (Nonfiction) (1989)
• Cranky Old Man from Tulsa (Nonfiction) (1990)
• Grasshoppers & Wild Honey - Chapters 1 & 2 (1992)

And the Very Nice bookseller has the Amazon storefront link: http://www.amazon.com/shops/u-b-i-k Stop by and check out his inventory.

My Bookshelf:

Apocalyptic

Apocalypses is a great example of R.A. Lafferty at the top of his form in the early '70s. Dense, introspective prose filled with wordplay and events rushing by breathlessly. It is simultaneously a breezy, enjoyable read, and a dense, wooly challenge to grasp. He gives us the events in a quickly readable form, but makes us work very hard to understand what is going on beneath the surface and between the events.

Apocalypses contains two novellas about consensus reality, "Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis" and "The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney." Both beg the question of what is real and if enough people believing something real makes it so.

"Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis" is a detective story. The 300-mile long peninsula of Sandaliotis has suddenly reappeared connecting southern France to Corsica. Is it real, or is it a fraud. It appears to have been there all along with a history thousands of years deep, or is that history a counterfeit? The worlds greatest detective, Constantine Quiche, is on the case. Can he find out what is going on or is he just an elaborate counterfeit himself? We never find out.

"The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney" follows the life of the great impresario, Enniscorthy Sweeney, and the change in history of the 20th Century. The 20th Century had been the Golden Century, the century in which humanity realized war was no longer possible and universal prosperity and well being were not only possible but imperative. It started with the inauguration of Harold Standpipe, the tall, thoughtful black statesman and humanitarian from Chicago as President of the United States in 1901. Then in 1917, Enniscorthy Sweeney produced his first Armageddon opera about a tremendous world war, and soon history adjusts to make it have been real. Then he produced his second Armageddon opera about an even more horrific world war, and history adjusts itself again. They are preparing to produce his third Armageddon opera--as one historian notes, “The situation worsens.” The whole novella is written as the material for a documentary-like study of Sweeney's life. It is told through small narrative segments of his life, reviews of his operas, interviews with various people involved in his life, excerpts of his letters, etc. There is no section of straightforward narrative more than a page or two long, and the narrative voices change out frequently.

In my opinion, "The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney" is the stronger of the two novellas, a more challenging read, and a more (I think) rewarding one. I'd love to see someone do a real solid comparison of the use of alternate history or "consensus reality" in this story with the treatment of the same themes in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

Pundits in Effigy

First, I must praise Chris Drumm and his chapbooks for helping to keep Lafferty’s work in print in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I recently found online, at cover price even, both Slippery and Other Stories and The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories.

Reading "The Effigy Histories" in The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories the other day, I was struck first by the idea that Lafferty was poking a bit of good-natured fun at himself.

For example, talking about the histories written by Karl Effigy:

"They are not conventional histories at all. They are art-forms, or they are life-forms, that resemble histories somewhat in their shapes and movements and effects. But they are not accurate in any of their particulars."

and a bit later:

"Was it true that Karl Effigy talked nonsense when he elucidated and clarified his dazzling and pleasant Histories? Yes, in the manner of having words correspond to things and ideas, he did talk nonsense. But, in a larger way, his talking and writing were composed of the rarest sensibilities, even if not of precise sense. His expressions had the inner coherence of great paintings, of grand and framed natural scenes, or of resounding and sustained pieces of music. And his discourse was all a series of great pieces of music. Only the instruments were invented to protect the guilty. His flowing Histories themselves were nonsense, to the limited view; but to the Big View, they were galas in which sense was only one of the many condiments to be sniffed and enjoyed."

Is he here reacting to the people who said his own writing didn't make sense, and to the others among the audience who praised his style over the substance of his stories? I once read an online review (which I can no longer find) of Lafferty's The Fall of Rome which claimed that the book read like a fun novel, but it was criminal to call it history. I disagree with that review, but could this have been Lafferty's reaction to such reviews?

Then another parallel struck me: Lafferty was unwittingly predicting today's punditocracy. The blathering of pundits on radio and cable TV in response to any political or news development is very much like the histories of Karl Effigy--at a quick glance, under unthinking and unquestioning observation, they seem like news, but the content is completely missing. Let me reiterate the key quote here:

"Yes, in the manner of having words correspond to things and ideas, he did talk nonsense."

Yup, sums it up succinctly.

The Heresy of Plot

I had a startling revelation the other day: The Devil is Dead (R. A. Lafferty, 1971) has a plot.

I first read The Devil is Dead when I found a copy in the Livermore Public Library around 1991. I was in my early twenties and had only just discovered Lafferty a few years earlier. I remember loving the book, and I can still recall some passages verbatim. However, if anyone asked me what actually happened in the book I would have been hard pressed to give a good synopsis. The experience of reading the book struck me as very much like dreaming. The narrative seemed to bypass the conscious mind and go straight to some sort of dream-like state of awareness.

About a year ago, I (very luckily) found a copy of the book online for a reasonable price. Re-reading it after twenty-some-odd years, I had the odd experience of having no idea where the book was taking me--odd because I had read it before. I could not remember the resolution of any of the situations, even which characters died and when. Again, I was smitten by some of the passages, but the overall arc of the book remained a mystery as I read it in fits and starts, five-minutes here, ten minutes there. It’s not that it’s a challenging read--the prose style is very readable and straightforward, and it has jubilant moments where Lafferty appears drunk on words. However, what he says in that prose seems to defy casual understanding. Lafferty even hints at this in the Promantia at the beginning of the book:

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will. Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers, the ships and the oceans of middle space, the corpses and the revenants, set them off in whatever apposition you wish. Glance quickly to discover whether you have not the mark on your own left wrist, barely under the skin. Build with these colored blocks your own dramas of love and death and degradation. Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not in your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out. Build things with this as with an old structo set. Here is the Devil Himself with his several faces. Here is an ogress, and a mermaid, both of them passing as ordinary women to the sightless. Here is a body which you yourself may bury in the sand. Here is the mark of the false octopus that has either seven or nine tentacles. Here is the shock when the very dead man that you helped bury continues on his way as a very live man, and looks at you as though he knows something that you do not. Here is a suitcase with 36,000 pieces of very special paper in it. Here is Mr. X, and a left-footed killer who follows and follows. Here are those of a different flesh; and may you yourself not be of that different flesh? Put the nightmare together. If you do not wake up screaming, you have not put it together well.

This last week, I picked up The Devil is Dead again and started re-re-reading it. Knowing in advance the events that happen in the story, I could start to put the pieces together as I read. Setting off the devils and monsters etc. against each other, and remembering how each of their parts played out, I came to a startling revelation. The Devil is Dead has a plot:

(Warning: this plot summary contains spoilers that may or may not affect your reading of the book)

The hero of the book, Finnegan, awakes from a drunk amnesia to find he is sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of a conversation with a millionaire. The millionaire, Saxon X. Seaworthy, takes Finnegan on a trip around the world on Seaworthy’s boat, the Brunhilde. For Finnegan, it is truly a journey of discovery--he remembers more and more of who he is as the voyage progresses. The boat is populated with a number of mysterious characters, including Papadiabolous, the Devil--affectionately known as Papa D. As the Brunhilde leaves each of its ports of call, violence, revolution, and chaos erupt in the cities they have just visited. Finnegan (and through him, the reader) discovers that there is another, ancient race that is mingled genetically with Humanity--perhaps Neanderthal, perhaps demonic, or perhaps those two are the same thing. The devils of human mythology may be a racial memory of the race we supplanted. Every few generations, by some design or by accident, some of this race breed true. While appearing human, they are wholly of the “other flesh,” this other, older race. They have some form of racial memory of being supplanted by Humanity, and are out for revenge. The goal of this other race is to stir Humanity up to wipe itself out, so the older race can reclaim the Earth.

The first half of the book ends with the end of the journey on the Brunhilde. Finnegan has understood the nature of the other race and that he is also a member of it. He has also finally remembered that the night before events at the beginning of the book, Seaworthy had killed Papadiabolous and together with Finnegan had buried him. Somehow Papa D. had either come back to life or been replaced by a nearly miraculous impostor the following morning. At the culmination of the first half of the book, many of the characters are killed, including the impostor who replaced Papa D.

The second half of the book covers Finnegan's wanderings around the world (mostly North America and the Caribbean) as he has vowed revenge on Seaworthy. He has decided that even though he is a member of the other race he will fight against them and try to protect Humanity. He learns from a mysterious Mr. X. that the man he knew as Papa D. was really an Irish cop named Noonan,who was member of the other race himself and dedicated to stopping the plans of Seaworthy and the Devil and their cadre. Noonan was a masterful mimic and half-brother of the original Papadiabolous. The original Papadiabolous was the grandson or great grandson of the Devil himself (and either the son or grandson of the diabolic Ifreann Chortovich from Lafferty’s historical novel, The Flame is Green). Finnegan, Mr. X, and a mysterious woman named Doll spend the second half of the novel staying half a step ahead of Seaworthy and his crew. It ends on the site of the grave of the original Papadiabolous (where he is buried on top of an earlier incarnation of the Devil). Doll, presumably as a representative of Humanity, takes the upper hand in the struggle with those of the other race. The next step and the outcome of the continuing struggle are left open.

Well, that’s my interpretation of the plot--a little rambling, and the result of 2 ⅔ readings of the book. Essentially, it is the story of the struggle between an unaware Humanity and another, much older race that seeks either to eliminate or control Humanity. In that, it is similar to Fourth Mansions. Now that I have assembled the pieces, I wonder what I will sound like when I wake up tomorrow. If I’m not screaming, I guess I’ll need to take the set apart and reassemble it again.

Note (7/10/2013): While looking for pictures of Neanderthal to see what Finnegan's nose might have looked like I stumbled across some articles on a recent discovery that Neanderthal DNA lives on in modern humans.

• TIME Magazine: Study: Neanderthal DNA Lives On in Modern Humans
• DISCOVER Magazine: Interbreeding With Neanderthals
• The Guardian (with the best pictures): Neanderthals live on in DNA of humans

You Can't Go Back and a Narrow Valley

When I was in the 7th grade, my middle school went on a camping trip to Havasu Canyon. Havasu Canyon is one of the improbable places on this globe. It is a finger canyon of the Grand Canyon. You drive off the freeway in Seligman, AZ, drive a long time on old Hwy 66, turn off and drive an hour on a narrow road to a parking lot carved into an esplanade half way up the wall of a 3000-foot canyon. From there you put on your backpack and hike through 8 miles of desert canyon followed by 4 miles of increasingly fertile canyon and arrive at a tropical paradise beneath a 100-foot waterfall with huge pools carved out by the clear water, perfect for swimming and swinging way out on ropes dangling from tall, ancient cottonwoods to let go, flail joyously through the air to splash down into the deep pool. The campground is about 2 miles below Supai Village, which is the home of the Havasupai Indians and has been in the bottom of that canyon for a good 800 or 1000 years. The village has an excellent cafe. The whole place took on an air of magic for all 60 of us on the camping trip. Just the name Havasu Canyon brings back a flood of euphoric memories and associations for most of my former classmates and me. I can still smell the red dust in my shoes and I still have a strange rock--possibly a meteorite--that I found in the canyon.

Yes, this is still a blog about R. A. Lafferty, and I will get back to the Laffertisms in a moment.

A few years ago, Pam and the kids and I went to Havasu Canyon over spring break. It is still one of the most spectacularly beautiful places on earth. But the trail, the village, and the campground were dingy. There had been floods in the intervening years, and one of the waterfalls, Navajo Falls, no longer existed. The village population had dropped by about 20%, and the campground stank from the poorly maintained outhouses.

I just read Lafferty's "You Can't Go Back" (published in Asimov's and one of Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies and later collected in Iron Tears). It is the story of how a bunch of kids found a magic place--a secret moon that hovered (and hid) over the Osage country in Oklahoma. The kids got to the moon by calling it down and climbing up from the roof of their grandma's truck. The moon itself had a village on top and trolls in a cave in its middle (and the village had outhouses teetering on the brink--in danger of falling off the moon into the sky). The place became magical for the kids and they would go back from time to time in their childhood.

Much later in life, when the kids are old men, they doubt the place ever existed (I mean it does sound sort of improbable). So one of the characters flies them there in his helicopter, and they visit it one last time. They react this time not with wonder but with repugnance--the place is dingy, the goats give sour milk, the village has shrunk to just four houses, and all but one of the outhouses has fallen off the moon. The whole place stinks from the family of Stinking Yeti that have taken up residence in the trolls cave in the middle of the moon.

The whole story, even the title, is one of wistful disappointment with memory--a theme of realizing how rose-colored the glasses of memory are. It is an old man's reminiscence over better times. The story opens with a verse on the evocation of memory.

A note, a musty smell, a tune,
Some bones and pebbles from the moon!
Today they set a-flow a spring,
Remembering, remembering.
- The Helen Horn-Book

What seemed magical and magnificent to the kids now seems dingy and insignificant when encountered in adulthood. One of the old men comments on how much smaller the moon looks as they fly to it in the helicopter:

"But it is as big as it used to be. It's still about a hundred yards in diameter,"
"Yes, but the yards aren't as long as they used to be," Whelk complained.

This quote is key--the yards in the kids measurement seemed much larger than the yards of an old man's evaluation. The grandeur has diminished as they face it with adult eyes.

Of course, they are still standing on a moon made of stone and earth that can zoom about in the sky and obey the commands of a properly played moon flute. So their disappointment and repugnance upon their return seems a little forced. It's almost as if Lafferty wanted to write a story about loss and disappointment but couldn't come up with a situation that wasn't magical. So he just forced his characters to mouth words and assume attitudes of disgust.

Now nonchalant responses to the magical and impossible are standard features of a number of Lafferty stories. It was part of his stock in trade. I like to compare "You Can't Go Back" to "Narrow Valley." Both deal with an impossible situation presented in a matter-of-fact manner. In both the kids respond to the wonder, while the adults deal with it. However, "Narrow Valley" ends hopefully, with the magic being renewed. "You Can't Go Back" ends with the magic being gone.

"Not only has the magic gone out of it, but nothing else has taken its place," Barry Shibbeen mourned. "What's the word for this place? Oh yes, 'dingy'. I could cry."

I don't know when Lafferty wrote the two stories. "You Can't Go Back" seems like it was written much later, because the tone in the latter half is bitterly wistful, while the tone in "Narrow Valley" preserves the sense of wonder.

I know in my own narrow valley experience, Havasu Canyon is still one of the natural wonders of the world. It turns out that on our last visit, we were there too early in the season--they hadn't cleaned up the canyon and the campgrounds for the summer tourist season yet. On our last day, as we were preparing to hike out, they were airlifting the disgusting outhouses out by helicopter and lowering shiny new ones into place.

(just don't stand underneath the outhouses, in case they fall from the sky)

Havasu Falls at night, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Re-Readability

Re-reading some of my favorite stories in Nine Hundred Grandmothers last night I revisited the thought that Lafferty's stories reward re-reading. This is not true of everything I read. I read a lot, and some books, while well written and fun to read, do not bear re-reading as much as Lafferty's and a few other authors' as well. Take for example Tolkien. How often do you re-read The Lord of the Rings? It is a rewarding experience, and I catch something else with each pass through the trilogy. Tolkien's text is so richly layered and dense with ideas, that each reading prepares me to understand themes and techniques that would not have leaped to mind without the prior reading. This happens to me at least once a year with Lafferty's Fourth Mansions. In my most recent re-reading, I was looking for instances of the "prose foot" described by Don Webb in his essay on "Effective Arcanum." Needless to say, Fourth Mansions is loaded with examples--every time he refers to Bedelia as a cinnamon cookie, he recalls the first chapter and his description of Bedelia's character when Harvesters invaded the mind of Miguel Fuentes.

It is much harder to write a short story that has the re-readability of a richly layered novel. Yet Lafferty achieved exactly that. Re-read "Hole on the Corner" or "Narrow Valley." Even though I know the jokes and the twists far in advance, I burst out in delighted laughter every time I come across them again. Like with his prose foot in his novels, re-reading his turns of phrase and cleverly developed situations recall to me the sheer delight I experienced the first time I read through them. Re-reading a Lafferty story is a full-body experience.