Little Deaths: Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja

Valued commentor and popular blogger Marzaat recently reminded us, in the comments to a blog post of mine about some late '70s and early '80s stories by one of my faves, Barry N. Malzberg, of Kathe Koja and her collaborations with Malzberg.  I've enjoyed most of the Koja work I have read, so let's today check out some more Malzberg and Koja material.  At the risk of turning MPorcius Fiction Log into some kind of porn blog (after all, in September we read three erotic stories by Nancy Kilpatrick and in October we looked at the SF content in an issue of men's magazine Swank), let's read the stories produced by Malzberg and Koja for Ellen Datlow's Little Deaths, a 1994 anthology of "24 Tales of Horror and Sex."  This thing actually won a 1995 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, beating out Stephen Jones' Shadows Over Innsmouth, a book of Lovecraftian stories we've looked at here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and Poppy Z. Brite's anthology of erotic stories Love in Vein, another book we've sampled.  (Is MPorcius Fiction Log already a porn blog?)  Let's hope Malzberg and Koja's contributions were key in the decision to present that award to Datlow. 

"The Careful Geometry of Love" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg  

Little Deaths first appeared in Great Britain, and when an American edition came out a year later it had a better cover but fewer stories; "The Careful Geometry of Love" was the only Koja or Malzberg contribution to survive the trip across the pond.  Damn--the SF world is ruthless!  Luckily you can get a British printing Little Deaths at ebay or do what I am doing, read a scan of a British edition at internet archive, world's greatest website.  (If you read Polish, you are in luck, as the only other place "The Careful Geometry of Love" has appeared is in the Polish magazine Fenix, in 1996.

"The Careful Geometry of Love" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis and has good horror images and some provocative themes, but the plot is maybe a little slight and perhaps the characters could have been better presented when it comes to personality and motivation.

K & M's story is about an artsy photographer, David, and one of his clients, an attractive woman, Elaine.  Cleverly, the first few paragraphs of the story allow the reader to believe David is some kind of BDSM male prostitute or something, what with phrases like "you wouldn't believe, he had told her once, some of the things I have to do," and maybe Koja and Malzberg are suggesting that artistic people like themselves who make a living at their art feel like or actually are like whores.  Later in the story there is a hint that Koja and Malzberg want us to think that being a business person, a professional, means compromising principles, turning a blind eye to injustice:

I will ask no questions, he said, I'm a professional.  I run a studio, I'm a businessman.  He heard the sound of her laughter, strident and focused in a way he could not fathom....Oh yes, she said, all of you are professionals.  You are so serious....You ask no questions even when questions should be asked.

(Yes, this is one of the Malzberg stories with no quotation marks, or, I guess as the editors of Orion Books, HQ: London, would say, "inverted commas.")

Perhaps pushing this point, Elaine sells real estate, a profession commonly felt to be particularly ruthless and unsavory, like, say, selling cars, and we certainly witness Elaine using her charisma to manipulate people in the story, to get them to do things they do not initially want to do.  Elaine and David agree they don't really care about money, but enjoy the creative problem-solving nature of their jobs (though the authors give us reason to believe that David at least is lying about this, perhaps even lying to himself.)

Elaine pays David scads of dough not to photograph herself, but people she brings in, apparently her lovers, both men and women among them.  Usually these individuals are photographed naked, and Elaine stipulates that the photos be both beautiful and true-to-life--no retouching, no airbrushing.  At first she brings in only particularly attractive mean and women, but then she begins bringing in men who are strange, ugly, even deformed.

David falls in love with Elaine, so when she stops coming in he gets upset and calls her.  She again brings business to him--was her failure to contact him, in effect wait for him to call her, begging to see her again, a manipulative strategy--"playing hard to get?"--or her way of confirming that he was truly under her spell and willing to do things of a questionable nature?  The members of the new crop of subjects are all quite deformed, some of them being pretty improbable freaks; e. g., a clawed ape-man with four testicles and a woman with three breasts between her legs and a vaginal opening in her chest.  In the final scenes of the story Elaine for the first time disrobes and has herself photographed with her freakish lovers, and then the photographer joins the group, the story's final lines suggesting he became a photographer to play the role of observer and thus resist his urge to participate in life, but that Elaine has now persuaded him to become a participant, what he wanted all along.  Are we to suspect David is a freak himself, that he has joined Elaine's collection? 

Shortly before the climactic scene, Koja and Malzberg offer info about David's personality and life history, and I can't help but suspect the story would have better if we had learned this stuff earlier.  Anyway, David has kept a record of all his sexual encounters and has had sex with over 200 women.  I'm not quite sure what that adds to the story; David is not portrayed as a sex fiend or womanizer in the beginning or middle of the story, as far as I can remember.  Better integrated into the rest of the story is the revelation that "he had no inner life, none whatsoever; he lived only on the screen of his reflectivity"--perhaps we are meant to think David's psychology makes him as freakish as do the physical disorders of the other members of Elaine's collection.

I still think this story is good, but I feel like it is not as tight and satisfying as it could be, that all its components could mesh together more smoothly.

In her intro to "The Careful Geometry of Love," Datlow says Koja and Malzberg have collaborated on a novel.  I'm not seeing any evidence of this novel at isfdb--is there such a novel out there?  If any readers have any clues to this mystery please enlighten me!  

"Sinfonia Expansiva" by Barry N. Malzberg 

"Sinfonia Expansiva" was reprinted in the new Barry Malzberg collection Collecting Myself, put out by the good people at Stark House, who deserve your support for their endeavors in reprinting classic genre fiction.  They are actually having a sale this month--25% off, it says!--so go to their site and look over their long list of science fiction and detective novels and short story collections.

This story is a response to AIDS, or at least exploits the famous disease in an effort to make Barry's story of sexual frustration and incompatibility more "relevant" and more scary.  In Malzberg's typical somewhat oblique fashion we observe the thoughts of Samuel as he goes to bed with women but ends up failing to have sex with them in a way that is humiliating.  Sometimes Samuel expresses his unusual sexual desires to a woman and she rejects him; sometimes a woman reveals her unusual desires to him and he rejects her.  Malzberg doesn't let on what the peculiar tastes in question might be--his story is not an exploitative one, the appeal of which is descriptions of nasty fetishes, but more a rumination about how difficult sexual relationships are, how our desires can't be fulfilled unless we open up ourselves to others, reveal our secrets and make ourselves vulnerable, and how such opening up can expose one to soul-destroying rejections.  

Sam feels like a loser, he having bungled so many sexual encounters and, it seems, never won another person's sympathy or affection.  He comes to believe that he can never reveal his secrets to others.  He resorts (apparently--I don't think this is a dream or fantasy, but who knows with Malzberg?) to raping a woman.  The twist ending is that one of Samuel's secrets is that he is HIV-positive.  Has he just passed his disease on to an innocent stranger?

This story is OK, no big deal.  The AIDS angle is sort of a let down, to be honest--the theme of the psychological risk of opening yourself up is timeless and universal, and the introduction of AIDS weakens the power of that theme by putting the story squarely in a particular time period and focusing on the particular problems of a particular community.  And the mention of AIDS is the only element in the story that is that specific--Malzberg doesn't do anything beyond the mention of HIV to paint a compelling picture of a particular era or community, AIDS feels like it is just stuck in there, perhaps even gratuitously.   

"The Disquieting Muse" by Kathe Koja

Somebody in Poland was really into Koja, I guess, because "The Disquieting Muse" also appeared in an issue of Fenix with a quite good robotic spider cover.  The story would go on to be included in the 1998 Koja collection Extremities.

For most of its length "The Disquieting Muse" is like a piece of mainstream fiction, lacking both SF elements and the kind of unconventional narrative techniques and punctuation we see in typical Malzberg-involved stories ("The Disquieting Muse" has quotation marks.)  Jeremy works at a mental institution as an art therapist--he loves art, and majored in art as a student, but couldn't get a handle on the academic side and so was directed to this line of work.  He has sessions with small groups of mental cases, three at a time, and Koja talks about how horribly these patients smell and their other bizarre idiosyncrasies--one woman, Ruth, refuses to wear street clothes, for instance, and is naked under her medical gown.  Jeremy has turned out to be a good art therapist--the people whom he works with have "breakthroughs," and the shrinks appreciate, are grateful for, his accomplishments; Jeremy himself is more surprised at his own success than anybody.

Jeremy also has a girlfriend, Margaret, with whom he has an unfulfilling sexual relationship, he not being very good in bed; besides this shortcoming, there are hints that Jeremy is not very secure in his masculinity, has neuroses of his own, and is an incompetent artist--Jeremy is a loser.

Of today's three pieces "The Disquieting Muse" is the most sexually explicit and goes the furthest in the direction of being actually erotic with its descriptions of conventional sexual desire (e.g., Jeremy gets an erection after brushing against one of Ruth's big breasts) and more or less normal sexual activity (Margaret's cold white fingers on Jeremy's body) as well as weird fetishistic desires (does Jeremy enjoy the smells of unwashed maniacs?) and behavior (see below!)  

Ruth turns out to be a skilled draughtsman and painter, and she always creates violent erotic images--a dissected stallion's penis, a man performing cunnilingus on a headless woman's torso, a little girl masturbating with a broken baseball bat--and Jeremy becomes attracted to her--he even fetishistically sleeps with her disturbing but arousing drawings.  He thinks of Ruth while in bed with Margaret; he starts masturbating while looking at Ruth's art work; Ruth behaves in a way that breaks all social norms and seems calculated to seduce him.  Who is in power in this twisted and strange relationship--is Jeremy abusing Ruth, a person who is seriously ill, or is Ruth manipulating him with her sexuality--or magic powers?  In the final scene Jeremy either suffers a delusion or has revealed to him the astonishing supernatural reality of his life: Ruth is some kind of demon or witch who has used her magic to charm Jeremy and his life, to give him the luck that has made his career a success despite his lack of effort and ability.  By ejaculating on a picture Ruth drew of herself, Jeremy unwittingly summons the filthy undressed and unwashed woman to his home where she grabs his genitals and squeezes--does she kill him or merely enslave him?  In any case, his relationship with Margaret is over, the last sentence of the story pointing out that he no longer returns her calls.

This is the most substantial and easiest to digest of today's stories, and the most effective as an erotic piece and as a horror piece.  Thumbs up for "The Disquieting Muse."       

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These stories are all worth reading; maybe we'll hunt up some more Koja-Malzberg collabs and talk about them in future episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log.  In this space here I'll provide links to earlier Kathe Koja coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"What We Did That Summer"
"Angels in Love"
"Teratisms"
"Ruby Tuesday"
"In the Greenhouse"
"Girl's Night Out"
"Teratisms" (I blogged about it twice!) 
"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts"