The 3rd Alternative - #42

Paul Meloy. Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow (the Coming of the Autoscopes)

Some months after getting it, a number of comments on the TTA website 'bigging up' this story finally persuaded me to read it. And having read it, I decided to put a short note up on BesfSF.net largely for my own future reference.

A story of two parts, to my mind.

The first part is exceptionally good. Meloy paints a masterly bleak picture of some low-life/socially excluded citizens (delete as appropriate) on the north Norfolk coast of England. What struck me was a direct Interzone link to those stories by Chris Beckett which feature similarly socially and economically challenged characters. I've never been really comfortably with Beckett's capturing of that setting, and Meloy shows why in that he is very much able to get into that community and the minds of those in it, whereas Beckett is, compared to his story, clearly more of an outside observer (as his real life social work role would suggest).

Meloy takes the settings and characters and flips the POV well, building up an intriguing picture in which something is 'not quite right'.

There's some excellent writing, and I'd pick out the comparison of a bleak housing estate with that of Gormenghast, in which Meloy points out that the only Titus on the estate is in fact hepatitis. (Sadly, I found myself nodding and whisper 'clever...'). And also writing such as the POV character pondering a low-life friend : "What stopped Dean from despairing? Utter lack of aspiration, perhaps. An almost immeasurable incapactiy to allow the gloom and toxicity of his few blunted relationships to afford him a nugget of insight into the superficiality of his existence? Probably. Cunt."

The first few pages are outstanding.

Then the genre elements crop up, with an interesting (and kept intriguingly vague to start with) threat to the community. However, when the recently cardiacally-threatened intellectually-challenged co-worker re-apppears, zombie-like, to have his head blown off by a shotgun-wielding hero, the story, for me (as an SF enthusiast rather than horror enthusiast) a rather disappointing Shaun of the Dead/HellBoy bloodfest.

A humongous alien presence tries to squeeze through a portal which is ripping open in the housing estate central shopping centre, and shotguns, Magnums and knives are used to repel the humans who have been taken over by the dark forces. It certainly comes across very visually, as if Meloy has the dramatic denoument story-boarded in his mind, and is able to get that down as text. But some things do stand out as working in films, but not in stories, such as things 'suddenly' happening.

The story ends up with the good guys alive, having used the old cinematic standby of a cigarette lighter and a load of petrol to despatch the big bad enemy. Roll credits.

But for me, the first half of the story is as good a read as I've had for a while.