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The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories, by Jonathan Carroll
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Nominated for a 2012 Bram Stoker Award and a 2013 British Fantasy Award: Thirty-eight extraordinary stories from award-winning author Jonathan Carroll
For more than thirty years, Jonathan Carroll’s writing has defied genre conventions. Known for his novels—including The Land of Laughs, Bones of the Moon, Sleeping in Flame, and many other compelling and often surreal stories—Carroll has also created an eloquent body of short fiction. The Woman Who Married a Cloud brings his stories together for the first time. In the title story, a matchmaking effort goes awry and leads one woman to a harrowing moment of self-discovery. In “The Heidelberg Cylinder,” Hell becomes so overcrowded that Satan sends some of his lost souls back to Earth. And in “Alone Alarm,” a man is kidnapped by multiple versions of himself. By turns haunting, melancholic, and enchanting, Carroll’s richly layered stories illuminate universal experiences, passions, and griefs. Described by NPR’s Alan Cheuse as “so richly imaginative, so intellectually daring,” The Woman Who Married a Cloud is essential reading for Carroll fans and short-story lovers alike. This ebook contains an exclusive illustrated biography of the author including rare images from his personal collection.
- Sales Rank: #302304 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-11-27
- Released on: 2012-11-27
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Review in LOCUS MAGAZINE
By concerned reader
Like Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll is a writer who, by common knowledge, ``defies classification,'' which by now has become a sort of classification all by itself; why else would we keep inventing terms for it? But it's not as though readers didn't make heroic earlier efforts to find easier labels for both Joyce and Carroll, mostly as horror writers.
Joyce's earlier novels like Dreamside and The Tooth Fairy sometimes were reviewed as horror, and in Carroll's case The Land of Laughs made it onto Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's ``best 100 horror books'' list, while his story collection The Panic Hand won a Stoker. Both writers have won World Fantasy Awards, which with its broad remit seems a bit closer to the mark, but the main point is that neither writer seems to start out with any particular notion of genre in mind at all, but rather with a singular angle of vision. For the last few years, Carroll has been a regular contributor to Bradford Morrow's journal Conjunctions, which seems a reasonable home - neither a genre venue nor one which turns its nose up at genre material. In ``Nothing to Declare'', one of the more recent tales in Carroll's generous career-overview collection The Woman Who Married a Cloud, a waitress begins a tentative romance with a customer by noting, ``It happens so rarely that you meet someone who perceives life from a unique perspective and in sharing it, expands your vision,'' and that, ``No matter what they talked about, he almost always came at it from a different angle.'' She might as well be reading the book she's in.
More than half the stories in The Woman Who Married a Cloud, the earliest from 1982, were included in Carroll's now out-of-print 1995 collection The Panic Hand, which gives some sense of how relatively sparse Carroll's short fiction output is - a little over 50 stories in
30 years, of which 37 are collected here. Most of us, I would imagine, know Carroll mostly through his novels, which often begin with likeable but flawed characters in believable domestic settings and unexpectedly spiral outward into broadly philosophical considerations of epistemology and ethics, while casually introducing fantasy elements such as ghosts, time travelers, aliens, or talking dogs - but which somehow never quite turn the novels into anything resembling genre fantasy, a label to which Carroll has frequently objected. Never very long, the novels are nevertheless boxes full of twisty surprises, and something of that effect is retained here in the two long novellas ``Black Cocktail'' and ``The Heidelberg Cylinder'', which together make up nearly a fifth of this large collection. Each would be a good introduction to the character-based narratives and unexpected reversals of his novels, while retaining the focus of his best short fiction. ``Black Cocktail'' is narrated by the host of a radio talk show ``which welcomes full-blown kooks,'' and whose lover has died in a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake (referred to in a few other stories as well). He meets a successful haberdasher named Michael Billa and, while they don't become lovers, she is fascinated by his stories of childhood, especially one involving a near-psycho kid named Clinton, who was Michael's protector in high school. When Clinton reappears - still apparently 15 years old - the narrator's life begins to take a series of classically Carrollesque turns. His house and motorcycle are vandalized, neither Clinton nor Michael are who they at first appear to be, and the whole tale begins to turn on such appealing pop-metaphysical notions as the ``Essential Time'' - ``when you are more you than at any other time of your life'' - and the ancient conceit that each human has only one part of a five-part soul and can only reach fulfillment by finding the other literal ``soulmates.'' Carroll's theology always seems a bit woolly to me, but he presents it with such grace, and embeds it so naturally in his plots, that it becomes almost charming - in much the same way that Charles Williams's peculative theology can be more appealing than C.S. Lewis's more doctrinaire bludgeoning. In a sense, he does for adults what his namesake Lewis Carroll does for children.
Hell, for example, plays a key role in ``The Heidelberg Cylinder'', but it sounds like a pretty pleasant place whose main problem is overpopulation, which leads to various denizens of Hell being relocated randomly into people's houses, and who are allowed to reconfigure the houses after their favorite movies. The narrator's first clue is when he notices that several of his neighbors' belongings have been unceremoniously dumped into the streets, and he's soon visited by two rather comical figures who claim to represent a brotherhood called the Heidelberg Cylinder, named after a mysterious device which has been behind every important modern invention from the cotton gin to the computer. By the time we get to a sentence like ``I don't like being told what to do; especially not by dead people who live on movie sets with burning dogs,'' we know we're in a Carroll story, and one that's as delightfully insane as it is indescribable.
Part of Carroll's signature effect derives from the mundane, almost old-fashioned way in which he frames his tales; the understated ironic voice (often first-person, sometimes with a female narrator or a gay narrator as in ``Black Cocktail'') sounds more like John Collier or the early John Cheever than a contemporary slipstream fantasist. There's almost never a clue in the traditionally ingratiating openings that the story is going to fly off the rails of realism, and sometimes it doesn't - it just gets really odd. ``Mr. Fiddlehead'' begins with ``On my fortieth birthday, Lenna Rhodes invited me over for lunch,'' but turns out to concern an imaginary childhood friend who becomes a real part of an adult's life. The wonderfully titled ``Elizabeth Thug'', on the other hand, begins with a similarly mundane image of a woman entering a tattoo parlor to get a tattoo that she hopes will make her distinctive, but never turns into fantasy at all. Sometimes these quiet, domestic tales pivot on an episode of sadness or grief - a dead wife (``Vedran''), a pair of beloved dogs (``Second Snow''), a dead child (``Florian''), a dead father (``Crimes of the Face''), or going blind (``A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon On Some Swings''). The choreography of sadness is something Carroll does as well as anyone.
At times, the stories which do introduce fantasy verge on a kind of slick sophistication that suggests a Twilight Zone episode, as when a character wakes up to find himself back in prep school (``Postgraduate''), or former residents of a house show up asking to see it for old times' sake and end up somehow transforming it back into the world of their memories; sometimes they seem too conveniently moralistic, as when the protagonist of ``Alone Alarm'' is kidnapped by figures who turn out to be versions of himself at different stages of life. But more often than not, Carroll's stories achieve a strangeness and power all their own, and of a sort that beggars any sort of précis.
Let me instead suggest that, in addition to the stories I've already mentioned, you read, and read carefully, tales like ``Friend's Best Man'', ``The Sadness of Detail'', ``The Panic Hand'', ``The Stolen Church'', or ``The Woman Who Married a Cloud'' (one of two stories might as well be original here, since they appear also in 2012 periodicals - though for most of us, nearly all the stories here will be accessible for the first time). There are dogs and children and lost lovers populating these tales, to be sure, and there are fair doses of grief and sentiment in some of them, but mostly there are the lineaments of a vision so distinctive, and so morally grounded, that it hardly bears comparison with anything else in modern fiction at all.
--Gary K. Wolfe
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
First-Rate Fantasy
By Rachel Anne Calabia
Despite constantly appearing on the World Fantasy Awards rolls, it's unfortunate that Jonathan Carroll lacks the instant name recall of some of his contemporaries. Hopefully this new collection of short fiction will shine the spotlight on this incredible writer who deserves superstar status.
"The Woman Who Married a Cloud" is dense with thoughtful, haunting tales. Most of the characters are painfully flawed normal people who are thrown into extraordinary situations. There's always a sense of impending doom, but Carroll handles his moments so well that the reader never sees the final crash. It's only felt after the book has been put away for the day.
I enjoyed "Friend's Best Man" and "The Second Snow," which both feature a dog lover's worst nightmares; "The Sadness of Detail" which deals with the growing incompetence of God; and "The Fall Collection," "Nothing to Declare," and the title story, which contemplates superficiality and the pursuit of love.
These slightly melancholic stories are meant to be savored. A reader must go slowly in order to examine the emotional weight and philosophical questions of each tale. Reminiscent of classic "Twilight Zone" episodes, this is first-rate fantasy which lingers long after its been read.
(This piece first appeared in the San Francisco Book Review.)
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A great way to start thinking...
By Corinne
I became interested in Jonathan Carroll from his social media postings. (Please check it out if you haven't. He's great.) I started reading this collection, and was floored. His writing is uncomfortable, thought-provoking, and often shocking. It takes the every day and pitches it into a different angle...normal enough to make you sink into it, then slowly, you realize you're in the 'uncanny valley'. He takes the everyday and adds a discordant note to make your hair stand on end. In 'Friend's Best Man', he turns the dog-owner relationship on its ear. In 'The Sadness of Detail', you wonder who is pulling the strings. He explores anthropomorphism, the occult, God, and human failings in his stories. I kept feeling as though he had a flashlight in my inner works and spit them on a page, as well. He is incredibly insightful and brutally honest about our inner voices. If you want easy brain candy, this might not be it. If you want to be provoked, disturbed, explosed, enlightened, and often amused, this is for you. His stories are razor-wit and horror, and won't leave you disappointed. Highly recommended!
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