Previously unpublished review

Short story collections all suffer from hit/miss syndrome. A collection by different writers is easy to cope with. You finish a slightly duff story, and the next one will be in a completely different style by a completely different writer.

Single author collections are different, because a duff story might put you off reading the next, especially if it’s written in a similar style or authorial voice.

I have to say that I found the first few stories in this collection hard going, so it took me longer to read than it might have. On the other hand, once I got into it, some of the stories were so good that I wished they’d go on longer. Some left you with no other option than to put the book down, because you wanted the thoughtful aftertaste of reading to linger on.

These stories were originally published between 1970 and 1990, in markets such as Omni, Orbit, and Redbook. Some of those outlets clearly mark this as (potentially) a Science Fiction collection. But with Wilhelm, the S in SF stands for Psychological. So this isn’t full of space operas, nanotech, and tales of the far future. It’s more like a Tales of the Unexpected collection of stories with a twist.

They were collected together in this hardback edition by St Martin’s Press in 1992. Of course, this is already out of print, so I got my copy from one of the sellers on the indispensable AbeBooks. It turns out to be a copy that was once in the Californian Orange County library system. From the OC to Buckingham, via the internet.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this collection. The first few are a bit too “interior” and cryptic for my tastes, including the opener, “The Look Alike,” which starts strongly and fades away. “The Chosen” is an interesting time travel story with a twist, but “On The Road to Honeyville” seems a little pointless.

There’s better to come, though. “The Scream” is a terrific story, classic Wilhelm. It’s the story of an ill-fated expedition to a deserted Miami following some kind of apocalyptic breakdown of society and technology. She’s great at imagining what’s going to happen to us in the post-oil economy. How much will we forget, for example, so that we can no longer hope to cure what ails us?

“The Dragon Seed” is a very moving story about an unregarded, non-academic girl who turns up to work for a horticulturist. Like many of Wilhelm’s heroines, she’s much stronger than she seems to be. “Forever Yours, Anna” is the story of a graphologist trying to unravel the mystery of some letters written by an unknown woman. Again, there’s a twist in the tale, but it’s a truly unexpected one.

The final story, “And The Angels Sing,” is in some ways the signature piece. A small coastal town’s newspaper editor rescues what he thinks is a girl from a storm. Think The Shipping News meets ET, and you get something of the flavour. Except, is the alien benign or something more sinister? And is it dying, or is it hunting?

My feeling is that Wilhelm is better at the longer form of the novel or novella. Her short fiction can be a little bit too weird for some tastes. You can see how this ended up being withdrawn from circulation. It’s a little bit too literary and psychological to appeal to the hardcore genre fan, and yet a little bit too strange for mainstream tastes.