Imagine you have found yourself in a world where everything that happens to people is really a mirror of their psyche. Their inner cravings, desires, fears and dreams are projected upon the surrounding landscape, and before you know it, reality seems to shift and becomes as elusive as a mood. If this really happened, it would look a lot like the writing of Alexander Zelenyj. We would experience a day AS IF there were invaders from Mars, but in reality, it would be something in between a hallucination and a daydream, populated by homunculi of our more cranky neurosis. (Yes I said it: cranky. You have some cranky neurosis. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
I was immediately entranced with this book. The writing is excellent. The images are compelling. The titles alone are fascinating (for example: The Snow Robins Fly Between Heaven and Hell). The book begins with a beautiful story about an old man who makes a disturbing and/or wonderful discovery one day in his potato garden, and earns a new appreciation for life. I don’t really know what genre I would put the book in, but I’m leaning toward Science Fiction. More on that later.
The book features very fitting, whimsical illustrations by David Rix. I wanted to let this go, but I couldn’t make myself: The otherwise excellent cover design and illustration is marred by poor font choices committed on the front cover, which makes it appear that the book design was done by someone who isn’t a designer. OK *whew* I don’t usually like to judge a book by its cover, but in a case like this, something needed to be said. Back to the writing.
The writing is pared down to the essentials. The stories reminded me of Ray Bradbury in that everything is psychological, and they especially reminded me of his short story, The Veldt. Another author who comes to mind is Phillip K. Dick, because much of the time it’s hard to tell what is real and what is the product of a character’s addled perceptions. Also Dick because many of the proceedings are melancholy and sometimes horrifyingly ugly.
Of course these are all comparisons. After falling in love with the book initially, I got bogged down by a few factors. Number one, it’s a collection of short stories, so the involvement to investment ratio isn’t the same as a novel, and the book weighs in at a whopping 658 pages with, like, a bazillion stories. I also ended up disillusioned by the fact that so much of what goes on might just be in someone’s head. I think the best example of this would be the story Waiting for the New Reign of the Fire Ants, where there might be an alien invasion going on OR it might all be in the imagination of the protagonist. This was a story that could have been turned into something much more haunting by adding just a little more information that would tip it either one direction or the other. In the end you’re left with a man who cannot get past events from his childhood that may or may not have happened the way he perceived them.
Reading these stories, I ended up thinking of old school Science Fiction. Not world-building, epic, or heroic Science Fiction, but the more painful, personal, oh-my-god-what-have-we-done Science Fiction that began when Mary Shelley set down Frankenstein and continued with the likes of Bradbury, Dick, and even Vonnegut.
Creepy Factor: 2 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 2 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5
Final result: This is not horror fiction, so the numbers above aren’t kind. I would recommend checking this book out. These stories are very imaginative and would stand out as excellent when placed in anthologies with works by other authors. Found all in one place, they begin to melt together and lose their power. At the very least, the next time you run across something by Alexander Zelenyj, you should stop and check it out.
Experiments at 3 Billion AM by Alexander Zelenyj – Eibonvale Press – 2009
Experiments at 3 Billion A.M. on Amazon
Many thanks to Eibonvale Press for sending me this book to review. (See my disclosure policy.) Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. See you next time!
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