After Many a Summer by Tim Powers

Published in spring 2023 by Subterranean Press

Subterranean publishes nice print editions of old and new works by established writers in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. This novella will be available in a trade edition, but the more expensive limited and lettered editions include full-color endsheets. Here’s a glimpse:

As this novella begins, an unsuccessful screenwriter named Conrad is pretending to be a homeless drunk who has staked out a spot near a 7-11 parking lot. Conrad, who has some real life experience with homelessness and alcoholism, has accepted a studio’s offer to purchase and produce his screenplay if, in exchange, he takes a car from the 7-11 parking lot and transports a package in the trunk to a stated location. He’s supposed to change cars a couple of times along the way.

Conrad assumes that the package he’s delivering is some sort of ransom. Horror fans know that the cardinal rule in situations like this is don’t open the package. Horror fans also know that the story won’t get started until the protagonist opens the package.

Curiosity gets the best of Conrad before he arrives at his final destination. He discovers that the package contains a shrunken head attached to a stick. He presses a button on the stick and the head asks, “Pray thee sir, whose dog are you?” Other than asking Conrad to kill him, the head’s conversation doesn’t always make much sense.

The head is some sort of oracle. It calls itself Tithonus. In Greek mythology, Tithonus begged the gods for immortality and was granted his wish, but never stopped aging, making immortality a miserable state of existence. Tithonus is also the title of a Tennyson poem from which the title of the novella is drawn. Readers of Greek mythology, Tennyson, and horror fiction all know that immortality is a curse. That’s particularly true when you’re living your life as a shrunken head on the end of a stick.

The hostage victim explains the oracle’s powers and how her family acquired it, but as readers of such stories know, nothing good ever comes from learning the future from a shrunken head. Conrad’s adventure takes him through a series of repeating, time-distorted events. He saves the woman who is being held hostage, unless she dies. He shoots a man, unless he doesn’t. Life is confusing when you’re unstuck in time.

Tim Powers has a long history of writing entertaining stories that often feature supernatural themes. The novella shares some of the flavor and time travel themes of his most celebrated novel, The Anubis Gates. Still, this is a less substantial work. After Many a Summer lacks the detail, careful characterizations, and surprises of Powers’ longer fiction. Having said that, the story is fast and fun, a good way to kill an evening for readers who want to read something spooky and unchallenging.

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Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers

First published in 1985; published digitally by Open Road Media on July 30, 2013

"Deprogramming" -- kidnapping someone who has supposedly been brainwashed by a religious cult and coercing their abandonment of the cult's belief system -- was in the public mind during the 1970s. Tim Powers (one of the most underrated writers of speculative fiction) grabbed hold of the concept in his 1985 classic Dinner at Deviant's Palace, incorporating it into a story of a post-apocalyptic future. In his introduction to the Open Roads edition, Powers explains the novel's interpretation of the Orpheus myth (a connection I would have missed if Powers hadn't explained it).

Dinner at Deviant's Palace is a science fiction novel with elements of fantasy. You can always expect the unexpected in a Powers novel, and this one adds a strange creature called a hemogoblin to the standard description of America-turned-wasteland. The novel was written long before the current obsession with post-apocalyptic vampires, and the hemogoblin isn't a vampire in the traditional sense, but blood does play a central role in the imaginative plot. Powers is an exceptional storyteller who often adds horrific elements to the stories he tells, usually to shed light on some horrifying aspect of the present, but no matter the plot device, his true subject has always been human nature.

It's been a hundred years since the age of electricity, and California as it once existed is long gone. The calendar is based on a deck of cards, brandy is used as currency, and residual radiation renders some places off limits. Trash men run loose -- not quite human, not quite robot, a little like a talking vacuum cleaner mated with a barbeque grill -- and the San Berdoo army is threatening to invade Ellay.

Gregorio Rivas is a musician, but he used to perform redemptions. At one point he was a Jaybird, then he rescued people from the Jaybirds. The Jaybirds worship Jaybush (the name's similarity to Jesus is no coincidence), an entity described at one point as an "interstellar limpet eel." The Jaybird sacrament, if taken repeatedly, erodes the mind -- or maybe it opens the mind -- but Rivas is still sharp. Now he sings and plays the pelican and wants nothing to do with the man who wants to pay him a huge sum of money to perform a redemption. But when he learns that the girl under Jaybird control is Urania Barrows, the girl he once loved, he has no choice but to bring her back. Before Rivas became a Jaybird, he spent some time in the depraved city on the outskirts of Ellay known as Venice (home of the Deviant's Palace). It is to Venice he returns in his search for Urania, although he fears she has been taken to the Holy City of Irvine.

On its surface, Dinner at Deviant's Palace is the story of Rivas' attempt to save Urania, but it's really a story about a different kind of salvation. Rivas has become self-centered and self-indulgent, enjoying the fruits of a well-paid life. During his quest for Urania, he rediscovers his empathy for others. Yet empathy can be crippling when survival depends on dispassionate strength. Rivas faces a choice between regaining his confidence but sacrificing his new-found empathy, or remaining a caring person, however weak and uncertain that makes him. Powers also explores the nature of obsession -- with religion, with love, with distorted memories.

Trying to understand exactly what's happening in Dinner at Deviant's Palace sometimes poses a challenge, but by the end, the novel makes sense ... more or less. Its internal logic is consistent even if it isn't always easily understood. Complex characters and a fun story with a serious theme make the novel worth the effort.

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