Borderlanz: Tales from the Edges by Douglas Smith

Reviewed by Robert Runté

A four-time winner of the Aurora Award (for Canadian speculative fiction and fantasy) and shortlisted for the Sunburst Award (a more literary, juried Canadian Speculative Fiction Award), Douglas Smith is one of Canada’s most successful speculative fiction writers. I favourably reviewed his Dream Rider Saga in previous issues of ORB, and his stories have been widely reprinted, including internationally in dozens of other languages. Smith has literally written the book on marketing short stories: Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction. If you’re a writer, it’s a must-have guide.

This is Smith’s third short fiction collection and gives a good cross-section not merely of his career, but of the range of speculative fiction. Zombies, werewolves, wizards, ghosts, dragons, space bar tall-tales, alien encounters, parallel universes, hard-boiled detectives, and straight-up horror are all represented in one or more of the 15 stories included. With the possible exception of the space bar story, however, none of them is what you might expect from those labels. Smith always has an original take that elevates his stories above the regular clichés of those subgenres. I have almost no interest in zombies, for example, but damn if Smith didn’t come up something entirely new, timely, and genuinely disturbing in “Gypsy Bikers Coming Home”.

I had read several of these stories before, when they originally appeared in On Spec, Pulp Literature, Tesseract6, F&SF Magazine, and so on, and I was surprised how well they have stood up over time and re-reading. It’s not unusual for different readers to each take something different from a story, but only a truly brilliant author can write something where the same reader can discover a new level or a new relevance when re-reading it at different point in their life.

My least favourite story is probably the title story, “Walker of the Shifting Borderland”, in which a god-like being keeps shifting realities. It’s a solid enough short, just not to my particular taste—and I am clearly in the minority because it won that year’s Aurora for short fiction.

My favourite story is a tough call. “If I Should Fall Behind”, about a couple of kids escaping across parallel universes, is filled with inventive word play and emotional depth, even if it left me totally creeped out. Similarly, “Radio Nowhere” is an eerie masterpiece of setting and a haunting story of love and obsession. “Doorways” is a chilling tale of a house controlled by a deceased madman. “Fiddleheads” is about a young boy’s longing for his missing brother and is the most disturbing of them all. I usually stay away from horror, but Smith’s stories are deeply memorable because they always have something more to say about life and love.

“The Stopover” is a short-short everyone can relate to. That’s all I can say because: no spoilers. But it’s perfect.

“The Balance” is the one story in the collection that is not SF, Smith’s personal story of the terror of becoming a new father. That’s probably the story to which I related the most, so another favourite.

It’s not all dark or moody fiction, though. “Murphy’s Law”, the space bar story, is an explicitly comic piece; “What’s in a Name?” is essentially a satire of the Sword & Sorcery genre; and “Oregon Shooters” is a similarly entertaining mixture of detective noir and alien abduction. These lighter pieces provide a nice break between the more intense stories, while the three shapeshifter stories (parts of a series) provide engaging adventures while still retaining the best of Smith’s lyrical style.

Each story comes with an individual afterword, which adds a nice element. I strongly dislike collections where the author introduces each story, prejudicing one’s perceptions when the story should speak for itself. Afterwords are great, though. I would not have gotten the many musical (Springfield) references, for example, without Smith telling us, and it’s often fascinating knowing where a story comes from.

Novels tend to be an easier sell than short fiction collections, but I’ve never really understood why. The short, sharp punch of a perfectly constructed piece seems like something perfect for a commute, a waiting room, or before bed. Smith’s collection is a good one, guaranteed to take your mind off things while still saying something important about life, the world, and our place in it.

Borderlanz: Tales from the Edges is published by Spiral Path Books.