You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

M John Harrison's latest collection of short fiction, spanning the last decade or so, is possibly his finest yet. Comprised of longer fictions interspersed with short (less than a page) You Should Come With Me Now is an unsettling read, juxtaposing as it does the ordinary and mundane with the strange, the weird, the fantastic.

In one story a man disappears into his own attic, escaping his own family; in another people are afflicted by strange emanations (Volsie) while in another London is besieged by a strange alien intelligence (the iGhetti). But nothing in a Harrison story is as it seems. Everyday things are bent and twisted into new perceptions. The metaphysical and the supernatural converge. Many of these stories are haunting, or haunted. Closure is relative. Themes of escape run through the book, whether from this world, a mundane existence or from oneself.

There are stories of Autotelia, the continental landbridge concurrent with our North Sea, where things are the same yet different. Echoes of Viriconium pervade these stories.

In Jack of Mercy's we also get one last visit to Viriconium itself, Harrison's mythical far future city where we follow the fortunes of the poet Hardo Crome. Yet even here he plays with the reader, setting Crome's timeline as concurrent with the 1930s and 40s.

There are imaginary reviews of works unpublished (at least in this universe); an exploration of the Theory Cadre, that mysterious organisation that set up shop in the Ambiente Hotel. Above all there is the sense of a master storyteller on top of his game.

If you haven't encountered Harrison's work before, this is as good a place as any to start. Highly recommended.