Autumn/E&T
2006
Pseudo-City
by
D. Harlan Wilson
Raw
Dog Screaming Press
224 Pages
(Review by Steve Finbow)
Twenty-nine
stories, flash fictions, parables, prose poems set in PC. The place is
Pseudofolliculitis City and its citizens resemble an unholy mix
between René Magritte’s bowler-hatted bourgeoisie and Anthony
Burgess’s Droogs. The medical disorder Pseudofolliculitis barbae
results in hair growing back into the flesh in the beard area and,
like the condition, these stories get under your skin, they itch and
irritate and fiction does not get any more virtual and hairy than
this. It is surreal when surreal does not mean advertising. It is
media savvy when there is nothing left to sell. Think Terry Pratchett
for the de Sade set, Douglas Adams with a hairball of Krafft-Ebing, or
William Gibson bent over and buggered by Sergeant Bertrand.
This is postmodern
science fiction that takes more from William Burroughs than it gives
away in free moustaches. Speculative fiction with a speculum for a
bookmark. I am not sure if the book holds together as a map of cities
of the imagination in the same way as Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and William
Burrough’s Interzone, but I had fun trying to figure out my route
among the characters and descriptions.
Surrealism is hard to do these
days; it comes over as old-fashioned, trite, even hokey, but D. Harlan
Wilson gets it just about right. Not since Mark Leyner has there been
such an able fusion of fantasy and satire. I am not saying that Mr
Wilson is on a par with Leyner, or Vonnegut, or Tom Robbins, who all
work in a similar vein, but he is at least following closely in their
footsteps.
Unencumbered by a fixed
narrative, Pseudo-City elides genres and explodes fictional
stereotypes. D. Harlan Wilson writes a universe that he considers “irreal”,
a universe that, in reflection, is more real than our own. The novel
investigates interzones between fiction and reality, the human and the
non-human, prose and poetry; often when a writer attempts this, the
writing comes over as a mulligan stew of half-baked ideas and flowery
verbiage but Pseudo-City excites with its fictional flavourings and
heady broth of poststructural philosophy.
So, it’s that good,
huh? Well, it is an enjoyable read, supercalifragilistic in fact,
despite the bad jokes – dollhairs for dollars – a
bit strained that one, and the somewhat metaphorical names of the
characters –Dr Beebody, etc.–become tiresome, plus the connections
between the stories can, at times, be tenuous; but if you like Philip
K. Dick, Norman Spinrad, or Rudy Rucker, you will enjoy this. I would
argue D. Harlan Wilson’s writing style is taken from André
Breton’s ultimate surrealist tenet to go ‘down into the street,
pistol in hand, and shoot at random into the crowd’, only, instead
of bullets, D. Harlan Wilson’s gun is loaded with words.
