Alice Unbound Read online

  Formatting note:

  In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.

  The latest release in our anthology series:

  Margaret Atwood, Austin Clarke, Leon Rooke, Priscila Uppal, Jonathan Goldstein, Paul Quarrington, Morley Callaghan, Jacques Ferron, Marsha Boulton, Joe Rosenblatt, Barry Callaghan, Linda Rogers, Steven Hayward, Andrew Borkowski, Helen Marshal, Gloria Sawai, David McFadden, Myna Wallin, Gail Prussky, Louise Maheux-Forcher, Shannon Bramer, James Dewar, Bob Armstrong, Jamie Feldman, Claire Dé, Christine Miscione, Larry Zolf, Anne Dandurand, Julie Roorda, Mark Paterson, Karen Lee White, Heather J. Wood, Marty Gervais, Matt Shaw, Alexandre Amprimoz, Darren Gluckman, Gustave Morin, and the country’s greatest cartoonist, Aislin.

  PRAISE FOR RECENT BOOKS IN THE SERIES

  “Those Who Make Us, an all-Canadian anthology of fantastical stories, featuring emerging writers alongside award-winning novelists, poets, and playwrights, is original, elegant, often poetic, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, and a must for lovers of short fiction.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “In his introduction to Clockwork Canada, editor Dominik Parisien calls this country ‘the perfect setting for steampunk.’ The fifteen stories in this anthology… back up Parisien’s assertion by actively questioning the subgenre and bringing it to some interesting new places.” —AE-SciFi Canada

  “New Canadian Noir is largely successful in its goals. The quality of prose is universally high…and as a whole works well as a progressive, more Canadian take on the broad umbrella of noir, as what one contributor calls ‘a tone, an overlay, a mood.’ It’s worth purchasing for several stories alone…” —Publishers Weekly

  “Playground of Lost Toys is a gathering of diverse writers, many of them fresh out of fairy tale, that may have surprised the editors with its imaginative intensity… The acquisition of language, spells and nursery rhymes that vanquish fear and bad fairies can save them; and toys are amulets that protect children from loneliness, abuse, and acts of God. This is what these writers found when they dug in the sand. Perhaps they even surprised themselves.” —Pacific Rim Review of Books

  “The term apocalypse means revelation, the revealing of things and ultimately Fractured reveals the nuanced experience of endings and focuses on people coping with the notion of the end, the thought about the idea of endings itself. It is a volume of change, memory, isolation, and desire.” —Speculating Canada

  “In Dead North we see deadheads, shamblers, jiang shi, and Shark Throats invading such home and native settings as the Bay of Fundy’s Hopewell Rocks, Alberta’s tar sands, Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and a Vancouver Island grow-op. Throw in the last poutine truck on Earth driving across Saskatchewan and some “mutant demon zombie cows devouring Montreal” (honest!) and what you’ve got is a fun and eclectic mix of zombie fiction…” —Toronto Star

  “Cli-fi is a relatively new sub-genre of speculative fiction imagining the long-term effects of climate change [and] collects 17 widely varied stories that nevertheless share several themes: Water; Oil; Conflict… this collection, presents an urgent, imagined message from the future.” —Globe and Mail

  THE EXILE BOOK OF ANTHOLOGY SERIES NUMBER SIXTEEN

  EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  COLLEEN ANDERSON

  PREFACE BY

  DAVID DAY

  Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Translation, Drama and Graphic Books

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Alice unbound : beyond Wonderland / edited and with an introduction

  by Colleen Anderson ; preface by David Day.

  (The Exile book of anthology series ; number sixteen)

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55096-766-1 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55096-767-8 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-55096-768-5 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-769-2 (PDF)

  1. Alice (Fictitious character from Carroll)--Fiction. 2. Canadian prose literature (English)--21st century. 3. Speculative fiction, Canadian (English). 4. Short stories, Canadian (English). I. Anderson, Colleen, editor, writer of introduction II. Day, David, 1947-, writer of preface

  III. Series: Exile book of anthology series ; no. 16

  PS8329.1.A45 2018 C813'.087608351 C2018-901284-6 / C2018-901285-4

  Story copyrights rest with the authors, © 2018

  Text and cover design by Michael Callaghan

  Cover and interior artwork by Maeba Scuitti

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

  144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

  PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2018. All rights reserved

  We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights –or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: [email protected]

  To those who have seen the face of madness

  and continue the battle.

  TALES FROM BEYOND WONDERLAND

  INTRODUCTION:

  OF MADNESS AND METAMORPHOSIS

  COLLEEN ANDERSON

  PREFACE:

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY

  DAVID DAY

  THE SLITHY TOVES

  BRUCE MEYER

  WE ARE ALL MAD HERE

  LISA STEDMAN

  OPERATION: LOOKING GLASS

  PATRICK BOLLIVAR

  MATHILDA

  NICOLE IVERSEN

  A NIGHT AT THE RABBIT HOLE

  CAIT GORDON

  REFLECTIONS OF ALICE

  CHRISTINE DAILGLE

  TWIN

  DANICA LORER

  TRUE NATURE

  SARA C. WALKER

  FULL HOUSE

  GEOFF GANDER AND FIONA PLUNKETT

  THE SMOKE

  COSTI GURGU

  THE RIVER STREET WITCH

  DOMINIK PARISIEN

  THE RISE OF THE CRIMSON QUEEN

  LINDA DEMEULEMEESTER

  HER ROYAL COUNSEL

  ANDREW ROBERSTSON

  DRESSED IN WHITE PAPER

  KATE HEARTFIELD

  THE KING IN RED

  J.Y.T. KENNEDY

  NO REALITY BUT WHAT WE MAKE

  ELIZABETH HOSANG

  FIREWABBY

  MARK CHARKE

  SOUP OF THE EVENING

  ROBERT DAWSON

  CYPHOID MARY

  PAT FLEWWELLING

  YELLOW BOY

  JAMES WOOD

  JAUNE

  CATHERINE MACLEOD

  WONDERBAND

  ALEXANDRA RENWICK

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BOOKS IN THE SERIES

  OF MADNESS AND METAMORPHOSIS

  INTRODUCTION

  Colleen Anderson

  Madness is a condition that few of us willingly pursue, but in madness our mettle can be tested, and, should we survive, we transform into wiser, more experienced beings. Dionysus, the Greek god of drama, wine and madness, knew that a st
ory has its own logic. Some would say that to act is to become mad, for you are changing into a different personality; it is a temporary metamorphosis that allows individuals to view a new realm and understand other perspectives. Perhaps, only a god can journey through madness unscathed.

  Lewis Carroll’s characters have prevailed through the test of time, where the inanimate takes on life and madness becomes the norm. While the original tales are still popular, the imagery and ideas have shifted and been adapted into numerous stories, comic books, movies and TV series. As editor of Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland, I did not want rehashings of the familiar stories, but something new, set in a more modern or futuristic time. There could be trips to Wonderland but the magic, and the characters had to affect more than that make-believe land – as in “True Nature” by Sara C. Walker in which displacement plays upon what would happen if the characters had to live in our world? Or, how would we cope with such encounters and with a reality twisted by the logic (or lack) of Wonderland? And perhaps, the craziness is already in this world, and only revealed when the looking glass is held up.

  As I read through the submissions, I noticed that Wonderland’s aether does not engender many tales of love, though Cait Gordon’s “A Night at the Rabbit Hole” immediately captured me on this aspect. Love is a motive for a few characters, but more often it is love lost and warped, as in Christine Daigle’s “Reflections of Alice.”

  The vein of madness runs so pure through this anthology that I would say every tale is touched by it, and I could list every title here. The exploration is sometimes light, sometimes deep and always an expedition into the unknown. Insanity may present in the form of infection, loneliness, living up to the status quo, or gambling everything on an outcome. Madness means crashing through the boundaries of normalcy, taking chance by the throat and beating logic into submission.

  Losing one’s mind, or being physically shaped into something “other” weaves through so many themes of war, loneliness, health and experimentation – Lisa Smedman’s “We’re All Mad Here” puts the madness of war under the looking glass, while Danica Lorer’s “Twin” examines the search for well-being of self. Whether we have dealt with lunatic thoughts, crazy surroundings, mad ideologies, or insane politics, few people ever stay the same after having danced through that particular minefield. Change is often integral to any story but when madness plays a part, when that special substance from Wonderland permeates, then it can be permanent and liberating, or destructive. This metamorphosis might be controlled or coerced, and it may not be what you expect.

  To say each piece in this anthology is only about the forces of madness, or only about metamorphosis would be a disservice. Themes involve complex searches and battles against insanity; sometimes embracing it, but always involving one’s self, one’s dreams or how the world expects one to behave. There are stories that can offer release, such as Catherine MacLeod’s “Jaune,” and those that will be a trap that leads into evil, which Andrew Robertson adeptly explores in “Her Royal Counsel.”

  It is said that the final goal does not matter; it is the journey that is important. The ventures here delve into the psyche, the world order and what it means to be. A chess piece can find a new place, an outmoded technology can find new purpose, and a soul bearing scars from moving through the landscape of life can find redemption. These adventures can be as much fun as a rollercoaster ride and as terrifying as falling off a precipice. The madness and metamorphosis is sought, self-inflicted, invented, chosen or coerced. Not all will remain unscathed. May you enjoy your madcap journey through Alice Unbound and find visions and capers that transport you beyond Wonderland.

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY

  PREFACE

  David Day

  Lewis Carroll’s influence on literature and popular culture since the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) has been nothing short of astonishing. After Shakespeare, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) has become the world’s most quoted author. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into 176 languages worldwide; and furthermore, it is the most frequently retranslated book in existence. There are over 400 versions in Spanish, 500 in French and German; and at least 100 each in several other major European languages.

  The greatest technician of language in the twentieth century, James Joyce, saw in Carroll/Dodgson’s manipulations, inventions and coinages of words and language, a kindred linguistic genius. Consequently in Finnegans Wake we may discover Joyce’s holy trinity of the “Dodgfather, Dogson and Coo” in hundreds of references to “Dadgerson’s dodges” in multiple forms, such as: “Wonderland’s wanderlad,” “Lew’d carol” on the “Wonderlawn” accompanied by “a tiny victorienne Alys” who is the “alias Alis, alas, who broke the glass!” Joyce even implies his novel – jabberwocky-wise – may be “jesta jibberweek’s joke.”

  Among many others, Carroll’s influence has been acknowledged in the writing of Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov – the first Russian translator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Indeed, it is difficult not to see Carroll’s influence in Nabokov’s flamboyant style with its double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams and coinages. The real-life Dodgson can easily be viewed as a shockingly contrary-wise inspiration for Humbert Humbert: the middle-aged college professor sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl in Nabokov’s Lolita.

  As evidenced by Nabokov’s novel, and despite the family-oriented charm of Walt Disney’s hugely popular Alice in Wonderland, there was a definite shift in perspective on Alice after the mid-twentieth century. No longer seen strictly as a children’s fairy tale in popular culture, films and literature, Alice drifted off in directions not even remotely imagined by Dodgson.

  From the sixties onward, much attention was given to the psychedelic aspects of Alice in Wonderland. From music by the Jefferson Airplane’s fantastic White Rabbit, John Lennon’s I Am The Walrus and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, to Aerosmith’s Sunshine and Natalia Kills’ Wonderland, on to an avalanche of films, books and visual artists’ portrayals of Alice and Wonderland that have varied from the surreal to the entirely pornographic. While through the eighties and nineties, all manner of genres and modes were devised, from steampunk and cyberpunk to gothic horror and science fiction. Who could have predicted the popularity of the new millennium’s American McGee’s Alice psychological horror action-adventure video games; or by contrast the plastic building-block toymaker Lego Alice in Wonderland video game. Not to mention that eBay would offer Naughty Zombie Alice Halloween costumes, and a licensed marijuana product purveyor in Alaska would dub itself “Absolem’s Garden” after the blue, hooka-smoking caterpillar in Tim Burton’s near-hallucinogenic 2010 cinematic rendering of the classic tale.

  It seems we all know something about Alice and Wonderland, but like Alice herself upon her first reading of Jabberwocky, we find: “It fills my head with ideas, but I don’t know what they are.” So as each new generation falls under Carroll’s word spells, each in turn must attempt to understand what Alice and Wonderland might mean in the context of their world and in their time.

  Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland is a collection of twenty-first century stories inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark; and to some degree: aspects of the life of the author, Charles Dodgson, and the real-life Alice (Liddell).

  Elizabeth Hosang’s story “No Reality But What We Make” is a title that might have been applied to many of the imaginings in this anthology. It would also be in keeping with Lewis Carroll’s perspective as an early member of the London-based Society of Psychical Research, a first of its kind in the world.

  “I have supposed a Human being capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness,” Carroll once mused, as he suggested that entities might exist that “sometimes were visible to us, and we to them, and that they were sometimes able to assume human form… by actual transf
erence of their material essence.”

  All the stories in Alice Unbound, to a greater and lesser degree, “delve into the aspects of the human psyche” in various forms and on a number of levels. These stories range from tales of childhood horror to drug-induced sexual nightmares. There is a surreal Oxford academic detective story and the tragic tale of a shell-shocked soldier in the Great War trenches in France. There are futuristic travellers tales with teleporting jabberwocks, boojams and interplanetary Snarks. There are dark conspiracies with biological weapons and gene smugglers, satires and comic cannibal stories. All manner of refugees from Wonderland are let loose in this anthology, even the rock and roll tale of a struggling Wonderband.

  In her introduction to Alice Unbound, Colleen Anderson rightly observes: “The vein of madness runs so pure through this anthology…” That same vein of madness not only ran through Lewis Carroll’s creative world in Wonderland, but it also rather darkly ran though Dodgson’s real life. Ironically, his favourite uncle Skeffington Lutwidge was a Commissioner of Lunacy who was killed by an asylum patient. It also has been suggested that Carroll’s very peculiar character and genius may in part be explained by his suffering from a mild form of autism, known as Asperger’s Syndrome.

  Be that as it may, in a truly bizarre example of life imitating art, Carroll’s literary child Alice has been posthumously diagnosed with her very own psychosis. The real-world symptoms for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) are straight out of Carroll’s novel and include: hallucinations, lost sense of time and an altered self-image where certain body parts appear disproportionate to the rest of the body.

  Nearly all of the stories in this collection share a sinister shifting sense of reality akin to some aspects of this syndrome (or “Sin-Drum” as Dominik Parisien’s River Street Witch insists) that very well may be related to the often surreal and chaotic times we find ourselves in today. Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland reveals the authors’ collective cathartic need to embrace Alice at this time in our history when we appear to have passed through Alice’s Looking Glass and entered the very real madness of “Trump World.” Every day we wake up to see what our modern-day Mad Hatter has tweeted. And we can only scratch our heads at the day-to-day shifting sense of (sur)reality that has become our daily news-feed reality show.