The Infernal Republic by Marshall Moore
| The Infernal Republic by Marshall Moore | |
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| Category: Short Stories | |
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Reviewer: Ed Prior
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| Summary: A mixed bag anthology of short stories that misses far more often than it hits. | |
| Buy? No | Borrow? No |
| Pages: 225 | Date: February 2012 |
| Publisher: Signal8Press | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-9881516404 | |
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The Infernal Republic is a collection of short stories containing a mixture of general fiction, horror and fantasy published by Signal8Press, an imprint of author Marshall Moore's own publishing company Typhoon Media Ltd. Now normally I wouldn't pay much attention to who publishes the books I read, but in this case I'm making an exception because I can't honestly believe that any traditional publisher would have put out this book in this form. The whole collection is so badly crying out for a good editor that it actually ended up making me angry in places.
Which isn't to say it's all bad. The opening story Urban Reef is genuinely interesting and well-constructed, detailing a lunch meeting between two strangers, both hoping to make a connection, while in the background a man threatens to commit suicide. This is a neat little story which poses some interesting questions about city living and its affects on the human psyche which gave me high hopes for the rest of the collection.
Sadly I was immediately disappointed. The next story Everything Has Been Arranged is barely more than a sketch of an idea about the form moving house might take in the future. I have nothing against flash fiction, but neither the central concept, the imagery or character here were strong enough to make such a short piece work effectively. What ought to be an arresting vignette instead ends up flat and forgettable. It's as if a comedian had walked on stage and said Speed cameras are annoying, aren't they? then not bothered to actually construct a joke around it and still expected the audience to laugh.
Elsewhere Marshall Moore makes such rudimentary errors as breaking up a conversation with a page long description of one of the characters between two lines of dialogue, totally destroying the flow of what's being said and leaving me having to skip back a page to pick up the thread of the conversation before continuing. This is the sort of basic problem any competent editor would have picked up on and could easily have been revised, turning what might have been an interesting piece of writing into a frustrating bit of reading.
The really irritating thing about this collection is it so clearly could have been much better. Moore has some good ideas, a sentient house afraid of being renovated, a young man slowly turning into a statue, a wannabe superhero with a particularly unsavoury power but there are too many little mistakes and awkward moments that interrupt the narrative every time it's in danger of getting interesting. If only this had been seen by a serious editor and undergone a bit of revision this might have been quite an original, interesting collection. Sadly the little mistakes add up to outweigh the few big pluses giving a disappointed group of stories that might have been much more.
We can recommend M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman and Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link.
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