In ‘Cicisbeo’, an apparently realist account of marital strife and paternal neglect evolves, in its final paragraphs, into a fantastically sad description of abandonment. There are also descriptions of miraculous weirdness offered to the reader like gifts.
There are references to Duck & Waffle restaurants, the M25, the Shard, ‘a Nikon 775 digital camera’. Yet they are anchored throughout by the kinds of resolutely concrete, descriptive ‘residues’ – brand names, physical textures, particular clothing – that Barthes identified as creating ‘the reality effect’ of literature. These conceits might sound a little outlandish in summary. There are magical-seeming edgelands that throb, like the ‘zone’ in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with buried secrets and inexplicable life. There’s a vision of Britain occupied by foreign powers and rebranded as ‘Autotelia’. There are astral-projecting aliens ‘extruded from a space that wasn’t quite the world’.
The stories – which range in length from flash-fictional paragraphs to haunting, hypnotic tales unfolding over several pages – reflect Harrison’s desire to excavate the disturbing stuff that lurks on the underbelly of genre or at the dark limits of literary fiction. You Should Come With Me Now, a new collection of short stories, cements his reputation as a master of what Mark Fisher has termed the ‘weird and the eerie’. He wants to ‘undermine’ the market-hardened borders of genre fiction to ‘ask what afraid of, what it’s trying to hide – then write that.’ In the Guardian interview, Harrison said that his fiction emerges, in part, as an act of defiance against the limitations of genre. Angela Carter, China Miéville, Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane are among those who have praised the disquieting clarity of his prose, as well as his restless inventiveness. Harrison has certainly been read seriously, if not as widely as he deserves. The ‘privileged’ world of literary fiction, Díaz believes, treats genre writers ‘unfairly’, rarely affording them the ‘serious reading’ they deserve. Junot Díaz – himself a ‘literary’ author whose work is often infused with a deep respect for science fiction and fantasy – has provocatively described genre fiction as ‘the third world’ of contemporary literature.
The complaint is a familiar one among genre authors. John Harrison argued that the segregation of literature into genres is ‘a marketing device that got out of hand’. In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, M. John Harrison’s ‘You Should Come With Me Now’
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