Monsters in the Garden.
Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy
Edited by David Larsen and Elizabeth Knox
(Victoria University Press, $35)
Reviewed by Alisha Tyson
"Speculative fiction" is an umbrella term encompassing many genres and sub-genres, including fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, horror, magic realism, surrealism, slipstream, gothic, and new
weird. Most of the stories in Monsters in the Garden — a speculative anthology for a weird year — are pure magic, exploring existentialism and escapism as only speculative writing can.
Monsters in the Garden stays in a few comfortable zones, with a bit of fantasy, some slipstream, extracts of historic science fiction. There are ghost stories upon ghost stories.
The extract from Margaret Mahy's unpublished novel Misrule in Diamond is especially enchanting, full of clowns, assassins, mad princes, and towers of crumbling stairs.
Two of my favourite stories in the anthology are horror: Dylan Horrock's The Paresach's Tulips is set in a fantasy world where a mage follows a trail of blood, hoping it will lead to an immortal killer. Jack Barrowman's wholly original The Sharkskin was full of so much tension that I felt as if I was reading Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.
Some of the pieces here subtly address the complexities of this moment in history. Kristen McDougall's A Visitation is set in a world where the Internet suddenly disappears, altering society in weird ways, much as Covid-19 has altered ours. Lawrence Patchett's The Tenth Meet is a sad piece on confronting family illness, and explores how communities can pull together in times of trouble, and the difficulties that arise when there is bad blood between neighbours.
Stories of existential exploration are numerous. This is the great strength of speculative fiction. Sometimes the only way to communicate complexities is to place them in a pot of strangeness, where they warp, and produce something that is somehow more honest than reality.
