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 newweird. 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 The extract from Margaret Mahy's unpublished novel Misrule in Diamond is especially enchanting, full of clowns, assassins, mad princes, and towers of crumbling stairs.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.
Pip Adam's short satire A Problem made me laugh and cry at the familiarity of its absurdity.
Co-editor David Larsen claims that within these 600 pages readers will find a "comprehensive selection of the most enjoyable and interesting speculative English-language fiction New Zealanders have written". I was thrilled to recognise many names, including Bernard Beckett, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Janet Frame, and Elizabeth Knox herself. But where is the Man Booker-longlisted Anna Smaill? Where is the Adam Prize-winning Kerry Donovan Brown? Where is the two-time winner of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards A.J. Fitzwater?
New Zealand anthologies of speculative fiction are few and far between, and genre writing rarely makes an appearance in established literary journals.
I so wanted the book to fully deliver on Larsen's promise. However, if it was to be comprehensive it would have needed to showcase a wider range of the diversity, strangeness and far-flung surrealism of New Zealanders' imaginations.
* Alisha Tyson is a writer, book critic and librarian based in Wellington. A longer version of this review will be published at anzliterature.com
