Anthologies are tricky to review. Sometimes you get a couple good stories out of a mediocre majority, sometimes the whole thing is a waste of time, sometimes it’s like a staccato pelting of machine gun bullets to the face. Happily THE BEST OF GERALD KERSH is more like the latter than the two former, though with slightly less fatality.
Gerald Kersh is one of those authors who was pretty big in his prime (lots of published novels and antholgies in the 50s and 60s) but has since sunk deep into obscurity. That’s a shame, because judging just from these short stories, the man knew how to tell a tale. These are little pieces of fiction that you might hear from some weird dude in the back of a bar; you know the type. The one with the eyepatch.
If there’s an essential character to his his narratives it would be…hmm. Shall we say jaunty? A certain fearlessness and boldness that overwhelms by sheer charm the occasional issues like pacing and characterization? Yes, let’s say that. Oh, what does it MEAN? It means these stories are unpredictably wild in terms of subject matter, flying from the grotesque to the humorous to the deranged, with a willy nilly approach to genre definitions which means you can never be entirely sure what sort of story you’re going to get. At least two of these stories could be classed as Science Fiction, but many of them contain elements of the strange and outrageous. In one, an investigation into a report of a humanoid sea monster reveals a possible temporal paradox; in another, a circus sideshow crashes upon a deserted island, with the survivors erecting a bizarre kingdom in miniature; and, in the first story of the collection, a committed misanthrope reveals to the narrator how months in a lifeboat brought him to a meeting with the only living creature he ever loved.
Written mostly for magazines, these are tales which, clearly, often suffered under a strict word limit. That shows in the clipped, no-nonsense prose, but it often leaves me wanting more in terms of description, character and pacing. Still, this is a very fun collection from an author who deserves to be rediscovered. Me like books.
Me Like Books 