![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/streetcar-dreams.jpg\" "\\"streetcar-dreams\\"")
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Richard Bowes \u2013 Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fantasies I read an advanced review copy from PS Publishing, so I can\u2019t comment on the introduction by Jeffrey Ford (not included), and I offer up the hope that the proof readers get to it before the final version. Broken paragraphs, sets of inverted commas that don\u2019t open or don\u2019t close … not a lot, more than there should be. But for all that …<\/p>\n There\u2019s a line that has stayed in my memory since I first read it in F&SF, and it\u2019s here too. The narrator remembers getting rid of his toys when he thought he had become grown up. In fact, \u2018all that had happened was a grown up had sex with me\u2019. It\u2019s a line about innocence not just lost but wasted. Now the character doesn\u2019t have it anymore, he just has to get on and do without it. That is a typical Richard Bowes character. Readers will probably emerge a little less innocent too.<\/p>\n These stories are worlds of three levels. There is here, the normal world \u2013 respectable, middle class, tax paying, and based around the author\u2019s own stomping grounds of New York or Boston. Then there is a level running parallel to that of drugs and prostitution and gay hustling. Some of us will be strangers to that world, though you get the feeling Bowes certainly isn\u2019t. And it is this level that acts as a gateway to the third, where the really weird stuff happens.<\/p>\n Sometimes that third level is incarnate in one person, like the doppelganger Shadow that dogs the life of Bowes\u2019s semi-autobiographical Kevin Grierson. The Shadow is a walking, talking picture of Dorian Gray \u2013 when Kevin is doing okay in life the Shadow\u2019s life disintegrates, and vice versa. Sometimes there\u2019s doubt in the reader\u2019s mind, and in Kevin\u2019s own, as to which of them is which.<\/p>\n Alternatively, the third level can be a completely different fantasy world, like the world reached by failing hippy Chris(tine) in \u2018Someday I Shall Rise and Go\u2019, reached through the portrait hanging in an office. Chris is a wimp who can\u2019t even drop out properly \u2013 pushed around and exploited by her boyfriend but finding strength and worth by going on a quest into said portrait. Most of her life is spent in a pleasantly drug induced haze, and the story is sufficiently surreal that the reader would probably feel likewise, if Bowes didn\u2019t make you feel every stabbing hunger pang of a starving drop-out in NYC.<\/p>\n Or the third level can be pretty well intertwined with the second, as in the touching \u2018Circle Dance\u2019 \u2013 a sort of Shadowish story, except that the two men are actual brothers, one dying and the other not \u2013 or the thoroughly unpleasant \u2018Transfigured Night.\u2019 The latter is the one story with no redemptive feature whatsoever \u2013 there\u2019s probably a point to it that I\u2019m not getting, but it came across as snuff fiction at its worst and at the end I was very close to giving my regrets to the reviews editor. But I was glad I progressed because I went on to read the World Fantasy Award-winning \u2018Streetcar Dreams\u2019 \u2013 sadly the only Kevin Grierson story in this collection \u2013 and the collection\u2019s finale, \u2018My Life in Speculative Fiction\u2019, which I suspect may be the most straightly autobiographical. Like \u2018Circle Dance\u2019, it adds further layers to the story by making the central character a writer and including snatches of his fiction, but we also get the character\u2019s fantasy monologue as he inflates and transposes the events of his life to the life of an imaginary alter ego.<\/p>\n Bowes\u2019s characters tend to be recovering, discovering inner strength, working their back to normality against the odds. A lot of stories are told in flashback or retrospect, mixing the present and the past. Bowes makes no excuses \u2013 each and every one has failed through their own immaturity and they pull themselves back through their own effort. That\u2019s if they pull themselves back. They all pass through the fire and the depths; some choose to stay there. But none chose to start their journey in that direction and the fact that it happened to them, and that we identify with them so easily, gives a good jolt to any complacency the reader may be feeling when they start to read. To coin another memorable Bowes line, you will lose virginities you never knew you had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Richard Bowes \u2013 Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fantasies PS Publishing, 2006, 184pp, ISBN 1-904619-38-X (deluxe hardcover), 1-904619-39-8 (hardcover) I read an advanced review copy from PS Publishing, so I can\u2019t comment on the introduction by Jeffrey Ford (not included), … Continue reading
\nPS Publishing, 2006, 184pp, ISBN 1-904619-38-X (deluxe hardcover), 1-904619-39-8 (hardcover)<\/strong><\/p>\n