I’ve been a fan of Gemma Files’s writing for a long time, so I was excited when she came out with a new short story collection. Her previous collection, Spectral Evidence, featured the same set of characters in several stories. There are no such obvious connections here, although a side character who briefly appears in one story is mentioned in another, and the phrase “in that endlessness shall be our end” pops up in two. This gives the sense that some of the stories may be occurring in the same universe while still allowing each one to stand on its own.
When I reviewed Spectral Evidence, I mentioned that I really enjoyed the story “Guising,” in part because of my love of stories about the Fair Folk. Two of the stories in Endlessness also feature these enigmatic mythological creatures, and more specifically the changeling trope. “Thin Cold Hands” is a wonderfully unique take on the idea that makes the fairies feel truly alien. “Cuckoo” plays the trope a bit straighter but gives it a fresh twist by positing that some human parents willingly exchange their children for fairy babies. While the fairies are described in a way that makes them sound sinister, the humans who abandon a child simply because it doesn’t meet their expectations are the real villains.
A pact that doesn’t go the way the human characters expect it to also features in “Look Up.” The tension between tradition and progress, and the disconnect between members of an immigrant community and their relatives who stayed behind in the Old Country, get a strong focus in this story.
Files has previously worked as a film critic and screenwriter, and film (particularly Canadian film and underground film) plays central roles both in her novel Experimental Film and her previous short fiction (e.g. “each thing i show you is a piece of my death”). Two of the stories in this volume, “The Church in the Mountains” and “Cut Scene” deal with a blurring between film and reality. I enjoy stories about eerie books/films/artworks, so these both resonated with me. Files does an excellent job of describing her fictional films so well that you can picture them in your mind’s eye…even when you might not want to.
My favorite story in the collection, though, was “Bulb.” Like Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” it creates a supernatural entity that not only coexists with the modern world but is entirely at home there. The imagery of the electromagnetic spectrum as a spiderweb was wonderful.
All in all, this collection was great. Files continues batting a thousand in my book.
Outside of a Dog 