Now this is a short story that grabs the reader by the throat and never lets them go. The plot keeps its cards very close to its chest, delightfully unraveling in bits and starts, jumping back and forth across its own timeline, and in and out of dreams and reality without warning or continuity, thusly mirroring the increasingly unreliable protagonist Dietrich Paine – weaving the catastrophic loss of connection with the world Paine is undergoing within the metastructure of the novel is a cunning trick, pulled off in extraordinary fashion here.
Thus, a window is gradually opened on a broken down New York, in a broken down world. The reader is slowly made aware of the peculiar type of darkness pervading this near-future world, how one of the greatest hopes of our modern world has turned into horror and despair.
Two more things make this short story stand out to me. First, it is composed as an eccentric mixture of different literary traditions, most prominently science fiction, horror, private investigation, psychological thriller (and the list is not exhaustive); yet, it never devolves into a pastiche of styles, but proceeds at his own beat, using the different styles and expectations that come from such traditions to tell its own story. It thus successfully walks a fine line, a story driven by its own mistery, achieved by blending styles, without ever becoming cliché.
Second, the driving force of the plot is the gradual horrific realization of what exactly is happening in this dystopic future. However, Kiernan manages the almost-magic trick of both showing very little at a time, distilling the denouement over the entire length of the text, while at the same time showing just enough that the reader can easily guess what is going on – only to have it confirmed in disturbing detail when the next plot point is uncovered.
These three aspects, the complex narrative structure, the mixture of writing genres, and the morbid fascination with which the reader is seduced from one realization into the next, conspire to create a compelling engine that keeps the reader turning the pages.
Intertextual by design – as hinted by the usage of so many different writing styles, the text likes to play with its readers’ expectations – it reminds me, among others, of Blade Runner for its atmosphere, Chaga (by Ian McDonald) for its topic (but with a dark, dark twist), and any of Charles Stross’ stories for its richness in ideas and detail.
In any case, a fantastically gripping, dark, melanchonically depressing story, which I cannot recommend enough!
“Riding the White Bull” is available online (at the time of writing) at Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as in a number of Anthologies, such as “A is for Alien”, a collection of short stories by Kiernan available at Amazon. I first read it in “The Mammoth book of best new SF 18”, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 2005.
Hamletic Tortoise 