[Clash Books; 2024]
In Daisuke Shen’s short story collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies, characters don’t make choices, exactly. They rebound and ricochet like sentient pinballs, plunged into a psychotic god’s arcade game. I don’t think choice interests Shen. At least not in the conventional sense. The world depicted in these stories is not one in which multiple options exist, and a character triumphs by acting in accordance with their best self. In Shen’s vision, all is foreordained, and choice is revelation. In this doomed cosmos, where crews of bored boys terrorize a vapid town, immortal children self-immolate to wild applause, and spectral lovers linger in vacant hallways, characters resign themselves to their fates and are, thereby, enlightened by the inexorable choices they are destined to make.
This feels particularly true of the titular story “Vague Predictions and Prophecies” whose narrator introduces themself as an archangel, the one who “stops the man just before the knife slits the boy open.” Though the archangel stays the man’s hand, in Shen’s version, they fail to undo the man’s affliction. The man is still convinced he has to kill his son and is left on the mount with something “dark and frantic squirm[ing] in his irises.” Shen calls the archangel, Zedkiel, but strips the biblical characters of their names. The choice, oddly, has a humanizing quality. It frees Abraham from the burden of religious interpretations. Besides, Shen seems uninterested in God’s game of chicken, his gratification, or design. Their emphasis falls on Abraham, after the decree is lifted and he’s stunned and undone by the memory of his willingness to sacrifice his own son. So, the archangel shrugs and floats off. Zedkiel hovers above a river for a little under three thousand years. Then—to their great bafflement—they drift into uncharted territory, a strange universe closed off from God. In this blank landscape, they meet Lucy. Lucy is, initially, a confusing spectacle. She’s some sentient thing trapped inside a serpentine cage of tentacles and fangs. It takes Zedkiel a beat or two to look beyond the monstrous convulsions and see her, an angel in strange captivity. She wants to enter Zedkiel’s mind. They let her. Immediately, a temple blossoms around them. Rose petals are strewn about, lush fruit bearing vines spread over garden walls, a wealth of richness and beauty erupts. And before Zedkiel can fully enjoy it, Lucy spreads something else: fear and dread. It inflames Zedkiel, who has now been taught how to feel. Lucy asks if they would like to go back to not knowing:
Maybe you’d like to go back to that, too. Not knowing, not having a sense of who you are. Just a function, a thing that serves a purpose. A dog so loyal that it wouldn’t even care if its owner was the one who skinned and boiled it alive. At least it could be him, right? At least you could die at your master’s hand. You’d roll and pant and jump around, and even worse, you’d convince yourself it was what you wanted, it was your choice.
It’s telling that Lucy locates choice and freedom not in one’s actions—as they have little to no power in this arena—but in how one feels when acted upon. Zedkiel, for their part, is shocked to slowly discover that they like feeling. Obviously, God doesn’t need to listen in; He (always already) knew what would happen. Still, Zedkiel is thrown to the center of the sun, where God’s ubiquity and prescience smothers them. And that’s only the opening.
While “Vague Predictions and Prophesies” is the sole story to center on a biblical retelling, at its core, I think, is a question that each story in the collection—in ever inventive ways—keeps asking. Namely, what is a character? Stories, conventionally speaking, have a tendency to construct them, through actions, speech, appearance. Yet, each story in Shen’s collection strips away some seemingly essential quality, like a body, agency, or memory. What is a hero when a beautiful sunset breeds amnesia, and they leave the town they rode into, wondering why they ever came? What is a lover when social rules swaddle them in a brutal cocoon of violence and forgetfulness? There are cyber-doubles in these stories, too, who are more compelling and less predictable than their originals. And there are characters, like Zedkiel, who, through some unwitting blunder, transgress the rules and survive a violent metamorphosis.
Take the story “Home Video,” which is set in a nameless town, populated by a troupe of children, who perform strange powers for a remote viewership. Their acts mostly involve self-destruction and regeneration—like the burning boy and the boy who can cannibalize himself only to grow back. The children have no recollection of their respective or collective pasts. Occasionally, adults, who’ve enjoyed watching their acts of self-slaughter on TV, arrive to rescue the parentless scions, but they’re easily distracted by a lovely sunset, and drive off, smiling and befuddled. For the children there is only the town and there is up and down. Down is the bottomless memory pit, a glut of history too vast to swallow; it breaks the minds of those who try. Up is physical degeneration and forgetfulness. Either way, they’ll lose themselves, but they’ll live through it.
In most of these stories, a character attempts to escape the all-encompassing architecture of their existence—like the self, a sinister God, or a small town. Their attempts are frequently foiled. Even death, when granted, fails to fully banish the psychic wounds of a former self. There are a few exceptions to this.
In “English Lessons,” for instance, Ayumi, a student of English and a clerk at the convenience store, falls in love with her neighbor, Tao. But Tao is not a boy. He’s a forgotten god, who needs to be worshipped, but wants to be loved. He denies her love because to accept would be to forget his divinity and thereby end it. Mortified by her unrequited desire, Ayumi wishes the world would drown. And, Tao, rather than surrender to love and be transformed by it, grants Ayumi’s unspoken wish. The town is slowly submerged, and its inhabitants transformed into fish.
In “Duckling,” the touch-deprived narrator shapeshifts into her lover’s wildest desires—a cloud-woman, a piano-woman, a flower-woman, a fruit-woman, a sea-woman, her dead ex-girlfriend—until, eventually, the lover misses her and wishes her to change back. But she cannot! There are rules to this, too, which the narrator has knowingly transgressed. She must be reminded, continually, of who she was or she’ll forget—and she looks forward to forgetting herself.
Shen’s collection—rife with ghosts, gods, and cyborgs—beautifully blends several speculative subgenres. The language is crisp, clear, eloquent. Every now and then, an odd word or clause cracks a sentence open and the prose grows thick with spectral meanings. They are stories with rich philosophical, spiritual, and political underpinnings. In many ways, these stories speak to the alienation and captivity of living inside identities not chosen but institutionally inscribed on us. Shen’s characters long to undo the order of things. They wish for an alternative, a world less impoverished. They often suspect, too, that the rules that bind us into our selves are little more than collective invention. The cost is steep, but they break the rules to feel something new. Feeling is, after all, the single defining quality that Shen never strips from their characters.
Jessica Alexander‘s novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) was published by Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her collaborative memoir (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) That Woman Could Be You came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her novel, Agnes, We’re Not Murderers is forthcoming from Clash Books.
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