Things That Never Happen

[author:M. John Harrison]'s style is somewhat pretentious, but I adore his words. Things That Never Happen is a collection of short stories which have been published elsewhere throughout his career. As such, they are arranged in chronological order, and tend to get more interesting and more sophisticated as the book goes on.

It reads well as a coherent body, though, especially since many of the stories share themes, events, phrases with each other, as well as referencing or prefiguring events and characters from [book:Light], [book:The Course of the Heart], or [book:Viriconium]. All of the stories take place in a world very like the one we know, subtly though significantly altered in ways that are never fully explained. Many of them speak of longing for pasts that never were; places that, once glimpsed from a railway car, can never be found again. He has the most amazing way of talking around the pivotal events of a story, leaving you to reconstruct them from the negative space, letting you read between the lines of what is said and what is left unsaid. His characters, like the places in which their dramas are played out, are eccentric, dingy, flawed; but sketched with compassion and evoked so clearly with only a few precisely written sentences.

My favorite stories were: Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring, The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It, Anima, Black Houses.