The book you hold in your hands has been written by a master of prose.
Who reads for good prose style? People who want something that captures the heart’s secret song on the wing—the rush of feelings and images that fly just below the cloud-level of speech. That starts out by showing you what it’s like to feel.
Go on. I dare you. Just read the first paragraph of the first story in this book and listen to the universe being born. Unless you find reading difficult (in sixty years’ time most of us will) you may well be borne away on Thomas Disch’s wings of song. In which case my job’s done and you won’t need to read this intro.
If not:
Chaz Brenchley has written everything, except perhaps the holy book for a new religion and I wouldn’t put it past him. He has published crime novels, romance, erotica (I am told), urban fantasy, children’s books, fantasy trilogies (times two; I can’t remember the word for a six-book series), science fiction and young adult fiction, a play (produced), essays and poetry. His novel Light Errant won the August Derleth British Fantasy Award. He belongs to something called the Murder Squad, which may be why he doesn’t always have the same name—you may have read him all unknowing. He has written a Rudyard-Kipling poem, the one that RK would have written had he ever gone to a steampunk Mars. Chaz has written a climate-change story in collaboration with a scientist (without much help from the scientist) and he’s written plenty of stories about boats. He knows ships and he knows they are inherently scary. He also finds ways to intersect them with books, ghosts, crime and mystery, buoys and boys.
Boats in this book: a man with morbidly sensitive hearing sets sail to chart dangerous rocks called the Silences. An old family bible unleashes ghosts on a ship stranded in fog. A ship’s chandler from among his shadowed stock gives an old friend a true compass that points somewhere other than north. A canal boat with a dubious crew finds another boat adrift—and the body of a battered woman inside it. Bitter Waters indeed.
But it’s not all boats: a military strategist falls in love with a tea boy in ancient China. A eunuch and his dwarf lover leave the Sultan’s harem to visit the baths of the city, poisoned by magic or radiation. A man takes his dying lover to the house of his recently dead uncle. A male prostitute troops home to his magic-infested city after a long war.
The stories, like Chaz’s unwinding sentences, build slowly to a punch line. The endings always go further, more movingly than you thought they could. A tender story of friends prepping a corpse for burial ends with his ghost making one sweet final gesture. The first story ends with the most moving use of a mobile phone I’ve found in fiction.
You hold one hundred thousand words of tale; as much as some writers manage in a lifetime. In all, Chaz has published five hundred short stories. I first met him in 1984 at Mexicon, a literary SF convention that was the brainchild of Greg Pickersgill. Chaz and I were working on a play and it was Like at first sight. I read his work and became at once envious. Since then Chaz has published over thirty books—basically a book a year, all of them joined like fine furniture. This has done nothing to reduce my envy.
Chaz can deliver sentences to live by.
‘Want is a slippery word at the best of times…’
‘Home was just a place to start.’
‘The old should hurry more, should be more urgent, they had so little left to play with…’
This book in your hands: it’s yours. You’ve won it. It is yearning for you to read it. It has a heart stuffed full of things, people alive and dead, poetry, realism, fantasy, crime and poetry. And it wants to be your friend.
Geoff Ryman