Somnambulists

Somnambulists
Allen Ashley
2004, Elastic Press
ISBN: 0-9543747-8-9 (paperback)

The sixteen stories in Somnambulists, four of which have never been published before, are moody speculations about human nature that question the boundaries between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness.

In the quasi-title-story “Somme-Nambula,” Lieutenant Dove nostalgically remembers his youthful visits to a mesmerist’s magic show as he huddles in the trenches during World War I, hoping that his sleepwalking won’t get him killed. Vivid writing captures the strange mix of civility and savagery the soldiers lived, such as a gramophone playing in a dugout and a captain more worried about sodomy among the soldiers than the likelihood they’ll all be killed before the war ends. Both awake and asleep, Dove moves through the nightmare of the war on his own peculiar vision-quest, guided by his memories of the mesmerist’s miracles.

The fuzzy line between one reality and another is a recurring theme in this collection. In “Sequel,” the line between past and present, cinema and real life are crossed as we discover what happens to the Midwestern hero of a 1950s B science-fiction movie after he has defeated the Martians. “Things Seen, Things Left” describes a couple learning to live with a new affliction that displaces people from space and time, while “In Search of Guy Fawkes” presents a London in which the Elizabethan past and the technological present have merged to create a new state. "Life Under Water" is an hallucinogenic search for significance and sex, and the last story in the collection, “State of the Ark,” mixes reality, dream, and madness as an English tourist visits Egyptian ruins and dreams of Queen Hahnehka while the ice caps melt and the world drowns.

Many of the stories in the collection share a sense of cynicism and outrage. Three of the weakest stories, “Oh Four,” “Life and Trials,” and “Matthew Saint,” are also among the collection's earliest, little more than a young author's sneers at a corrupt world. In contrast, Ashley's later stories reveal his greater maturity by allowing the story to take precedence over the social commentary. For example, “Downsize” is a darkly amusing fantasy about increasing corporate greed and decreasing employee autonomy; “Pumpkin Coach” is a bitter fairytale reconstruction of Princess Diana’s death; and “Harmonic Excursions” is a curious little tale about petrified song that suggests the interdependence between systems of control and rebellion.

Allen Ashley is an experienced writer, with over 100 published stories and a novel, The Planet Suite, to his name. Until now, however, he's been better known in the UK than elsewhere. This collection should change that. Somnambulists provides readers with an entertaining cross-section of Ashley's work, well-chosen for unity of theme and mood and very reasonably priced at £5.

Kudos to Elastic Press for another well-edited collection and to artist Dean Harkness for an interesting original cover that lets readers pick out specific story references in the shadow boxes. (The dodo, lest you wonder, refers to Ashley's regular column in The 3rd Alternative, "The Dodo Has Landed.")

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