Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Adventurists by Richard Butner

The Adventurists, Richard Butner (Small Beer 9781618731944, $17.99, 312pp, tp) March 2022.

Here’s a good example of the value of a well-curated small press. To the best of my knowledge, I’d never read a word of fiction by Richard Butner, though I recognized the name as one mentioned respectfully by some of the attendees at the fabled Sycamore Hill Writers’ Workshop, which he’s been directing for several years. But a story col­lection from Small Beer is almost certainly worth checking out, even from an unfamiliar author, and I’ve yet to be disappointed. The Adventur­ists is Butner’s first collection (except for a 2004 chapbook also published by Small Beer), and ten of the 16 stories haven’t been published before at all. It turns out that Butner’s stories are wonder­fully insidious in a number of ways. He seldom works beyond traditional short story lengths, and the stories tend to be constructed in ways that first seem conventional, with conventional concerns: trying to recapture the past or reconnect with old friends, visiting sideshows and fairs, surviving in anonymous corporations, exploring a spooky old house. Butner also brings along some famil­iar furniture of fantastika, like magic portals, timeslips, and ghosts. But – more through the accumulation of sinister anomalies than through dramatic plot twists – we watch the world of the tale grow estranged around us. Even the order of the stories in the collection tends to do this, shifting gradually from the almost-mimetic into SF, fantasy, and surrealism.

For example, the lead story, “Adventure”, begins with the narrator visiting his old friend Virginia on an island near where Blackbeard’s ship The Adventure was supposedly anchored. Upon arriving, he spots an odd figure in jester’s garb, whom Virginia says may be Death’s Fool. She then tells him a fairy tale about Death’s Fool, and as he leaves the next morning he spots the jester again, walking toward Virginia. Except for the interpolated tale and the ominous figure of the jester, it’s largely a mainstream story. So is “Holderhaven”, one of the finest stories here, the title of which refers to one of those grand old ec­centric manor houses like the Biltmore mansion. Here the Gothicism is more pronounced. A young man who takes a summer job there discovers a secret passageway and, in trying to puzzle out its purpose, uncovers an ominous secret about the house’s history. The third story, “Scenes from the Renaissance”, set at one of those tacky outdoor Renaissance Faires (where, again, the narrator seeks out an old friend) seems even more liminal in its negotiation between the mundane and the magical.

By the time we get to “The Master Key”, such liminal spaces become actual fantasy portals. Two old friends reunite to visit their old high school in a neighborhood now barely recogniz­able to them. One has held on to a master key stolen years earlier, which inevitably opens a door­way into Somewhere Else. Another portal shows up in “Delta Function”, in which a sound engineer revisits his alma mater after decades and ends up timeslipping back into his old college band. Both stories may resolve a bit like old Twilight Zone episodes (Charles Beaumont is one author who came to mind), but the other portal story is truly weird. “Stronghold” opens like a parody of Playboy-era urban sophistication and decadence, complete with a Corvette, Brubeck records, elaborate cocktails, and a ridiculously hi-tech house. When the predict­ably well-dressed owner arrives home, he finds the naked corpse of a green-haired woman he doesn’t recognize. Cops show up and immediately dispatch a “police parrot” – apparently hidden in a belt pouch–to examine the body. Placed under house arrest, he decides to start his own investigation, leading him to a metal construction hut across the street. There he meets a woman with a dog – some­thing he’s never seen before – and then passes into an unfamiliar world, where a bartender offers him a martini – something else entirely strange to him, despite his passion for cocktails with names like Golden Frosted Inseminator. What we might call the inverted portal – one which leads to a more familiar world from an unfamiliar one – isn’t entirely new, but the sheer strangeness of the tale makes it one of the more compelling.

Ghosts, of a sort, show up in “Circa” and “Chemistry Set”, both of which also feature But­ner’s signature theme of trying to reconcile the past, and both of which moderate their tendency toward sentimentality with unflinchingly realized charac­ters. More rarely does Butner turn toward SF, but virtual reality is featured in “Give Up”, in which a VR dome replicating a Mount Everest climb turns out to be almost as deadly as the real thing, and in “Sunnyside”, with its odd VR wake staged by an eccentric artist after his death. In “Pete and Earl”, we gradually learn that the titular figures, both caregivers for the elderly, are in fact artificial (as, apparently, is the playboy’s servant in “Strong­hold”). But probably Butner’s most evocative SFnal setting is also his most Kafkaesque: “Ornithopter” takes place on a fading corporate campus – “fewer and fewer people every month” – in a series of anonymous white buildings in a “piney forest.” Oddly, the lobby of one building contains a display of models of da Vinci inventions, including the ornithopter of the title, which eventually comes to play a significant role in the tale. While one team leader persists in thinking of this deteriorating set­ting in terms of Star Trek, the protagonist observes that “the metaphor they’re working inside of might be the Nostromo, the spaceship from Alien, not the USS Enterprise.” That might be said of a lot of the metaphors Butner’s characters find themselves in: not nearly as neatly defined as we might expect from the familiar narrative conventions he some­times plays with, but shaggy, full of unwelcome surprises, and often haunted by a profound sense of loss. If not quite a new voice, Butner’s is one of the most distinctive and memorable I’ve encountered in quite a while.

This review and more like it in the February 2022 issue of Locus.

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