Stone and the Librarian

What a treat! One of my favorite writers, William Browning Spencer, has a short story in the February issue of F&SF! Spencer presents us with a protagonist, Stone, who hates, despises, and loathes literature. At the same time, his ability to connect deeply with the written word has been noticed by the Librarian, who holds Stone prisoner and forces him to read, and read, and then read some more. For Stone, life in Knowledge Base #29 makes him feel as though "time turned the color of a rain-laden sky." Forced forays into Faulkner give Stone the impression he's trying to "puzzle out the thought process of a giant squid mulling things over at the bottom of the night-black sea." Yet Stone wakes in the middle of the night, having understood the precise essence of what Faulkner was trying to say. He runs through his prison, shouting the message at the top of his lungs- but all anyone can hear is a madman shouting gibberish.

As in my other Spencer favorites, Zod Wallop and Resume With Monsters, the beauty of "Stone and the Librarian" comes from those moments when the reader sinks with the protagonist into a whirlpool of uncertainty about what is real, and what represents the fevered workings of a mad, mad brain. At a certain point the reader feels a jolt, a moment of being unsure whether he's still got all his marbles. For me the moment came on p. 56. Where is the fall for you?

As you can tell from the large amount of quoting in today's post, the prose is also fantastic in this story. Spec fiction fans will enjoy the references to Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Great fun for literature buffs, too!