Strange California

As the introductory essay makes clear, California is a state at home with the uncanny. Defined by generations of seekers and dreamers, from the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California is the kind of place where strange and normal are neighbors in the same ticky-tacky subdivision. What you get in this collection are 26 stories (and beautiful cover artworks) about California ranging from horror to fantasy to scifi, but mostly in that liminal gothic slipstream genre pioneered by (adopted) Californian Ray Bradbury.

The stories are universally strong, by well-known masters of short form fiction. I particularly liked S. Qiouyi Lu’s “From Something Emerging” and Laura Blackwell’s “The One Thing I Can Never Tell Julie”, but everybody will have their own favorites. The settings and themes of the stories vary, but are biased towards ordinary working people, small towns, and the suburbs of San Francisco. There are no starlets and venture capital unicorns to be found. Strange California is a little outside my usual reading, but it’s quite enjoyable. Although as an Angeleno, I wish we’d had more than one story set in L.A. So it goes.