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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2023
A Very Dark Ride: Three Ways of Looking at the Short Fiction of John Kessel
I don’t pretend that it’s based on a comprehensive survey. But I’ve read a lot of stories in the last forty years, and I can say with confidence that many of Kessel’s stories stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of them. His work warrants sustained attention, and not alone because of its uniform excellence. A closer look at the way his stories a review essay by Dale Bailey complicate, challenge, and embrace science fiction has much to say about how our assumptions shape the way we read, misread, and too often fail to read some of our finest It’s not customary to begin a review with a writers – which is why the paragraphs that follow confession. Nonetheless: comprise not just one, but three reviews of this In reviewing The Dark Ride: The Best Short long-deserved career retrospective. Fiction of John Kessel,* I have sinned against the Let’s dispense with the easy one first. general rule (and personal principle) that one should not review books by people one knows, much less people one knows well enough to shoot an occasional text. But I have occasionally texted John Kessel, and while I would not put him in that inner circle of close friends with whom one shares confessions of a more personal variety, I do call him a friend and believe that he would call me one, as well. Yet I undertook this review all the same. Why not? The quality of the work was a foregone conclusion. I began reading John’s fiction – especially his short stories – two decades before I met him, so I knew in advance that in gathering his best short fiction, The Dark Ride would assemble in a single volume some of the finest speculative short fiction written in the last few decades. Re-visiting these stories affirmed that conviction – and vastly enlarged it. When I read Kessel’s stories in aggregate, it became clear to me that far more than a simple review was in order. Here’s why: The stories in The Dark Ride are not merely among the finest speculative stories of the last few decades. They are among the era’s finest short stories of any kind. Period. That’s a grand claim, and
* John Kessel, The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel (Subterranean Press, 2022); quotations from this collection will be cited parenthetically.
DALE BAILEY’s third short story collection, This Island Earth: 8 Features from the Drive-In, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He is the author of eight previous books, including In the Night Wood (Harper, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019). His fiction has been adapted for Showtime Television, has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker Awards.