A Son of the Rock

Earthlight, 1999, 264 p.

This is the first collection of Priest’s stories set in the Dream Archipelago, preceding The Islanders by 12 or so years, though apart from the introductory The Equatorial Moment – describing the strange vortex which affects the planet and presumably written especially for this book – the stories herein are considerably older.

The Negation features an author, Moylita Kaine, who has written a book called The Affirmation. (Priest later reused this title for a novel of his own and Kaine reappears in The Islanders.) Kaine’s book fascinates a border guard, Dik, who visits her in her position as writer in residence in the town where he is on leave.

Whores is a strange tale of another (unnamed) soldier whose visit to one of the whores of the title – forced into that profession by the enemy’s prior occupation of the island – has unexpected consequences.

The Cremation has Graian Sheeld travel to a funeral on an island where the customs are strange to him. His faux-pas lead him to a mistake. In parts this reminded me of the work of Michael G Coney. There is an enigmatic woman, a particularly nasty indigenous lifeform known as a thryme and its unusual life cycle.

The Miraculous Cairn is a tale of narrator Lenden’s sexual awakening combined with an unusual – possibly hallucinatory – encounter, and its ramifications resounding in later life.

The Watched has another of Priest’s confused protagonists. Ordier is fascinated by the mysterious Qataari who have been decanted from their ancestral peninsular home as a result of the war but who are notoriously secretive. A folly on the land he has bought allows him to spy on them.

As a collection this is fine but it doesn’t add up to a whole in the same way The Islanders did. But then it probably wasn’t supposed to.

There are some USian usages presumably because of where some of the stories were first published (though a twice mentioned casket is also once referred to as a coffin.)

Then there was the strange sentence, “You did not make rape my wife?” which badly needed editing and (twice) the common misuse of aureole for areola.