The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

In the last few years, largely because of Jenn, I’ve been coming around to the belief that a lot of the best literature being written these days, at least by Americans, is speculative. We hosted Tananarive Due at our bookstore around the time The Living Blood came out, and always regretted that we didn’t have the chance to host Octavia Butler. We’ve each read a lot of Neil Gaiman, and especially prize the Sandman graphic novel series and the stories in Smoke and Mirrors. Jenn is a big fan of Ursula K. Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness -- one of the many books I’ve read out loud to her—and she introduced me to the work of Ted Chiang, who immediately became one of my favorite writers. We both greatly enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s funny/horrible apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, and noticed that “mainstream” writers these days, like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, may have one foot firmly planted in sci-fi.

Now, again thanks to Jenn, I’ve discovered the work of Jeffrey Ford, which is giving me the tingling sensation that lets me know I may have to read all of it. Fortunately, Jeffrey Ford is much more prolific than Ted Chiang, so there’s a lot to look forward to. The Drowned Life, his latest collection, highlights his extraordinary range, his wild imagination, his character-drawing gifts (not always a strength in sci-fi), and his ability to handle the whimsical as well as the creepy. These stories appeared in places I’ve never heard of, or heard of only recently: anthologies from Nightshade Books and Social Disease Press, and magazines like Journal of Mythic Arts (now defunct) and Subterranean Magazine.

The story I will probably remember longest from this book is “The Night Whiskey.” It begins with a scene in which a young man is learning from an older man how to use a padded pole to push drunks out of the limbs of trees so they will land safely in the back of a pickup truck. A light-hearted small-town tale, apparently, except that the drunks aren’t really drunks. They have been chosen by lottery to drink the “black whiskey” that is brewed from a plant called the deathberry. From there, things get steadily darker and more interesting.

How well does Ford write? Here’s his description of the deathberry plant:

The Harvest centered on an odd little berry that, as far as I know, grows nowhere else in the world. The natives had called it vachimi atatsi, but because of its shiny black hue and the nature of its growth, the settlers had renamed it the deathberry..... If you were out hunting in the woods and you came across, say, a dead deer, which had not been touched by coyotes or wolves, you could be certain that the deceased creature would eventually sprout a small hedge from its rotted gut before autumn and that the long thin branches would be thick with juicy black berries.... Instances of this weren’t common but I’d seen it firsthand a couple of times in my youth—a rotting body, head maybe already turning to skull, and out of the belly like a green explosion, a wild spray of long thin branches tipped with atoms of black like tiny marbles, bobbing in the breeze. It was a frightening sight to behold for the first time, and as I overheard Lester Bildab, a man who foraged for the deathberry, tell my father once, “No matter how many times I see it, I still get a little chill in the backbone.”