• Wild Spaces by S.L. Coney (Tordotcom, 2023)

Review by Warner Holme: S.L. Coney’s Wild Spaces is a novella at its longest, and a short and bittersweet piece dealing with concepts ranging from family to Lovecraftian horrors. While a book handling such disparate concepts is certainly nothing new, it is nonetheless impressive both due to style and the relative brevity of this work.

Teach is an adorable dog rescued by the young lead and reluctantly accepted by his parents. Fitting with the classic archetype he is a pretty Inseparable companion of the young man as he notices the oddities of his family and surroundings, before discovering how he is changing as well because of them. While Teach and the parents, as well as in disturbing and often dangerous grandfather, play major roles in the story they are not by any means the leads.

The young man is given a fair bit of focus, yet kept deliberately opaque in terms of a great many of his details. The most obvious of these is that names are avoided whenever possible, leaving him largely identifiable as “the boy” even while the occasional mention of an actor or piece of culture reminds readers that proper names do indeed exist. In fact even local names, such as the page 92 mention of a young woman named “Lissa Martin” who represents a first somewhat physically romantic encounter for the young man. This is well sandwiched within other statements, and the concept only serves to make it disturbing in decidedly atypical ways.

There is a question asked of many books, like this one, with a dog on the cover. That is whether or not it lives. In this particular situation, that’s not nearly as easy to answer as someone might have hoped. Nonetheless in one manner and another the book begins and ends on the animal. The status of the dog is a character and not merely a plot device is relevant throughout the book, however the separation various individuals feel is well illustrated by the fact he is given a proper name when most individuals appearing in the pages of the book as characters do not receive such a detail. This seems not sloppy, but instead used for the purpose of reminding readers of different types of isolation as well as pushing into the cosmology of a child where a dog will be remembered more for a given name than a parent.

At around 120 pages this is not a long read, and will likely be finished in a single sitting for many readers. There is a quiet elegance to much of it, a sad and disturbing tale of discovery that exquisitely uses concepts pioneered and popularized by Lovecraft in a way that would make Bradbury proud. This one is easy to recommend to curious parties, in no small part because of its length and quality. That said, the tastes of the reader will always make a difference, and the feeling of this story lending so much towards both strange everyday life and using the grotesque in the style of a fairy tale give it a style that will remind readers of many things but not quite map to any of them.