By Devon Halliday •

When I worked as a literary agent assistant, one of my tasks was to read (or skim) the manuscripts that my boss had requested from promising, unagented authors to determine whether my boss should offer representation. I remember reading the first ten pages of one particular manuscript she’d passed to me and feeling that the writing was good, but unpleasantly visceral—everything was embodied, full of weird heat, even the mundane described with a sort of grotesque and overly intimate physicality. I skipped to the end and discovered that the novel was in fact about cannibalism. Though the novel rather appalled me (I’m extremely squeamish), I give it credit for telegraphing its genre from the start. It was very obviously written in the “cannibalism aesthetic,” an aesthetic I had not come across before but recognized instinctually, even in that first apparently ordinary scene (a character sending an email).

What interests me in this essay is not cannibalism but the idea of telegraphing genre via language. How do writers create a speculative world that is recognizable even in moments of mundane realism? What stylistic traditions constitute the speculative aesthetic, and how might a reader subconsciously recognize them, even in a passage where nothing overtly otherworldly is happening? By looking at moments within speculative stories that might plausibly take place in the real world, we can identify strategies for signaling the unstable or unfamiliar through language alone.

There’s nothing more conventional or real-world than the weather. In her speculative novel Duplex, Kathryn Davis describes a rainstorm as follows: “Often it happened that the world’s water got sucked aloft and came down all at once as rain.” What I love about this sentence is how Davis frames realism in speculative terms: she captures the real-world feeling of being caught in a sudden rain (as if all the world’s water is suddenly bearing down on you), but she does so with a vastness and a vagueness that feel speculative. “Often it happened” has a haziness akin to “once upon a time”—a fabulist unwillingness to commit to a timeline. The image of the world’s water getting sucked aloft seems plausibly in keeping with the alien powers at work in this speculative world, a world in which “the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky.” Simile is eschewed for metaphor; it’s not “as if” the world’s water is getting sucked up into the sky, it’s actually happening, an assertion that blurs the limits of the world we’ve just entered.

If we return the line to its context, we can see a few other ways in which speculative techniques are at work in the passage:

By the time Miss Vicks got to number 49 the storm was making it almost impossible to find her front door. Often it happened that the world’s water got sucked aloft and came down all at once as rain. She swept her little dog into her arms and felt her way onto the porch. They were both completely drenched, the dog’s red coat so wet it looked black. For a while they sat there in the glider, surrounded by thundering curtains of rainwater.

In the first line, Davis’s phrasing gives the storm agency; it’s the storm that is choosing to make it harder for Miss Vicks to get home. And, in the final line, there’s a mixed quality to the image (rainwater curtains we can visualize clearly enough, but are the curtains themselves thundering?) that seems to further imbue the novel’s environment with power and immensity. This is a world in which the darkness billows like a backdrop (an image that returns throughout the novel), empowered by its own inscrutable agency.

So, if I might quickly sum up the emergent techniques of the “speculative aesthetic,” I’d include: agency and intent imparted to the story’s natural world or environment, sweeping yet vague assertions, metaphor in place of simile, and chaotically mixed imagery. I want to turn now to a Karen Russell short story, “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” to look at how these and other techniques evoke a similarly speculative sensibility.

In the story’s opening pages, Russell’s narration will inform us that former president Rutherford B. Hayes is in the body of a horse—but before we know that anything definitively absurd is happening, we’re given this description: “Wisps of newly-mown hay lift and scatter. Light floods into the stalls.” The minutiae of Rutherford’s surroundings are not passive but active agents—the wisps of hay aren’t acted upon by wind, they simply lift and scatter of their own accord. The syntax might be simply a coincidence of description, except that the pattern recurs throughout the story: “Then the Barn breathes with the promise of fire. Stars pinwheel behind the black gaps in the roof. Rutherford can hear the splinters groaning inside wood, waiting to ignite” and “Oats fall around him like float-down snow” and “Wool flies up and parachutes down in the sun.” These descriptions are active as well as vivid, which gives the natural world the opportunity to be menacing when it chooses (“groaning…waiting to ignite”) or mysterious and aloof (“stars pinwheel behind the black gaps”).

Another aspect of the story’s natural world that interests me is its boundaries. Part of what gives the farm its eerie timelessness is that there appears to be nothing beyond it: “The Barn is part of a modest horse farm, its pastures rolling forwards into a blank, mist-cloaked horizon. The landscape is flat and corn-yellow and empty of people.” Even the farmer, who has the power to leave when he chooses, “squints into the green mist beyond the Fence.” When one of the president-horses escapes by jumping the fence, there is only “trackless black mud on the other side of the Fence. There are two deep crescents where Garfield began the jump, and then nothing. It’s as if Garfield vanished into the cool morning air.” The absence of an outer world creates the sense of an enclosed space, where the sights beyond the fence are so permanently unreachable that they might as well not be real.

I think again of the recurring motif of backdrop in Duplex, the sky variously described as “a great tent of blue,” “thin and transparent like a colored mist with blue and green and yellow stripes you could see the moon and stars through,” “a solid shade of blue that suggested everything worth seeing lay behind it,” a “bright blue banner” that conceals the stars. Though the scope of the accessible world is wider in Duplex than in “The Barn,” its limits (the sky, the “edge of the world”) are just as shadowy and impassable. Like the horses in Russell’s story, yearning to escape to the other side of the fence, the characters of Duplex look at the sky and think only of what it’s concealing, what better things might lie behind it.

Added to our growing list of speculative techniques, then, is the division of setting into an inside (enclosed, stymying, inescapable) and an outside (tantalizing, unknowable, infinite). We have this sense at the beginning of Duplex, as the story zeroes in on a particular suburban street, and even as the edges of the setting expand, we return (and the characters return) to the street as the focal point of all that follows. The characters aren’t technically trapped, and yet they never manage to stray too far from the original street, continually corralled back inside the neighborhood, as if they would soon run out of oxygen anywhere else.

Likewise, “It’s our suspicion that there’s another, better heaven behind the cumulus screen,” thinks Rutherford from within his enclosure in “The Barn at the End of Our Term.” In both stories, a climactic escape to the “outside” is possible, but requires the character to break the rules of the world the author has created (the impassable fence in “The Barn,” or a Duplex character’s journey across “what remained of the material world”).

Though these boundaries end up mattering on a supernatural level in both stories, they emerge first in descriptions of familiar, real-world setting elements: the sky, the fields. The early introduction of these boundaries suggests that, in order to communicate the speculative aesthetic, an author needs to imbue even the ordinary, familiar touchstones of narrative setting with speculative potential. The mist might just be mist, the sun might just be our usual sun, but they feel conscious and visceral, as if, at any moment, they could rise up and become actors in the story, trapping or provoking the characters.

I mentioned above that chaotic or mixed imagery seems to be another indicator of the speculative aesthetic, and I’m interested in delving more into the lyricism of both these authors, and exploring whether any of their common techniques feel distinctively speculative in nature. We see this lyricism at work in the following passage from “The Barn”:

If we could just reach a consensus that this is heaven, Rutherford snorts, we could submit to it, the joy of wind and canter and the stubbed ashy sweetness of trough carrots, burnished moons, crushing the secret smells out of grass. I would be free to gallop. The only heaven that Rutherford has known in the Barn comes in single moments: a warm palm on his nose, fresh hay, a tiny feast of green thistle made nearly invisible by the sun. At dawn, heaven is a feeling that comes when the wind sweeps the fields. Heaven is this wind Rutherford knows for an instant, bending a million yellow heads of wheat.

Though the subject of these descriptions could be the real world, the contradictory and mixed imagery elevates what it describes: “stubbed ashy sweetness” and “tiny feast of green thistle made nearly invisible” feel larger-than-life, startling and estranged from the carrots and grass that they refer to. And, as in Duplex, the natural world is afforded agency as the wind sweeps and bends the wheat. The existential (heaven) is juxtaposed with the small and tangible (grass, hay), a pairing we likewise see at work throughout Duplex:

The dining room was empty at this hour. It was the worst hour of the day, the one that came after the big noonday meal was finished and the tables had been cleared and set for supper, the sounds from the kitchen growing harder to hear as if everything alive and capable of meaningful action had moved farther off like a population in retreat after a costly and decisive battle. There were no windows in the room; until the lights got turned on for supper there was almost no light in the room, except the light that came in off the hallway.

The empty dining room echoes with death, as if abandoned by “everything alive and capable of meaningful action”—and yet all that has occurred is a “big noonday meal,” and all that’s to come is supper. Within the speculative aesthetic, a writer is free to seesaw between the minuscule observed details of life (the taste of carrots, clearing the tables for supper) and poignantly existential implications.

We begin to arrive at a preliminary list of craft choices that “feel speculative,” or that serve as markers of the speculative aesthetic: active, conscious, agentive setting; lyrical and contradictory imagery; metaphor presented as possible truth; impermeable boundaries separating the inside world from the outside world; and juxtaposition of the tangible with the sweeping and universal. Though this list is rather broad, and not necessarily confined to speculative stories, I’m interested in how it might be put to practical use. Some speculative stories announce their absurdities right out of the gate. But others begin in the real world, or seem to, only to gradually reach some speculative twist, some decisive threshold crossed between the real and the impossible. How can these latter stories avoid the reader critique that the speculative twist comes out of nowhere, or fails to feel plausible? The answer might be to write even the real-world mundanities of the story in the speculative aesthetic, so that the story feels off-kilter and atmospheric and slippery long before anything officially speculative needs to happen.

 

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DEVON HALLIDAY is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow, and a 2024 Anthony Veasna So Scholar. Her short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in Ploughshares, One Story, The Idaho Review, West Branch, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a BA in comparative literature from Brown University. Find Devon on Instagram @thehalliday.

 

Featured image by John Towner, courtesy of Unsplash.