Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction
“Make sure you ask someone whether they’ve even heard of Sallis, Knight, or Ellison before you gift-wrap this massive block of pages. It’s an acquired taste.”
In 2019 Soho Crime brought out reprints of the six Lew Griffin crime novels, a 1990s series by James Sallis. The books featured an African American PI in New Orleans and may be the most familiar of Sallis’ work to readers today.
But Sallis, born in 1944, began writing science fiction the 1960s. Linked with Damon Knight and Harlan Ellis through their anthologies and other publications, he helped nurture “sci fi” into its edgier forms better known now as speculative fiction, while at the same time refining the short and very short story, a predecessor to both microfiction and neo-noir.
In a surprising extension of its familiar crime fiction focus, Soho Crime now offers an 800-page collection of 154 of Sallis’ stories, 11 of them not previously found in any anthology. One of the strengths of the collection is the list at the back of the publications that first held each work. That lets, say, a mystery fan narrow down quickly to reading pieces like “D.C. Al Fine” that offers conspiracy theorists an entry into genocide, or the very quirky “The Very Last Days of Boston,” segments of crimes laid together with a darkness that hints that love is superseded by pain, and civilization by the next flood. Or the two-page tale of “Dogs in the Nighttime,” a compression of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler (no, Father Brown wouldn’t have touched this one).
The book earns its place on the shelf of every historian of the mystery genre and the short story form. However, most of its bulk comes from twisted speculative fiction veiled in the darkest of dark humor. Readers of especially Harlan Ellison won’t find this unexpected.
Alas, the insightful introduction or intermittent commentaries that could have put Sallis’ development and the dozens of narratives into perspective are not present in this volume. Why not? Did Sallis resist being “explained,” or was nobody daring enough to tackle writing about an acknowledged master? Soho offers no explanation, although its promotional material with advance copies describes Sallis as “a writer’s writer,” a term intended to convey “nimbleness of vision, prolifically high standards, and an uncompromising devotion to craft.”
Sallis, direct and sharp, might avoid all of that. Many of his stories reach an ending—far from a climax—like this one from the story “Good Men”: “I went to get my book and sweater and looked for a moment a Louis’s cap on the back of my chair. Then I put his notebook on the shelf with the rest and went on to school.” In other words, if there’s insight, passion, and love to be gained in life, prepare to see them vanish as the planet turns. (Or perhaps, as in “Attitude of the Earth Toward Other Bodies,” there are other explanation for the universe.)
The book may make an impressive holiday gift by weight, page count, and author significance. But it’s not going to make the “naughty or nice” list of many readers. Make sure you ask someone whether they’ve even heard of Sallis, Knight, or Ellison before you gift-wrap this massive block of pages. It’s an acquired taste. And if one of these is still lingering in someone’s thoughts as “the writer they’ll never forget discovering,” you’ve found your target gift recipient.