CHAMBERS OF THE HEART

A volume of short stories focuses on SF and fantasy.

In these 16 tales, Allen takes readers across a wide spectrum of speculative content, from distant planets and alien cultures to the strange byways of ordinary life on Earth. The stories can offer elaborate allegories, as in the title tale, which presents the human heart as a towering keep whose floors are arranged by ascending emotional states, from “Despair” to “Ecstasy.” A lonely Master inhabits that keep, attended by servants who worship him but worry when he descends to the lower depths. In the brief “About the Story” afterword that attends every tale, the author reveals: “I have a very minor heart condition. Confirming its nature required a day wearing a heart monitor, which naturally had me thinking about the heart and its chambers.” This kind of clarification, a dramatic misstep, dogs every story; after “Blush,” for instance, readers are told: “I’ve never been a fan of cosmetics. Most of them have historically been tested on animals, and most people I know look better as their natural self.” The evocative “Some Sun and Delilah” is followed by a note mentioning that it was partially inspired by a trip Allen took to the Seychelles (“Sadly, the vegetarian food wasn’t as good as in the story. And I don’t recall the coco de mer having any effect. But the snorkeling was beautiful”).

Throughout this collection, Allen adroitly employs a combination of whimsy and wide-ranging imagination, filling his tales with both bite and heart. The rhetorical register he uses fits these stories squarely into the literary lineage of James Tiptree and Algis Budrys, the territory where mythmaking and SF intersect. The SF worldbuilding in “Building on Sand,” for instance, is well conceived but wisely kept entirely subordinate to the more resonant emotional drama playing out in the tale’s foreground, the touching story of a man named Penho. For years, Penho served in the Sand Guards while dreaming of returning home to his beloved Anoush and living a joyful life: “They would expand the gardens, and he would clear out that area behind the workshop and make it into a lawn where he and his workers would play with his dogs in the mist of Anoush’s new-built fountain.” In sure, deceptively economical steps, Allen portrays a man who decides to abandon his dreams in favor of a new family he never expected to have. The author uses the same technique in the excellent tale “Minstrel Boy Howling at the Moon,” in which a young Oklahoma man named Rafe seems able to summon Native American magic with his harmonica, which makes him dream of great musical success: “His mind was full of cities and billboards and marquees, of crowds and swank hotel rooms and high floors where you could see humanity spread out below you like a map of the future.” Often these narrative strengths combine in remarkably effective stories, including the volume’s most touching entry, “Fetch,” about a doomed cosmonaut hurtling toward the solar system’s far reaches. He draws comfort from his computer simulation of Laika, the dog launched into the cosmos by the Soviet space program in 1957. “The cruelty of Laika’s death has haunted me since I was a child,” Allen predictably chimes in.

A marvelously varied and heart-tugging collection of tales.