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Terrence Holt’s new book of short stories, In the Valley of the Kings, is one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I almost said “the best book I’ve read this year, or even this decade,” which is true, but since it’s the only book I’ve finished so far this decade, that would be faint praising it, and I don’t want to do that. It’s kind of a miracle that I read it at all, since I’ve never heard of Holt, and I almost never buy hardcovers. (The fact that most midlist fiction writers can’t afford to buy hardcover fiction is a topic for another time.) And I bought it entirely on the basis of the glowing blurbs on the back, which, again, is something I almost never do, but in this case, they came from Peter Matthiesen, Gerald Stern, and Alexsander Hemon. The one that sold me, oddly enough, was the one from Junot Diaz, despite the fact that a) I knew from the acknowledgments page, even before I bought the book, that Diaz is a former student of Holt, and b) I haven’t actually read anything by Junot Diaz. But he said the right things to pique my interest, namely by comparing Holt to Melville, Poe, and Borges. So I took the plunge.

As it turns out, Diaz et al. were dead right: this is a marvelous book, one that scratches all of my itches as a reader. The stories are beautifully written, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and genre-inflected without falling prey to genre cliches. The first story, "Ο Λογοσ," is the most Borgesian, the story of a plague that is spread by a single word, which appears in the afflicted as a sort of bruise under the skin. To read the word is to become infected and, inevitably, to die. You might even think of it as a surreal gloss on scripture, to wit, that the letter killeth. A couple of other stories, “My Father’s Heart” and “Scylla,” likewise tend toward the surreal, recalling Kafka as well as Borges.

But the stories that absolutely knocked me out were a trio set in the outer regions of the solar system, each of them a first person account by a lonely explorer at the end of his tether. All three are straight-up science fiction stories, but written with a stylistic mastery you don’t often find even in the best sci fi. The first, “Charybdis,” is a sort of retelling of Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” (which provides the story’s epigraph), crossed with the second half of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (to which the story refers obliquely), but it’s more psychological than Poe’s story and more strange than Kubrick’s, as the unnamed narrator relates the inexorable and mysterious unraveling of a mission to Jupiter. The second story, “Aurora,” is narrated by a sort of cyborg, a spaceship which has been implanted with a human consciousness and which orbits Saturn, mining the ice of the planet’s rings for rare minerals. The story explores some classic sci fi themes—can a machine be conscious? Is a human a sort of machine?—but it’s also as haunting evocation of the mysteries of memory and longing as you’re likely to read, in any genre. The third story, “Eurydike,” is a sci fi retelling of the titular myth, and it reads as if Ovid and J. G. Ballard collaborated on an episode of The Twilight Zone. Set on the frozen wastes of Pluto, it’s another first-person account of a scientific mission (the creepy nature of which is slowly revealed) gone horribly awry. Taken together, as a thematic trilogy, these stories are brilliant accounts of loneliness and loss, and situated in the frighteningly well-evoked and spectacular setting of interplanetary space.

The title story, “In the Valley of the Kings,” is a novella, really, and it’s also the most purely entertaining story in the book, reminiscent of Poe’s “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” and Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” with a little academic satire and just a hint of post-structuralist literary theory. The narrator is an obsessed, imperious, sarcastic, and more-than-half-crazy Egyptologist who thinks he’s stumbled onto an undiscovered tomb that holds a secret of world-shaking proportions. The story ends with a long, wildly inventive set piece as the narrator penetrates further into the tomb, ending in a really terrifying Lovecraftian cul-de-sac, wherein the narrative snicks shut after the reader like the door of, well, a tomb. Just in case the Lovecraft comparison scares you off, let’s just say that it’s much better written and more self-aware than most of Lovecraft, not to mention much wittier. But make no mistake, it’s no mere parody or pastiche, but the creepiest thing I’ve read in ages.

The final story in the book, “Apocalypse,” is also superb and disturbing, concentrating on the quotidian details in the life of a married couple at the end of the world, but it’s also the warmest and most heartbreaking story in the book. Coming at the end of a series of stories that evoke, to varying degrees, loneliness, obsession, monomania, and fear, “Apocalypse” ends with a paragraph that moved me to tears—not because it’s hopeful, necessarily, but because it sees the beauty in the impermanence of just about everything:

But before the end we will speak once more, of everything that matters: of the brightness of the moon, of the birds still flying dark against the sky; of the man who brought me here; of the hours she waited; of what we would name the child; of the grace of everything that dies; of the love that moves the sun and other stars.

Nuff said. This is a thrilling and beautiful book. Go read it.
 


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