Fiction: Oh, the arch irony of it all. A title that immediately beds you down in comfortable kitsch. Pages interspersed with ads for tobacco and rubber heels from a bygone America.
Melodramatic illustrated articles from old pulp comics investigating such things as whether the death ray has been developed by the Nazis. And then there are the blurbs for the stories; cliffhanging paragraphs sodden in come-hither mystery ("He went in search of a relic of Earth's past, and came face to face with a mortal spectre of his own").
This, then, is McSweeney's territory, where the detail is in the deconstruction. It was in 1998 that Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, established Timothy McSweeney's Literary Quarterly (named after his grandfather). This is its 10th edition. "There have been nine before," it declares, "there are 46 to come." It has quickly established itself as a publication with an imagination as broad as it is sometimes baffling, and with the attitude of a whiskey-breathed gumshoe. Just as important, it sells a lot of copies.
It has claimed to have been "created in darkness by troubled Americans", although it was originally put together almost single- handedly by Eggers. It seemed to be a literary sweeping brush, taking on the letters, pieces and general musings that had been rejected elsewhere. McSweeney's only really became a literary journal with the third issue, when it dedicated itself to fiction. The short stories it included, however, were deliberately opaque. They largely rejected the standard story as already present in New Yorker, stories with a beginning, middle and end. They eschewed standard structure and were often incoherent. The margins sometimes featured critical appraisals by other writers. Zadie Smith has not only written for it but also seems to have been influenced by its style. Her most recent novel, The Autograph Man, is rife with hallmark; self-indulgent asides, typographical quirks and single jokes stretched thin.
It does not pay its contributors; there is enough reward in being pulled into the bosom of the one true literary movement to emerge from America in over a decade. So, Thrilling Tales offers a line-up of galactic proportions: Stephen King, Nick Hornby, Rock Moody, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellisson, Glen David Gold, Michael Crichton and Eggers all contribute. What's more, having previously gone out of its way to mangle the standard structure of the short story, here it gives an open declaration to do otherwise. Its guest editor, Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon, says that he was tiring of plotless short stories, such as his own, which sparkle with "epiphanic dew" but offer nothing in the way of colour. He wanted to re-introduce the short story to its pulp roots and accompanying genres; to westerns and ghosts and fantasy and terror and all the colours of the literary prism. So, given Eggers's permission, he sought out both the traditional masters of the genre, such as King, and those, such as Hornby, who are willing to wander into unfamiliar territory.
The result is less confident than the attitude of the packaging originally suggests. While the idea of retro-pulp fiction suggests hard-jawed heroes fighting off alien Nazis, the brief proves a little trickier to stick to. Elmore Leonard nails the concept, with 'How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman', a terrific tale of a young man's encounters with a bank robber. Michael Crichton's 'Blood Doesn't Come Out' features a hard-boiled detective having a very bad day, while Nick Hornby's spooky tale of a VCR that foresees the end of the world, and how its teenager owner uses it to lose his virginity, is a disposable treat. Stephen King goes for a western ghost story while Rick Moody's 'The Albertine Notes' is a compelling, complex tale of a future drug that is anything but short at 67 pages.
Eggers's 'Up The Mountain Coming Down Slowly' is a deftly written adventure tale, but it is about the idea of adventure as witnessed through a tourist on a guided climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Glen David Gold's 'The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter' tells of the public hanging of an elephant. Chabon's tiresome 'The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance' is not nearly as good as its title.
Ultimately, 21st-century sensibilities dominate over pre-war ambitions. Not all the stories have great plots. Some have more middle than they do beginning and end. Some tales work, some don't. But, then again, pulp fiction anthologies were always a mixed bag.
They set out to conquer a genre, but they hadn't bargained on a foe greater than irony itself!
- Shane Hegarty
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales Edited by Michael Chabon Hamish Hamilton, pp497, £14.99
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist and critic
Fiction