Dead Americans Read online

  Praise for Ben Peek

  Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth

  “Ben Peek is a writer I fully expect to blunder out into the scene like a runaway brontosaurus one of these days. He has titanic talent generally leashed to micro-detail projects when his true canvas is probably something much wider and deeper. Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a gently experimental text that uses a glossary of terms from A to Z to create vignettes, one-liners, and other supports for loosely connected narratives. Some are funny, some are most definitely not funny. All are lively and deserve your attention.”

  —Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online

  “I emerged from the book feeling somewhat dazed and exhausted (having read it from beginning to end within a twenty-four-hour period), and I’m not entirely sure what I feel about it. Impressed, certainly. Curious, definitely. A little pissed off . . . well, maybe.”

  —Tansy Rayner Roberts, ASIF

  “What I got from it is this: that truth matters when it matters, and doesn’t when it doesn’t. And that each of us must find our own path as to where that distinction lies. Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is an intelligent, playful, funny, challenging, thoughtful and deeply moving work. It is a book filled with outrageous lies. And it is a book filled with truth.”

  —Ben Payne, ASIF

  “It ought to fail miserably. But, curse his eyes, Mr. Peek has written a fantastic book. And despite its structure, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth has a powerful narrative drive. Mr. Peek has deftly woven a story into his encyclopedia, complete with character development, unfolding themes, and a hard shock of an ending.”

  —Chris Lawson, The Talking Squid Blog

  “Quite extraordinary.”

  —Clare Dudman, author of One Day the Ice Will Reveal Its Dead and 98 Reasons for Being

  “Ben Peek’s Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a memoir in the form of alphabetical entries, ten or so entries for each letter. The book is also semiotic, social commentary, a meditation on the truth-telling responsibilities of a writer, a part-time comic book, funny as hell, profane, and melancholy. Like the best memoirs it’s deeply personal yet engaging and universal. Peek lays out the truths and lies and is smart enough to trust the reader to fit everything together. Powerful stuff. Highly recommended.”

  —Paul G. Tremblay, author of In the Mean Time and

  Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye

  “This is a clever, moving, funny and insightful book. I laughed, and I would have cried, but I’m too fucking hard for that sort of shit. See, I understand, relate and empathize with a lot of the truth in this book, the truths I know are true.”

  —Paul Haines, author of Doorways for the Dispossessed

  “Recently I read Ben Peek’s Twenty Six Lies/One Truth. Yes, it’s full of bluff and bluster, Peek coming across as a hard-ass, and yes, it’s very fucking good. There are moments, in fact, of brilliance.”

  —Rjurik Davidson, author of Unwrapped Sky

  “A bit too clever.”

  —Dan Hartland, Strange Horizons

  “Ben Peek’s Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is inebriating, an absinthe of self-deception, a smoke-filled room of conflicted emotion, a hall of mirrors, each of them distorting both perception and reality. Ben Peek dances on the stepping stones of Ben Peek’s supposed life, leaping from philosophy to pop culture, from insight to angst. As one reads this remarkable work, the question arises, ‘What is the line between the art and the artist’? Peek knows. I know. But you cannot know, for certain, until you pick out the lies. Do you trust your judgement that much? Do you trust Ben Peek? What makes you so certain that you can crack the code of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth? I’d be careful if I were you. Deception awaits.”

  —Forrest Aguirre, World Fantasy Award-winning editor of

  Leviathan 3 and 4

  Black Sheep

  “With the gravitas of a Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro, Peek, in his debut novel, Black Sheep, crafts a quietly horrifying world displaced from ours by a century of time and an implosion of globalist attitudes.”

  —Paul Di Filippo, Barnes and Noble Review

  “There’s a clear critique operating here of contemporary Australian society, with its expectation that newcomers leave their cultural background at the door on entry. . . . Black Sheep is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in recent times.”

  —Ben Payne, ASIF

  “This is an angry young book . . . it blazes across the page with absolute intensity. It’s also one of the most interesting and politically challenging science fiction novels to come out of Australia in a very long time. It’s a novel that has something to say.”

  —Tansy Rayner Robers, ASIF

  Above/Below

  “Continues to press the nerd pleasure centers of my brain.”

  —John Scalzi

  “Cleverly and at times beautifully written.

  —Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth

  “An old-fashioned flip book. . . . An interesting concept. . . . Overt politics in SF, making a clear statement. . . . Highly recommended.”

  —The Writer and the Critic

  “The stories concern diplomatic visits between the cities, and the terrible misunderstandings between the two, exacerbated by the ill-treatment of the ground people by the cities above, and in particular by the illnesses that doom those below to early deaths. . . . [I]nteresting, with affecting main characters.”

  —Locus Magazine

  “Above/Below is an admirable, entertaining and successful work that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Its authors, Ben Peek and Stephanie Campisi, have done more than produce excellent novellas in their own right (although they have done that, too)—they have produced an elegant composite novel which can, as I think I have shown, be read in any order.”

  —ASIF

  “It’s not everyday, after all, that we come across a book like The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy or City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris in which the medium or the storytelling technique changes everything. Above/Below is one such book and I say that not just because of the format but due to the quality of the writing as well. While short and immediate, one could spend a long time analyzing the book, poring over the details, debating the politics of the setting, and analyzing the nuances of Campisi and Peek’s technique. They’re compelling novelettes in their own right but together, a must-read novel for any reader—genre or otherwise—and is easily one of my favorites for 2011.”

  —Bibliophile Stalker

  Dead

  Americans

  AND OTHER STORIES

  BEN PEEK

  ChiZine Publications

  Dedication

  For Nikilyn Nevins

  Contents

  Praise for Ben Peek

  Dedication

  Ben Peek: Liminal Artist—An introduction by Rjurik Davidson

  There Is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious

  The Dreaming City

  Johnny Cash

  Possession

  The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys

  The Funeral, Ruined

  Under the Red Sun

  John Wayne

  Octavia E. Butler (a remix)

  theleeharveyoswaldband

  Acknowledgements

  Publication History

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  Ben Peek: Liminal Artist

  An introduction by Rjurik Davidson

  Parramatta road runs west from central Sydney, out into a vast urban and suburban sprawl. It’s a liminal space, be
tween the city and the bush. Roads climb and fall over the small hills, they wind through the districts with their little shopping centres and vast malls. Freeways bypass the area altogether, as if some of us weren’t meant to venture there. In one of these little dense knots of population lives Ben Peek, a man accustomed to the liminal zones.

  Peek is a large man with a quiet voice. He rarely drinks, has excellent taste in both music and literature. Over the years, he’s made both friends and enemies. This is in part because of his forthright opinions, many of which can be seen on his well-read blog. Peek is not one to compromise and that’s to some people’s taste but not to others. Intransigency is not an admired trait in so-called civilized society, though it is one we are sorely lacking. To begin with, Peek has been openly critical of awards, for he sees them as contingent affairs that don’t represent much at all.

  For over ten years, Ben Peek has been quietly writing his dark and intense fiction. For over ten years, he has been making himself into one of Australia’s pre-eminent writers. For over ten years, he has been under-read and underappreciated. His early dystopian novel, Black Sheep, examined an Australia where ‘multiculturalism’ was a crime. Despite laudatory reviews, the book was lost in small-press isolation and quickly disappeared. His brilliant postmodern novella, Twenty-six Lies/One Truth, told a story in fragments, each piece headed by a letter of the alphabet. It was a literary triumph that made small waves among a select readership. Peek’s equally ambitious book A Year in the City—a section of which is printed here as “The Dreaming City”—rewrote the geography of Sydney through the eyes of Mark Twain and aboriginal myth. Like his lucent Red Sun book—showcased here in the exciting “Under the Red Sun”—it is yet to find a home. All this is about to change, as Peek has sold a major fantasy series and soon his work will be sought out. Some of this early work will yet see print.

  From this short précis you might gather Peek is a genre writer but, like the suburb he inhabits, he stands on the borderlands of the literary. In a sense he is the archetypal speculative fiction writer. He likes to experiment with form and he has read widely outside genre. In this collection of stories you will find—in “Johnny Cash” and others—the influence of “literary” writers such as Murikami, Peter Carey, or science fiction’s great experimentalist, J. G. Ballard. Peek’s love with headings and sub-titles implies a meta-narrative distancing, a self-conscious eye overlooking the very stories they are a part of.

  Take the opening story of this collection, “There is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious.” Each subtitle resonates with the story adding the self-referential depth. The story takes the form of a police procedural, resonating with Chandler and Ellroy, and yet subtly shifts into the kind of magic-realism you might find in Peter Carey. The true centre of the story, however, lies in the character of Williams, a drawn-out forty-year-old. His world-weariness is so finely crafted that we can practically feel the weight in his bones as he moves around.

  Which brings us to the question of voice—an area of writing difficult to analyse, hard to teach, yet crucial to the success of any writer. Peek found his voice early: distanced and ironic, and yet in some contradictory way still powerful and intense. If the distance and irony come from the self-reflexiveness, the muscular intensity comes in the prose itself, the attention to detail, the inner life of the characters.

  In his stories, Peek likes to refer, however tangentially, to cultural icons: John Wayne, Lee Harvey Oswald, Johnny Cash, Octavia Butler. It’s a manoeuver that appeals to the wider world beyond the text, with all its meanings, and so adds to the self-reflexivity, the ironic distancing.

  In Butler’s case, the reference is to science fiction’s greatest female African-American writer, and highlights Peek’s ongoing concern with race and multiculturalism. Each of his novels in some way meditates on this concern, in Peek’s distinctive way. Peek is an iconoclastic progressive, belonging to no discernable political tradition, but rather having fashioned a political outlook of his own making.

  A collection of Ben Peek stories is long overdue. For over ten years, he has stood at the forefront of a new wave of Australian short story writers. In this book, you’ll find his best short work, though certainly there will be more to come. It will take you away from your everyday life and throw you into unknown, dark worlds. Peek will impress you with his technique. He will make you think about life and death, race and gender, hope and despair. With the recent sale of his fantasy books, he is no longer the proverbial “writer to watch.” He no longer needs to show what he can do. He has done it. He has been doing it for more than a decade. Here is a selection of the fruits of that laboor. Prepare yourself.

  —Rjurik Davidson is a freelance writer and Associate Editor of Overland magazine. Rjurik has written short stories, essays, reviews, and screenplays. His collection, The Library of Forgotten Books, was published in 2010, and his novel, Unwrapped Sky, will be published in 2014.

  There Is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious

  The Mosque That He Did Not Know You Visited

  After the fire in the mosque burnt itself out, Pete Williams, Red Grove’s local representative from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, found himself staring at the cindered, broken skeletal remains of the building long after all others had left, the site lit by the bright headlights of his truck. It was a stark sight, coloured in blacks, grays, and whites, and boxed in by lines of tape that secured it from no one. He had been standing there for an hour: the splinter of moon above him had pushed its way through a portion of an ugly cluster of stars, but the shadows over the Calico Mountains to his left had yet to be disintegrated by the clean, bright light that would reveal it and the tangle of cheap housing, local owned stores, and dust that was Red Grove running beneath it. Until then, the only thing that punctured the long empty darkness were headlights coming off the I-10.

  Williams’ solitude was due, he knew, to the remains that had been found inside the mosque. Unsurprisingly, the body had been burnt, but that fact was looking to be as if it were an event after the actual killing, an unpleasant attempt to disguise what appeared to be a brutal attack to the head of the victim. He’d asked Jesse, who doubled as mortician and coroner, to let him know for sure after the autopsy, which had been unnecessary given that they were identifying the body through dental records and he’d be receiving the paperwork anyhow; but Williams was the kind of man who said the unnecessary things at times. He liked to talk, and he did, muttering to himself when alone—“I don’t like this one. Something’s not right. Her face.”—a habit he had never tried to break. There was something about the body, about the anger that was written across its blackened head, that left within Williams a series of questions about the mortality of the individual that he couldn’t quite shake, and it was digging inside him. He had passed it off as a joke at first: being forty-one now came with a predisposition to linger over life and its meaning just as it came with a renewed interest in woodwork, but the joke didn’t stick. He made shit jokes, anyway. But yesterday, he would not have thought about how easy skin went black and crisp and when touched broke to reveal something so pink and red underneath; and he would not have thought how in death every expression was stripped back to a grimace, as if the recently departed knew that he or she was being taken away to some place worse, or taken away from the one good thing they had, the thing that they neither had to barter or earn, and it bothered him that the thought was there. He had been exposed to violent death before: car and farm accidents, mostly, but also to the suicides of men and women his same age and older, and kids who hadn’t gotten enough in life. It was part of his job and he had thought—when he had given it thought—that he possessed a coldness, an impersonality that allowed him to keep those thoughts from him.

  “What if you couldn’t switch it off anymore?” his wife asked him, six months after they moved from L.A. to Red Grove, and settled into their small house. “Wh
at if you wake up and it’s not there anymore?”

  “Why would it change?”

  The memory was of the two of them lying on the bed, naked, smoking pot and drinking beer. It was hot outside, and that third element, combined with the previous two, left them uninterested in sex, wanting nothing more than to touch, to talk. That was seven years before she left, fifteen years before he stood before the burnt out mosque, fifteen years before the memory returned. His hair had been full, then, black as grease, and the skin under his jaw did not sag and he, in general, had not sagged; nor had his teeth been a partial plate that aged him another ten years in the mirror when he took them out.

  “A moment.” He did not know what she looked like now, just what she was then: pleasantly plump and white, with dark hair, and a tattoo on her left shoulder in the shape of a paw print so bright and new that it was as if blood had seeped out of her skin to reveal an inner, bestial quality. Which is exactly what she wanted everyone to think. “A moment. Like an epiphany. A moment where something inside you just changes, where you lose something and gain something, but you’ll never be sure why it all changes, and why it means so much to you.”

  “What am I going to do then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got no fucking idea.”

  They had laughed, then, a good easy laugh aided by everything in the room, and despite the nature of their parting, and the cruelties that both had visited on each other since, Williams smiled faintly at the memory, though, so self conscious of his fake teeth was he that even alone, he did not smile wide enough to reveal them.

  Burnt Down with the Body of a Girl

  You’d Never Met Inside

  The burnt body had, only recently, been named Amanda Currie. She had been nineteen.