DARYL GREGORY: FACTS AND OBSESSIONS
by Nancy Kress
Here are the facts: Daryl Gregory’s first story appeared in 1990 in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. He has since published three novels, Pandemonium in 2008, The Devil’s Alphabet in 2009, and Raising Stony Mayhall in 2011. In addition, over a dozen stories have come out in various magazines and anthologies. Daryl lives with his wife Kathy and two children in State College, Pennsylvania.
The problem is that facts do not begin to describe Daryl. Not describe him, not contain him, not constrain him. Both in person and in his fiction Daryl breaks the paltry bonds of fact. They cannot hold him. In person he is exuberant, tireless, eager, one of the last guys in the convention bar and the first to propose another expedition. A former theater major, he is a terrific performer, reading his fiction aloud with verve and animation. If you ever get a chance to hear him read, do so.
In his writing, however, exuberance takes a different turn. Because he is such a good writer, Daryl has all that intensity under control. The result is a cast of characters with a wide range of personalities but one similar quality: When they want something, they want it with every fiber of their fictional souls. What they want differs radically from story to story; as a writer Daryl has a wide range. Sometimes his characters achieve what they want, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they do but wish they hadn’t. But always that longing is there, sharp as pain.
What do his protagonists long for? The usual things: love, glory, adventure, power, to go home again. However, a list like that says nothing about the actual stories, since the list is the same for anything ever written. What matters are a particular author’s characters, relationships among characters, obsessions.
Superheroes are an obsession of Daryl’s. Many of the stories in this collection are about superheroes with powers beyond the human, although none are the simplistic good-or-evil beings of comic books and movies. Daryl doesn’t do simplistic. His Lord Grimm, Soliton, Teresa (aka Lady Justice), Multiplex Man — all have complicated relationships to those around them. In one of my favorite stories, the hilarious and wistful “Unpossible,” fictional heroes don’t even exist — maybe — but still retain their power to shape our emotional lives. In “The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy,” which is at once moving and shocking, the longing for superheroes both destroys and liberates the story’s characters.
Another of Daryl’s obsessions is the limits of the human brain. He explores how much extension is possible for our powers of concentration (“Dead Horse Point”), for our powers of empathy (“Glass”), for our powers of religious vision (“Damascus”). The disturbing “Damascus,” another favorite of mine, also deals with another human ability: self-deception.
Whatever a particular story’s theme, however, it is always played out in the context of complicated human relationships. Brother and sister, hero and sidekick, mentor and disciple. Daryl is particularly strong on father-son relationships. That fertile subject, with all its complexities of love and rivalry and control, gives birth to “In the Wheels,” “The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy,” and “What We Take When We Take What We Need,” the latter closely tied to his novel The Devil’s Alphabet.
None of these stories is set on a space station or an alien planet. This comes off as not a constraint but as an enrichment, freeing the author to concentrate on that sufficiently exotic creature, homo sapiens, in all his sometimes-exotic longing. Doing this fully requires the tropes of both science fiction and fantasy, and Daryl blends them freely, unconstrained by fact. That’s because these stories have something else in mind besides the facts, something much more important: truth.
Read these stories for their human truths, for their inventiveness, for their verve. Most of all, read them for your own pleasure. Enjoy.