“I remember feeling shocked that there was still so much sunlight outside, that the sky hadn’t turned black already.” There are uncountable undercurrents of illumination within David Surface’s stories, moments where rippling light penetrates disfigured shadows, affording readers a reflective glimmer before the glow dims, obliging itself to darkness.
Lethe Press, 2024
These Things That Walk Behind Me (Lethe Press, 2024), his second, may serve as an ideal entry point for Surface’s evolving body of work. There’s a continued reliability in quality his fans can trust—a trust that has been fostered following praise of his 2020 collection, Terrible Things (Black Shuck Books), not to mention the literary fidelity of his newsletter project, Strange Little Stories. As a tale-teller, his dependability and writerly precision is why we come here to his work—“to be focused. And to be haunted.” (I’ve appropriated the previous line from his story, “The Man Outside,” which, in its climactic scene, contains an unsettling sequence, a depiction that lingers with electric irreality.)
With an introduction by John Langan, the fourteen pieces within These Things That Walk Behind Me are a stylistic and compassionate dissection of loss, duality, severance, and responsibility. And though Surface’s stories certainly compel readers to glance over their own shoulders—a curious inspection at the things that walk behind each of us in that familiar darkness—it’s best to keep one’s eyes on the page.
Genuine friends and partners nudge and shove each other to be, in general, better — better people, sure; but what I am really aiming to say is that a byproduct of the mere adherence, and dependence, of friends expands what intrinsically exists as we’re compelled toward potentials of our chosen disciplines.
Creatively speaking, it’s a benefit when those friends are writers who consistently challenge me to perform at a progressive pace. To grow. (It’s lost on me, and I’m grateful for, just how many talented, literary allies exist in my epistolary network.)
Over the past several years, I’ve come to know Adam Golaski as not only a friend, but primarily as a writer with whom I can calibrate my own growth as a writer. As a teacher and lecturer, Golaski is insightful and encouraging; he’s also critical, but, like most competent educators, he also knows what the hell he’s talking about.
On his blog, Golaski recently made mention of the forthcoming Looming Low, Vol. II(Dim Shores), and noted my short-story contribution, “Lovenest.” (The line-up for this anthology is so astonishing that I’m afraid someone’s going to ask, “Who invited this dude to the party?“) Colleagues and readers are so much better at portraying what occurs in my stories than I am (note: I’m not a clueless creature, but often my audience repeatedly lands bullseyes about the content of my tales better than I ever could), and, to our benefit, Golaski maintains jewelers-loupe scrutiny.
Hotels and motels figure into my fiction (and into my formative years, for that matter, not to mention the more turbulent segments of adulthood) owing to their transient nature: a temporary “home” — complete with the neon seduction of VACANCY — a palliative to the exercise of travel (or, to look at it another way, the lure of Midwest “mobility” as an antidote to potential stagnation). I can think of a few of my stories where hotels are critical settings (“Fiending Aphophenia,” “The Undertow, and They That Dwell Within,” and an early one called “Mums”), but my derelict locale in “Lovenest” occupies a significant portion of the action and thematic rumination.
I open the story with an excerpt from one of my most personally-influential poets, Charles Simic — this from his poem, “Paradise Motel” (A Wedding In Hell, 1994):
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other’s clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
Speaking of poetry: I know there’s a significant contingent of Golaski-fiction fans in my network, and though I can’t speak for him, I can (I think?) mention that there are projects slowly ascending to the surface of our literary community. Golaski wrote the introduction to my 2020 collection, The Skeleton Melodies (Hippocampus Press), and so I am indebted to the man for that gesture alone. But I encourage his audience to remain current with what’s he’s doing. What I mean: you’d do well to keep an ear to the rail. A trusty method is to check in on his blog from time to time. Check it out here.
Clint Smith Fiction 