The Panic Hand by Jonathan Carroll

The Panic Hand

by Jonathan Carroll

(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)

(Review first appeared in Nova Express)

Jonathan Carroll is the author of eight novels, including The Land of Laughs, Bones of the Moon and Outside the Dog Museum, but I first encountered his work in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. That story, 'The Panic Hand', motivated me to go looking for his novels as soon as I could get off the train and find a good bookshop.

I still haven't read all of Carroll's novels, and I haven't loved all that I've read; nor do I love all of the stories in The Panic Hand. Reading the collection in too few sittings over less than a week was probably a mistake. Carroll has a genius for making the most disturbing situations seem real by his loving attention to detail, the normality of his settings, the credibility of his characters, and a quietly intimate tone which is most effective if you treat each tale as a shared secret. Unfortunately, twenty Carroll stories taken en masse is rather like a cocktail party dominated by erudite and mostly well-mannered upper-middle-class urbanites who've noticed something weird about the world but aren't necessarily comfortable discussing it in public. Sometimes you may find yourself reading a story without realising that the previous one has finished... or didn't finish.

That said, there are some undeniable gems in the collection. In 'The Sadness of Detail', a woman visits her favourite cafe and is recruited by a man named Thursday (shades of G.K. Chesterton) into re-creating small details of the world to assist an amnesiac God. 'Mr Fiddlehead' is a wonderful piece of magic realism about a woman who finds herself falling in love with her best friend's very real "imaginary friend". 'Friend's Best Man' is more equivocal about its fantasy elements - a girl who talks to a clairvoyant dog - but is also gently twisted. So is 'The Panic Hand', the story of a computer salesman and fairy-story collector who meets a glamorous woman and her strangely attractive daughter on a train; its strange vision of creation and reality is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll at his most frightening.

'A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings' and 'A Flash in the Pants' (new to this collection) are beautifully written tales about memory and souls. 'The Jane Fonda Room' and 'The Dead Love You' give us different glimpses of Hell. 'Postgraduate' and 'Tired Angel' are effective little chillers. 'The Zoondel' was too short, and feels like the first few pages of an abandoned novel, while 'Uh-Oh City' seemed too long. 'The Life of My Crime' gives the impression that Carroll has devoted so much space to creating wonderfully detailed portraits of his characters that the plot tired of waiting and went home... but if you like characterisation for its own sake, read it anyway. The characterisation in 'Black Cocktail' is better still, magnificent even by Carroll's high standards, and I'm not sure why I didn't like the story more than I did.

If you're already a Carroll fan, you'll want to buy The Panic Hand anyway, if only for the previously unpublished story. If you're not familiar with Carroll's work, this book is an excellent introduction.

Publisher: St Martins Press (hardcover, 1996)

Hardcover is 295 pages

ISBN: 0312146981 (hardcover edition)