THEME PARK

by Rob Lopresti

I’ve been reading a weird and interesting anthology of short stories. Not mysteries, but there is a connection.

I have mentioned Ryan North before. He is the creator of Dinosaur Comics, a very strange bit of web-based art. In one strip North’s hero T-Rex proposed an idea for a book: someone invents a machine that successfully predicts the manner of your death. Stick in a finger, it takes a drop of blood and spits out a piece of paper that reads: OVERDOSE, CAR CRASH, IMPROPERLY PREPARED BLOWFISH, or whatever. And the machine is always right.

But the machine has a quirky sense of humor. OLD AGE could mean being killed tomorrow by an octogenarian. SUICIDE could mean being hit by a jumper. And so on.

The idea became a book: Machine of Death, edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bernardo, and David Malki, is published by Bearstache Books.

Some of you have probably recognized that this is a technological variant of one of the oldest themes in literature: wanting to know (and probably to cheat) your fate. See Oedipus Rex, for example.

My favorite story in the book is “Flaming Marshmallow” by Camille Alexa, which asks the question: what would high school students do if they knew how they were going to die? Her brilliant answer: use the information to form new cliques. So the “crashers” and the “burners” are automatically the cool kids.

Not all the stories are funny. Julia Wainwright asks what do you do if the slip of paper reads “Killed by Daniel” and one of the millions of Daniels in the world is your beloved son?

The advantage over mystery

Not everyone’s cup of tea, obviously, but the point I want to make is that this sort of theme anthology seems a natural for science fiction, and not so much for mysteries. I think this is because “what if” is the natural beginning for science fiction and that fits well with themed collections.

Even I have taken the bait. One of my two published science fiction stories appears in Jigsaw Nation, where the theme is: what if the red and blue states separated?

Anthologies of original mystery anthologies don’t generally seem to be created around a theme in this way. Granted, MWA’s annual books tend to have a general rallying point – show biz, lawyers, cops – but that’s not the kind of specificity I am thinking of here.

I can only think of two such themed anthologies of mystery stories: The Plot Thickens (each story contains a thick fog, a thick book, and a thick steak,) and The Black Moon (a private eye is hired to collect six paintings in different cities and hires different detectives as sub-contractors.)

I’m sure there are more such themed collections, and I expect you are about t to tell me what I missed. Feel free!

But first, one more thing . . .

An amusing anecdote. The editors of Machine of Death urged their friends and fans to but the book from Amazon on the day it was released, in the hopes that it would, for one brief shining moment, make it to number one. And it did! But by coincidence this happened to be the same day that Glenn Beck’s latest book was released, so he came in at number 2. For some reason this made him cranky. Go figure.