Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore

Short story collections can be tricky, for writers and readers both, but let me eliminate any potential suspense: Rebecca Campbell's collection The Other Shore is an excellent follow-up to her 2023 novella Arboreality, which thoroughly deserved its win of the 2023 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and I'd highly recommend it to any readers willing to speculate about the various forms Earth's future might take.

The book club I've belonged to since 2007 (!) has historically been quite hard on story collections, and I've often found my response to collections uneven. In most volumes, some of their contents feel exactly right, some I wish had been turned into novels (or novellas, at least), and others ... well. I'm not a writer, so any critique involves a brief mirror-glance and "but I couldn't write that," but some stories do seem to me a drag on a collection's accomplishment.

But I don't feel that way about a single one of the ten stories (plus intro) that comprise The Other Shore. In preparing to teach Campbell's novel Arboreality, I'd already read the previously published stories linked to from Campbell's own website, and in fact the majority had already been published in one venue or another, but Stelliform Press and Campbell have collaborated to make this edition really valuable (which isn't always the case when previously published works get swept up into a volume!).

Crucially, each story gets its own headnote that comments about the story's genesis, its composition history, its echoes in or from Campbell's bio, and/or threads for the reader to pay attention to. As tetchy as I can get about being told how to read or what to think, Campbell's achievement with these was that I came away from each one feeling better equipped to face the story on its own as well as to recognize its relations with the other stories. This structure reminded me, in some very good ways, of Robert Wiersema's autobiographical essay about Agassiz that accompanied his criminally out-of-print The World More Full of Weeping (damn you, ChiZine! But I own four copies, if anybody wants one).

These stories are examples of, as Campbell and Stelliform variously claim and brag and acknowledge, weird fiction. Sometimes I can use a hand with weird, so if you don't need the help and would rather skip the headnotes, you go ahead and do that, but you'll be missing out.

There have been some really insightful reviews of this book, ones that I'd call helpful for on-the-fence readers but that also read like recognition for those of us who've already journeyed through these pages: Dana McFarland in The BC Review, as is often the case; Jan Priddy at Calyx, though too briefly; Niall Harrison for Locus. McFarland's was an especially good read, I think, and yes, that's a confession that this post is going to be shorter than I'd like it to be.

What stands out for me, a week or so since finishing the last of the stories, is simply that they're standing larger in my memory than short stories normally do:

• "Lares Familiares 1981" reads like a whole Jack Hodgins novel, but one resculpted by an imagination like LeGuin's. The Thornes are a long-time logging family on Vancouver Island, with blood and death in their past, but their whole existence might pass in a blink from the perspective of the place itself -- and of the supernatural folk whose place it is.
• "The High Lonesome Frontier" reads a bit like Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquillity, with a similar thread of a song echoing between past and future: possibly the only review I posted on Substack and deleted, that I accidentally failed to repost here on Blogger. Plus its song reminded me of the great Lyle Lovett tune "Which Way Does That Old Pony Run," which can only ever be a good thing.
• "Thank You for Your Patience" is a whole novel in micro that Douglas Coupland should've gotten around to writing, but I'm glad he didn't because Campbell's hand is both more delicate and more sure (even if I do have a soft spot for Coupland's mannered stylishness).
• "Such Thoughts Are Unproductive" is crying out to be filmed, with its inventively hyperlocated version of truly dystopian levels of official surveillance and social control ("among the worst futures I can imagine for the world," Campbell remarks in the headnote [p.138]), and its human, fully dimensional characters.

And "The Bletted Woman" combines with "Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea" as paired narrative meditations on the nature of sensory integration and embeddedness into the world we humans share with each other and with uncountable other species, beings, and phenomena. Stunning as separate stories, but more so when inside the same volume like this.

Honestly, I wasn't prepared for how much I wanted to keep inhabiting these stories. I had lots to say about her Frankenstein-ish novella The Talosite (set in the First World War), and her seemingly realist The Paradise Engine (which I said was about "people living their lives just off the edges of a Lovecraftian, theosophical canvas depicting the eternal struggle between good and evil," and I stand by that), but were there world enough and time, I don't know that I'd want to shut up about the stories in The Other Shore.

My biggest regret is that I didn't blast through these stories and crank out a review in time to help sales for Christmas 2025. On the other hand, I've really enjoyed spending such a long time living inside them, and I can see them becoming favourites for a great many readers (not all of whom need have connections to BC).

Buy it for yourself, and buy a copy for someone you care about, too, who spends more time than they should thinking about the state of the world and the world to come.