At a time when some of the most groundbreaking of television shows were being created, it was one of the most iconic of introductions: "There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear." The introduction to The Outer Limits (1963-1965) would be a fitting introduction to Daniel Braum’s second collection of short stories, The Wish Mechanics (2017; 309 pp.) Written over a period of fifteen years, the twelve stories in the anthology encourage, nay, force the reader to surrender to the author’s vivid and unique imagination and blend of storytelling.
Admitting his stories are “strange,” Braum writes in his Introduction to The Wish Mechanics the stories are best thought of as simply “fiction” …“dark and dangerous” “tales that defy classification” and which are “stories that mix and operate in between and beyond the galleries of genre.” Any one story in the collection might contain elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror and when readers least expect it, dark humor leaps from the pages to add to one’s reading pleasure. Even the shortest and least genre-defying tale in the collection, “Red Lights,” is likely to produce a surprising (and in this case sardonic) response by the reader.
Braum takes the effort to make his most fantastical plot lines believable and the settings of the stories play an important part of nearly every tale. Some of the environments in which Braum plunges his characters are quite foreign such as in “Resolution Seventeen” which introduces the concept of some most unusual “space travelers,” or the title story for the collection, “The Wish Mechanics” which also has a faint thematic resemblance to Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” Other locales depicted, like the stories themselves, mix the instantly familiar with the mind-boggling. “How to Make Love and Not Turn to Stone” takes a perfectly idyllic setting and inserts into it mythological creatures of absolute horror. The narrative contains a scene evocative of one of Hollywood’s most unforgettable and romantic tableaus and turns it on its head and also contains an incredibly funny, sexual double-entendre.
Whether intended for the reader or a source of inspiration to the author (or both), Braum also plays with real life events and settings in many of his stories. In “The Water Dragon” echoes of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba (as well as a possible twisted trace of the movie Gremlins) can be found in the background. The testing of the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, the Hadron Collider, haunts (pun intended) “An American Ghost in Zurich.” Readers will not be able to help but think of the devastation of the rain forests of the world as they read the otherwise bizarre tale, “The Canopy Crawlers.”
Still other stories in The Wish Mechanics such as “Tea in the Sahara” and “Tetsuya and the Ranagareet” could, with a little imagination, be seen as having being torn from One Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights.
In spite of the uncanny nature of the stories in The Wish Mechanics, there are moments when the author’s deep feel for humanity leaves a longer lasting impression upon the reader than the story itself. “The Truth About Planet X” is one such story as is the last selection in the collection, “This Is the Sound of Your Dreams Dying,” which toward the end contains the idea that people are often aware of how the end of a relationship feels (“sounds”), but not so aware of the sound of one beginning. It is a reflection worth pondering.
Given the ambiguity of some of the stories in The Wish Mechanics and their non-specific genre nature, the anthology might not register with every reader. The stories in The Wish Mechanics are a Lemarchand's puzzle box for the reader to try to solve or to just sit back and enjoy, in awe of Braum’s fantastic imagination and well written, fast moving, captivating creations. Thus, readers who appreciate a creative and unique approach to storytelling are the proper audience for this collection and are likely to be quite appreciative of Daniel Braum’s efforts.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 12, 2017
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Top reviews from other countries
J. Everington
...a varied, eclectic, accomplished set of short stories...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 15, 2018
Amar Benchikha
A very unique and imaginative short story collection
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on January 27, 2018
