Songs for The Lost

Foreword

FOREWORDby Brian A. Dixon

Ray Bradbury once offered advice to all those daring enough to take up a pen or challenge the typewriter: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” The threat, Bradbury knew, is real. His writings are a gift to all those fortunate enough to have ever become drunk off his prose. Alexander Zelenyj is just such a man. He has been drunk on Bradbury ever since he first picked up a copy of The Martian Chronicles. He discovered the battered paperback in the back of a classroom and, enchanted by the cover artwork, immersed himself in the novel, ignoring the day’s lessons at school. Songs For The Lost is a testament to the fact that Mr. Bradbury proved himself to be a far more inspiring teacher. Zelenyj would go on to write intoxicating prose of the sort that proves none are more impervious to the brutal offensive waged by so-called reality.

When Alex refers to the author as Sir Ray Bradbury, he isn’t being flip. His debt and devotion are transcribed in every line of his poetic stories, as evident as his debts to H. P. Lovecraft, China Mieville, Richard Matheson, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bradbury’s is a world that exists between genres, a place of signs and wonders in which the inhuman is introduced only as means of demonstrating who we really are. In even his most startling or unsettling tales there is something that charms us. Ask him about these stories and Alex will speak of the “romance” of Bradbury, that bewitching sense of comfort and beauty that accompanies those tales that deliver us beyond the boundaries of recognized reality. It is an uncommon quality in fiction. Once its influence is observed in this collection’s tales of dark roads and higher powers, it signals what you will find in the literature from this remarkable author from Ontario, Canada.

The first short story I read by Alexander Zelenyj—my Martian Chronicles, so to speak—was “The Demon Takeover of Windsor, Ontario.” As the editor of Revelation magazine, dedicated exclusively to publishing apocalyptic fiction, I was sifting through a slush pile of narrative doom and brimstone more brutal than anything described in the magazine’s biblical namesake. Here was a story that piqued my interest with the title. Eyebrow raised, I began to read: “The voice in the plastic receiver at my ear had died along with the lights in the small convenience store.” That’s how it began. A tale as fleeting and mesmerizing as a kiss in the dark, this was a story of fear, of perseverance, of the collapse of our culture and the enduring dominance of nature. It was a tale that captured the human spirit and served it up raw, without any hint of condescension or glamour. I found myself immersed in a weird and wondrous universe that I was utterly unprepared for. I’ve been drinking up his words ever since.

As an editor and as a reader, Alex is continually surprising me. Like the best of bizarro geniuses, he stands as a talent who defies definition. Just when I think that I know what to expect from him, he’ll unleash a work both experimental and astounding. Throughout the years he has proven himself to be a captivating storyteller, an accomplished scholar, and a dedicated professional. Alex is as comfortable composing song lyrics for the meta-fictional Deathray Bradburys as he is examining the mythological influences evident in modern cinema. In eagerly taking on alternate history and slipstream anthology projects alike he has risen to artistic challenges that would have left lesser writers retreating to more comfortable corners of their creativity. Through it all, his imagination and his boundless enthusiasm remain undiminished. There is an infectious quality about the words that he weaves. Believe me when I tell you that it is the essence of the man himself, the product of a personality both captivating and inspirational.

Those within earshot at the end of my day know that after more than ten years of editing Revelation magazine I have grown weary of the apocalypse. The undead are insatiable, that dusty road through a postapocalyptic wilderness is never-ending, and the judgment of mankind is as inevitable as it is epic. The end of the world takes its toll. Truly great storytelling in this vein calls for an inspired approach, as in any genre, and no author is better suited to confidently guiding us beyond our limits than Zelenyj. There is something of the apocalypse in each and every one of his stories. Indeed, though we have published strange tales by talents from all over the world, he has graced the pages of Revelation more often than any other author. He has left his mark on the magazine and on each and every one of its readers.

Stories written by Zelenyj are inherently apocalyptic, imbued with a palpable sense of spiraling chaos and mounting unease, but after sampling the short stories presented in this collection you will learn that for him the end faced by mankind is only the beginning. Here is an author who eagerly deconstructs familiar literary genres before reassembling the jigsaw pieces into something astonishing and new. The title story offers a standout example. “Songs For The Lost” is a novella like no other. It is neither space opera nor fairy tale, though there are moments when it seems to be both. Though it bears the hallmarks of the American Western it is not beholden to the heritage of any one time and place. It is a breathtakingly beautiful story of solace and redemption. The longings and laments of its cast of misfit characters are familiar to us at once, even if those characters are alien to us all.

Songs For The Lost cannot be categorized, raising a worthy question. Why do we reach for books such as this? We read so that we may experience the world through eyes that are new, and the experience is never more satisfying than when we are in the hands of a storyteller as inventive as Alexander Zelenyj. From “The Demon Takeover of Windsor, Ontario” to “Songs For The Lost”, his stories have quickened my pulse and set fire to my imagination. They delight even as they dizzy. Perhaps the experience is stimulating because this is not mere psychedelic fantasy. Dipping into the bizarro universe woven by his inebriating narratives is like peering beneath the cracked and peeling veneer of reality. Zelenyj is a mad yet marvelous seeker, an eccentric impresario, a conductor of dreams as charming and hypnotic as Rod Serling himself. Follow him and you will find yourself among lost souls touring abandoned hopes and forbidden dreams at the edge of an impossible paradise. Each story concludes with a wink signaling that he knows what you have always felt, deep down—that there is more to this life than meets the eye.

And therein lies the power of Alexander Zelenyj. We fill up our lives with the familiar, with mundane routines and ridiculous consumer products, laments and trifles and limitations. Through it all there is an ache deep inside of us. It is the ache of an unspoken truth, the key to surviving the destruction wrought by reality. Stories such as these share that truth, the promise that keeps us going. Life in this universe is more strange and dangerous and wonderful than you have ever been led to believe.

Two heroes gone,

but never gone

The ancient stars they burn strong.