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 BLURB

 Iris: An adventuress.

 Iris: An explorer.

 Iris: Abroad.

 

 From the Nile in the

 1930S to Texas in the

 1970S, from visions

 at the Little Big Horn

 (Casino, Bar & Grill)

 to a painful colonic

 in space, Iris and

 Panda are fresh BACK

 from their holidays,

 knackered, skint and

 burned the colour of

 a Bloody Mary.

 

 Thank God they can

 sit back, tip the sand

 out of their Crocs,

 sort through their

 photos and decide

 which versions

 of their holiday

 stories they like

 best...

 

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Iris: Abroad

NOVEMBER 2010

 

 

 

                                                       

 

  

Following on from novella-length experimentation in Miss Wildthyme and Friends Investigate, the purveyors of horror and high campery, Obverse Books, return Iris to her pre-ferred short story format in Iris: Abroad. The title gives it all away here: this time we’re all set to follow Iris and Panda on their excursions to foreign climes, straying from familiar territories such as Darlington’s Tesco. Apart from the presence of Miss Wildthyme herself, Panda and their magnificent, magical bus, taking trips to other nations is all that links these stories, and some only tenuously manage to fit that bill. This is fine by me though, for the great strength of the short story anthology is variety.

 

Having spent some little time taking in the sumptuous cover art of Paul Hanley (check out his DeviantArt account for more wonderful Who­related artwork), the reader is presented with no fewer than thirteen Wildthyme-flavoured stories. Inevitably, some are more successful than others. Chicken Fried Banana Republic by Jonathan Dennis is a reasonably amusing light-hearted space monsters tale, but it has little depth, while the solution to the central mystery George Mann’s Annabel Regina is rather predictable, though it is certainly well-written and enjoyable, with even quite a haunting quality to it. Later in the volume, Iris Wildthyme and the Colonic in Space is precisely as irreverent as its title suggests, and though Cavan Scott and Mark Wright have created a fun, diverting tale of the demon detox between them, it’s all over very quickly with little impact. Couch Potatoes might be seen as a little harsh in its attack on the overweight and infirm, but it’s all in good fun, and there’s a fine tale to be read here as Panda tries to save Iris from a dodgy teleport system while he’s stranded in Switzerland.

 

Events become somewhat grimmer with The Midnight Washerwomen by Scott Handcock, an effective horror story with a genuine touch of originality, which successfully balances the spooks and silliness that collide in an Iris-starring chiller. Chilling in more than one sense is Panda on Ice, which places our heroic pair in deep frozen Toronto. By tackling the absurdity of a sentient stuffed Panda head on, Richard Salter overcomes the issues this may cause to create a story with some rather uncomfortable moments, as young children begin to vanish with a horrific explanation. Ian Gregory takes an Aleister Crowley-styled occultist, a boatload of unlikeable tourists, a mysterious Egyptian curse and an intelligent Holiday Organiser and mixes them into the ripping yarn that is The Best Holiday Ever.

 

A few of the stories have more in common than their holiday-destination hopping, riffing on the nature of narrative and metatextuality in the fashion that has always been central to Iris’s adventures. Editor Stuart Douglas provides one of the standout stories with First Meetings, a short but highly effective account of Iris’s earliest encounters with the mysterious wanderer, El Jefe. A new spin on Iris’s own early days, Douglas plays with the idea of stories becoming more real than real life. Dare I suggest that we’re seeing a different side to the Doctor’s own origins here? Could he be El Jefe? Surely not…

 

The Little Bighorn Casino, by

the talented Kelly Hale, ponders

the nature of legend and how

they change history and shape

the future, while her erstwhile

writing partner, Simon Bucher-

Jones offers Riviera Shakedown,

which presents Iris as one of the

Six Sexy Sirens in a piece that

takes on archetypal characters

and ponders how they become

trapped in a story. Lawrence

Conquest’s story How to Play

Four-Dimensional Chinese

Checkers, and Win, is a damnedly odd tale of talking pandas and social revolution, that has

some terribly interesting things to say about history, the nature of fiction and the relationship

between truth and lies. It’s also available here as a free sample of what the Obverse has to offer.

 

Perhaps the best story though is Richard Wright’s The Story Eater, which takes us to the hellish slums of Delhi in an exploration of the true power of story. Exploring the concept that all places are in essence composed of the stories that occur within them, Wright takes on topics of social injustice and the invisible misery of the truly poor; heavy, serious subjects that he nonetheless uses to create an excellent story. Iris and Panda don’t escape analysis either; they are revealed for what they truly are, mere players in other people’s stories, who never explore the stories of their own.

 

Following this last story of the main body of the book, we get out thirteenth and final piece,

a bonus story by Paul Magrs himself. Hospitality returns to the very origins of Iris Wildthyme. Iris existed before Magrs wrote his first Doctor Who fiction, as an altogether more earthly, yet equally strange, mysterious and incorrigible being. It’s been a long time since I first read Marked for Life, and it’s high time I dug that novel out and gave Iris’s debut another go. For now, though, Hospitality is a window onto a world that isn’t a million miles from our own, in which people watch Doctor Who and Iris Wildthyme is a successful author. Eschewing the fantasy whimsy of the previous twelve stores, Hospitality is the personal story of a young man’s realisation that his life and his lover aren’t right for him. Sometimes we geeks can forget that the most interesting and affecting stories don’t have to have a sci-fi or fantasy element dominating proceedings. This is a fine, touching story, and an excellent end to a generally very successful volume.

 

Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2011

 

Daniel Tessier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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