Stephen Beachy’s fictional universe is not a happy place.  In his previous two novels, The Whistling Song and Distortion, Beachy gave us sprawling road epics that examined damaged characters living on the edge. The books are packed with literary and pop culture references as well as gorgeous and sometimes hallucinogenic prose, which together paint a cold, often frightening view of American values, myths, and lies. In his latest book, Beachy seems to be using a smaller canvas, offering the reader two thematically related novellas, each focusing on a single character who drifts across the dying landscape of America in search of something they’ve lost or never had. Yet these novellas have as much depth and hidden pleasures as either of Beachy’s novels and, in some ways, offer a more manageable entrance for the uninitiated into his bleak, magical fiction.

Some Phantom opens as the unnamed narrator, a woman fleeing from a seemingly abusive relationship, dozes on a bus and “wakes now into a world of salt flats and sunset.” She lands in an “immaculate, heavy, abstract” city that seems to be Salt Lake City re-imagined by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World and David Boring) and refracted through the eerie cult horror film Carnival of Souls. The woman gets a job as a teacher’s aide, working with SED (Severely Emotionally Disturbed) children, but spends most of her time alone, sometimes riding buses out to the salt flats and watching a storm build and dissipate in the distance. Eventually, she connects with two young boys, one of whom is her student. Her resulting fantasies about the boys and about a male co-worker, who might be a pederast, sends her closely guarded, secretive world spiraling out of control.

In No Time Flat, Beachy takes a less straightforward approach, juxtaposing police reports of a brutal murder with the foggy wanderings of Wade, a tall, handsome drifter. The approach is mythic. Wade, as a very young boy on a farm in the Midwest, experiences an unconsummated sexual awakening during the brief visit of a mysterious stranger. Later, he runs away and spends his life wandering from one man to the next, inspiring lust and love in others, but barely feeling it himself. The strange police reports—which include references to missing pages, disputed facts, and sometimes outrageous explanations by “experts” on criminal psychology—don’t refer directly to Wade, but serve as a counterpoint to his story, a clinical and somewhat misguided attempt to explain ultimately unknowable motives.

The novellas work together by sharing themes of alienation and loneliness as well as overlapping imagery of comic books, horror movies, and soulless American landscapes, but any description of their plots and characters don’t do justice to the haunting and challenging world Beachy has created.   At the end of No Time Flat, Wade describes a comic book he shoplifted as “disappointing” because “each panel…proceeded quite logically into the next. The plot was clear; there was nothing missing, and the characters got what they deserved.” Beachy’s work is the antithesis of that comic book and yet the results couldn’t be more satisfying.

Originally published in Lambda Book Report, Winter, 2007