Short Story Showcase #13: The Red Flower

This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective.  This week, granite cheese souffle!

Surrealism is difficult to pull off well, as I’ve no doubt just demonstrated there.  Frankly, even when I run across some well-regarded surrealism, I usually find it to be a combination of overrated and nauseating.*  So I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself recommending The Red Flower, a surrealist western fantasy story by Lavie Tidhar that appears in Persistent Visions.

Tidhar weaves a sense of underlying order and a strong POV character into a complicated, surreal world so smoothly that I found myself nodding along and thinking something to the effect of, “Oh, right, of course the kaleidoscopic vision tunnels meant there was a bit of shattered labyrinth wrapped up in the land around there.  I should have caught that sooner.”  If that’s not good storytelling, I don’t know what is.

I suspect it helps that this is a surrealist western.  Sure, the sun might change color periodically, but we know the lonesome hunt is the heart of the narrative and we can hang onto that no matter what drips out of the empty sky.

So check it out!  It’s an interesting place to visit.

*I’m not saying I hate it.  It actually makes me a little sick to my stomach.  Same thing with Still Life paintings, for some reason.