Jul. 24
3:13 PM
Review: Alex Jeffers’ You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home
Polymath Alex Jeffers has done some very attractive book designs over the years (such as Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire), so it's not surprising that You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home, his debut collection from Lethe Press, sports a lovely layout and cover. As with Llewellyn's aforementioned book, the contents here are more than worthy of the tidy edition that houses them, and fans of rich, decadent prose will find much to appreciate here. Jeffers' tales run the gamut from the familiar to the alien, from real world settings to far-flung fantasy lands, but even with the most reality-bound entries the word mundane never applies--in these fictions, the Aegean Sea holds just as much magic as the unnamed worlds Jeffers conjures up.
As with the best collections, the stories in this volume feed off of and bleed into one another, offering a wide range of experiences rather than hitting the same notes over and over again. The book's two hottest stories (look, I fumbled around with words like erotic and sensual, but while they are certainly erotic, sensual, lush, etc., hot really is the operative word here) bookend the rest, with the opener "Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Blood for Sorrow, Salt for Joy" giving a friendly pinch of magical realism to the story of a young man crushing on a Turkish deckhand, while the concluding story, "Tattooed Love Boys," amps up both the fantastical content and the sexuality--the two stories mirror one another nicely without at all feeling repetitious, despite similar motifs. Throughout the work, stories pair with one another in a charming fashion that only occasionally is the result of a direct relation, such as the Arabian Night-styled "Firooz and his Brother" and the even more adventurous follow-up, "Haider and His Dog," but for the most part arises from a thematic or stylistic connection.
As is the case with virtually any collection or anthology, there were a few stories here that didn't 100% work for me, but even these pieces displayed Jeffers' talent and intelligence--I thought one or two stories were the teensiest bit heavier-handed than they needed to be, and "Liam and the Wild Fairy" never stood a chance, as I have a severe allergy to most anything involving the fair folk. Most of the stories were a direct bullseye for me, however, and Jeffers is adept at hitting that sweet spot of covering distant lands, times, and peoples without ever coming across as exoticizing his subjects. Bittersweet rather than cloying, intriguingly open-ended rather than overly-explained, the stories in You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home offer a refreshing draught even as they make the reader thirst for more.