Casey Agonistes

What a truly pleasant surprise! What a great writer! The payoff I got from this short story collection is exactly the reason I spend hours perusing old dusty used book stores, be they in actual physical buildings or in cyberspace. This book gave me about eight hours of reading pleasure.

Calling it a short story collection is a little bit misrepresentative. There are five stories, three of which clock in around twenty pages. These were very good, well-written, imaginative stories that hook you from the first paragraph and pull you in for a half-hour ride. The longer stories, the novellas, I liked better. There’s a sixty-pager that’s maybe the best science fiction I’ve read this decade. Then there’s the longest one, eighty-seven pages, which develops such a fascinating world out of such a nasty premise that I burned my fingers turning the pages.



“Casey Agonistes” – The eponymous story, an intriguing tale of sick warders during what seems to be World War II. Attempts to answer the question of whether mass hallucinations can attain physical reality, and, if so, for what reason? Likeable characters skirting the edge of cliché because you get the feel McKenna is using men he actually knew. Strange ending, unsure of its meaning. B+.

“Hunter, Come Home” – Best of the bunch. McKenna creates an incredibly rich, wonderful world and fills it with two cultures best described as Spocks and Klingons (story was written four years before ST:TOS ever aired). Conflict, on both a personal, racial, and biological level. Multiple antagonists. A very bad man-made bio-weapon called Thanasis. A love story, too, of sorts. The hero a schmuck outsider – can he possibly redeem himself? A+.

“The Secret Place” – I’m sensing a trend here. McKenna has (had) the uncanny ability to create detailed, fantastical worlds. In this story, a childlike woman’s magical world somehow corresponds with the real terrain of the Oregonian outback in the military’s hunt for uranium. One hapless Joe is tasked to find the mine by unraveling the riddle of the woman before angry townsfolk turn angry stares into angry fisticuffs. B.

“Mine Own Ways” – This was good, too. What would happen if, say, a thousand years in the future, human anthropologists studying developing humanoids on another planet are discovered? But wait, as in any good tale, there are twists. Not everyone is who he seems, and the victims are put to a tribal test which challenges each one to his very core. Hard to put this story down. A.

“Fiddler’s Green” - The longest story, one I have mixed feelings. It could have been the best of the bunch, but it ended kinda abruptly and still I’m not sure what it all meant. But I’m recommending it anyway. A group of World War II sailors are adrift in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from anywhere and no one knows their ship’s gone down. Thirst and starvation are driving them mad, and they draw straws for ... you know what. Then, one has an idea, and is able to conjure up a dream world that, in their dire straits, they are able to anchor in reality. This mystical world grows and grows, some sailors go mad, some adopt, new characters are brought in, and the man who created it becomes a mad deity of sorts. B+.

In the paperback copy I have there’s a neat little piece by Damon Knight on McKenna’s life. Apparently he did serve as a sailor in World War II, hence the characters in many of the stories here. After the Navy he set out to get a college education, but wound up becoming an autodidact. He is also the author of The Sand Pebbles, which you may know as that four-hour Steve McQueen movie from the sixties. In the 597-page novel about sailors he famously uses no vulgarities save a g.d. here and there. Unfortunately, he only put pen to paper for about ten or twelve years before a premature heart attack killed him. Based on these five stories alone, I think I may put Sand Pebbles on the Acquisitions List. As a writer, he does have the rare gift of an easy voice and a talent for luring the reader, helpless, deeper and deeper into his tales.