Visitations
Jack Dann’s collection from Five Star Press, contains a variety of
stories spanning the twenty-nine years, from the 1972 publication of
“I’m with you in Rockland” to the
2001 story “Ting-a-Ling.”
Although not arranged in chronological order, the stories do
provide an insight into the growth of Dann’s career as an author as well
as the progress made by the genre as a whole over a thirty year span.
Despite the vast
range of the stories, there are common themes and tropes which run through
them, possible a result of Dann’s selection process as much as anything
else. Both the earliest story
and the latest one deal with cars and feelings of loneliness, even when
with other people. Not unique
to those stories, these object appear in several other stories as well,
notable “Night Visions,” which also explores the need to control
dangerous and capricious impulses.
Not all the stories
deal with these themes. In
“Reunion,” a man attends his own funeral and has the opportunity to
say his goodbyes to his various relatives and see how they respond to his
death and the decisions he made in his life.
Rather than being a story of loneliness, Stephen Neshoma discovers
that despite his thoughts of loneliness, his family still accepted him,
for all their disagreements.
Similarly,
“Vapors,” which takes as its setting the world of Dann’s novel The
Memory Cathedral, focuses on the power of friends when Leonardo da
Vinci leads a contingent to rescue an ailing Sandro Botticelli.
Like Neshoma in “Reunion,” Botticelli finds he has more
friends, and more loyal friends, than he had realized.
The slightest story
in the collection is probably the brief vignette, "A Cold Day in the Mesozoic," in which a young boy has the
opportunity to see a living dinosaur.
Most of the stories are much longer and stronger in both their
writing and in the themes they explore.
One aspect of Dann’s writing which sets him
apart from many SF authors is the fact that he pays careful attention to
his writing style, which makes his stories more “literary” than many
of the tales which grace the pages of the science fiction magazines and
anthologies. Readers who are willing to work with Dann's level of
writing will find themselves rewarded by stories which stay with them long
after they have closed the cover of Visitations.
