The stories and poems in Geoffrey W. Cole’s Zebra Meridian imagine the factors that might determine success in extending the lifespan of objects, relationships, people, ecosystems, planets, universes. Salvage and repair are central concerns. Don’t read Zebra Meridian because you want reliably feel-good stories: the book seems to offer odds of about 40 percent on positive outcomes for crisis-driven human(ish) reconstitutive enterprises. But do read it if you’re interested in stylish, genre-informed investigations of what it means to “save” or “fix” almost anything.
Throughout, Cole skillfully conjures a range of difficult, high-stakes wrangles for survival and flourishing, across a wide array of genres. In the collection’s inaugural near-future story “Billy Ray’s Small Appliance Rehabilitation,” for example, a prosperous Christian cult known as the Grahamites has cast out, but still employs, a man named David, who now lives and works with his lover Billy Ray. Together, David and Billy Ray strip modern tech from appliances large and small, thus “rehabilitating” clocks and cars, phones and typewriters. The Grahamites are happy to pay for this service, as they consider “the years between 1954 and 1965 to be the most holy in history” (p. 14) and live their faith partly by residing in homes that recreate an imagined lower-tech Eden. But David is starting to break down under the strain of his exile, incurred because he bears the visible, inherited marks of a genetic-medicine “plague” which the separatist Grahamites refuse to allow in their communities. The story tracks Billy Ray’s attempts to reconstitute David’s sanity and happiness amid a destructive collision of faulty biomedical tech and religious longing. It asks, quite seriously, if it’s possible to change outcomes for others by changing oneself.
Zebra Meridian’s next story, “The Five Rules of Supernova Surfing, or, A For Real Solution to the Fermi Paradox, Bro,” on the other hand, leans into comedy more than any other in the volume. It takes the phrase “running out of time” and stretches it hard. The conceit is that a chance surfing accident off the coast of Honolulu in the year 2046 has bonded a human surfer, Reef, and an alien surfer, Ka-10-8, who now travel the universe riding supernovae shockwaves together. But what if that’s just about over? What if they’re running out of universe because the “chronoperception” tech that allows them to ignore the time it takes to travel to the next supernova means they’ve lost track of their proximity to the End of All Things? If they must downsize and repurpose tiny scraps of a future to preserve their partnership, will that be the choice they make? Interestingly, despite the vast scales of time and distance on which its conceit depends, it also feels in some ways like the smallest.
Voice, genre, and setting continue to shift. In the generation-ship story “The Song of Mary,” the title character is an artificial intelligence charged with keeping as many of the vessel’s passengers alive as possible, after reactor failure results in a terrible dearth of life-sustaining energy. She must bear witness to scarcity-driven violence and genocide in an increasingly hostile frozen artificial world. “Two from the Field, Two from the Mill,” meanwhile, is a canine Rapture story. It cements its end-times allusiveness in its title, which refers to Matthew 24: 40-41. “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” The Biblical text is uninterested in human choice: It simply relays the future fact of what will unimaginably occur, what shall be. In Cole’s story, humanity staggers in the wake of cheerful dog-disappearance:
Dogs floated out the open door of the day care. Feet-first, tails wagging. They all looked so damn happy … Canine shapes filled the sky all across Vancouver, rising higher and higher, until they faded into the cold blue. (p. 81)
In the aftermath, the story’s narrator, Nadezhda, must do her best to wrestle a new equilibrium from the religiously charged surreality of a post-dog society. [1] Her life is already stressful: She is unusually big, strong, and fast; struggles with annoying neighbors; plays professional women’s hockey; her brain constantly narrates her father’s past deprecatory comments at her. The blundering, “dogged” (sorry), unpredictable path she takes toward her own healing and others’ is a constantly unwinding surprise which leaves you at the end of the story not quite sure if you’re glad or sad, to say nothing of what kind of laughter you might be laughing. That may, however, be irrelevant. In difficult circumstances, Nadezhda has found—perhaps she has made—something that works.
Another way of saying these stories are interested in salvage and repair, then, is to say they are interested in event-sequences driven by increasingly limited choices and resources. Repairing and remaking things doesn’t work quite the same way in horror as it does in other genres, however—and Cole’s range as a writer extends comfortably to sea-horror in particular. Zebra Meridian contains two watery tales; both will lift the hair on the back of your neck. In “Desolation Sounds,” a woman trying to bury past grief by assuming a new “party girl” persona goes to an isolated bay on a sailing trip, to celebrate her engagement with her new fiancé and his son. Nothing goes as planned, and soon she will need to draw on her endurance of past horrors to break through into an entirely new, unimaginable set of them. (Just repeating here: do not read this book for feel-good fiction.) In “Carbon Capture,” the work of saving or salvaging is initially placed in the reluctant hands of a young Arctic reef-worker named Jeje. His job is to look after the health of bioengineered live coral, a carbon-fixing technology farmed on acres of ocean according to a leasehold system. It’s been a tough, cold slog for him and—unbeknownst to Jeje’s boss Elvis, who holds the lease and the license for the coral—Jeje plans to get out. So it’s particularly inconvenient when a woman who should be dead shows up on a nearby ice floe and needs rescuing. On top of that, something’s not quite right about her, and soon Jeje and Elvis are fighting for their lives on a hijacked boat surrounded by freezing waters. You’ll find slant echoes of zombie and vampire lore in “Carbon Capture,” along with the isolating power of a suddenly hostile ocean. The most interesting thing to me about the story, though, was its thoughtful examination of the limitations and frustrations of a speculative carbon-drawdown mode of capitalism, and the imagined annihilative rage Cole’s story conjures against it.
My second-favorite tale in Zebra Meridian after the well-selected title story (on which more shortly) is the ghastly, absurd, hopeful “The Way of the Shrike.” It’s a feminist Grand Guignol coming-of-age story involving first romantic relationships, puppetry, nonlethal ritual impalement, and smoked pigeons. Cole has constructed a bizarre, detailed, often funny world in which the young protagonist, Marjormam, must decide between a literally torturous, but stable, career that might preserve her current relationships, or an off-piste, fly-solo gamble on life as a popular entertainer. It’s interesting to compare Cole’s account of Marjormam’s entanglements and dilemmas with other recent feminist horror-inflected fiction about young women’s hard choices: Many focus on the monstrous ideas—about what they are individually worth and how they should act—to which women are expected to conform. Cole’s story focuses on Marjormam’s passionate-but-fading relationship with her girlfriend, Pranny, and the way it troubles her sense of her own future. This plot element gathers pathos and force when read in tandem with longer-form work by Sarah Langan, whose novella You Have the Prettiest Mask (2020) identifies the imaginary of the beloved as a powerful resource for young people who need escape from the restriction and sadness of their own lives. “[W]hen I had time off,” says Langan’s often lonely, completely overextended protagonist Cathy, “I went to the cold bathroom and sat on the heater, pretending I was with Pamela Xenteras and it was snowing” (Langan, p. 38). The world feels different, friendlier—even climate-wise—with good friends and lovers than without them. So it is painful to leave them, or have them leave.
I need to turn the rudder a bit here and clarify: “The Way of the Shrike” is not at all what you’d call sentimental. Although the relationship between Marjormam and Pranny was at one time a site of erotically charged co-organization, planning, and self-actualization (what Langan calls in her story a “coven”), Cole signals it is already past its prime when the story begins. Here’s Pranny’s entrance to Marjormam’s dread coming-of-age party:
“Hey kiddo,” Pranny said, wrapping Marjormam in a chaste embrace. “Happy Childhood’s End.”
Perfume drenched Pranny’s bare neck, hiding something sour beneath the musk. (p. 117)
“Chaste,” “sour”—the signs are clear though Pranny has her reasons. Her withdrawal and emotional obfuscation mean “The Way of the Shrike” ends on a note of gleeful self-preservation, which is satisfying, and useful for the balance of the collection.
All this diversity of genre has its challenges, however. The WWI-with-necromancy story “River of Sons” seemed to me like a weaker entry, unconvincing in its rendering of an alternative early-twentieth-century Brussels suffering under German invasion: Descriptions lack nuance, the narrative treatment of refugees is perfunctory—a fact notable in this global moment. [2] My criteria for assessing historical fiction are admittedly idiosyncratic: One thing I tend to look for is how well writers indicate the complexity of architectural environments in major cities; so when a plot-significant “Caramelite Church” in Brussels was mentioned, my ears pricked up. The most we learn about the church, though, is that it has a “cavernous nave” (p. 151)—even though the protagonist has to go all the way in, and down, and unhex some things. Hmm. When I finished reading the story, I mostly felt I’d been walked through an interesting exercise that the author devised for himself and then lost steam for. Which is okay—it happens! But “River of Sons” did raise questions for me about why Zebra Meridian had tasked itself with covering so much ground in terms of genre.
Those lingering questions probably somewhat blunted my ability to engage with the next story, “‘Ti Pouce in Fergetitland,” a cheerful, food-focused, infernal phantasmagoria narrated in postapocalyptic English-French-Italian creole (think Riddley Walker, but a lot happier.) “‘Ti Pouce” approximately translates to “Tom Thumb,” so you know right away you’re in for folk-hero shenanigans—and that is indeed what you get. It’s a rollicking, grotesque tale with a lot of sentence-level interest, and stands in unstable ground between comedy and horror. [3] All of the above is encapsulated by Cole’s description of the horrible/funny predatory “coyoodles” that threaten the group-intelligence of ‘Ti Pouces’s physically linked septuplet siblings at one point:
Three more coyoodles slinked out of the spindlies, eyes aglow, teeth slickened with bile, head furpuffs quivering, tail furpuffs wagging. (p. 168)
They’re going to kill you, but they’re also enthusiastic and ridiculous. There’s a lot of that in “‘Ti Pouce,” a story I suspect many readers will enjoy more than I did, mostly because I read it in the role of “slightly worried critic who is furrowing their brow at issues of collection-sequencing.”
The next two entries in the collection are terrific. “On the Many Uses of Cedar” is an expertly paced time-loop narrative about a strained logging-camp marriage and ecocide, which ends in a way I don’t think any reader will predict. Its regenerative imagery operates in an almost Symbolist manner. And the title story of the collection, “Zebra Meridian,” more than earns its pride of place. It’s a terrific bittersweet further-future tale about immigration, love, competent feminist climate hope, and an asshole silver-spoon patriarch. Cole’s ability to braid action, pathos, absurdity, and comedy is on full display here, as is his talent for combining structural analysis of capitalist injustice with delightful lashings of respect for the anarchic passions and hyperfixations which can help us fight that injustice. You really should read this one. It’s a corker.
I’m not sure why the collection didn’t conclude with it, to be honest. I’ll attempt to explain what frustrated me about the ordering, and you can decide if you might feel similarly or if I’m missing the point. Without too many spoilers: by the end of “Zebra Meridian” one feels a very (very) hard-won, limited new way forward might be possible for the world described there. But the concluding note of “Cradle and Ume”—the final story in the collection—is that of an unlikely set of “parents” watching “children” set out to make the same mistakes they made. To me it seemed like an oddly backward-looking tale to end on. I do not, however, regret any of the time I’ve spent reading Geoffrey W. Cole’s short fiction, and will continue to mull with interest their particular intersections of hope and resignation, leisure and labor, comedy and terror, loss and salvage.
Endnotes
[1] “A new equilibrium” is an important phrase in Cole’s fiction: it’s what Mary, in “The Song of Mary,” wishes and fears for her suffering charges. (p. 62) [return]
[2] I think it’s set in WWI. But would not be astonished to learn that WWII is intended. [return]
[3] I don't mean “unstable” as a pejorative here. It’s just a story that requires constant recalibration from the reader: a fair ask, and an interesting one. [return]