Tim
Powers is certainly best known for his novel-length work—The Anubis Gates, Last Call,
The Stress of Her Regard, Declare, and the like. What fewer people are aware of are his
talents as a short story writer.
Admittedly not prolific, he nevertheless puts the same attention to
detail into his shorter works. Not
forcing epic storylines into twenty or so pages, everything is appropriately
scaled to suit his writing style. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
(2011) is a good example.
Opening
with the strongest two entries in the collection, the title story “The Bible
Repairman” is about a haunted man involved in spiritual work. Now a simple eradicator of troublesome bits
of the Bible for customers needing absolution, he once was, however, a
kidnapping negotiator for ghosts. His
soul sapped to its dregs as a result, the weight of his own daughter’s death,
and subsequent kidnapping of her ghost, hangs heavy, resulting in a dark,
personal story with more than a few hints of run-down suburban magic to broaden
the scene. “A Soul in a Bottle” is about
a rare book dealer who has a remarkable encounter on Hollywood Boulevard putting
three pennies in Jean Harlow’s hand prints.
With a touch of voodoo and poetry, Powers tells a semi-familiar tale in
rich style.
Occupying
the middle of the collection in suitably middling fashion are three
stories. The first is “The Hour of
Babel.” A fallen angel story perhaps unlike any other, this story of a team
trying to piece together an event years in the past is fully genre without
ostentation, but at times can be a bit too clever for its own good. The shortest story in the collection, “Parallel
Lines” is about a dead twin trying to get back into the world through the
writing hand of her sister. And in “A
Journey of Only Two Paces,” when a friend commits suicide, it’s Kohler’s job to
collect on the will. Getting in over his head with cats and kabbalistic magic,
everything turns out not as simple as he had hoped.
A
prime example of Powers’ fame for secret histories, closing out the collection
is “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” a story at novella length. A return to the Europe of The Stress of Her Regard, this time
around, however, Powers ignores Byron and Shelley and focuses on Trelawney,
recasting Trelawney’s own “reality heightened” autobiography to re-tell his
time as a privateer in the Greek foothills, and the bizarre murder attempt
which finds him living out a local legend.
In
the end, The Bible Repairman and Other
Stories is a solid collection that displays Powers’ talents, talents that
have certainly matured since the author’s early years. There are no timeless stories in the
collection, but each has its own singular level of detail, idiosyncrasy, and
subtle layers of plot. The title story
arguably the strongest, most readers, however, will probably enjoy “A Time to
Cast Away Stones.”
The
following are the six stories collected in The
Bible Repairman and Other Stories:
The
Bible Repairman
A
Soul in a Bottle
The
Hour of Babel
Parallel
Lines
A
Journey of Only Two Paces
A
Time to Cast Away Stones
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