The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster, and Woe edited by Hunter Liguore – Review
Books, Review | Professor Crazy | December 30, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Post-apocalyptic visions of the future, natural and man-made disasters, the end of the world as we know it, plagues, alien invasions: there are so many ways to die, to snuff it, to bite the big one (insert your own favorite euphemism for death here), that it’s a wonder mankind has lasted as long as it already has. In The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster, and Woe, edited by the talented Hunter Liguore (who has also contributed a short story to the collection entitled “The Last Soucouyant”), and inspired by Mary W. Shelley’s futuristic novel, The Last Man, contains 41 short stories and poems about what it would be like to be the last man living on Earth. That’s enough to please the most hard-core fan of science fiction that deals with dystopian futures.
The short stories and poems in the mixed new and reprint anthology are written by some of the most famous authors of the past and present. For instance, from the past are authors like Edgar Allen Poe (“The Mask of the Red Death”), Jack London (“The Scarlet Plague”), Ray Bradbury (“There Will Come Soft Rains”), D.H. Lawrence (“The Last Hours”), Percy Shelley (“Ozymandias”), Emily Dickinson (“The Last of Summer”), and H.G. Wells (“The Star”). From the present are offerings by people such as Barry Malzberg (“Corridors”), Koos Kombuis (“The Last of the Coffee Shop Philosophers”), William Wood (“Teddy & the Last Girl of Brighton Street”), Big Jim Williams (“The Last Man On Earth”), and Alexandra Wolfe (“Finley’s Last Chapter”).
I’m going to assume that most people might be familiar with the literature of the authors included in this anthology from the past, so I won’t go into these stories much. Instead, I’ll mention a few of the more recent stories, and why I liked or didn’t like them. I have to mention some of my thoughts about the Ray Bradbury short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” though. I’m a fan of his writing, especially The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and The Illustrated Man. The story mostly revolves around an automated house, the last house that remains in its neighborhood, and maybe its city and the world. The house continues on, going about its daily chores and duties, preparing meals, cleaning up after them, etc., despite there no longer being any inhabitants of the house alive. Recorded voices announce the times when the people would normally be doing their daily activities, like waking up, eating meals, and getting ready to go off to school. It’s kind of a sad, melodramatic short story, and the first time I read it decades ago, I took it at face value, for what it is–basically, a pretty cool story about a house that refuses to admit that there’s no longer any reason for it to go on. That’s what it is, and I liked the story then, and I still like it now–but, I let logic enter my mind with this reading of it, and wondered to myself, “What is powering the house? Electricity?” If the answer is electricity, I wondered, “How, then, can the house continue to function?” The power lines must be down, the electric company destroyed, so the house shouldn’t be able to keep going on…. Still, it’s a great short story; even if it may not make sense logically speaking, that’s not really the point of it, so who cares?
All of the short stories and poems in the anthology aren’t necessarily about the last man living on Earth, as you can probably already tell by some of the titles of the stories I’ve already mentioned, like William Wood’s excellent tale, “Teddy & the Last Girl of Brighton Street”. I had not read any of his stories (nor those of many of the other newer authors) before this one, but I really liked this short story about a little girl and her beloved teddy bear left all alone in the girl’s partially destroyed house. The tale is told through her eyes. Aliens have attacked the Earth, her father is off fighting them and is likely dead, as is her mother, and aliens are patrolling the streets looking for any sign of life so they can snuff it out. It’s a sad story, like most of them in this collection, because of the overall theme of the anthology, but it’s also a well-constructed jewel of a tale.
Big Jim Williams’ short story is almost micro-short, being less than a page and a half in length, but it is an oddly touching one that I liked because it approached the theme from a different angle. The story is about a man named Mac, who at the beginning of it, “staggers out of the New York subway.” He seems to be stunned at what he sees:
Buildings are toppled, storefronts are smashed and burning, cars are overturned, fires and thick acrid smoke everywhere. The air tastes like burning trash.
Mac sees bodies everywhere, and it reminds him “of his combat days in Vietnam.” But, then we read soon after this that Mac is “a worthless drunk and drifter, a moocher and bum forever lost in a city of millions.” Though he believes he’s the last man on Earth, Mac has actually just stumbled onto the scene of a disaster movie. I liked the idea that as a reader, my initial concept of the story–that it would be another one about the last man on Earth–got turned on its head. Still, in his own mind, Mac actually does believe he’s the last man on Earth alive.
The stories are all pretty good ones, but I’ll just say a few words about one of the other short stories that I especially liked, “The Last Soucouyant,” by H.L. Liguore. I wasn’t even really sure exactly what a “soucouyant,” before I read the story, but I soon found out as I read it (they’re demon-witches that suck the blood of their victims like vampires). It’s one of my favorites in the collection, because it plays on misconceptions, somewhat like Big Jim Williams’ one does, but in a different way. The misconception that children have when they pass by an old, rickety house is that a mean old witch lives there, a soucouyant. The so-called “witch” is in reality just an older lady who has had an extremely rough life, living with an abusive husband, who broke some of her bones, set the house on fire after locking her in it, etc. She lives there with her only friend, her black cat, “Little Sir.” She does her daily chores, talks to herself, and talks to her mother, whom she has buried out in her yard. The lady fears the children as much as, if not more than, they fear her. She especially is afraid of one she thinks of as the “Tall One.”
The “Tall One” is a girl named Elma. She had a little brother, who died near the old lady’s house when he fell down into a ravine. Elma feels responsible for his death, because she didn’t come to his aid soon enough to pull him to safety, thinking his yells for help were just him playing some sort of prank on her. But she also feels that her brother died because the witch must have put a curse on him, so she buys herself various charms to ward off the witch’s evil spells, and she decides to get revenge on her for her brother’s death. I won’t get into what happens after this, but the story was a highlight for me in the collection.
The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster, and Woe has short stories of mankind’s final days in it by renowned authors of the past and up-and-coming fantastic authors of the future. The anthology surprised me in more ways than one, with the many different takes on the theme of the collection, and the stellar quality of the writing. It’s an anthology I would recommend to anyone who loves to read science fiction, especially tales that deal with mankind’s possible dystopian final days.
Tags: Big Jim Williams, Hunter Ligoure, Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction, Sword & Saga Press, The Last Man, William Wood
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