Expository Fantasy

THERE'S A CERTAIN sense of security that comes when the guy who taught you Fiction Expos publishes his first collection of short stories and they turn out to be offbeat, readable, even provocative. All those thesis statements adequately supported, specific active verbs and logical transitions produce a warming glow, a feeling that, after all, God or John Harvard or at least Richard Marius must be in his heaven.

Seriously, though these nine short stories by John Domini (who does teach Expos 18) are a lot more fun to read than any Expos paper. Domini's authorial voice is far from polished, his imagery and recurrent motifs reveal some weird phobias and preoccupations, but by and large the events that unfold in real and unreal locales (two stories are set after death and one involves astral projection) compel and haunt.

Domini's main strengths lie in violent, unconventional metaphor and involved plotting--so involved, in fact, that bristling complexities, few of which are ever resolved, end by frustrating or intimidating the reader. A favorite theme seems to be the middle-aged protagonist grappling with the leftover complications of long-ago some adventure that ripped the fabric of a conventional life: a successful businessman, whom the CIA drugged with LSD 20 years ago as a random experiment, throws himself into the public eye by suing the government for his life's subsequent turmoil; a Vietnam veteran, past 30, goes to Florida to watch the filming of a T.V. documentary about his sensational escape from prison camp a decade before. Or the pattern is inverted in "Some Straight Numb Commitment." A pair of teenagers married straight out of high school become hired "parents" to a flabby mental case in his 20s, and his insanity tinges their inexperience with crazy shades of age and sexual maturity. Age roles are almost always convoluted and distorted. T.V. is a constant scoundrel.

Another stubbornly ubiquitous villain, or maybe scapegoat--for whatever it reveals about Domini's private paranoias--is the executive woman. Sometimes her domain is T.V. production, but she masquerades too as a plant-store employee named Priss, striding into a narrator's office "all body," and telling him. "People like you marry people like me;" as the intense 17-year-old wife of the teenage narrator; even in one post-mortem fantasy, as a formless floating femine "blob" of a soul whose outer layer develops iron patches when her philosophizing outstrips the narrator's comprehension.

It is she who focuses his fiercest and most striking images--images that draw power not so much from their unexpectedness as from the fear and loathing they convey. The LSD-scarred businessman in "Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side" stands helpless in the authoritative presence of a "jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip's shouting..a hornet prowling the air." As she enters she checks a mirror, "parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth."

DISTURBING AS THIS TYPE of repulsion may be, it evidences a frantic, self-conscious energy that produces most of Bedlam's best and worst aspects. Tension shows up in the jerky diction of the first stories, "Over 4000 Square Miles" and "The Return," which bristle with the odd, awkwardly-placed "nevertheless" and "moreover" and sentences like. "At last Rucker understood that all the sensations of his long experience had this night joined together in a motiveless musical triumph that was almost violent." In such over-intense passages, one conjures up Domini teetering on chair-edge, biting his nails at the typewriter.

The stories are far more accessible when reflective whimsy eases the tension, as in the two afterlife fantasies. One of these entitled "Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be" and concerning Dante and devils in Hell, shows the considerable influence of C.S. Lewis, which combines with passion and lively musing to create by far the richest piece in Bedlam. Some dialogue is still overwrought and unconvincing to when the two devils "argue."

"But," thundered Miplip at me, "does memory have its limits?"

"I--"

"Does it?"

"Memory..."

Imbecile. Respond!"

"Yes it does. Yes, I can't remember when we first met."

But such strained spots fade from importance next to the sensitive insight Domini nurtures in this impossible landscape. The devil narrator's most telling lines hide in throwaways, with the pretended unconsciousness increasing their force. "The one concrete proof of our changed relationship," he offers timidly, "...if indeed it is concrete proof, if indeed it was a changed relationship--is that Miplip and I became lovers." And when the "relationship" turns painful, "every single time I wondered if I could possibly survive (though how I got the idea that there is anything besides survival, I cannot imagine)."

These wistful doubtings are Domini at his best.

AS A FIRST COLLECTION should, Bedlam demonstrates a range of approaches and strengths. "An Encounter," a short tour de force composed entirely of questions (no dialogue), hangs together nicely, and "UI'Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo" actually goes a long way toward convincing the reader of the narrator's romantic attachment to "a kind of jellied ball floating off the ground."

On the other hand. "Astral Projection," the most radical departure from traditional narrative in the volume, fails to forge its avant-garde devices--all-caps subheadings, fragmentation, floating unexplained lines of dialogue interspersed with blocks of "technical" data--into a memorable whole. It would be a shame if Domini's work (the cover says he is finishing a novel) blundered into experimental affectation, when he could follow instead the promising signposts of whimsical intuition or philosophical fantasy that Bedlam suggests. If he takes the right path, he may not be teaching Expos forever.