Baseball-style Review: Glen Hirshberg’s The Ones Who Are Waving: Tales of the Strange, Sad and Wondrous

Cover art by Jonas Yip

Glen Hirshberg’s The Ones Who Are Waving: Tales of the Strange, Sad and Wondrous

Cemetery Dance Publications, 2018

Out of Print (but some copies are findable on ebay and amazon)

The Short Version, or Postgame Analysis

Glen Hirshberg’s done it again, telling speculative stories through a literary lens, whether describing characters agonizing over their pasts, events they cannot quite come to terms with, or ruminating on the cost of the pursuit of one's dreams and ambitions. As promised, there’s horror, fantasy and wonder in these fine new tales.

My only qualm about this limited-run collection is the lack of background about each piece or previous publications credits. Often, learning about a writer’s background regarding their work is enriching. With Hirshberg, such explanation can be positively enlightening. It can mean the difference between finding a writer's story in Ellen Datlow's Best Year's Horror and then discovering their various novels and collections.

And now the review, sports fans...

Well, ol’ Artie is looking good as he steps up to the plate. Lean and mean. He’s got eight stories to bat out this time, sports fans. Let’s see what he’s got. Hirshberg’s limbering up, taking practice swings with his Louisville slugger. He gives a nod to his fans and peers in the bleachers, Peter Atkins, Dominik Parisien, Aimee Bender and Sean Moreland among them.

“Shaken”

Hirshberg really stepped up to the plate, all bases loaded, and showed the visiting team where he lives. Home run! The fans are on their feet, roaring. An elderly retired corporate man must wait out a disaster at an airport in Tokyo. It might be tremors, or war, or something else that has awoken. Literary speculative fiction that may or may not be spec fiction. It's a character study with ruminations on an unfolding disaster, supernatural or otherwise.

“A Small Part in the Pantomime”

A grand slam. Lookit’ Hirshberg run! Hirshberg sent teammates to home base, but not all of them. This story is reverent in regards to “Mr. Dark’s Carnival”, his lightning-in-a-bottle story of a mysterious carnival that protagonist professor tracks down in Halloween-crazed Clarkson, Montana. This story serves a love letter to Halloween and to Ray Bradbury. For Hirshberg, it meant moving from the farm team to the majors, and readers were better for it.
This sequel focuses on the meta of storytelling within storytelling. What has happened in Clarkston since the original story? Well, the professor protagonist has an academic circle of friends (literally) who are quite obsessed with relating his story to a newcomer who just earned the rarity of tenure. The characterization is deft, layered and complex. The ending, though (no spoilers, here...) did not quite tickle my brain and soul like the original “Mr. Dark’s Carnival”. Still quite good, though. Makes me wonder, though, if Hirshberg has unintentionally set up his own Green Town, Illinois, Bradbury's established town for many of his novels (including Dandelion Wine). "Pantomime” is rich and evocative in that sense, metafictional, and possessing a history and life of its own and whose characters' pasts have pasts.

“India Blue”

A pop fly into far left field. Hirshberg earns first, then second, base. This telling of a game of a bastardized version of critique, laden with reference to Hirshberg’s home turf (at least for a good number of years) of San Bernardino, is a wonderful ode to the environs, the strange game and its athletes. Shades of Ray Bradbury’s “The Great Black and White Game”. The ending was a knuckle-biter until an outside element, introduced late in the last act, seems unnecessary to the remainder of a beautiful rendering.

“Pride”

A solid hit that earns Hirshberg a third base run. Off he goes, in good form! He introduces sleuths of the supernatural, Nadine and the enigmatic Collector. Riveting descriptions of show, startling characterization. Much postgame analysis in the denouement, however, is muddled and undermines the magical tone of the piece.

“His Only Audience”

Hirshberg returns with his A-game that we saw during the regular season (his short-story collections). Crack! He hits another homer. The supernatural-mystery-solving team of the Collector and Nadine seems to really gel this time. Plentiful musical references abound. The ending presents a very Bradburyian view of inspiration, ambition, and their costs to the artist, but in a good way.

“Hexenhaus” 
Our pro ballplayer is waxing poetically here, and taking readers along for his visions. He's pausing, looking out at the left field, musing about the past. Glen writes about snow like a poet, whether in Detroit or Siberia. It swirls, dances, blends, obfuscates, clarifies, distorts. Hirshberg concocts a heady blend of magical realism and longing for the past. The protagonist returns to his anarchist roots, although Siberia is now populated by polar bears. There's a lovely ambiguity at play initially, where the reader is unsure whether the animals are real or visibly only by the narrator. There's magic here, too, and reminiscing of younger days, tempered by knowledge and experience. 

“The Ones Who Are Waving”

Still waiting in the dugout box on this one. Looks quite charming, though, and ready to swing the Louisville slugger.

A tribute to Peter Atkins’ and Hirshberg’s Rolling Darkness Revue. A travelling road-show of horror writers, they performed predominantly in the Los Angeles area, but also once in Canada (with myself) and featured guests including Aimee Bender. Since I also have a story-in-development about the very same Revue, and travelled with Artie and Algie to Nipissing University, North Bay, and also performed the play and my story “Glimpses through the trees” there and at the Ottawa International Writers Festival (they also held a talk at the University of Ottawa), I may recuse myself from reviewing this one.

What a spectacle! Thanks for watching, folks! Hirshberg has once again brought his skills to the playing field. He can do horror, he can do sci dystopia, he can do fantasy and, yes, fine folks at home, he can do literary works as well, all grounded in a human sensibility and often sympathetic characters.

Hirshberg remains a premiere voice in American speculative fiction, whether running the distance in novels such as the unbelievably good The Snowman’s Children, his Tor Books vampire trilogy Motherless Child, Good Girls and Nothing to Devour or sprinting down the track, as in his short fiction collections, The Two Sams, American Morons,The Janus Tree and Other Stories. Hirshberg brings the human condition to horror, for example the Jewish  traditions ever-present in the wonderful short story, “Shomer”.