Dreamy Mystery & Fantasy: On William Vandenberg’s ‘Lake of Earth’
Book Review by Margaryta Golovchenko
Margaryta Golovchenko talks about breaking the boundaries of genre in William Vandenberg’s story collection.
William Vandenberg
Fiction | Short Stories | 90 pages | 5.5” x 8.5” | Reviewed: eBook
978–0–9888915–3–1 | First Edition | $9.00
Caketrain Press | Pittsburgh | BUY HERE
I don’t believe in fate; it is an absurd concept meant to rationalize events we fail to predict. (“Lake of Earth,” p. 51)
William Vandenberg puts reality into question in his collection Lake of Earth. Despite the above assertion by one of his characters, Vandenberg challenges the reader’s definition of accident and outcome, dream and nightmare. The stories in this collection have an almost prophetic quality to them. They speak beyond this world rather than for or about it, reaching for a time and place that could be reality as easily as it could be a dream. Reading Lake of Earth gave me the paradoxical sensation comparable to dreaming. Each story creates an impression of hyperawareness that follows the reader as she moves through narratives that feel weightless and detached from everything that might feel familiar. Vandenberg serves as a guide through a literary landscape that is welcoming and hostile in equal measure, but which never falls short of thrilling and mesmerizing.
Although the stories have an airy feeling to them, dropping the reader into the scene and hitting the ground running, Vandenberg leaves enough clues to make navigating the Lake of Earth’s magical-realism-filled world possible. The collection has a wholeness to it that might be easy to overlook initially. It reads like a fragmented whole, as each story forms a kaleidoscopic fragment that can either be admired individually or grouped with the others and admired collectively. The opening story, “Treatment,” captures this sensation perfectly, making it easy for the reader to relate to the speaker who realizes that
[s]omething has changed [. …] When the sound leaves me, I am unsure of where it comes from, where it goes. Then I hear, Good, you are making progress. (p. 18).
One of the things I admired most about Vandenberg’s style was his ability to “repurpose” imagery, to weave it together in such a way that it feels startlingly new. “Five Cities,” my favorite story in the collection, is a perfect balance of “informed vagueness,” where imagery is both the building blocks and the glue holding the piece together. Following the life of an unnamed couple, Vandenberg does not bother to weigh down the narrative with excessive precision, opting for a more open-ended situation. However, the details he does provide create a charged atmosphere that makes the vagueness a vital component rather than a stylistic decision, resulting in moments where it felt like the speaker was talking to both the reader and the speaker’s unknown companion, like when he states:
I didn’t have to work until your office figured you out and fired you and we got notices in the mail and on the door, and we dreamed of bigger, more useful cities. In the morning we wrote our curses in black marker on the walls and left. (p. 16).
Lake of Earth differs from your average, passive reading experience where the reader is expected to follow along and emotionally respond to the characters and the events that unfold around them. Instead, I felt as if I were a viewer who was never fully able to engage with her surroundings. This was especially the case in the titular story “Lake of Earth,” the lengthiest piece in the collection, which mixes mystery and fantasy with a dash of Inception sprinkled on top. The story creates a designated space for the reader to watch and ponder without “interfering” emotionally with what is happening around him on the page. In fact, Vandenberg occasionally comments on his approach through his characters, most notably when A tells the speaker:
“The dreams remove you from the world, the real world, the one in which you are flesh and blood. Your visions are only the garble made by your idle brain.” (“Lake of Earth,” p. 48).
Whether you enjoy (like I do) picking out and mauling over little details or prefer a more overarching reading experience in which you get swept up by an emotional wave, Lake of Earth can offer both to the curious reader. It’s a collection that feels much longer than the seven individual stories contained within it. This is partially due to the way Vandenberg plays with and subverts the boundaries of genre, but more importantly, it is the result of a collection that is not interested in stopping at any point. Instead, its effect and world- and character-building can be felt long after I’d turned the last page, by which time I felt like my surroundings were not that different from those described by Vandenburg, that someone had trapped me into a crystal and told me where I must kick in order to come out feeling enlightened.
