AN A-Z OF POSSIBLE WORLDS
By A.C.Tillyer
Roast Books, 300 pp., ISBN 190689406X, Price £20

Kit Toda

The first thing you notice about An A-Z of Possible Worlds is that it’s not really a book. It’s a beautifully designed box in which nestles 26 little booklets of stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. In fact it is so attractively packaged that I couldn’t bring myself to scribble in the margins, as I usually do when reviewing works.
But all this prettiness would be a mere waste of effort if the stories were badly written. Happily, this is emphatically not the case. While the stories do, of course, range in quality, they range from very good to if-only-I-had-written-that-alas-alas!

These stories were apparently born when the author was stuck on a commuting train and so travelled in her mind to imaginative worlds. In keeping with this, the box comes with a ‘Metro Mind Map’ and the small lightweight booklets are supposedly suitable for commuters. I beg to disagree. Quite apart from the stories being too literary to be associated with the almost derogatory term ‘commuter market’ as the publisher implies, they also proved to be perilous impediments to a smooth commute. On two separate occasions I missed my train stop while absorbed in a story, which added at least fifteen minutes to my journeys. Another time, I had just a couple of pages left of a booklet when I got off the tube for work that I ended up standing in a doorway on the street to finish it. I then had to run to work to be on time.

As the title suggests, each story is based around strange worlds or places. While a couple have an obvious debt to classic dystopian literature, almost all are incredible feats of imagination. There is a town based around a reservoir that exercises a sinister compulsion on its inhabitants, a train system in which commuters are unwitting prey, and an entire city where humans have devolved into cannibalistic animals. Even the rather ridiculous premise of a road so lovely that drivers become fatally addicted reads convincingly.

A.C. Tillyer is a master of the ‘killer’ line. There is the elegantly fanciful such as “Perhaps good luck is a natural resource, as tangible as mineral deposits […] and some places simply have more of it than others” (‘Youth Hostel’) and there is the witty humour of “If they could capture the attention of the President, a benchmark for banality if ever there was one, the Mission was convinced that their project would be a success” (‘Zero Gravity Zone’). Others are simply great examples of unpretentiously beautiful writing: “the houses are built as if they are posing for a photograph […] At dusk, people gather on rooftops or lean out of windows to watch the sun set behind the thicket of spires.”

While the stories are self-contained, one also has the pleasure of seeing recurring characters and places. We meet the imperious entrepreneur and proprietor of ‘Golf Course’ drifting into a living death in ‘Warehouse’ and in other stories his popular products are mentioned. The line ‘the streets fan out from the seashore like segments in a slice of lemon’ is the indicator that three of the stories depict one city’s ignoble origin, its supposedly utopian peak and its horrific ruin.

I always strive to write balanced reviews that are as objective as possible in a subjective exercise. But here the attempt at cold objectivity is hard to keep up. It’s fantastic and well worth the money. Buy it.

(My delight with this work led me to request an interview for a ‘Keep your eye on…’ feature. You can read it here.)