The Next Fix

Rating NR Genre horror Author Matt Wallace Publisher Apex Publications

Orson Scott Card's fiction was once described as playing patty cake with Baby Huey.  Whoever said that wouldn't last five minutes with Matt Wallace.  The Next Fix is a collection of Wallace's genre-bending, gritty, and raw short fiction, and it will leave your skin crawling.

The collection kicks off with “Absolution, Insured,” an object lesson in guilt, regret, and holding grudges.  Oh, and there are monsters.  Treating someone badly with malicious intent summons a lo-gi (think Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with more teeth) to punish you and anyone stupid enough to help you try to escape them.  The only way to shake a lo-gi is to be absolved by the person you wronged.  So when the narrator's friend Carey knocks on his door in the middle of the night, he decides to hop in the car and drive him to his ex-girlfriend's place.  As Wallace explains in his brief introduction to the story, the result is Waiting for Godot on wheels, existential dilemmas debated with a monster in the rear-view window.

The stories that follow maintain a hard-boiled, rough-and-tumble tone.  “No World for Warriors” and “Another Man's Run” both deal with isolation and sacrifice.  In the former, an immortal is stationed in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, and sees that the weakness he sees in his fellow soldiers is a kind of strength he can't know.  In the latter, a futuristic postal service demands its messengers put their lives on the line with every delivery, and no one wants to see his name come up on the board, least of all the short-timers.  “The Losting Corridor” is pure noir poetry, relying more on cadence and rhythm than sense to overwhelm the reader into buying Wallace's hallway of missing things and watching the transformation that happens inside.

Wallace's most powerful stories in the collection can best be described as hard-boiled cyberpunk. In “Delve,” workers use drugs injected through shunts in their arms to dive into the minds of newborn monsters, hoping to scrub clean their monstrous instincts and turn them into human beings.  Success has come less and less often, and as the story progresses, we wonder if we want the delvers to succeed after all.  In the last and longest piece, “The End of Flesh” (weighing in at 40 of the collection's 225 pages), we meet Jon “Busboy” Pacson, a cop assigned to investigate and shut down the city's cannibalism problem.  Mad Cow Disease wiped out the supply of cattle, but that didn't reduce some people's craving for meat, and they'll get it any way they can.  This story is as hard boiled as they come.  There's the beautiful girl whose brother was murdered and who steals Pacson's heart; there's the weasel of a contact Pacson has in the underground who feeds him information and promises he's gone legit; there's the shadowy figure behind the thugs pulling the strings.  Of course, in Wallace's hands, the beautiful girl's brother was eaten after he was killed, the weasel is a tattooed hacker who jacks into his computer through ports in his skin, and the shadowy figure is - well, why ruin all the surprises.

The Next Fix is dark - it stares right at the worst parts of humanity, but it doesn't despair in it.  Underlying all the dark, moody, gloomy texture of these stories is a compassion that keeps them from being morose and makes them, in their own depressing way, hopeful.