Review: Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha

 

A few years ago, I came across a stunning story, “Sweetbaby,” in Clarkesworld. It opens with a scene of shocking violence. And yet despite the violence and weirdness in this tale, there’s also a tone of quiet introspection. It’s a story about a girl struggling to unravel the truth of her circumstances, the truth about her world. And it’s about others who are doing everything they can to deny reality. It’s about parents and children; it’s a wild mashup of genres; it extends compassion even toward what seems unforgivable, and it left me with a quiet ache in my heart. I knew then that Thomas Ha was a writer to watch.

 

And how. In the last few years, Ha has released one brilliant tale after another--weird, unsettling tales that mix horror, science fiction, and fantasy. His work has garnered major award nominations, and placed as a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Shirley Jackson awards. It all culminates (for now) in this first collection of his work, Uncertain Sons. This book gathers together eleven of his best stories, along with a never-before-published novelette that gives the book its name.

 

Uncertain Sons is an apt title, for the theme of uncertainty runs through these stories. Protagonists are caught in strange, difficult situations, unsure of which path to take. Moreover, reality itself is uncertain, unstable in these tales. In “House Traveler,” the stars overhead change from red to green. People disappear without warning. Houses—and the world itself—changes. The protagonist is sent on a mission he doesn’t fully understand, in a world he can’t comprehend, with a mind that he knows has been selectively wiped of memories. In “Alabama Circus Punk,” the main character isn’t even human, and the slippage in his perception of reality extends to language itself as his “core information-set” is altered and basic definitions of words are replaced. In other stories, reality seems perhaps a bit more stable—there’s a suggestion that perhaps there really is an objective, stable reality out there—but fellow humans seem to be conspiring to hide and distort that reality. In the quietly devastating “Window Boy,” the sheltered upper-class use visual filters to screen out unpleasant realities. Their nice, seemingly normal suburban homes are a façade. Their attempts at normality are a façade in a weird, apocalyptic world. The young boy who serves as the main character slowly begins to see through these pretenses; he attempts to apprehend the reality out there. I admire the way in which Ha deals honestly with the dangers this entails; compassion is an admirable instinct, but in this case the boy’s compassion may invite  real danger and disaster onto his family. In this story, as in others, difficult and uncertain choices abound.

 

“The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” takes up some of the themes of “Window Boy” at extended length. As in “Window Boy,” modern technology is used to hide, distort, and rewrite reality. Lovers meet wearing augmented reality glasses, so that they never know what the other actually looks like. Physical media is all but gone. Everything has gone digital, and digital books can be rewritten without even notifying readers of the change. When one man discovers a “dead” book—a paper book which can’t be easily rewritten at the touch of a button—he steps into vast, unexpected danger. It’s a story that reflects on the ephemerality and artificiality of much of modern life and media, that asks: What are we willing to stand by? What do we want to remember, what do we want to hold onto and keep unchanging—even if happier updates or edits are possible? What do we want to preserve—to know—of reality?

 

One of the choices the narrator of “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” makes is to truthfully remember the relationship with his dead mother—both the good and the bad of it. Sons and mothers, sons and fathers, parents and children—these relationships are at the heart of many of Ha’s stories. A father’s deep protectiveness toward his children is evoked in the wonderfully creepy “Balloon Season,” in which a town and family are threatened by the seasonal appearance of horrific, balloon-like monsters. And that sense of deep and tender parental protectiveness shines in the moving “The Sort,” a story of quiet yet nerve-wracking unease, in which a father-and-son road trip takes on elements (or does it?) of steadily building danger.

 

This all culminates in the title story of the collection, “Uncertain Sons.” In some ways, this novelette is a departure from many of the other stories in the collection; in most of the other stories, the horror is unnerving yet quiet; the violence is hidden or implied. In “Uncertain Sons,” the violence is gruesome and graphic and shocking, even more so than in “Sweetbaby.” The world is shockingly weird, a kind of future/alternate California invaded by monstrous (extraterrestrial? supernatural?) “exofauna,” which includes monsters with hundreds of little hands, headless galloping creatures, and tentacle-like nightmares with such wonderful names as “polypods,” “gastropates,” and “fingerwhorls.” In this horrific landscape, a young man referred to only as “the young bikeman” is on a mission to destroy all the exofauna once and for all. He is guided in his quest by the memories of his dead father, and it is, in fact, his dead father who narrates the tale (to give you an idea of how wonderfully weird Thomas Ha can be. I love what he does with voice in this story). It’s a tale that is gripping, tense, kinetic—a gory, cinematic action-quest. And then in its final pages it veers into sudden tenderness. It’s a story, like many in this collection, about a father and son. But this is about a son moving past uncertainty, doing what his father could not, going beyond what his father ever imagined. It’s about the older generation giving way to the younger. It’s about a young man letting go of (some) of the past so he can move on. It’s about love. And like the collection as a whole, it’s about horror coexisting with tenderness; about human relationships in a world that can be frightening and unstable and unreal; about difficult decisions and the courage to see the world as it is. It’s about fear and empathy. And love.