Portable Magic, by Mark Allan Gunnells

Portable Magic by Mark Allan Gunnells

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In his new story collection, Portable Magic, Mark Allan Gunnells explores a wide range of genres, including a post-apocalyptic tale, a ghost story, tales that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, such as when a grieving fan at the mausoleum of his favorite writer, meet a grieving character, a journey into a dream, among others.

Gunnells, who is best known for his horror fiction, does not disappoint in this new collection which crossed more than one genre boundary. I especially liked that this story collection is about stories and storytelling. Gunnells sets this up with a frame story. Fifteen-year-old Lance receives as a birthday present from his uncle, an antique manual typewriter. When Lance, an aspiring writer, sits down to write, he feels an almost electrical jolt when he touches the typewriter keys. His stories change. It seems as if he has accessed imagination he didn’t know he had. His stories acquire a new power, and he is surprised at the stories that seem to be flowing out of his fingertips. He seems he has found his muse, or rather, the typewriter is helping find his own interior muse.

I want to look a little more closely at three of Lance’s unexpected stories. The first, “The End is the Beginning,” is a tale of a high school student, Kyle, waiting for that all-important letter: has he or has he not been accepted into the college he desperately wants to attend. The letter comes, but the letter has only has only two words, The End. Kyle is devastated, he wants to go to the school and find out what this means. His mother shakes her head and tells him their story is over. “You can’t leave this room,” she tells him. “You can’t even leave this moment. “We’re in a short story, not a novel.” Her face goes blank. She no longer seems human, but rather a mannequin. These are not the characters one expects. They know they are in a story; the reader has been invited into the story’s backstage. Kyle refuses to accept his ending and challenges his Creator, Malek, demanding a longer script, a bigger part. In essence, the reader is invited into the process of storytelling.

“The House That Dreams Built” takes the reader from story as theatre, story as the act of storytelling, to story as dream. Keith comes home to find an unexpected gift from his husband, Gene. Inside the package he finds a tiny “two-story house, brown, shingled roof, two attic windows,” a replica of the home of Keith’s favorite writer, Bradley Raymond. The replica was carved from a brick of Raymond’s home, now torn down. Raymond’s fiction was Keith’s escape from bullying and parental abuse. The gift triggers dreams, dreams of the real house and Raymond upstairs writing, and again, Keith has a gift from the writer. Yes, Bradley Raymond is meant to be a homage to Ray Bradbury, whose fantasy and science fiction can be said to be akin to dreams. This story is also about dreams as story, as the stuff of story. That Raymond’s stories helped Keith survive is a testament to the power of stories..

As much as we all dream, and have to dream, the last story I want to talk about asks us to consider how much we need stories. “The Library” takes place after the apocalypse. Books are rare, as many were used as fuel. Lowell and Dru are on the run, seeking a haven from the chaos. They come across The Community, where stories are be bought by making a trade. As Avery, a member of The Community, tells them, “no one knew how badly they missed stories” until they were hard to come by. “People gotta have stories.” They make their deal and are invited into the library. There are no books. Instead, they find a man, a writer whom Lowell recognizes. He tells them the stories they bought. This living library is being kept prisoner. What should Lowell and Dru do, if anything? Answering this question proves less straight forward than they imagined. This story attests to the power of stories and how essential they are. It reminds us that stories were oral first, told by people like this living library who tells stories he knew by heart.

When I finished this gem of a collection, I found myself thinking of Walter Fisher (1931-2018), Professor Emeritus at the USC Annenberg for Communication and Journalism, and his idea that humans should be “reconceptualized as Homo Narrans. Humans are the animals that tell stories. We are all storytellers. He argues in Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action, among other things, that “all forms of human communication must be seen as stories …” Granted, the idea of stories here is a broad one, but it speaks to what Gunnells is exploring in this collection: the art and process of storytelling, storytelling as a creative act. We tell stories to entertain, yes, and we also tell them to make sense of, and interpret, human experience.

This collection celebrates this essential human act. That these tales are told through a queer lens, adds to the power of these tales I do find myself wishing the stories were longer, which again attests to their power.


Highly recommended.





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