What do you think?
Rate this book
She Comes When You're Leaving & Other Stories
Eight speculative fictions from the author of Jackbird. You'll meet a medieval monk, the greatest small press poet of the 21st century, the mad Dosctor Spoleri, a true gentleman farmer and more. Contains the prize-winning 'Broken Portraiture.'
64 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 1982
6 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
356 books118 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 7, 2019
As art – peculiarly, often abstractly or even bizarrely, always meticulously – depicts artistry we are amused; a gathering of short speculative fiction that allow for a wide-range frolic in the aesthetic crafts.
This book, untouched/closed but observed, seems nonsensical, but as it is touched, opened, studied, it becomes apparent that its face does truly reveal something very meaningful as far as the contents are concerned. The image is a black-and-white view of a piece of reality – a wooden quay? – but one too close to make out the motive beyond doubt, all that is perceived are a set of lines in different angles, seen through a very red window; it is reality sectioned so as to seem surreal framed by a strong colour, framed by imagination and wit – a frame, as in such limits that are worked to point centre-wards, to an area which merits observation. This description does perhaps bring forth associations with art, which would be entirely the association intended by this reviewer since art and artistry is perhaps the most pervasive theme of the collection, not only as a subject, but also a medium.¹ A more precise elucidation can be obtained by taking the dictionary entry for ‘art’ into consideration, which is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination” (according to the Oxford Dictionaries), and these stories do indeed concern themselves with expressions of creativity and imagination – be they paintings, music, poetry, etc. – and they do so while retaining a variety of carefully planned styles which are nothing less than such expressions in themselves. (Well, this is true for most of the stories, anyway. Two of them, ‘Interview With a Gentlemen Farmer’ and ‘The Monster and the Moon,’² could be included if one were a bit generous with excuses, but excuses aside, their connection to art seems coincidental at best.) While quite diverse these styles share a commonality in their penchant for amusement – to define: if comedy is a barking laugh then amusement is a delighted smirk – bringing quirk and wit to these artful abstractions, and a light-hearted entertainment value. More than anything it is these frames and their vividness which gift each story with their own radiant colour spectrum, often avoiding any and all greys to saturate them well beyond reality.
The colours of ‘Broken Portraiture’ comes from a handful such styles, each assigned to its own fragment of a nameless man’s dislocated biography. The first fragment concerns his youth, styled as a torrent, where he is consuming ever stronger substances, searching for something more than the mediocre real, many commas, only one period; this fragment is named Red Petals on a Variegated Ground to make sure we understand that his youth shone with vigorous saturation against the bland backdrop world. But this wild phase could not last forever. The pressure of conformity from the variegated won out in the end and the nameless man was caged in a colour-depraved office (grey-green in fact) – appropriately this fragment is named Mondrian Monochrome, and it shows the first blatant reference to art by mentioning the painter Mondrian, whose works consist mainly of abstract, ascetic squares and lines, (akin to what one finds at the centre of the cover image, if you were looking for an example) – and the style reflects this by reining in the pace and applying a statistical/mathematical approach when describing his life, (but another more passionate style keeps sneaking in to speak of bottles and what needs be kept in them). The following and final two fragments take on yet another two styles, one fleshy and infused with a sense of body horror and sensory distortions, and the other serene; art sees further blatant references and is even created at some point; the colours are once again at large in a man who could not exist in their absence – is this ‘artist’ defined? If so then this hints of a basic need which only some are afflicted by – the variegated are not, and it is clearly only an affliction because of them – but it is also colour, the most vivid thing in its surroundings.
Another interesting style comes to light in ‘Limb Still Kicking from a Stillborn Novel’: the dishonest one, the self-pitying and egocentric one, the one which aim is to distort reality in the narrating protagonists favour and thus nurture his conceit. This protagonist is a cuckold man, or at least he claims to be, and it was due to his wife’s infidelity that he committed murder, or at least so he claims he did, but then again he claims that he did not. Perhaps he never carried out any of it, being too much of a coward to vent his feelings anywhere but on paper? It is difficult to believe anything this protagonist writes, but surely there is some truth to it because his genuine rage keeps seeping through, revealed by his choice of words and way with them. He wants to be an author, that much is clear, playing with prose and poetry, putting much effort into sounding like a seasoned writer, but fails utterly in the endeavour, neither being able to retain coherence nor consistency. Actually, he himself stumbles upon a very fitting description at the very end of the story (if you can call such disunity a story): ”Have you ever tried playing a guitar with a hole in it? The music comes out, but it is the kind of music only decapitated limbs can dance to” (p. 26). His work has copious amounts of holes strewn across it, a metaphysical gopher infested lawn, yielding a storyline which is only acceptable according to a decapitated understanding. Then again it did not need to make sense to anyone lesser than him, anyone else at all in fact, this was written for his own vainglory and nothing else; it is a case of art made for purely narcissistic reasons (and failing for the same).
In ‘Sunday Review’ we find the scrutiny of another ridiculous – read: Pythonesque – writer who ends his days as a coat tree; in ‘The Poets’ War’ there are, unsurprisingly, poets to be found, and the war concerns itself with a misunderstanding as far as what the point of their trade is; in ‘Doctor’s Dozen’ alchemy and reanimation are paired in a macabre art form, intertwining with the search for an immortality; and in the titular story we are presented a grand but anti-grandiose musical number containing plum-munching fat men, an even rounder bouncing creature named Motley, excrement-and-coconut beauty mirrors, and a soap named God. (And, if one was to apply the aforementioned generosity to the two last tales then one would have to admit that, firstly, the breeding of perfect gentlemen requires the cultivation of a sense of the aesthetic, and secondly, that behind the power of a folk tale lies a storyteller, or artist if you will, and that the better this art is plied the more convincing it is, sometimes to the point of mass hysteria.) Each short story has its own style, or styles, ranging from the down-to-earth and unremarkable to the avant garde, taking into account states of mind, the intentions of the narrator, places and periods, sometimes even being artful for its own sake, but always taking being mindful of the readers amusement (as previously defined). Some of the stories are quick reads, some are not, but there is enough intricacy and meticulousness – and, dare I use that word again, artistry – to make sixty-four pages seem like a full journey. Herein one will be rewarded for taking not just what is framed into account, but also the frame itself.
1. Although I cannot be certain that this was an intended theme by the author, coincidence is still composed of what coincides, and to me at least it seems fair to lump the stories together on this common characteristic.
2. The book states that it is inspired by the homilies of Rabanus Maurus (often spelled Rhabanus or Hrabanus), the Abbot of Fulda University of Paris from 822. This inspiration seems specifically to be taken from Lib. I Hom. XLII, wherein is described the superstitious loosing at the moon to prevent a monster from eating it.
This book, untouched/closed but observed, seems nonsensical, but as it is touched, opened, studied, it becomes apparent that its face does truly reveal something very meaningful as far as the contents are concerned. The image is a black-and-white view of a piece of reality – a wooden quay? – but one too close to make out the motive beyond doubt, all that is perceived are a set of lines in different angles, seen through a very red window; it is reality sectioned so as to seem surreal framed by a strong colour, framed by imagination and wit – a frame, as in such limits that are worked to point centre-wards, to an area which merits observation. This description does perhaps bring forth associations with art, which would be entirely the association intended by this reviewer since art and artistry is perhaps the most pervasive theme of the collection, not only as a subject, but also a medium.¹ A more precise elucidation can be obtained by taking the dictionary entry for ‘art’ into consideration, which is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination” (according to the Oxford Dictionaries), and these stories do indeed concern themselves with expressions of creativity and imagination – be they paintings, music, poetry, etc. – and they do so while retaining a variety of carefully planned styles which are nothing less than such expressions in themselves. (Well, this is true for most of the stories, anyway. Two of them, ‘Interview With a Gentlemen Farmer’ and ‘The Monster and the Moon,’² could be included if one were a bit generous with excuses, but excuses aside, their connection to art seems coincidental at best.) While quite diverse these styles share a commonality in their penchant for amusement – to define: if comedy is a barking laugh then amusement is a delighted smirk – bringing quirk and wit to these artful abstractions, and a light-hearted entertainment value. More than anything it is these frames and their vividness which gift each story with their own radiant colour spectrum, often avoiding any and all greys to saturate them well beyond reality.
The colours of ‘Broken Portraiture’ comes from a handful such styles, each assigned to its own fragment of a nameless man’s dislocated biography. The first fragment concerns his youth, styled as a torrent, where he is consuming ever stronger substances, searching for something more than the mediocre real, many commas, only one period; this fragment is named Red Petals on a Variegated Ground to make sure we understand that his youth shone with vigorous saturation against the bland backdrop world. But this wild phase could not last forever. The pressure of conformity from the variegated won out in the end and the nameless man was caged in a colour-depraved office (grey-green in fact) – appropriately this fragment is named Mondrian Monochrome, and it shows the first blatant reference to art by mentioning the painter Mondrian, whose works consist mainly of abstract, ascetic squares and lines, (akin to what one finds at the centre of the cover image, if you were looking for an example) – and the style reflects this by reining in the pace and applying a statistical/mathematical approach when describing his life, (but another more passionate style keeps sneaking in to speak of bottles and what needs be kept in them). The following and final two fragments take on yet another two styles, one fleshy and infused with a sense of body horror and sensory distortions, and the other serene; art sees further blatant references and is even created at some point; the colours are once again at large in a man who could not exist in their absence – is this ‘artist’ defined? If so then this hints of a basic need which only some are afflicted by – the variegated are not, and it is clearly only an affliction because of them – but it is also colour, the most vivid thing in its surroundings.
Another interesting style comes to light in ‘Limb Still Kicking from a Stillborn Novel’: the dishonest one, the self-pitying and egocentric one, the one which aim is to distort reality in the narrating protagonists favour and thus nurture his conceit. This protagonist is a cuckold man, or at least he claims to be, and it was due to his wife’s infidelity that he committed murder, or at least so he claims he did, but then again he claims that he did not. Perhaps he never carried out any of it, being too much of a coward to vent his feelings anywhere but on paper? It is difficult to believe anything this protagonist writes, but surely there is some truth to it because his genuine rage keeps seeping through, revealed by his choice of words and way with them. He wants to be an author, that much is clear, playing with prose and poetry, putting much effort into sounding like a seasoned writer, but fails utterly in the endeavour, neither being able to retain coherence nor consistency. Actually, he himself stumbles upon a very fitting description at the very end of the story (if you can call such disunity a story): ”Have you ever tried playing a guitar with a hole in it? The music comes out, but it is the kind of music only decapitated limbs can dance to” (p. 26). His work has copious amounts of holes strewn across it, a metaphysical gopher infested lawn, yielding a storyline which is only acceptable according to a decapitated understanding. Then again it did not need to make sense to anyone lesser than him, anyone else at all in fact, this was written for his own vainglory and nothing else; it is a case of art made for purely narcissistic reasons (and failing for the same).
In ‘Sunday Review’ we find the scrutiny of another ridiculous – read: Pythonesque – writer who ends his days as a coat tree; in ‘The Poets’ War’ there are, unsurprisingly, poets to be found, and the war concerns itself with a misunderstanding as far as what the point of their trade is; in ‘Doctor’s Dozen’ alchemy and reanimation are paired in a macabre art form, intertwining with the search for an immortality; and in the titular story we are presented a grand but anti-grandiose musical number containing plum-munching fat men, an even rounder bouncing creature named Motley, excrement-and-coconut beauty mirrors, and a soap named God. (And, if one was to apply the aforementioned generosity to the two last tales then one would have to admit that, firstly, the breeding of perfect gentlemen requires the cultivation of a sense of the aesthetic, and secondly, that behind the power of a folk tale lies a storyteller, or artist if you will, and that the better this art is plied the more convincing it is, sometimes to the point of mass hysteria.) Each short story has its own style, or styles, ranging from the down-to-earth and unremarkable to the avant garde, taking into account states of mind, the intentions of the narrator, places and periods, sometimes even being artful for its own sake, but always taking being mindful of the readers amusement (as previously defined). Some of the stories are quick reads, some are not, but there is enough intricacy and meticulousness – and, dare I use that word again, artistry – to make sixty-four pages seem like a full journey. Herein one will be rewarded for taking not just what is framed into account, but also the frame itself.
1. Although I cannot be certain that this was an intended theme by the author, coincidence is still composed of what coincides, and to me at least it seems fair to lump the stories together on this common characteristic.
2. The book states that it is inspired by the homilies of Rabanus Maurus (often spelled Rhabanus or Hrabanus), the Abbot of Fulda University of Paris from 822. This inspiration seems specifically to be taken from Lib. I Hom. XLII, wherein is described the superstitious loosing at the moon to prevent a monster from eating it.
March 15, 2025
Eight fantastic and imaginative stories by one of our best speculative writers. Strange, surreal, yet visceral. Much enjoyed these.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews