Throwing people for a loop seems to be a theme of this collection. There is the reason part that says ‘Hell, it can’t be’ and there is the wonder part that says ‘Hell, maybe it is.'” He was the storyteller, and he offered to teach me the art. “There is only one story in the world,” he said, “and it pulls two ways. Galli was an hereditary storyteller of the Indies. No one who writes the sentence “And Judy retched funfully” could be doing anything else. He is palpably enjoying throwing us for a loop. But it is precisely this verb ‘play’ which makes his stories both too much to read in large doses and also too good to put down. He plays with language and the reader’s sense of reality in equal measure. Elements of science fiction blend with fantasy tropes before being mixed into a surrealist cocktail.

Lafferty is almost entirely unclassifiable.

I didn’t review Nine Hundred Grandmothers when I read it, partly because I didn’t have the time and partly because I wasn’t sure what had hit me. Soon after, a trip to Powell’s Books in Portland resulted in another Lafferty collection, Strange Doings. I began scouring used bookstores and continuously came up empty until a couple of years ago when I finally hit paydirt: not just the short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers but also two of his novels. I looked it up on Amazon and found the next worst thing to nothing: an incredibly expensive specialty edition that was a first volume in a complete collection, and well out of my price range. Eager to find a new author I’d probably like, I looked up Lafferty’s name in the library and found nothing. In his collection Fragile Things, Gaiman praises Lafferty as being one of the best short story writers in the world.

Aloys by R.A. Lafferty