Autumn Country: Selected Fiction of Tim Jeffreys is a guilty pleasure of mine. I’ve read it several times just to enjoy the way Tim tells a story. Right in the first paragraph, he lets us know we are in the hands of a storyteller and the story is underway. Plot and character are inextricably bound, and the language is their servant, as it should be. This is the reason I proposed this volume, selected the stories, and wrote the introduction.
You might want to read this book not as fourteen stories, but as a unified fictional work with fourteen parts, chapters if you insist. Weaving in and out of the fictional work is his peculiar inventiveness as relates to the shape-shifter. From the first story we feel the urgency of creatures who mimic the loved ones of others and eat the love they take. Tim manipulates his own theories in ways only he could have imagined, and the last time through, I just read those to feel that theme and those changes once more.
Other themes run through the fictional work with great effectiveness, and one of them is the writer’s sense of humor that sometimes lurks beneath a dark surface and sometimes erupts in viscous bubbles. The mordant humor about humorists in “Here Comes Mr. Herribone” creates a sparkling metaphor for the artist, and, in particular, comedians. “Collectable” is something of an elegant joke about the writer’s love of the music we hear at times while reading the stories.
But, for reasons I have stopped trying to understand, my favorite remains “Under Iron,” a story that picks up this musical theme and twists it into a ghost story that makes such sense we know what ghosts can actually do in our mortal world. I get so impatient with ghost stories where you know the writer doesn’t believe in ghosts himself; here’s one that makes perfect sense. I don’t have to imagine very hard to make the leap into meaning.
At my first reading of “Black Nore,” I was surprised and just a bit shaken. It did that grand old thing: it made me stop and think about what I’d just read. That’s something I enjoy. Of course, I enjoy thinking in general a great deal. The only reason I am telling you is to suggest that if this sounds all right, you should read the book. And it’s worth it for the writer’s thoughts on the stories at the end.
-Robert Pope
Who is Robert Pope?
Robert Pope has published a novel, Jack’s Universe,
three collections of stories, most recently Not a Jot or a Tittle (2022), and a book of flash fiction, Disappearing Things (2023).
His stories appear in journals, including Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fiction International, and anthologies, including Pushcart Prize and Dark Lane Anthology. Seven fictions appear in Fictive Dream.
Robert can also be found in HARDBOILED AND LOADED WITH SIN (paperback/eBook) and Vella
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Have a great summer!
GRAVELIGHT PRESS 