Description
Book SynopsisMagic stops. Men vanish. Worlds end. Life goes on. The stories in The Last Vanishing Man start with the end of the world, as a narrator seeks to imagine how the actions of an American terrorist ripple through his family. American violence and masculinity are topics that weave through these stories, as characters of various genders and sexualities get scarred by the wounds of manhood. But though these stories bounce similar themes off each other, they are not narrow in focus or tone. Hard-edged realism lives alongside ghost stories and weird tales; the lyrical tragedy of “A Suicide Gun” sits beside the wild, filthy, absurdist romp that is “The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra”, a murder ballad that might be a lost Weird Al song for a John Waters movie. The collection winds down with an expatriot American living in the melting tundra of Siberia, seeking liberation from the forces that deranged his life, the same forces that shaped and warped the lives of all the other characters in the book.
The Last Vanishing Man is organized in four sections. The first section tells tales of people seeking to make sense of history and their place in it, whether the history of a queer sanctuary in Canada or of the unfulfilled dreams of the Warhol star Candy Darling. The second section gives us characters who are each on a quest to understand someone who is gone, vanished into memory or worlds beyond, their stories closer to myth than history. In the third section, lonely men seek meaning in a world where they have lost their way. Their quests become philosophical, even spiritual, as they wander toward something greater than their own transient desires. The final section breaks the book open with extremes: extremes of feeling, extremes of strangeness, extremes of horror. The fiercely disturbing story “Patrimony” portrays a post-apocalypse where male power renders the procreation of humanity into torture. “On the Government of the Living” is also a post-apocalyptic story, also a story of children and humanity, but more haunting parable than horror, more Samuel Beckett than Clive Barker.
The Last Vanishing Man is a book for readers seeking more than familiar genre conventions, readers seeking stories that challenge, unsettle, surprise, and sing. These are stories aware of the sufferings of the world, stories of characters tormented by unfulfilled desires and unfathomable violence, but also stories of compassion, of community, of humor, and of infinite possibilities beyond the prison of the self.
Trade Review"Matthew Cheney’s most recent book, The Last Vanishing Man (Third Man Books 2023), is first-rate! I can't—as they say—recommend it highly enough." — Samuel R. Delany, Four time Nebula Award, two time Hugo Award, winning author and Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee
Matthew Cheney’s stories in The Last Vanishing Man are fables of survival and community. His fully relatable characters are up against the same environmental, social, and political problems we all face today. Weird, dark, and wonderful visions and hallucinations from a wholly unique voice. —Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy, Nebula, Edgar, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of A Natural History of Hell
“An unforgettable collection of ghost-haunted memory and blighted futures, in the lives of people from the isolated and quietly paranoid to the criminally insane—brutal and beautiful.” —Franz Nicolay, musician The Hold Steady and author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control and Someone Should Pay for Your Pain
Matthew Cheney's stories know how to make a boy look around on the subway as if to ask people CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!” —Sam J. Miller, Nebula- and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Boys, Beasts, and Men
Matthew Cheney is a citizen of those strange lands “beyond the fields we know,” who brings back fever-dream reportage wrapped up in packages both bloody and colorful. - Paul Di Fillipo, Locus Magazine
Cheney’s stories have a very close relationship with doom, annihilation, the unreachable prospect of solace. God help me, I love that about them! - Adrian Van Young
Cheney has a talent for the bleak and the beautiful, and it’s well worth losing yourself within. Some of the most disturbing fiction I’ve read in a long time. - Peter Biello, New Hampshire Public Radio
In Matthew Cheney’s “Hunger” … the well-executed and unexpected ending makes this one special. - Paul Guran, Locus Magazine
Table of ContentsI.
After the End of the End of the World 5
The Last Vanishing Man 21
Winnipesaukee Darling 38
II.
Killing Fairies 57
Hunger 82
Mass 99
III.
At the Edge of the Forest 123
Wild Longing 147
A Suicide Gun 173
IV.
The Ballad Of Jimmy And Myra 204
Patrimony 217
On the Government of the Living 228
A Liberation 234
The Box 252
Publication History 253
