As I read through Obverse Book's Faction anthology line, my biggest struggle with it has been its lack of focus – at least in its first couple of installments, often the atmosphere wouldn't quite coalesce, and through good and bad stories, neither seemed to be very benefited by the format. Liberating Earth brought us closer to that goal, giving every story a shared premise that tied everything together quite nicely with an emotional core, while still allowing stories to breathe. The Book of the Enemy tries for much the same, but rather than Liberating's bittersweet hope, the emotion at the core of this one is something more akin to a "...what?" That's both a good and bad thing for The Book of the Enemy, at its best making for an fun and trippy read that plays with interesting ideas and lets the reader work out the puzzle pieces, and at its worst making the book feel obnoxiously obtuse.
This is a book that revels in the esoteric nature of Faction Paradox as a franchise, and as with the rest of Obverse's output, it's not afraid to go all over the place while exploring that nature. The core theme – various propositions about what the Enemy might be – comes in a wide variety of flavors throughout the text, and this is a rather long book with lots of particularly brief stories, meaning readers are sent through a real diversity of settings as they make their way through it all. The result feels shaky as a whole, hard to look at as a monolith – a common impression with anthologies, but especially so with one quite so packed.
Still, though, there's a fair attempt at granting it connective tissue. Simon Bucher-Jones, the editor, contributed a fair amount of this book's stories, as well as interstitial "briefing" blurbs and a framing narrative, "Subjective Interlock". Bucher-Jones's writing is a constant throughout the text, and does a lot to soften the often-disarming transitions warranted by the anthology format. The full-on short stories are probably the most successful, especially "Interlock" itself, giving the whole thing context – it's a real shame it disappears for two-thirds of the book's duration, but that's somewhat balanced out by the higher concentration of Bucher-Jones–penned stories in the second half.
Really the weak link in his contributions is the briefings, which are emblematic of the largest issue I had with this book – it's too esoteric for its own good. A certain dose of it can be quite fun – I wouldn't have fallen in love with this franchise if I didn't think that way – but because anthology stories tend to be on the shorter side, there's less time for me to get invested. Short story writers tend to be aware of that fact and work within their constraints, but when a piece gets particularly dense or opaque, due to the length it becomes a lot less rewarding to try and untangle it. Add to that the fact that a lot of The Book of the Enemy is invested in references to Faction lore that even I consider deep-cut, or concepts from classic lit and historical esoterica, and you get something I personally have no desire to mentally work through in the same way I'm invested in even the densest full-length Faction novels. I'm not asking for things to be spelled out for me, but this is a series where most entries are presented as standalone – and if something's going to require research and/or in-depth analysis, I'd rather it be one big something I spend time living in, rather than several smaller stories all asking for separate analysis.
That problem carries over from the briefings to a fair chunk of the stories. One of the first stories, "Cobweb and Ivory", is likely the biggest offender, a trippy stream of scattered scenes and dense narration, all of which I'm sure is very entertaining for scholars of deep Faction lore; it gets so caught up in being weird and referential that it fails to be entertaining in its own right. Other stories in the anthology carry similar traits, but most luckily find a way to balance it out by being more accessible in other respects.
"A Bloody (and Public) Domaine" is a good example of one of these stories that successfully straddles the line, a fun Factiony take on Dracula that, while very referential, explains itself as it progresses well enough, and introduces some really fun stuff in its own right such as the character of Auteur. (Who, I should mention, absolutely deserves the dedicated series he's getting, he's a joy.) Some other stories I particularly enjoyed were "First Draft", a dramatic and wonderfully-written tale about living fictions, marginalized populations, and the power of stories.
Oh, and my absolute favorite – penned by Philip Purser-Hallard, of course, "T. memeticus: A Morphology" is a story about the Enemy actually being a memetically camouflaging octopus. It's told through a series of vivid vignettes whose settings could all make for whole novels in their own right (I need more of the intelligent dinosaur alt-history, stat) and which all come together to paint a beautifully quirky and terrifying picture, in classic Faction Paradox form. Each vignette's setting is vibrant and fully-realized, the prose is stunning, and the concept is nothing but fun – just another point on Purser-Hallard's near-perfect track record for this franchise.
Unfortunately, I also have to take a moment to spotlight the other extreme of my enjoyment here: "The Enemy of My Enemy is My Enemy". This is a story whose nature – its length, content, purpose, placement – I simply cannot understand. With this tale, Jay Eales finally pens a Faction story without aggressively overtranscribed blaccent, only to instead spend sixty pages regurgitating the biographies of several real-life creatives, with some vaguely interesting occult and science fiction concepts floating around at points. Alan Moore turns into a tree and several pages are spent on JK Rowling girlbossing her way through a Twitter war with Donald Trump, a section which I will charitably describe as probably being at least marginally palatable when this released in 2018. "Enemy of My Enemy" grinds the book to a halt, a decently progressing anthology taken over by sixty pages of Wikipedia biography.
Still, stories I had strong opinions about were rather the exception. A lot of this book's stories were fun enough – shoutout to the very brief story positing the Enemy is a tardigrade which will live rent-free in my brain, and the final two stories juxtapose each other very well and end the anthology on a fittingly ominous note – but at the same time, there's plenty that were so short, and so buried within everything else, that they left me without any lasting impression. Stories can be enjoyable yet ultimately slight or aimless, and they aren't helped by all being smushed next to each other to create an anthology that just doesn't come together.
As an anthology, The Book of the Enemy can only ever be the sum of its parts. Fun, and at times as brain-breaking as I expected, but perhaps not in the way or to the extent that I was hoping for. Plenty of the individual stories were modest to great successes, and I don't want to downplay that – but this was a strange place for them, a book too disjointed, strangely-paced, and invested in
its own esoteric nature for me to truly enjoy it as a whole. I really appreciated the attempt to dig into the depths of Faction lore and atmosphere – but an anthology just wasn't the way to execute it.
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