Out of the Window, Into The Dark by Marian Womack

I would like to thank Calque Press for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Calque Press

Published – out now

Price – £12.99 paperback

The employee of a library-planet grapples with industrial espionage. The connection between an indie comic and a local boogie-man is discovered by a group of friends. In a future museum of the mind, a nostalgia-addicted curator tries to understand the emotions of 20th century humans. An Anglo-Saxon traveller narrates her journey into the Artic regions to her Queen. A group of friends tries to capture the last pink-footed goose on Planet Earth...

Marian Womack's new collection of short stories shows us how the then and the now, the future and the past, are made of the same particles. Loneliness, nostalgia and its dark ghosts, and the possibilities for humanity if technology and preservation dovetail, are brought together with Womack's characteristic crossing of genres, places and moods. Out Through the Window, Into the Dark is a collection for our and future times, movingly demonstrating the devastating consequences of our collective actions.

When you get a short story collection by an author you often know what you are in for. A set of a particular genre like science fiction or horror; tales with a certain style or format where the voice stands out but then there are those authors who cross and blend formats, genres and styles and mean I’m never quite too sure what I’ll get as I turn the  page. There is a certain delight when you’re reading when you think I’m not sure what this is or where it is going then BLAM it connects. A new example of this latter kind is the excellent Out of the Window, Into the dark by Marian Womack a beautiful and often eerie set of tales to beguile and intrigue a reader.

The first section of the collection highlights Womack’s versatility as a writer and how on their nose the ability to identify prescient themes. In ‘Player/Creator/Embassy’ we head into the far future where our narrator appears to be on a secret mission to a gigantic galactic repositor y of knowledge. We have thrown at us extremely altered humans and forms of life with highly technical terms but as we start on a debate of what is truth; how far the great Minds have decided to refine the sum of all knowledge makes us realise Womack is exploring the dangers of untamed AI in relation to knowledge, art and even our own personal history. It has a devastating ending which stays with you and immediately puts the reader on notice that these stories have surprises in store.

From far future drama to near future post apocalypse merged with black comedy in ‘Pink Footed’ where Womack creates an alarming Southern England setting transformed by climate change where animal life is decimated but we also get swept up in three posh and clueless academics trying to find one of the last animals in the UK. Womack merges SF with the feeling of a 1920s/30s farce with additional vicar found going the loo in the field and we are not sure if the tale will turn tragic or comic and Womack manages expertly to land the coin on the side.

An absolute favourite for me is ‘The Iceberg In The Living Room’ where a newborn mother juggles nursing her child, medication and the need to immediately start applying for a job. This is a hyper-speed walk through our narrator’s mind who is someone juggling the pressure to be all things at once and we can feel sanity fraying at the edges. From the need to be a perfect parent to the horrors of navigating academia jobs boards we can feel the pressure building, circling and circling someone’s mind and it’s a powerful impression of someone lost and then weaves in themes of being a parent up against climate change again it’s a worrying future we leave our main character to navigate next. A story that circles around in your head too after reading it.

Another disturbing future awaits in Fox and Raven’ where we watch a young girl eventually turned into a charismatic cult leader’s bride but a feeling that the clock counting down before she is replaced by a younger woman is running now very fast. It paints a worrying picture of people with little left to lose bargaining with human devils and getting very burnt in the process. Harrowing and tragic with a twist of the modern fairytale.

In another far future tale ‘At the Museum’ Womack explores the need for people to feel something where we visit a museum that thrives on simulations. A mix of SF and ghost stories commence when we start to realise that this story is about how if you start to question your world you can be brought down by it. The sense of people being trapped by their own rules and society builds until we see the doom everyone seems to be patiently taking themselves to without anyone ever saying stop.

The first section ends with the rather brilliant and surreal ‘M’s Awfully Big Adventure’ which as our main character starts to have their afterlife assessed by Winona Ryder suggests we’re not in for a normal ride. It crosses everything from the joy of tv show fandom; watching our stars age as we do to asking how can we know we are in reality and has a wonderful pay-off about the desire we all want to have just that little bit more time to do what we love. In a dark sequence of tales it brings some necessary smiles to the face which also giving us more to mull over our own mortality.

In the second section we have an epic prose like journey in ‘Voyage to the White Sea’ where a boat crewed by women goes to explore the farthest reaches of the world. It reads like an ancient epic that is full of wonder, magic and surprises in just a few pages. The ending is unexpected and equally magical.

There is a slowly increasing feeling of dread in ‘Ready or Not’ a pandemic lockdown set tale of a young wife getting more and more afraid of her elderly neighbour. Cats are harmed and we start to unpick our narrator’s relationship with her own family which gets the reader very curious as to what is going on and why very little feels right. Our sympathies for a woman pushed to her limits are matched by a sense that not everything adds up which the finale of the tale only just starts to explain and we may end up preferring to not to know any more – powerful horror indeed.

The title story ‘Out of the Window, Into The Dark’ is brilliant and haunting. Its about growing up, learning your community’s darks secrets and then finding out that you too eventually will have some. A strange comic shows children being revealed dark secrets at night. Our narrator then gets a similar experience when she is down with a strange fever. It is a story that makes us question what was real, the impacts childhood makes on who we become, and it really gets under the skin.

The final prose story is a tale of being kept in thew shadows and working out how to get out of them. Our narrator is an academic studying William Bake’s wife Catherine who is often excluded from the history. Our main character is also having an affair with her supervisor and there are resonances between past and present in how a man controls the story and her behaviour when she appear to be in love with him. But the work she does on her subject and learning to bind and print books herself starts to help her own sense of worth.

Finally in the collection we have poetry in the form of Bluebeard Variations with a remarkable set of POVs going into a familiar dark story and What Would Kate Bush Do? Which merges real life news stories with Kate Bush songs to illustrate the hurdles women across the world still face.

As you can see, I really enjoyed this and every story aims to deliver something different. Themes of climate change, the loss of knowledge and how stories change s all feature and this is the type of collection you go away thinking about long after you close the cover. Marian Womack is a great storyteller and I very much strongly recommend you grab hold of this!