Review: The Last Vanishing Man
Matthew Cheney
270 pages
Third Man Books (2023)
tl;dr summary: Genre-spanning and blurring collection that is a study in crafting voice and balancing realism against absurdity.
Read this if you like: Juan Villoro, David Foster Wallace, literary horror
This collection hooked me from the very first line. In fact, that’s a universal statement I’ll make about the stories in The Last Vanishing Man. All of them have very tight, enticing openings that hook the reader in right away. This is true whether the story is barely past a page long or over 20—all of them hit right from the beginning. I’d definitely recommend this collection for any short fiction writers who are looking to improve their story beginnings, especially those who write longer short stories. I think sometimes there’s a misconception that the opening isn’t as critical in a longer story since it’s a smaller percentage of the total, but in my opinion the opposite is true. The first page is what tells the reader whether it’s worth reading the next 20, and the opening of every story in this collection makes that case convincingly.
Some of my favorite opening sentences:
“I have tried to tell her story for over a decade now, but she slips between the lines.” (After the End of the End of the World)
“I met Jack at the end of my first year of college, a year that began in misery and ended in something else, though even now I’m not sure what to call it.” (Killing Fairies)
“It was only a few weeks after my mother’s funeral when my father told me never to come home again.” (Hunger)
“The brief obituary for Wendell Hamilton that appeared in the September 20, 2015 issue of the Coös County Democrat was not entirely inaccurate, but it was far from complete.” (Mass)
“Jimmy started smoking when he was eight.” (The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra)
….what all of these do masterfully is entice curiosity. There is some kind of tension either directly stated or implied in each of these first sentences, and that gives them all energy that pushes the reader into the story at a run, already eager to learn more.
And what follows those killer openings doesn’t disappoint. I love how unexpected the stories in this collection were, both in terms of where he took the plot and characters and the way he used time, voice, and POV. Even the way the stories were arranged surprised me—ending on a flash felt like a nose-thumb at the old convention to anchor a collection with its longest work.
It enhances the surprise that Matthew Cheney deftly blurs and blends genres. It gives the reader the feeling that every story is truly a blank slate where anything could happen. I love stories that dance on the edge of genre. “Killing Fairies” does that beautifully. It gestures at fantasy even in the title, but the speculative element is secondary—at its core, it’s a love story. There are also some that hit a genre head on, like the slow-building horror in “Hunger” and “A Suicide Gun”.
One detail the horror fan in me loved was Cheney’s artful use of the viscerally grotesque. There are moments in “Hunger” that give that skin-tingling creepy vibe, deployed at just the right moment in the story arc. It’s wielded differently in “A Liberation”—at first it’s frightening, but as the story goes along it begins to celebrate the grotesque. The story is set in a far northern town that is slowly sinking, where death is omnipresent but becomes increasingly visible on the page as the story goes along.
A brief side note: I find it interesting that the two dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories are back-to-back (“Patrimony” and “On the Government of the Living”). They do feel like they’re in conversation with each other. Both center on the idea of legacy, though approached in dramatically different ways.
Even stories that are technically literary realism often have a surreal feel. Something Cheney does exceptionally well: the plots and characters are sometimes absurd, but they never feel contrived, or like things are strange for the sake of being strange. The plot of “Winnipesaukee Darling”, for instance, sounds a bit ridiculous: a couple rents a vacation home, gets drunk and stumbles to the neighbor’s house, where he invites them in for a lovely evening. Yet in the context of the story all of these steps feel natural and logical, thanks to the cadence and confidence of the voice and the way he’s built the characters. Everything feels like something these characters would do, and that makes it all believable, even if it’s strange behavior for the average person.
The opening story (“After the End of the End of the World”) is an excellent example of this. Its plot synopsis sounds literary: the daughter of a suicide bomber has to cope with the consequences and emotions of being related to such a hated, infamous figure. It’s twisted into a surreal space because the daughter character, Jane, is never singularly defined. Instead, the different possible iterations of Jane are shown prism-like in parallel narratives.
This fracturing also segues nicely into something else I appreciated about this collection: Cheney’s artful use of time and POV. The second story (“The Last Vanishing Man”) is maybe the best example to cite. It tells a contiguous story from three different first-person narrators from different generations. Each voice adds a new layer to the narrative, filling in different details that changes the way readers interpret things from earlier sections.
Maybe the most impressive use of time in this collection, though, is in “At the Edge of the Forest”. It’s a very smooth non-chronological narrative, for one thing. It also takes full advantage of the fractured narrative to place scenes exactly where they’ll make the most impact, which I think is an important detail a lot of writers neglect when they first start writing non-linear stories. Just because they’re out of order doesn’t mean they should be random—there still needs to be an arc that builds and resolves. The structure of “At the Edge of the Forest” feels very intentionally built and effortless at the same time. One little detail that I think helps with this—he uses a similar weaving-in technique as he does with the scene shifts in “The Last Vanishing Man”. Something that was said or done in the previous scene is used as the jumping off point for the next. This gives the reader a tether to hold on to while they jump backwards in time, or from one narrator to another, so they’re not jarred out of the story.
And then there’s “The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra”, which I think it’s fair to call a romp. There’s something pulp-ish about it, almost cartoonish. The humor balances what is otherwise an incredibly dark story, and I would argue it’s the most entertaining story in the collection.
It’s probably pretty clear from the overall tone of this review that I very much enjoyed reading The Last Vanishing Man. Strong recommend for people who enjoy reading and/or writing dark fiction across genres. It’s also an excellent craft study for how to smoothly integrate non-traditional structures and forms, or for writers of longer short stories working on their pacing or use of time.
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