PS Publishing, 2006, £25

reviewed in Interzone 207, December 2006

It was Camelot, the Promised Land, when all the dreams of the future were about to come true. But JFK was assassinated, and Bobby Kennedy after him, Marilyn Monroe killed herself, James Dean smashed himself up in a fast car, and Elvis just got fat. The dreamers, and the ones who might make the dreams come true, were gone, and somehow America never really did live up to its promise. That golden age, from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, was a lost time.

But what if not all the dreamers were killed? What, in particular, if James Dean had lived, gone on to make bigger and better movies, and had eventually moved into politics as, in our world, Ronald Reagan did? That was the premise of Jack Dann’s last novel, The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean; now, as a pendant to that book, comes this collection of stories.

Although all have been published separately, none of these stories really stands alone, independent of the novel. There is no big picture revealed; few of the stories have much in the way of plot, and when they do they rarely reach a satisfactory conclusion; most, despite the sub-title, don’t even occupy an alternative America identifiably different from our own. What they do is fill in odd gaps in the novel, or provide an additional or complementary view.

And if the dreamers had lived, would America have been that much better? From this collection it is impossible to tell, because Dann concentrates exclusively and at times pruriently on the sleazy underbelly of sex and drugs and booze. What is certain, though, is that Dann writes with an energy and spirit that sits well with a cast of characters including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Just imagine if those old beat writers had lived to write contemporary alternate history science fiction.