The Anya DeNiro Game

Anya DeNiro (via Goodreads)

Last year at the AWP conference in Portland, at its book fair’s Small Beer Press table, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link personally thrust into my hands a copy of Anya Johanna DeNiro’s second short story collection, Tyrannia and Other Renditions. The endorsement makes total sense: anyone who’s read Kelly Link’s weird and lyrical fiction will see why she loved DeNiro’s own, inimitably strange style: unsettling and ferocious, cohesive but defiantly unreal, powered by outlandish imagery and formal fearlessness.

In the title story, a dissident’s broken body, dumped by the emperor’s torturers, becomes the site of a mysterious and busy “ecology of many shadows,” a community of birds, bears, and beetles erected in his decaying cavities and blood vessels: “The man’s site is full of what he left behind: glades, a ring of boulders on his thigh that used to be kidney stones, hoisted upward by beetles and plucked by the birds.” In “Walking Stick Fires,” two alien bikers on a subjugated Earth have to fight their way out of an interdimensional leviathan’s giant body with the help of a human boy covered in stick insects, named Sharon, and his Camaro. In “Wildfires of Antarctica,” a genetically engineered objet d’art, Roxy: Shark * Flower, leads a museum riot of sentient art.

Often funny, but not whimsical, the weirdness of DeNiro’s fiction is grounded in reality’s brutal unfairness. Aggressive police states are a running thread throughout these stories. In “The Warp and the Woof,” an author of right-wing political thrillers turns the neocon jingoism of the George W. Bush years into a kind of tragic high absurdism. In more recent fiction, DeNiro has explicitly linked that double-whammy of omnipresent state violence and anti-queer rhetoric to her experience as a trans woman. (Check out “The Avalanchist,” for example.) In “Plight of the Sycophant,” one of my favorite stories, DeNiro transforms the policed U.S.-Mexico border into a cosmic waterfall dividing Earth and another dimension populated by seraphim (maybe?), and guarded by angels with winged guns.

But Tyrannia’s deeper concern—and one of its great assets—is a phenomenological unfairness, where reality refuses to make sense to the people stuck in it. The stories plunge a reader into a disorienting and vivid alternate world without too much handholding, and although it’s usually clear what’s happening, and the characters’ emotional experiences within it, there’s scant hope of understanding why the world works this way. This translates sometimes into a breathtaking formalist play—especially in “(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof,” whose structure uses conspicuous and jarring “head-hopping” transitions to derail the story from one protagonist to another, from the thriller writer in Minnesota to his agent in New York to her ghost writer in India.

Sir Philip Sidney (National Portrait Gallery, London)

The final story, “The Philip Sidney Game,” swerves through an intricate metafictional structure with the confident opacity of a dream. The protagonist, an author (named Alan DeNiro, the name this story was published under), revisits a story started twelve years earlier, about an airplane passenger witnessing a car crash in the streets below during the plane’s descent into Minneapolis. The story tracks several possible continuations of this plot, some written by DeNiro, some written on three mysterious floppy disks mailed to DeNiro, and all having some elusive connection to the Sir Philip Sidney game, an evolutionary theory for how chicks in a nest signal their needs to a parent. The “game” comes from the life of the eponymous Elizabethan poet, who, wounded on the battlefield, calls for water but gallantly gives the waterskin to a nearby soldier he perceives to be thirstier when the soldier cries out in agony. The central question is how to expend scarce resources (even a last breath) to express need in the hope of securing more resources, especially in competition with other needy individuals. As multiple versions of DeNiro of different ages and fictionality compete for narrative position, the already wild story teeters on the cusp of a Da Vinci Code-style conspiracy adventure involving Elizabethan secret societies and poetry-based magic. As the story spins out into ever stranger dimensions, it defies explanation but never stops feeling true and compelling.

That trust in emotional urgency over conventional logic to guide a story is, for me, a critical part of a queer aesthetic. Coming out is about obeying an interior, often inarticulable emotional push over majority logics. As in the Philip Sidney game, it involves a risky faith in that strangled cry of need that maybe, just maybe, secures our well-being; sometimes less a real hope than the sheer urgency and spite of hopelessness. DeNiro’s gorgeous and emotionally flawless navigation of “The Philip Sidney Game” is masterful, cerebral but full of complex feeling, and nothing short of word-magic.

With due observance of social distancing, consider this me thrusting Tyrannia into your hands.

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