Getting Started With Lafferty

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will. — "Promantia," The Devil is Dead (1971)

This post is meant as a shortcut into the heart of Lafferty's work if you are new to Lafferty.

To begin, I want to distinguish between two very different things: canonical Lafferty and your Lafferty. Everyone who reads Lafferty has to assemble their own sense of him. Obviously, all writers are like this. Lafferty, though, is especially like this. My own idiosyncratic way of doing that is something I call the Whole Lafferty. By canonical Lafferty, I mean everything of his that has appeared in print. But even that category is incomplete, because Lafferty also wrote many stories and novels that have never been published.

If you want to start reading Lafferty, my first piece of advice is to join East of Laughter and seek out the stories that experienced readers there recommend. I would not suggest beginning with The Best of R. A. Lafferty. I also would not recommend spending heavily on Lafferty books on the secondary market. Prices have become inflated, and new readers are often poorly served by the collector’s market. Lafferty needs smart readers, not collectors.

There is a group, with which I have no association, known as the Book of Sand. They are pirates. Their materials are easy enough to find online, and probably will be until someone hunts them down and shoots them. They seem to have been around for a decade. In particular, you may come across an EPUB called The Man Who Talled Tales, which can easily be converted to PDF. It contains most of Lafferty’s published and unpublished short stories. That makes it a convenient way to explore his short fiction selectively and at your own pace. The stories are arranged roughly in the order in which Lafferty wrote them. If you want to read them in exact compositional order, you can use this bibliographic resource alongside it. It was compiled from Lafferty's index cards.

If your interest is in the novels, I would point you to this resource, which provides both a sense of what the novels are about and a timeline of their composition.

On the Works page, you will also find other useful resources to help you get oriented.

Lafferty wrote two great sequences of stories, and they make especially good entry points.

The first is the Institute for Impure Science sequence, which features one of his greatest creations, Epiktistes, who also appears in the novel Arrive at Easterwine. Many readers find the Institute stories an excellent way into Lafferty’s fiction. Arrive at Easterwine is demanding, so it is best to read at least half a dozen of the Institute stories before taking it on.

If you want something more representative of mature Lafferty, though also more difficult, the second major sequence is worth your attention: The Men Who Knew Everything stories. These stories feature Barnaby Sheen and his friends, along with Austro, Roy Mega, and several other eccentric figures. If you read these stories, I recommend getting a copy of E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds, or at least learning something about it, because it is central to much of what Lafferty is doing in that sequence.

For a quick primer on Lafferty himself, you may wish to consult this resource, which gathers essential material from his interviews. It is one of the fastest ways to get a sense of who Lafferty was and what shaped his imagination.

Finally, a few practical suggestions.

For the history of Lafferty publications, there is the ISFDB.

For old issues of Galaxy, If, and others, there is the Luminist Archive.

Centipede Press is currently publishing Lafferty’s short stories. The volumes are beautiful, but they are also fetish objects. As someone exploring Lafferty, you are better served by learning the order in which Lafferty wrote his stories, and the thematic clusters into which they fall, than by reading them in the mostly random order in which they are currently being published by Centipede.

The fan publication Feast of Laughter is largely available for free in digitized form. I recommend reading everything by Ferguson, Petersen, and Montejo in those volumes, since their work is the most intellectually rewarding criticism in the Lafferty community as it currently exists. You should also seek out the work of Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first important critical reader.

And rather than paying a fortune for rare Lafferty volumes, consider creating an Aeon account with the University of Tulsa, especially if you get hooked, want to read rare material, or research on something only in the archive. You can obtain scans of entire Lafferty manuscripts for less than some sellers now charge on eBay and elsewhere.