A straight-ahead Lafferty story. A cliché about Lafferty is that there is not much science fiction in Lafferty’s science fiction. Of the whole rejection process, Lafferty wrote, “The reason is that editors are kind of dumb. In Haycock, the speckle-eyed scourge, Lafferty gives us a ministering angel who is also an archetypal The story is ghoulishly entertaining, and about as entry-level a Lafferty story as one is likely to find

Lafferty for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matt Keely writes: “Lafferty was an electrical engineer “We will shape the whole world like clay in our hands. There was a whole period of flea-circus legends, among them Louis Bertolotto, who helped turn flea acts , I'd still have guessed it was written by Lafferty. Serious Lafferty is here.

Justin, being a Lafferty hero, becomes distracted. Death is puzzling in Lafferty. But while there are brutal, stony deaths in Lafferty, more often death is less grim than it is in almost It just doesn’t work that way in Lafferty. Parts outlive the whole: a head is lopped off and talks. Lost states return, often improbably.

Its title might just as well describe Lafferty’s Ghost Story. It coincides with how Lafferty takes reality to be. That’s him. friend Cob Coliath shouts, “You are an unmatched half, Tom . . . and ours is a world full of unmatched wholes Hence the sun-and-swine motif in Lafferty’s story. Lafferty knew full well that Frazer was deeply out of fashion.

A warning at the outset: this post begins with an early and pretty innocent Lafferty sex farce, then Sex is all over Lafferty. It is symptomatic that people miss this. It is here that Lafferty’s own libidinal interests enter the story in a compromised form. No one thinks of Lafferty as an erotic writer. Lafferty enjoys it.

Charles Scribner’s Sons published Lafferty’s Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? Lafferty did. In it, Lafferty works through the "Secret Places" stories one by one and tears the whole category apart Lafferty adopts the persona of being terrified by his own work. Lafferty is not just being cranky. He is saying something programmatic.

There are so many memorable birds in Lafferty’s work. Still others are threats around which whole plots turn, as with the roc in “Heart of Stone, Dear” and Lafferty finished it after the wonderful “And All the Skies Are Full of Fish” and before the difficult Lafferty is parodying the detective genre and having a great deal of fun. Lafferty has them on his mind. They inform the character building.

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. The poem also gathers several of Lafferty’s recurrent symbols. There is also the multimedia line, concerned with ontology and communications, Lafferty's great of the Finally, there are Edmund Weakfish and the Putty Dwarf, two of Lafferty’s most interesting images of

Although completed in 1976, the novel already contains the Vietnam argument that Lafferty later makes It is an instance of Lafferty allegorizing history from within the postfiguration machinery of the novel such help, the novel can look like this: space girl crashes on a planet; strange things happen; the whole One has to enter the Lafferty thicket. But Lafferty’s greatest butterfly is Aurelia.

Lafferty would have disagreed about what changed. Lafferty called their concord music. It arranges fictional persons, actions, causes, and consequences into a consequential whole. Yet no whole self can be made from postfictional elements alone. Enter Og, Lafferty's primal storyteller.

The whole evolutionary process is directed toward the Omega Point, the transcendent and already active threaten to replace communion in love with absorption into an impersonal whole. Teilhard begins without bread, wine, or altar and makes the whole earth his altar. The Eucharistic pattern thus encompasses the whole course of cosmic becoming, as though all creation So let’s just end with Marshall McLuhan, whose star was already fading when Lafferty wrote the story.

I admire Lafferty’s verse. The whole “given to a woman young” is powerful and scary. And what does this mean for Lafferty as a writer? If the poem is about Lafferty himself, it places him within the paradigm of martyrdom. It’s just a terrific poem by Lafferty. He didn't write enough of these.