My finalist pick for the Samuel Richardson Self-Published Fiction Prize

Ms. Never by Colin Dodds

Months ago, I volunteered to serve as a judge for the Samuel Richardson Self-Published Fiction Prize, conceived of and organized by Naomi Kanakia. I was eager to get a taste of the kind of fiction that traditional publishing scorned. I braced myself for the unconventional, the edgy, the unprintable. But mostly what I found was incoherence and under-editing. The most polished and readable submission in my batch, the one I am naming as a finalist in the contest, is in fact the most commercial-feeling book.

Ms. Never by Colin Dodds is a contemporary-world fantasy about a young woman, Farya, who has an inexplicable and uncontrolled magical ability to erase pieces of reality, along with everyone’s memories of whatever has disappeared. This has the effect of altering huge swaths of history and geography. These incidents of erasure, which Farya conceives of as ‘seizures,’ happen in moments of depression, distraction, or else fear and rage. Her primary tool to keep herself from reducing the universe into nothingness is the music of Thelonious Monk, the structured randomness of which is capable of jolting her out of a mental state that leads to catastrophe.

Farya remembers a childhood in a world that is much grander than the one she now inhabits as an adult—a world very similar to our own. In that magnificent past that she inadvertently destroyed, Ohio was a vast empire known as the Greater Anointed Imperial Ohioan Commonwealth, with a space program, diplomatic relations with a nation on one of Jupiter’s moons, and a ten thousand year history. Now Ohio is just… flyover country. The majestic history and billions of lives have been erased. Farya lives with the guilt of knowing that her ‘seizures’ are somehow the cause of this catastrophic elision of reality.

Farya’s storyline, of trying to keep afloat in a bullshit office job in New York and navigate dating in her twenties while managing her destructive condition, intersects with Bryan’s, the entrepreneurial son of a British rockstar who owns a budget cellphone company that literally buys its customers’ souls in the fine print of their cellular plan contracts. His clients, the ones he sells the souls to, are up to something nefarious with all those “Non-Mortal Elements,” as the legalese goes. The plot builds to a climax of cosmic stakes.

At first, it’s not clear that Farya is literally altering the fabric of reality. The first couple of chapters struck me as some extended metaphor for major depression with psychotic features. And it does work on that level, more or less, but it soon becomes clear that Farya is, according to the logic of the book, actually collapsing histories and people and places with her mind, somehow. Only a few people can remember the things that she makes disappear, and most of them go mad when no one else can corroborate their memories.

The bit about souls and psychopomps and angels and demons recalled Good Omens.¹ With its supernatural elements and contemporary setting, it reminded me of what I used to like about Stephen King, back when I was a mega-fan. This is not the kind of book I typically choose to read these days, but it was competently executed and I was invested enough to want to know how it ended.

Ultimately, the plot falls apart in the final act. Juggling huge mysteries and stakes of theological proportions, Dodds fails to stick the landing. There is an over-reliance on dialogue-as-exposition, and the mind-fuck, earth-shattering climax is undermined by long, confusing, word-salad-y descriptions. He was aiming for lyrical and intense, but it comes across as silly and underbaked. Supporting characters fall away and threads go untied.

This isn’t a total dealbreaker for me. One of my favorite contemporary sci-fi authors is Neal Stephenson, who is infamous even among fans for simply giving up and phoning in the last 20% of his books.² William Gibson is also guilty of this, to some degree. But readers who value the destination as much as the journey should be advised.

Ms. Never is at its whimsical best when giving us glimpses of the world-that-was, the world that Farya destroyed:

Being so near to such peril, she felt permission to remember her father, her childhood as a daughter of one of the shining lights of The Greater Anointed Imperial Ohioan Commonwealth. She remembered him visiting the New York Straits as a diplomat when she was a girl. He told her about their family’s history in that exotic land—fleeing through it more than 1,800 years before. That was the story told by relatives at holidays when Farya was young, and people still remembered such things. Her ancestors had been on the losing side of a religious war on the continent of Nantucket. To escape, they took the perilous sea-voyage along the edge of a horizon-spanning, telepathic beast whose blue-and-white-striped torso rose and fell with its breath, creating tides as it dreamed its dreams into passersby. After the Iroquois Catholics pursued them through the Paterson Archipelago and the Monongahela Gap, they crossed the Lesser Cincinattan Sea to their new home, in Columbus.

I really enjoyed these little snippets throughout the book, especially as someone with family roots in Ohio.

I look forward to reading the other finalists.

1. I enjoyed the TV show but, full disclosure, haven’t read the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

2. I think it was Contarini who recently described it as “[Stephenson] just walks off the playground and leaves his toys on the ground.”