Far From Home is Walter Tevis’ only short story collection, and, I know everyone seems to say this cliched comment about all short story collections (or at least I do) - “it’s a mixed bag” - but they say it because it’s true! Rarely is a short story collection full of bangers and Far From Home is no different - there’s both good and bad stuff here.
Tevis is an interesting writer as he was successful both as a novelist who wrote on contemporary subjects - The Hustler (about pool sharks), The Queen’s Gambit (about professional chess players) - and sci-fi as well - The Man Who Fell to Earth, Mockingbird. I disliked The Man Who Fell to Earth, I’ve tried the first chapter of Mockingbird and have put it on indefinite hold for now, and the stories I liked least in Far From Home were the sci-fi ones - I just don’t like Tevis’ genre fiction.
Not that those stories are badly written, and they at least always seem to have an interesting premise or idea, but they all felt kinda one-note and unengaging. The Ifth of Oofth is a trippy story about the fifth dimension, The Goldbrick is about the US Military trying to dislodge a gold brick in a mountain and take it too far, which I took to be a satire on the military industrial complex, and The Big Bounce is about a ball that never stops bouncing and gains speed the more it bounces.
The title story is the worst one - it’s nothing like the movie adaptation where Spider-Man fights Mysterio in Europe! I’m joking of course - it’s really about a whale in an Arizona swimming pool - but it still sucked.
The best stories for me were the ones that were reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s stories - if you don’t know who that is, he wrote a number of brilliant ‘60s Twilight Zone episodes so that should give you an idea. Weird, creepy, imaginative stories with a twist at the end, basically.
Rent Control is about a couple who discover they can stop time when they’re physically touching in their apartment. The premise reminded me a lot of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals! The ending though is kinda flat.
Out of Luck also suffers from a weak ending but the story was interesting for the most part. An artist sees the same man in every person as he goes about his day in New York - but who is this strange man?! This one was definitely the eeriest story of the bunch.
In The Other End of the Line, a man receives a phone call from himself two months in the future and uses the information he gets to become rich - but what’ll happen in two months’ time if he fails to call himself back...?
My favourite story was A Visit From Mother and its companion piece, Daddy. The ghosts of a man’s dead parents visit him and he works through his issues with them. Knowing a little about Tevis’ life, I couldn’t help seeing it as an autobiographical piece. In real life he was abandoned by his parents in a hospital for a year when he was a kid and the man in the story raging at his parents’ ghosts was also abandoned by his parents after getting sick as a kid.
The story takes a bizarre Oedipal direction with his mother, whom he has spirit sex(!) with (sexualising mother happens again in a later story, Sitting in Limbo - I think Tevis was a seriously fucked up dude!), but his conversation/rant with his dad was deeply compelling and felt very real. Fiction as therapy?
Considering many of the stories feature a sexual component, I was surprised that only one (The Apotheosis of Myra - a sci-fi tale about the wife of a murderer becoming one with an alien planet and tormenting her hubby) was published by Playboy magazine. And, as I’ve noticed the more I’ve read Tevis, who was an alcoholic, there is booze in every one of these stories, always in the background, but always noticeable and ever-present.
Some stories didn’t land for me but quite a few did and I enjoyed those ones plenty. They’re all well-written and imaginative so Far From Home is certainly not a bad short story collection. Despite not being among his better known books, it’s worth checking out if you’re a Walter Tevis fan like me or someone who enjoys the kind of stories Richard Matheson wrote as well.
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