The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Explanation and Other Good Advice by Don Webb
Trevor Dodge

Don Webb. The Explanation and Other Good Advice. Woodcraft of Oregon, 1998. 120 pp. Paper: $9.95.

The Explanation and Other Good Advice, Don Webb’s latest collection of short fiction, promises and delivers dreams worth dreaming, where the sheer weight of language lies squarely on the reader’s chest and she is asked to breathe, where the author gets lost in the pleasure of creating worlds simply for the Heideggerian joy of it, and where fiction is governed only by secrets that can be discovered through an actual engagement with the Big Whatever that fiction is anyway.
While Webb’s forte remains psychedelic science fiction shot through with a hefty dose of H. P. Lovecraft, The Explanation takes exciting risks with language that are hard to come by in most genre fiction. Webb uses genres like wild marionettes, creating worlds and questioning them with the same What Have I Done? awe-anguish that plagued Victor Frankenstein. I don’t know if Blake was right about the entire universe in a grain of sand, Webb writes, but you can have an entire world in ten blocks.
And the worlds are seemingly bottomless; from forty telestatic channels of History of Ballooning, an Al Azif sticker book, and a quasi-academic dialogue concerning Barthelme’s Come Back, Doctor Caligari, Webb challenges us to download smarter, slicker and quicker fiction by offering us the same thirty-nine-cent Magic Marker he uses to conjure the pages before our very eyes. Webbs dreamworlds are intelligent, engaging and surprisingly inviting. The Explanation encapsulates the results from a wide spectrum of creative experiments and serves them up without grudge or agenda, allowing readers rare access to the actual processes by which fictions are made. [Trevor Dodge]