Short Fiction by R.A. LaffertyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Every Lafferty story I've read goes more or less the same.
1. Something weird happens, either to an individual or to the world, for reasons that are largely unexplained and unexplored.
2. Not-especially-ethical people deal with it the way such people do.
3. This doesn't end well.
It's not a formula I love, and I didn't much enjoy these stories, particularly since Lafferty had the misogyny that was common in his time very much on display. It's often mentioned that Lafferty, like Gene Wolfe, was a devout Catholic, but I see very little evidence of it in most of their work; the tone is generally cynical and misanthropic, and rather than being set in a well and benevolently ordered universe, their fiction shows us random, inexplicable events. At least Lafferty's characters mostly behave like human beings, even if they're generally the less admirable type of human being. I've never felt that Wolfe's characters made any sense at all.
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