Time Tolls for Toro

Robert Moore Williams Time Tolls for Toro (2014)
Regular readers may possibly be aware that I've developed a bit of a fascination with Robert Moore Williams, generally overlooked author of an almost uniquely peculiar body of science-fiction writing. He was a populist who churned them out, very much at home in the digests and so easily dismissed as pulp, and while his writing style allows for the occasional poetic flourish, he reads very much as the self-taught enthusiast bashing them out without concessions to literature or even basic literary conventions. His stories tend to follow their own internal logic, probably made up as he went along complete with disorientating dramatic swerves and elements which seem so poorly fitted to the narrative that it's tempting to think of Williams as having been the science-fiction equivalent of Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowry.

Yet beyond the occasionally tangible influence of Abraham Merritt's hard-boiled adventure, Williams writing always seems to hint at some intense pseudo-spiritual undercurrent, something almost theosophical and doubtless drawn from the author's own idiosyncratic understanding of reality, itself informed by his schizophrenia; so even when he's writing what amounts to a hard-boiled thriller with some minor element which just about tips it over into science-fiction, it feels somehow biblical in essence. As may not come as much of a surprise from the above description, he was approximately living on the same island as A.E. van Vogt, and given van Vogt's significantly having influenced Philip K. Dick, it probably shouldn't raise too many eyebrows that 1950's Danger is My Destiny - one of the eleven short stories in this collection - features a detective on the trail of a suspect who turns out to be himself; and the other ten stories are of equivalent quality - both wonky and startling, or containing startling ideas, at the same time.

After six novels by this guy, I've anticipated a degree of burn out, as can often occur with the work of those taking what may seem like an exclusively intuitive approach, but it hasn't happened yet; and while some of these are clearly the work of someone who wasn't playing with quite the same deck as the rest of us, there's always something new and unexpected thrown up by the sparkly, crackly energy of Williams' narrative.