Conrad Williams' The Unblemished

My introduction to the limited edition of The Unblemished, from Earthling Publications...The thing about Conrad Williams is that he always means it—every word of it. With a rough elegance and a disarming precision that isn’t fussy. I’ve never read a dishonest sentence by this man. Locked in with that sensibility the reader finds an implacably original imagination and world-view. When you enter into a Conrad Williams novel, you are going to come out the other side…altered, offered up to something unexpected. He’s not the kind of writer who conforms to your reality. Instead, you conform to his vision. Sometimes he scares the shit out of me with that vision, but I still want to follow him because his characters are so real and his prose is so amazing.In the most horrific scenes in The Unblemished—and there are many—Williams’ writing is so good it makes you want to re-read sentences even as you’re trying to look away. It’s not that he makes everything pretty. Far from it. Instead, it’s that he’s fully in the moment, fully engaged in giving the reader the specific and telling detail that makes a character or a scene come to life. Perhaps as importantly, he doesn’t hand you comic-book violence or TV realism like so many writers these days. You can’t escape Williams because what he offers up to the reader has no falseness to it. If you want escapism, find it somewhere else.Yet at the same time, the horrific is mixed with the gentle, the keen observation of a quiet moment, because even though some of the things that happen in The Unblemished could never happen in real-life, the relationships, the description of a city—these are clearly taken from the personal. Williams may be possessed by a dark vision, but in the local color and in the personal observation and confessional aspect of his prose the reader finds needed balance.Did I mention how exciting this novel is? Down forgotten tunnels. In the dark. Real people caught in terrible situations. With the reader right there beside them, unable to get away.Did I mention how creepy this novel is? How absolutely frightening in places? It takes a lot to scare me these days, but Williams manages to do it—in the idea of mimicry, in the idea of both human and inhuman cruelty. These are themes Williams returns to again and again, along with a kind of revelatory, visionary quality, a streak of otherness that seems to me akin to the Decadents’ acknowledgment of the strange beauty to be found in the grotesque and the horrific.In my estimation, Williams does so many things so well that there’s really not much he can’t do. He is one of my favorite stylists and one of the few writers working in the area of horror and dark fantasy who has my full attention all of the time, in every book, every story. The Unblemished is further evidence of his superlative talent.