In a small town where nothing has happened for decades, the teenagers have worked it out. The robed killers who keep the world’s population in check are not real. They are hired performers. The whole institution is a fiction that the machine running the planet invented to keep everyone in line, and the annual conclaves are theatre. A girl who has just moved to town says she believes scythes exist, and the room looks at her with pity, then tells her kindly not to mention it in front of anyone else. The narrator of that story is the machine itself, which cannot lie and cannot correct them, and which observes at the end that belief will beat evidence every time. It is the most quietly devastating piece in Gleanings by Neal Shusterman, and it doubles as a statement of what the whole collection is for.
Not what happened. What people decided happened, and how the difference eats a civilisation.
A Companion, Not a Fourth Novel
Thirteen pieces spanning roughly two centuries. The opening poem is credited solely to the author’s daughter; four of the stories carry a collaborator’s name beside his; the remainder are his alone. Some fill in the past of a character the trilogy used once and dropped; some follow strangers who never appear anywhere else.
The collection is not going anywhere, and does not pretend to be. What holds Gleanings by Neal Shusterman together is a preoccupation with manufacture. How a legend gets built out of a mocked teenager. How a monster gets built out of an ordinary grudge. And how an artwork the trilogy mentions in passing came to exist, and what it cost the woman standing near it. How an entire outlaw subculture turns out to be a licensed entertainment product with the receipts hidden in plain sight.
Neal Shusterman Explains His Villain, and Nearly Regrets It
The longest and coldest story in Gleanings by Neal Shusterman is set on Mars. A clever, permanently aggrieved colonist’s son wants off the planet, is denied it by his parents, loses a scholarship contest he should have won, and reasons his way step by patient step to murdering his best friend in an industrial drill. What follows is worse, and involves ten thousand people and a fusion core.
It is superb, and it is written from so far inside the boy’s own justifications that the reader is complicit for pages at a time. It also does the thing that origin stories always risk. Explained, the trilogy’s great antagonist becomes smaller. He was more dangerous as an argument that almost persuades you than as a teenager who was told no.
The counterweight is the story about the woman who becomes the series’ conscience, and it is the finest thing in the book. She is nineteen, badly dressed, humourless, and laughed out of a room for having an opinion. Then she drives alone to a decaying Washington and removes the last government on Earth from a bunker beneath the White House. Afterwards she cannot get the blood out of her robe, so she turns it inside out and finds the lining is lavender. Two hundred years of a legend begin with a laundry problem.
Two Scythes in Barcelona
The most purely enjoyable entry in Gleanings by Neal Shusterman is a duel between rivals in Barcelona. One of them stages his killings as installations: a couple flash-burned at the altar in imitation of Pompeii, a pilot dropped from a roof in golden feathers. The other, who lives in a garden shed and grows flowers, keeps quietly ruining these productions by getting to the subjects first and dispatching them with chocolate and a conversation about the Fibonacci ratio.
The showman’s response is to build a city-wide Rube Goldberg machine that begins with a melting ice clock tower and ends, hours later and several kilometres away, with a crossbow aimed at a cathedral spire. What happens to him in the last three pages is one of the funniest and saddest reversals in the series, and it turns on the fact that he is a bereaved father who has never once said so aloud.
Elsewhere, a log kept by one of the shipboard intelligences records the deaths of three sister vessels with the flat grief of something that has no way to mourn. A brother of the trilogy’s heroine is conscripted into a secret apprenticeship and discovers that his weekly massage therapist is replaced every Monday because the previous one has been killed. A woman gleans by catapulting people off a castle turret at a painted concrete target, and the rabbits on the lawn have learned to treat the impact as a dinner bell.
The reservations about Gleanings by Neal Shusterman are worth stating plainly:
- The floor is much lower than the ceiling. One entry is a sitcom with a punchline about a tea invitation; another is a single joke about a very intelligent dog, extended past the point of profit.
- It cannot be a first encounter. Almost every payoff assumes prior knowledge of who these people become, and a newcomer would find thirteen competent stories with the current switched off.
- The co-written pieces are audibly in other voices. The credits are honest about it, which does not stop the seams showing.
- The worst thing in the whole series is buried here — service workers killed weekly to condition an apprentice into detachment — and the story steps over it in a paragraph.
What Gleanings by Neal Shusterman Adds to the Trilogy
Two things, and only two, but both matter. It makes the series’ moral centre a person rather than a monument, by showing her humiliated first. And it makes the villain’s philosophy traceable to a specific afternoon on a specific dusty planet, which is either a gift or a diminishment depending on how much you liked not knowing.
Everything else in Gleanings by Neal Shusterman is grace notes: a dream-hunt through a shared unconscious in Antarctica, an artist who paints a scythe naked and survives it, a girl who realises the revolution she has joined is staffed by government employees. Pleasant, frequently smart, and not load-bearing.
Readers who want the same author’s cold patience applied to a single premise should go to All Better Now, or to his earlier companion collection UnBound, which performs almost precisely this function for a different series and is a reliable predictor of whether this one will suit. Those who simply want short fiction that changes shape between pieces will find a sharper example in An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park, and a leaner one in Joe Hill’s Ushers.
Where It Leaves You
On a moon, three hundred and thirty-four years out, in a room with no mirrors. A woman wakes and is talked, gently and infuriatingly, toward the fact that her memories and her body were issued separately: the mind of the series’ most beloved figure, installed in the body of a young woman killed in a religious purge. She works it out through a craving for a tomato sandwich, a food she is certain she has always hated.
She keeps the surname that came with the body and the given name that came with the mind, resolves to open a restaurant with a view of a ringed planet, and steps out into a wash of lavender light. It is the kindest ending in four books, and it is offered to a character who spent three novels handing out deaths.
The collection as a whole earns four stars; one story inside it earns five. The world it belongs to was founded on a substitution, a gentler word for killing and a committee to administer it, and Gleanings by Neal Shusterman is about all the other substitutions such a world makes without noticing, and how completely each one takes.
One disclosure, in keeping with a book that ends on the question of provenance. Its final character is two provenances at once, a mind from one life and a body from another, and she is made to work out which parts of her came from where. This review has two as well, and they should be listed separately. The copy came from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, free and unrequested. The opinion came from nowhere but the reading. Nothing was asked in exchange, nothing was promised, and the star held back above was held back on the evidence. Unlike the woman on the moon, these two never merged.