REVIEW: “The Ravens’ Sister” by Natalia Theodoridou

Review of Natalia Theodoridou, “The Ravens’ Sister”, Podcastle: 508 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Oh. Oh my.

I don’t want anyone to get the impression that the best way to get me to like a story is to rip my heart out of my chest with your bare hands. I’m just saying that it’s been known to work on occasion.

“The Ravens’ Sister” riffs off the fairy tale motif of the seven brothers who are enchanted as birds and the sister who has to save them. But there are some fates you can’t save people from. Key quote: “Were my brothers men when they went to war? Had they always had the hearts of birds?” The story is told in several versions, but the core story is the same: seven brothers go off to war in what is clearly some part of the horrors that the former Yugoslavia dissolved into. They return to their father changed, and their sister is tasked with a quest to change them back. In a fairy tale, she would have spun shirts from nettles or kept mute silence under persecution. Here she encounters several celestial beings who either help or hinder her, each taking its toll on her body. It is always the sister’s fate to sacrifice herself for her brothers’ sake. She never even questions it.

In one version of the story, the brothers return as literal birds, in another they return heroes, in the last as traitors. But in all cases, the war has changed them and they will never be whole again. The language is powerful and poetic and ugly. Be in a good place when you listen to this story. It will damage you.

The one structural thing that I disliked (and this is a general thing that I’ve touched on before) is that there is a framing structure of numbered verses, sometimes with as little as a single sentence in each verse. The narration included giving the verse numbers, which I found intrusive. Each spoken number jolted me sideways from the flow of the story. In my (highly subjective) opinion, the narration would have been more effective simply with a pause between verses, leaving the numbers in the written text but unspoken. They work visually–the eye slides over them as it does over the verse numbers in a Biblical text. But in audio that particular aspect just didn’t work for me. The story worked, but not that detail.

(Originally published in Kenyon Review Online)

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REVIEW: Abandoned Places edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell

Review of George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell, eds., Abandoned Places, (Shohola Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This anthology is the inaugural publication of newly launched “Purveyors of Fine Genre Fiction”, Shohola Press, and what a fine way to launch it is.

This is a collection of stories about places which are “forgotten but not gone,” of “the lonely, the rejected, and the uninhabited” (to quote the back of the book). Some of the stories are classics, written by greats such as Poe and Bradbury. But many more of them are new tales, by a variety of contemporary writers both familiar and new. In the editor’s introduction they say that “we especially wanted to introduce audiences to strong voices who haven’t yet received the widespread distribution they deserve”. Since one of the reasons I was motivated to start SFFReviews was so that I could broaden my reading horizons and learn about new authors (whether actually new or merely new to me), I was incredibly excited to receive a review copy of this beautiful book.

Below is the table of contents, and the review for each story will be linked from here as it is published:

In his introduction, Cornell says that “If you discover at least one new writer who speaks to you in these pages, we have accomplished our goal, dear reader.” I discovered not one, but many. The collection is well balanced and every individual piece is stellar. Even the ones not entirely to my taste left me glad to have read them.

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REVIEW: “Bartleby and the Professor Solve the Riddle” by Shondra Snodderly

Review of Shondra Snodderly, “Bartleby and the Professor Solve the Riddle”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 246-248. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The title of the story is almost a story in itself; we’ve got the characters, we’ve got the problem or obstacle, and we’ve got the resolution! Ordinarily that would mean there wouldn’t be much left in the story to be surprising, but here at least two questions present themselves as in need of answer from the title alone: What is the riddle, and how do they solve it? Following close on their heels is the question: Why does it matter that they solve it? All these questions are aptly answered in Snodderly’s relatively short story — though to be fair, Bartleby’s role in solving the riddle is perhaps a bit overstated in the title!

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REVIEW: “Work, and Ye Shall Eat” by Walker McKnight

Review of Walker McKnight “Work, and Ye Shall Eat”, Apex Magazine 105 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The story opens three months into an unknown apocalyptic situation. All we know is that the staff of a colonial re-enactment village have been walled in with two layers of electric fencing, and they have no idea why. Is is a virus? An alien invasion? They are told simply to plan for the future, which Karen, their general manager helps them to do, getting the tradespeople to teach the actors and salespeople useful skills and making sure they plant enough food to survive the winter.

This is the calmest apocalypse I’ve read about, which makes the slow-growing menace all the more powerful. Karen becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as she struggles to keep her people inside the walls, but it remains satisfying to read, because it’s so believable, so normal. In the end, I don’t really know what happened, except that it isn’t good. I’m not normally a huge fan of ambiguity, but in this case I think it works.

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REVIEW: “Camping” by J. D. Buffington

Review of J. D. Buffington, “Camping”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 260-265. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

What I liked about this story was the structure, a tale of two camping trips, of two sons and their parents (mother and boyfriend in one; father in the other), of encounters with the strange and unusual. The son in the first trip is the father in the second, and this allows the two encounters, experienced by one person, to be filtered through two very different lenses. What seems wild and exciting and just a bit scary as a child can be terrifying as an adult; and what was told off as merely a wild animal to a child may, when seen by an adult, be a very different thing. At the end of the story, one is left wondering if the man’s childhood memories are true, or if his adult experiences are closer to reality.

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REVIEW: “Daughter” by Will Reierson

Review of Will Reierson, “Daughter”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 249-256. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The title draws focus to the daughter in the story, but from the start it is Mary’s father, Neil, the narrator, who attracts my attention — and not for positive reasons. He is willing to ignore the fears of his wife, Cáit, and sacrifice the safety of his family simply to prove himself in the face of a dare. Oh, he has his own fears — but his fears of the fair folk pale in comparison to the more legitimate fears of his wife that they will struggle to survive the winter in an abandoned homestead. Throughout the story, my biggest impression is that Neil is both superstitious and a bit dim, and the consequences of both these things for his family, and especially his daughter, are real and serious. It makes it hard for me to find him sympathetic, in that basically that everything that happens to Mary is his fault, and he could have prevented it, at many different steps, and he refused to do so. That he eventually does all he can to rescue Mary in the end does not make him the hero of this story. It only reinforces that villainy comes in many different guises.

(In case anyone was wondering (and I doubt anyone was), Cáit is not a plausible nickname of Caitilín in the middle of the 18th century. Details matter. It’s worth doing the research.)

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REVIEW: “Robbie and the Birds” by A. R. Collins

Review of A. R. Collins, “Robbie and the Birds”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 182-185. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

We’ve all read the ghost stories, read all the horror movies. We, like the narrator, all “know perfectly well that people who casually moved into haunted houses would always end up regretting it” (183). So reflects the narrator after she moves into a new house only to find dead birds upon her doorstep every morning, their throats broken or cut. Sometimes, though, the ghosts haunt not the house but the people who live in it.

Maybe it’s because I’m a parent myself, but I found this story of child possession exceptionally creepy. Thankfully (from my point of view), this creepiness was offset by a happy ending.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Of Anger and Beauty” by Stephen R. Smith

Review of Stephen R. Smith, “Of Anger and Beauty”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 179-181. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Smith’s story is short, and I can see the anger in it. I don’t like reading stories about human trafficking, especially of young girls, but if I have to read them, I want them to be stories of vengeance and come-uppance. This one is, and it ends on a happy note. But while the anger is clear, the beauty is harder to find.

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REVIEW: “A Helping Hand” by Samantha Trisken

Review of Samantha Trisken, “A Helping Hand”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 238-244. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I feel pretty strongly that every story needs to have a purpose, a reason why it has to be told, why this story, rather than another story. Sometimes that purpose is what the story itself has to say, the way in which the world is improved because of something in the story itself; sometimes it is simply that the story gives pleasure to those who read it; and sometimes the purpose is simply that the author is better off for having written it than they would have been had they not.

Given this, everything I read I read with a pervasive underlying question “Why this story?” I thought that a lot while reading the opening of Trisken’s tale, in which a young girl, Tessa, escapes a would-be abductor only to witness his murder.

The importance of that scene is that it introduces us to Dillon, and the centerpoint of the story is Tessa’s relationship with Dillon. It is engrossing to see the complexities of this relationship and how it develops, but the other consequences of the opening — the trauma that the witness of a murder has to have caused — seem nowhere taken up, and I found this made it hard for me to fully engage with the story. The end brings no further resolution: Why this story? I don’t know. Maybe someone else reading it coming with a different background and different experiences might be able to answer that question.

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REVIEW: “Picture Perfect” by Lori Tiron-Pandit

Review of Lori Tiron-Pandit, “Picture Perfect”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 227-236. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Do you sometimes feel like motherhood is just a huge trap? Like you might have made a mistake, but now there is no going back? And you’re locked into this life with a child, and as much as you’d like to escape, you’re just stuck, and there’s no more hope? (227)

This was a scary, scary story, not because it exhibits any of the “scary-story” elements of classic horror, but because it tackles head-on a scary, scary topic, one which is both ordinarily quite taboo but also commonplace in the lives of many women: motherhood regret. Whether it comes in the haze of post-partum depression, or whether it is a one-off thought “Maybe my life would’ve been better if my child(ren) had never been born”, it happens, it’s real, and no one is willing to talk about it. This is where the power of stories come in — it allows us to explore the “what if” without the consequences, to work through how things might have been, both if things had gone worse than they actually did and if they had gone better.

I have a delightful child whom I love very much, who has always been a good sleeper and a good eater, and who was long-awaited, but so many aspects of Larisa’s experiences, and the experiences of the women in her online mothers community, ring true. It’s a glimpse of how things might have gone, but (in my case at least) didn’t, and it’s a scary, scary glimpse.

Goblins and ghosts, zombies and vampires, serial murderers in the dark — none of these scare me. This story did.

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