REVIEW: “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allen Poe

Review of Edgar Allen Poe, “The Oval Portrait”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 127-130 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is one of the reasons I was so excited to review this anthology — for despite having been an English lit major many many years ago, the only Poe I’ve ever read is “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” (if you can call listening to the Crüxshadows’ version of it “reading”).

Poe’s tale of an oval vignette portrait of a young woman is gothic in the extreme — an injured hero, a forced entry into an abandoned building, old and gloomy and grand, references to Mrs. Radcliffe — and it was a little bit weird to read a story that wasn’t so much aping or mimicing or paying homage to these literary structures as being a part of what the homage is paid to in the first place.

Two other things struck me about the story: I love Poe’s use of hyphens, his punctuation style is very much after my own heart; and on p. 129 there were a few things where I wasn’t sure if they were errors in language or intentional. When Poe’s narrator reads a description of the portrait in a small volume he has found upon his bedpillow, the same sentence describing the woman is repeated. A few sentences later, the unusual spelling “pourtray” (for “portray”) is found — not implausible for the mid-19th century, but it’s the only atypical spelling in the story. I could look past both of these as being quirks of Poe’s writing, but then a few sentences later there is a genuine typo, (“be” for “he”), which served to make me unsure about the legitimacy of the two earlier issues. It’s unfortunate: For it then made me question the reliability of this edition of the story.

There is a note at the end of the story indicating that this is a shortened version of a longer story originally published in 1842; this shortened version was revised to remove “the suggestion of a drug-induced hallucination” (p. 130). Given that, and my uncertainty about the story as it is published in this 2018 edition, if nothing else I have now been stirred to go find the original 1842 edition and read that!

(Originally published in Broadway Journal, 1845.)

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REVIEW: “The Stories We Tell to Sleep At Night” by Anna Yeatts

Review of Anna Yeatts, “The Stories We Tell to Sleep At Night”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 199-211 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: Contains oblique references to sexual assault.

John Clive Owens has been offered the chance of a journalist’s lifetime. The divorce of Frank and Cecile Cooper is “as high-profile as they come in Atlanta’s social circle” (p. 199) — not just because of the divorce but because two years into litigation, Cecile disappeared. So when Owens gets a letter purporting to be from her, ready to tell her story, he cannot say no.

He cannot say no when he arrives in the middle of nowhere and Cecile takes away all his tech, his cell phone, even his glasses.

She knows too much. Against Owens, that knowledge is her power over him; but against her ex-husband, no knowledge would be enough to free her from his power. The story she relates is a horrible one of deceit, manipulation, assault, gaslighting, and outright lies — a story all the more horrible because every woman reading Cecile recount her experience either has or knows someone who has had similar experiences.

But Cecile’s story is not the one that Owens needs to tell…

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REVIEW: “The Inheritance” by Bethann Ferrero

Review of Bethann Ferrero, “The Inheritance”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 267-274 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

When Glen inherits a house from his reclusive uncle Butch, and finds a rat-infested abandoned wreck left to moulder, it’s clear that we’re in for a classic horror story. There’s really no other way things can go than badly.

I’m not a huge fan or horror, and this story is certainly not one I’d ordinarily enjoy. Nevertheless — like fine Scotch that is well-made but not to my taste — I could appreciate how well Ferrero took all the typical elements of a horror story and wove them together into something where nothing is new or unexpected, and yet the story is still overwhelmingly successful in what it sets out to do. If you like horror — or prefer your Scotch aged in port to bring out the sweetness — you’ll like this story.

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REVIEW: “The Lost” by Doug Engstrom

Review of Doug Engstrom, “The Lost”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 229-238 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is one of the shorter stories in the collection, which is a plus in my book because it’s also 1st-person-present-tense — a combination I find tougher than some to read. Wait — that makes it sound like I’m saying “thank goodness it was short because then I was put out of my misery sooner”, which isn’t at all what I meant. Rather, that when this combination works for me, it tends to work best in shorter rather than longer pieces.

Another reason that makes the POV and tense work here for me is the way in which this otherwise solidly SF story adapts frameworks from fairy tales. In fairy tales, one rarely gets characters, only caricatures. The Beautiful Younger Daughter, the Clever Youngest Son, the Wicked Stepmother, all defined by their labels. In Engstrom’s story, the characters too are identified with their labels, but the labels become names: Engineer, Captain, Ship, Pilot, no definite article, defining their roles and defined by them.

No one is more so defined than Agent, who is the only one of the crew who has “allowed the imperative of privacy to be connected to taboo…stood in the Hall at the Agent’s Academy and seen the shrine dedicated to the Agents who died rather than violate the integrity of the mail” (p. 237). Agent chose this life, chose to allow himself to be defined as Agent, and through his choice this label contains untold power — and an untellable choice.

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REVIEW: “Fishing Village of the Damned” by George R. Galuschak

Review of George R. Galuschak, “Fishing Village of the Damned”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 251-266 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching SFF TV from the 90s on, it’s that things never go well for the Chosen One — and it doesn’t go any better for Astraea in this story, on assignment with Fred the Burning Skeleton, Sadako the evil spirit, and Dave. It’s supposed to be a charity mission, rescue the provincial Spanish fishing village from Big-Dick Howie, but Astraea — none of them — expected to find a village that didn’t want to be rescued.

This was a light comedy of errors, quick to read and amusing.

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REVIEW: Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri

Review of Sarena Ulibarri, ed., Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers (World Weaver Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I was extremely pleased to be offered an ARC of this book as my exposure to the solarpunk genre has so far been rather limited and I’ve wanted to change that. I read enough depressing stuff, fiction and nonfiction, that the prospect of reading a collection of stories all of “a type of optimistic science fiction that imagines a future founded on renewable energies” (back cover) is enormously tantalising.

The book promises stories that are uplifting and optimistic, and the seventeen stories in this anthology are speculative in the very best sense of the word: They speculate on how our future could be, rather than how it must be, and provide an optimistic view which somehow manages to escape being escapism. Reading these stories, there is still a sense that these speculations could turn out to be true. The red thread that runs through all of them and ties them together into a lovely whole is the thread of hope: Sometimes the hope that survives in the face of adversity, sometimes the hope that thrives in the seat of comfort. I came away from reading these uplifted.

As is usual with our reviews of anthologies, we’ll review each story individually, and link to the reviews in the contents list below as the reviews are published:

All of the authors are new to me but one; Julia K. Patt’s story in Luna Station Quarterly was one of the first I reviewed for this site. But this is what I love about anthologies: A chance to be exposed to new genres and new authors.

The book itself is a lovely one, with attractive typesetting, impeccable proofreading, and a colorful and enticing cover. Having reading this anthology, I’m now quite interested in seeing what else World Weaver Press has to offer.

Sara L. Uckelman17 Comments

REVIEW: “The Death of Paul Bunyan” by Charles Payseur

Review of Charles Payseur, “The Death of Paul Bunyan”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 279-286 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The suits pass a glance amongst themselves like it’s weed at a folk rock concert and Johnny wishes he ad brought something to take the edge off. H remembers smoking with Paul and Babe, during a summer they spent in the northwest once. Bigfoot hunting, they said, though in the summer of 1944 draft dodgin was probably more accurate.

For me, this was the perfect piece to finish off the anthology with, which is why I left it for last. The title alone evoked both nostalgia — memories of the Paul Bunyan murals at the Memorial Union at UW-Madison where did my BA and MA — and also a bit of embarrassment when I realised I’ve left Wisconsin behind long enough ago that I do not remember the details of Paul and Babe’s story.
So of course I did what any self-respecting academic would do, and read up on them before reading Payseur’s story. (While utterly irrelevant to Payseur’s story, I feel honor-bound to inform all of you that Disney did an animated musical Paul Bunyan, featuring the voice of Tony the Tiger.) What surprised me — most likely because I never knew this in the first place — was the status of the Bunyan tales as “fake-lore”, that is, stories that were made up to be like folk tales but without the long oral history that folk tales have. But this is supposed to be a review of Payseur’s story and not a discourse on Paul Bunyan, so let’s go see what happens when Bunyan dies, because that is when this story begins:

Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north (p. 279).

Both Bunyan and Appleseed are men out of American myth, but their status as myths doesn’t prevent them from still being men. (Reading the story I had a strange sense that I was reading a superhero story.) But how one can be both myth and man is the pole around which this story pivots, and in turn the story — stories — are that which make Paul and Johnny who they are:

They’re all made of stories, people like Johnny, people like Paul (p. 283).

But does the story die because Paul does, or does Paul die because the story does? That ambiguity, dear reader, is why you should read this story for yourself.

(Originally published in Lightspeed, 2016.)

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REVIEW: “Deleted Scences” by Chris Cornell

Review of Chris Cornell, “Deleted Scenes”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 73-85 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

There are many ways in which a place can become abandoned — there can be a specific reason, a conscious decision, a particular action; or it can merely the slow ebbing away of any reason, decision, or action that one might have or take to go there. The town of Shetlerville has been abandoned both by choice and by inaction, and this illustrates the central theme of the story, how our choices affect our futures.

I really enjoyed this story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a story that balances upon the precipice between romance and horror. It is only the deleted scenes that determine which it is.

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REVIEW: “The Drowning Line” by Haralambi Markov

Review of Haralambi Markov, “The Drowning Line”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 183-195 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I drive on the way back and tell my husband everything he needs to hear — slowly and with conviction, a recital of sweet nothings. What I really do is think about the man in the water, my family’s legacy and undoing.

The story opens with a man being woken by the ringing of a cell phone, and in the exchange that follows between the first-person POV narrator and the man who has called him, I found I had to flip pages back and forth and reread the scene two or three times until I figured it what was happening and who was saying which words.

But that is pretty much my only complaint about the story. It is breathlessly beautiful and full of love and it caught me up in its wake and made my heart weep and bleed. It is both ordinary — the queer aspect is both foregrounded but utterly mundane — and extraordinary — with the speculative elements providing a framework that blend fantasy and reality seamlessly. Reading this story makes me so glad I bought this anthology, despite my misgivings about my suitability to review it.

(Originally published in Uncanny Magazine, 2016.)

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REVIEW: “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” by A. C. Wise

Review of A. C. Wise, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 259-275 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Do dead boys get boners? Or are they safe from being mortified? Oh, God, pun intended.

This is a classic coming-of-age, boy-meets-dead-boy, high-school-prom-graduation-and-what-comes-after story — oh, wait, that’s not really classic, is it. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the story is, and it was a pure delight to read. Now, I’ve never been a high school boy myself, so I can’t attest to the verisimilitude of the narrator’s (I just realised we never learn his name) experiences, but they feel so very real and genuine, the embarrasment, the longing, the joy, the fear. This is a story I will file carefully away, to keep safely until the time comes that I think “I know someone who needs to read this story,” at which time I’ll pull it out and share it with them. Because everyone at some point in their lives, particularly in high school, needs to read a story that shows them they are not alone.

(I also totally and shamelessly want to see this short story turned into a movie. But only this story, however short a movie it ended up being, and not some story vaguely inspired by this story but with a whole bunch more added to it. Because the twist that comes about 2/3 of the way in is both completely unexpected and entirely perfect.)

There is no way to separate the act of reading a story from the reader. There is no way I cannot read the title of this story without thinking of the same-titled REM song, the song that was my mental soundtrack in the weeks after discovering I was pregnant. I cannot get away from those memories or that song while reading this story, which makes my experience of it individual, singular (but though it is individual to me, it is no more individualised than any other reader’s experiences of the story). So I was quite glad that a nod was made to the REM song at the end of the story. I hope those kids think of that time of their lives every time they hear the song, too.

(Originally appeared in The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, 2016.)

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