REVIEW: “Sin” by Karl Egerton

Review of Karl Egerton, “Sin”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 108-118. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

It’s astonishing how often SFF stories don’t seem to have any form of religion in them, given how major an influence that has been on pretty much the entire history of human culture. Without religion there really isn’t any kind of concept of “Sin”, so going into this story the question for me was: What kind of religion is it going to be?

Never did I expect it would centered around the goddess Perchta (whom I’d recently been reading up on, so to see her name was a sudden delight!), rather than classic Christian tropes. There is a visceral — no pun intended — delight in reading of the school children chanting:

“But we know that she was a Sinner because…?”

Albert and the rest of the class, in unison, practically sang the response.

“Because Perchta came and sliced up her guts!”

The teacher gestured to Albert.

“And then?”

“She filled her with rocks!” he chanted.

The children let out an excited giggle.

“And why did Perchta’s righteous knife disembowel her?”

“To save us all from Sin!”

Because when I read that, I know I’m in for something different, something fun.

Egerton’s story is an investigation of childhood, of sin, where it comes from, and how we rationalise it. “What sort of thing is a sin, really?” Albert asks the priest, and that question encapsulates the entire story. “It was absolutely necessary for actions to have consequences,” the narrator tells us, and in the end, we see that Sin and Perchta, transgression and punishment, are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Breach” by Niki Kools

Review of Niki Kools, “Breach”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 122-133. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I love stories where the main characters are not like us, and where this is fed into the story in little bits and pieces. At the start, there is no indication that Vivion is other than human, until then, a few sentences in, we read “The air outside, swarming with little summer seeds, has hardened her scales on her way here.” Ooooh! I am now instantly intrigued.

And the story just keeps getting stranger, full of bits that are unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and there are so many beautiful little details. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “What Lies in the Ice” by C. A. Harland

Review of C. A. Harland, “What Lies in the Ice”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 103-106. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I always knew mining was dangerous. But…

This story is told through a series of logs, or snippets of logs (we do not know if the entries we’ve been given are excerpts or complete). In fact, there is much we do not know. We never know the narrator, their name, their age, their background (other than that they have previous mining experience), there is nothing to make them feel similar or foreign or familiar or strange. The entire story rides on this narrative anonymity.

What lies beneath the ice? It would probably be no surprise that it wasn’t something happy and cuddly. But the obvious answer isn’t always the right one…

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Katabasis” by Petter Skult

Review of Petter Skult, “Katabasis”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 120-121. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story is a mishmash of elements from a variety of sources — Biblical references to Lazarus, contemporary SF in the form of integrated human-machines, a sprinkling of Greek gods — providing a sense of familiarity and also a sense of a much wider scope than can actually be given in a two page story. This is generally quite an effective technique to use in flash fic, in that one can omit many details knowing that the reader will be able to fill them in themselves from other stories they have read. (This is what the philosopher David Lewis calls `interfictional carryover’. Interfictional carry-over occurs when readers import knowledge of certain types of tropes into a story where those tropes are not explicitly mentioned. [1, p. 45]) But predicating a story on the assumption that readers can all fill in certain gaps is a dangerous gamble to take; for if you’ve got a reader who, like me, doesn’t know who Adrestia is, all the import of the ending is lost.

Note

[1] Lewis, David. 1978. “Truth in Fiction”, American Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 1: 37–46.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Nephilia clavata” by G. Grim

Review of G. Grim, “Nephilia clavata“, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 70-71. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Oh, this story was deliciously creepy! From the very first line —

So back in the day, there was this hipster trend for living tattoos.

to the very end, and through all the riot of complications and consequences of sharing your skin with someone else. The story is only a page and a half, and unlike many stories that length, it is perfectly complete as it is, and extremely well crafted.

Warning: If you’re not a huge fan of spiders, don’t do as I did, and look up nephila clavata in wikipedia. Utterly gorgeous, but they’re as creepy as their namesake story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Flesh and Code” by Johanna Arbaiza

Review of Johanna Arbaiza, “Flesh and Code”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 276-305. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’m always a bit worried when a story starts with a person standing alone, thinking to themselves, because most people tend to think pretty boring thoughts, and if that’s all that’s going to happen, I’m going to be bored — even if the person thinking these thoughts is the intriguely named Deathgleaner. In the end, I wasn’t bored, but I certainly was a bit confused.

It’s a slow building story. The initial world-building is done via a conversation that the Deathgleaner overhears, but there is little enough context to that conversation that the details that are provided are hard to make sense of; I felt as though I was being told quite a bit but that I had no way of understanding what any of it meant. There is (or was? or will be?) a war. There is (definitely is) a shortage of clean water. Probably these two things are connected.

Many of these questions are never answered, which I found frustrating — all the more frustrating because the characters are rich and complex, and excessively intriguing, and I wish that I could fully know and grasp their story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Demon of the Song” by Ville Meriläinen

Review of Ville Meriläinen, “Demon of the Song”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 337-355. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is a nice, satisfyingly long story full of rich description and characters with complex histories.

Natalie and Siren are linked together in uneasy partnership that Natalie longs to escape. Vanderoy — perhaps — is the one to help her. But can Natalie accept Vanderoy’s help when she knows that Siren is waiting beside her for the moment that she can get Vanderoy in her clutches? Will Natalie save herself at Vanderoy’s expense, or sacrifice herself to save Vanderoy?

The story was finely crafted, with details fed to the reader at just the right pace, until the last of the pieces snapped into the puzzle.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Demon in a Copper Case” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “Demon in a Copper Case”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 135-137. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

When times are hard, heresy no longer seems like such a bad idea. The people of Singstoat are suffering from a decline in industry, and many people are debt-ridden and struggling. In such a context, the temptation to call upon the demon in the copper case is too strong to resist…

This was a fun little story, quickly told but with plenty of detail and characters. It’s a classic plot line but there is something satisfying in reading a good retelling of an old tale.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Everybody and His Mother” by Agrippina Domanski

Review of Agrippina Domanski, “Everybody and His Mother”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I struggled with this one. I struggled with reading the story, to the point where I eventually gave up about half-way through, and then let it sit for another month before coming back to reread it. It’s not that it was poorly written, it’s not that it contained elements I found problematic, I just found it a difficult story to engage with. Part of it is that it seems quite atypical for Luna Station Quarterly‘s usual offerings; it very much felt like an ordinary story, of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places and that’s all it was for the first three-quarters of the story or so. In another venue, this wouldn’t have even been worth mentioning; but reading this story in a spec fic journal, I found myself waiting for more, wanting more. So I’m in the strange position of having to say that even if the story itself is good, the venue choice isn’t. It just didn’t work for me, and that ended up affecting my interaction with the story.

The story deals with the permeability of memory, and involves a lot of double-talk; I’m never quite sure what or whom to believe, never quite sure what the truth is. Part of this is because the narrator, Jemima, is not entirely reliable; part of it is simply because many useful pieces of information are omitted from where I would want to have them, or even omitted altogether. For example, both “Jack” and “the kid” play central roles both in the story and in Jemima’s life, but it was unclear for quite awhile what the relationship was between the kid and Jemima, or between the kid and Jack, or between Jack and Jemima. Clues and puzzle pieces were given, but I put them together in the wrong way, only to find a significant portion of the story later that I’d missed the mark. All of these things conspired to my finding this a difficult piece to read.

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REVIEW: “A Taste of Freedom” by Thomas Webb

Review of Thomas Webb, “A Taste of Freedom”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 375-378. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: Probably not the story you want to read if you’ve suffered from abuse.

This story is told in shadows and secrecy, the story of She and of what He did to her. We never know who either of them are; this is because She doesn’t have enough sense of who she is in order to tell us more than what she does.

It’s not a pleasant story, and, to be honest, not the sort of story that I enjoy at all. I tend to think one must have a very good reason before choosing to write a story of abuse — to have some sense of what will be gained from doing so, and that this gain will outweigh any harm done by perpetuating, almost normalising, such behavior. If there was a gain in telling this story, I’m not sure I was able to see what it was.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment