REVIEW: “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” by M. R. James

Review of M. R. James, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 179-197 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story opens with a long paragraph of Latin which — I’ll admit — I spent far too long translating before moving on to the next paragraph and laughing when the antiquary reading the book the text is from comments that he still needs to translate the text, and does so in the next paragraph. (Unfortunately, modern spellcheckers tend to choke when it comes to Latin, as I know all to well from my own academic research, which is why, I suspect, the typo in the first line wasn’t caught in editing or proofreading.) And, oh, dear reader, the story has informative footnotes (five of them!), and those who’ve been with SFFReviews from the start know how much I love an informative footnote. All this to say: This is a story basically set up to appeal to me. What appealed even more was when I flipped to the end and read the author’s bio: “Though still well-regarded for his work as a medievalist, he is best known as one of the preeminent voices in modern Gothic horror.” A fellow medievalist who specialises in speculative fiction? How have I not heard of James before? This is one of the things that I love about the anthology: It has introduced me not only to contemporary authors but also historic ones, ones where my chances of otherwise stumbling across them are significantly reduced.

(Originally published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Sound a Raven Makes” by Mathew Scaletta

Review of Mathew Scaletta, “The Sound a Raven Makes”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 104-120 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

He yearned for the spark that would flare against the low alder and tall draping hemlock that surrounded the compound. He yearned for the bloom that would illuminate them all. His gaze shifted between the fireweed, his lover, and finally onto the muskeg plain that started at the bottom of the hill and stretched for miles until it slammed into foothills of another devastated mountain.

Ash works with his grandmother and uncle in a meat processing facility in southeastern Alaska, taking in the kills of rich men who fly in to hunt there and butchering them, smoking them, turning them into teriyaki—it all seems perfectly ordinary enough reading until the first customer arrives and Scaletta skirts deftly around the issue of what it is that is being hunted. Same with the next, and the next, until I’m getting increasingly anxious because I know it can’t be anything good.

Spoiler: It’s not anything good.

Such darkness needs to be balanced by light, and in this story that light comes in the form of Ash’s love for JB and JB’s for him. It is a peculiar little story, but that thread running through it lifts it from being just a little too depressing for me.

(Originally published in Gigantosaurus 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Palm Bride” by Diana Hurlburt

Review of Diana Hurlburt, “The Palm Bride”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Any man might create a Palm Bride…It’s made of dreams.

I love me a good historically-influenced fantasy story, and Hurlburt’s story set in St. Augustine-of-the-past, -of-the-not-quite-here-and-now, delivers.

The setting of the story is post-war, when those who returned from the fight are still alive but now old and grey, and the war is near enough so that the uneasy tension between black and white remains, along with the uncomfortable matter of unchaperoned, unmarried young girls. Miss Randolph has traveled to St. Augustine from Seneca Falls to pursue a matter of ghosts, or spirits, but what she finds at Mrs. Cobb’s mansion, Villa Reina, is not at all what she expects. That which inhabits the Palm Bride is “a spirit now, and a bit livelier than most, but there was a time in which she was a goddess”. Miss Randolph is there both to study the spirit and exorcise it.

It’s a pretty standard ghost story; I kept waiting for some twist at the end, but I never quite got it.

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REVIEW: “Episode 14” by Shannon Ryan

Review of Shannon Ryan, “Episode 14”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 131-145 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story takes the central conceit of the anthology and runs with it from the very start: A group of Minnesota teenagers take a car and a cameraman and go off to film — not ghosts, but abandoned places. This is not a ghost story and these are not ghost hunters: “We’re not going to run around screaming like girls and taking our shirts off” (p. 131).

This is not the first time they’ve done this. In fact, they’re up now to their 14th episode, and their goal is an abandoned recycling plant that closed up shop quite suddenly a few years ago. It is dark of night when they reach the deserted building, but inside there is a noise.

Of course it’s not a ghost, because this isn’t a ghost story. And it certainly couldn’t be the giant rooster it sounds to be…

This story was a perfect treasure hunt of clues; I was pretty sure I’d figured out where it was going about half-way through, but there was just enough uncertainty that it was resoundingly satisfying when my hunch was confirmed.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Carnivores” by Rich Larson

Review of Rich Larson, “Carnivores”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 239-256 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The restaurateur leaned forward. “You’re a survivor from the original batch, then? From the Bangkok biolabs?”

This story wears its Sci Fi badge with pride, announcing its genre in many different ways in the first few sentences. We have decaying engineering AIs, neural implants, Neanderthal hybrids, and autocabs before we finish the first page. Rather miraculously, these details don’t come across as info-dumping, nor as overwhelming.

Finch and Blake are planning a heist, of a restaurant “kitschy as fuck” (p. 241). The modus operandi involves getting Finch in under false pretenses — and prepared to make false promises. Once inside, what they find is more valuable, and more dangerous, than their wildest imaginings.

The story is visceral, it is tender, it is horrific, and it is sweet. It’s a mess of contradicting experiences, yet nevertheless all balancing each other. And for all of its darkness, it ends with hope. We always can do with a little more hope in our tales.

(Originally published in Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Tale of the Costume Maker” by Steve Carr

Review of Steve Carr, “The Tale of the Costume Maker”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 1-10 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

In the normal light of day, in this room with light streaming through the window, the costume maker is exceedingly handsome. His pale face is as clear as an unpainted porcelain figurine. He resembles Montgomery Clift or Paul Newman or Louis Jordan or none of them, or all of them all at once. His eyes react slowly to the light, as if he is waking from a dream — a dream of lazy, ethereal lovemaking.

This story was a strange one…it started off beautiful, with lovely words and lovely images, but then we are suddenly observers to a scene which should have been private — or rather, which should never have happened at all, because the costume maker did not ask for it, did not consent to it.

This is the first story in the anthology, but I’m glad it’s not the first that I read, for I think it might have put me off. I am increasingly uncomfortable with and intolerant of non-consensual sexual encounters in fiction, even when they play an important role in the story (and sometimes, precisely when they play such a role). If you share my sentiments, then you might wish to skip this story.

(First published in SickLitMag 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Gentleman of Chaos” by A. Merc Rustad

Review of A. Merc Rustad, “The Gentleman of Chaos”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 55-66 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

He has no name, for it was banished long ago. By royal decree he has no face, for he does not exist. No one has heard his voice, soft like velvet; no one has seen the exhaustion and pain in his eyes; no one has felt his hand, scarred and calloused, on their cheek in an apologetic caress.

I really enjoy 1st-person POV for short stories, because then I feel like I’m sitting around a campfire, or in someone’s quiet room, or at a theatre, listening to someone tell a story. This story is steeped in history and mythology, and it feels real — not that the events in it happened, but that they are events that someone, somewhere would tell to captivate an audience who is disposed to believe the teller’s fantasies. It feels like something Shahrazad would tell her captive king.

Who, exactly, the narrator is, and why She (for that is the name which we are instructed to use) has chosen to tell this tale rather than another one, put me in a position where I — cis, het, female — feel like I’m wholly unqualified to review the story. There are so many aspects of the story where I simply do not have the right standing to comment on them. So I will stick to making personal remarks: This is a love story, and I loved it, and it is magical.

(First appeared in Apex Magazine 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar” by Maria Haskins

Review of Maria Haskins, “A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 57-72 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I love the title of this piece — it is stuffed full of possibility.

The story is told in alternating points of view, from above, from beneath, from between. These voices provide the shape of the mine that is the titular abandoned space of this story. At first, I thought it was a horror story, with all the horror that comes from being a parent myself and imagining it is not Alice but me in the mine, dark, claustrophobic, uncertain of where my children have gone. (Such simple things so terrifying.) And that horror is just a shadow horror that Alice must face: The choice between whether she wants to find her children or find her way out of the mine. But then, at the very end — I don’t want to say for fear of spoilers, but the ending makes me need to revise my original classification.

A powerful, real, and disturbing story — probably my favorite of the anthology so far.

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “A Jangle of Bells and Voices” by Chia Lynn Evers

Review of Chia Lynn Evers, “A Jangle of Bells and Voices”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 213-228 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The opening scenes are of a sprawling battle field full of armies and weapons and activities all unfamiliar and fell. While the point of view soon zeroes in from generalities to specifics, namely the specific of Remsa Brand of the nation of Lys, I’m still left with a bewildering amount of people and places and nations and rulers. Three pages in and I feel like I’m floundering in over my head; I struggle enough with actual history, and I’ve had three and a half decades of exposure to it! I’m not sure three pages is enough for me to grasp all the necessary nuances of this very elaborately-built world. (The fact that Remsa’s empress is named Mathilde doesn’t help matters, as I keep thinking of the English empress!)

In the end, I had to stop reading this story, and then pick it back up again a few days later. I wasn’t much more enlightened by the end of that, and I’m not sure that a third read would help me much. I suspect other people who can hold details of battles and tactics and politics in their head better than I can will appreciate the story more than I did.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Where’s the Rest of Me?” by Matthew Cheney

Review of Matthew Cheney, “Where’s the Rest of Me?”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 31-52. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

And I’m looking at you right now, Mr. Reagan, and I know you’re not a queer, so I have to ask myself, as any reasonable man would: If you don’t look like a queer, why do you write like one? This is perplexing to me.

The story is a collection of snapshot vignettes, from a few sentences to a few paragraphs long, each with their own title. The same characters populate the vignettes, but the snippets are not ordered in a way to make a plot or story manifest. The reader must build the story themself while they read the different pieces, figure out how to put them into order in order to understand why we’ve been given these pieces rather than other ones. What’s omitted from the snippets are the answers to the question asked in the title of the story.

I found the story alternatingly startlingly sad and very perplexing. it is full of names and dates, historical details and precise facts — so full, in fact, that half-way through I was no longer able to reconcile what I was being told with what I (thought I) already knew about history, and had to pause and look up various things in wikipedia. That confirmed my own knowledge, and left me then wondering why Cheney chose to change history so much; what was gained by taking real-world historic figures and changing their lives, that would not have been present if Cheney had made up his characters? I don’t know. But I’ve also decided I don’t care about not knowing; even without that, this was a good story.

(Originally appeared in Blood: Stories, 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment