REVIEW: “Teeth” by Jessamy Corob Cook

Review of Jessamy Corob Cook, “Teeth”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 150-176 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

In the final story of the anthology, Cook explores how it is that Baba Yaga ended up where and who she is. It’s not told from her perspective, though, but from the perspective of one of the three riders (the white one who rides at dawn; the red one who rides at noon; and the black one who rides at night show up as side characters in the traditional stories). The black rider is not who she seems, at first, and as we alternate between the black rider’s present experiences and her memories of her past, we are given pieces of both her story and Baba Yaga’s.

At the very last the 1st person POV shifts from the black rider’s perspective to the white rider’s, which I found a bit abrupt; however, I’m not sure the final resolution (which worked beautifully) could have been brought about without this change in perspective. I wonder what the story might have been like if the perspectives of the black and white rider had alternated throughout — but it’s not fair to criticise a story by saying “I wish it had been a different story”, so don’t take that as a criticism, but rather as a hope for another story I might someday read.

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REVIEW: “Boy Meets Witch” by Rebecca A. Coates

Review of Rebecca A. Coates, “Boy Meets Witch”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 125-149 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Like Honigman (read the review of her story), Coates gives her Baba Yaga story a contemporary setting. The timing and location isn’t as clearly specified, but it needn’t be — it could be any late 20th/early 21st C high school, with the same bullies and the same awkward teenagers and the same secret hidden desires that every bullied child has of someday getting revenge.

Coates takes all of these familiar aspects, and the familiar character and story of Baba Yaga, and weaves them together with some quite unexpected turns for a very satisfying “revenge” story.

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REVIEW: “The Swamp Hag’s Apprentice” by Szmeralda Shanel

Review of Szmeralda Shanel, “The Swamp Hag’s Apprentice”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 101-124 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Despite the change of location — shifted from the Slavic forests to the southern American swamps — and the translation of the names — from Vasilisa to Queenie — the first half of the story is identical to the classic story of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Fair. Once Queenie finds the swamp hag, the story shifts into something new, as the swamp hag sets her not impossible tasks but a variety of lessons, training Queenie to be her apprentice.

Unfortunately, this story didn’t quite do it for me. It was too repetitious of others in the anthology in the beginning, and the plot and motivation in the second half were not clear to me. I also found the overall “voice” of the story unclear; sometimes it slipped into dialect, sometimes it read in quite a high register, most of it was in the past tense, but sometimes it shifted into the present tense. I’m not against these types of things in principle, but I want to see clearly why an author choose the voice they do at each point. For instance, if the dialogue was in dialect and the narration in the high register, that would make sense; or if the entire story were told in dialogue, including the narration, that would also make sense, and would have been enjoyable. Similarly, if the shift in tense happened in particular scenes, or particular characters, that would make sense; but as it was, it was a sentence here or there, in the middle of a paragraph in the past tense, leaving me uncertain whether it was a deliberate choice or simply a mistake.

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REVIEW: “The Partisan and the Witch” by Charlotte Honigman

Review of Charlotte Honigman, “The Partisan and the Witch”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 79-100 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story is the crown jewel of the anthology, taking the myth of Baba Yaga and transplanting it into World War II Poland. Chaja is a young Jewish girl in hiding who has already seen her brother and sister, Zivek and Rywka, die. When the farmers who are protecting her can do so no longer, the farmwife tells her there is someone in the depths of the forest that may be able to help her. So Chaja sets off to find Baba Yaga and beg of her to kill the three riders, the white, the red, and the black, who are roaming the countryside slaughtering her people.

This was a superlative example both of how to take a historic myth and completely reinvent it, and how to write good modern historical fantasy. Every word breathes life into Chaja and her siblings and friends, and I was riveted.

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REVIEW: “Baba Yaga: Her Story” by Jill Marie Ross

Review of Jill Marie Ross, “Baba Yaga: Her Story”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 47-77 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

In this long short story — long enough to nearly be a novelette, long enough to take up almost an entire bath time before the water grows cold — Ross spins out an origin story for Baba Yaga. Who is she, what was she like as a child, how did she get to be how she is? It’s richly detailed, weaving in many other Russian and Slavic mythic elements, and deeply satisfying.

The one thing that put me off a bit was the use of parenthetical glosses for the assorted Slavic phrases dotted here and there. First, these glosses were inconsistent; some foreign words were not glossed. Second, some of the foreign words seemed unnecessary, e.g., why call the oven pech instead of ‘oven’. Third, while I love seeing foreign words and phrases incorporated into a story, I’d rather see them used in a such a way that their meaning is clear from context, so that they don’t need to be glossed. But this is only a minor point.

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REVIEW: “A Tale Soon Told” by Lissa Sloane

Review of Lissa Sloane, “A Tale Soon Told”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 16-46 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story starts off so similarly to the preceding that it irritated me a bit, but that irritation quickly left me as Sloane developed the story of Vasilisa into a three-part arc that drew upon the maiden-mother-crone triune, other Slavic folklore (such as the story of Finist the Falcon), and turned it all into an origin story. It was beautifully told, and very satisfying.

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REVIEW: “Vasilisa the Wise” by Kate Forsyth

Review of Kate Forsyth, “Vasilisa the Wise”, in Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford (World Weaver Press, 2019): 5-15 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This opening tale of the anthology is a straight-up, no frills, no changes retelling of the story originally recorded by Alexander Afanasyev (don’t let the title confuse you: this is story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, not the story of Vasilisa the Wise, which is a version of “The Frog Prince”). Vasilisa is sent by her stepmother out into the darkness to borrow fire from Baba Yaga. Along the way, Vasilisa meets three horsemen, one white as dawn, one red as noon, one dark as night, and once she’s within Baba Yaga’s clutches, she must rely on her wits, her kindness, and the advice of the doll that her mother gave her before she died to perform the tasks that Baba Yaga has set her.

It’s quite a classic fairy tale, with bits recognisable from many other tales in the tradition of the Grimm brothers — the evil stepmother, the trek through the woods, the witch who eats people, the three tasks — and Forsyth’s retelling maintains the classic, antique “voice” of the fairytales of childhood. It sets a good stage for the rest of the anthology.

(Originally published in Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women, Serenity Press, 2017).

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REVIEW: Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga, edited by Kate Wolford

Review of Kate Wolford, ed., Skull & Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga (World Weaver Press, 2019) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

In this anthology, folklorist Kate Wolford collects seven tales of Baba Yaga, the dangerous and deceptive crone-witch figure of Slavic mythology. The collection is introduced by Amanda Bergloff, who delves into the history of the Baba Yaga character, and the subversive ways in which she acts, both in historical myth and in the present set of stories. The stories themselves range from retellings of the classic Baba Yaga tales, including the most well-known of them, “Vasilisa the Beautiful”, found in Alexander Afanasyev’s 19th century Russian Fairy Tales, to ones that depart from the classic tradition much more, focusing on Baba Yaga’s origins, or transferring her from the Slavic myth to World War II history.

Three of the stories (Forsyth, Sloan, Shanel) are straight up re-tellings of the original story, although sometimes extended or transplanted. Two (Honigman, Coates) are stories of Baba Yaga in modern times. Two (Ross, Cook) explore Baba Yaga’s history. As isolated stories, each can more than stand on its own merits. However, rather perversely for a themed anthology, having three tellings of the same story in the same book got a bit repetitious. The ones I loved the best were the ones that reinvented the story, rather than merely retold it, and made something wholly new. On this count, Honigman’s story is the bright shining jewel of the anthology.

The seven stories are listed below, and we will review each in turn, linking them back to this post when the reviews are published.

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REVIEW: “An Advance Sheet” by Jane Barlow

Review of Jane Barlow, “An Advance Sheet” in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018): 127-148 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

What a marvelous story. Reading it, it was hard to keep in mind that it was written more than a hundred years ago, how unexpectedly timeless, prescient, and modern it was. We are quickly introduced to the main characters in the first page, Dr. Warden and Dr. Thomas Harlowe (the 1st person POV), two medical doctors who work in a mental institution, and a patient of theirs, John Lynn, who ended up in the institution after a nervous breakdown caused by anxiety over his university exams, a story all too familiar in the early 21st C. The focus of the story is Lynn, and a strange encounter that he relates to Harlowe. The trope involved is not an uncommon one in early SF: Travel to another time or another world via mental projection alone.

But what really took me with this story was the detailed explanation that Lynn gives Harlowe not about how such travel is possible, but about why we should even think these other worlds and times exist. Barlow’s explanation is uncanny: First, she articulates a version of the many-worlds interpretation of the universe:

“I refer to the fact that such a limitless atomic universe necessarily involves the existence, the simultaneous existence, of innumerable solar systems absolutely similar to our own…” (p. 129).

But not content to start there, she has Lynn immediately make the analogical step from the existence of different worlds to the existence of our own world at different times — and all of these different worlds being causally isolated from each other.

See, when I’m not writing, reading, and reviewing speculation fiction, I’m a philosopher who focuses on questions of modality and time. One of the most important developments in the logic and metaphysics of modality during the 20th C was David Lewis’s developments of modal realism, the idea that there are other “possible worlds” that are of exactly the same type as ours, but which are causally inaccessible to us. Lewis himself took time to be represented by different “stages” of these possible worlds; but it is also possible to take the possible worlds model further and identify times with worlds themselves, speaking of “possible times” instead of “possible worlds”. For Lewis, these worlds are out there, fully developed, and independent of ourselves; while we cannot access them through spatio-temporal relations, we can think of them, and, with a bit of a loose metaphor speak of looking through a telescope to these worlds to see what is occurring in them. Lynn adopts a very similar metaphor, as a means of explaining clairvoyance:

For, if what I have said is factually true, the explanation is simply this: the clairvoyant has somehow got a glimpse into one of these facsimile worlds, which happens to be a few years ahead of ours in point of time, and has seen how things are going there” (p. 1310)

The parallels in the views are remarkable, and even more remarkable that Barlow as writing 75 years before Lewis, and without the benefit of the philosophical and educational context that Lewis had in the 1950s and 1960s. Having read Barlow’s story, I’m now totally convinced I need to read more by Barlow, and write up a paper on this curious 19th-C Irish female precursor to one of the most important developments in contemporary analytic philosophy.

(Originally published in 1898.)

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REVIEW: “The Professor’s Experiment” by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Review of Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, “The Professor’s Experiment” in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018): 107-123 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

In the days before cryogenics and assisted comas, the idea of being able to put a person to a dreamless sleep that can persist days or weeks or years without any degradation of the body is both fantastical and tantalising — since the days of Shakespeare and perhaps even longer people have dreamt of potions which can induce a sleep like death. In Hungerford’s story, the old Professor has been researching the potions of the ancient Peruvians and South American Indians for decades and is now ready to put his theory into practice, despite the worries of his student and friend, Paul Wyndham. As yet, he has been unable to find anyone in Ireland that he could experiment on…and then there is a knock upon his door…

There is one place in the story where I fear there may have been an editorial mishap in the abridgement process; on p. 117 there is a strange repetition of six sentences. In the first place, there is a queer shift in time which is inexplicable, while the second occurrence of the sentences a few paragraphs later makes a lot more narrative sense. It seems as if the first occurrence of the sentences was mistaken, and it makes me wonder what — if anything — should have been there instead.

(Originally published in 1895.)

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