REVIEW: “Penumbra” by Chris Brecheen

Review of Chris Brecheen, “Penumbra”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 168-177. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Brecheen’s story is urban fantasy, set in San Francisco, as we can tell from references to BART stations and other familiar aspects of the city. It’s a first-person story, and unlike many first-person stories which start off with a bunch of introspective maundering, here we were immediately introduced both to the personality quirks of the narrator (rather bitter and a bit sarcastic) and of the people the narrator interacts with, such as Dr. Cienica, who “pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies” (168).

I really enjoyed Brecheen’s use of language; there were turns of phrase every paragraph or so that made me smile. If you read for enjoyment, then this is a good story for you. If you read for a creepy feeling of displacement, and the sense that the setting of the story is shifted from our own reality by only a fraction, then this is also a story for you. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder what it would take for people to be able to see the Penumbra here, in our own world.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Beauty Mortis” by Jaap Boekestein

Review of Jaap Boekestein, “Beauty Mortis”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 147-164. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story starts off with a rather uncomfortable scene of a man exploiting a scantily clad young woman for his own purposes, sending her down to lie on the ice of a frozen stream. “What else could she do?” the narrator asks, and that one question encompasses all that is wrong with the power dynamics between men and women in much of modern society. In this story, we see a woman playing along with those dynamics because the alternate, because what would happen if she refuses to, is so much worse. Except it isn’t: Whether she refuses or she obeys, the end result is the same. She still ends up a corpse at the hand of a man.

If I were reading for pleasure, I probably would’ve stopped reading the story at this point; stories like this are simply not stories for me. I want to see stories that push back against these power structures, that criticise these dynamics, that try to subvert them. But I was reading for reviewing, so let’s plow on.

This is one of the longer stories in the anthology, and it pushes stylistic boundaries more than some of the others. The story is told through a series of numbered vignettes, but they are all out of order; as soon as one realises that one has gone from scene 1 to scene 8, and that the next one after is scene 2, one must face the question: Do I read the scenes in numeric order? Or in the order they are printed?

I opted for numeric order, but only got as far as 6 when I couldn’t find scene 7. So then I went back and reread it in printed order, 1, 8, 2, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 6. In the end, I liked the story; it was well executed. I just wish the opening scene didn’t have to play upon the horrors that it does.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland” by Shondra Snodderly

Review of Shondra Snodderly, “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 139-142. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is the first of Snodderly’s three fairy tale retellings in this anthology, and the longest. In this version of Hansel and Gretel, Gretel and her brother are uneasy partners in a post-war world where there were “no free rides. Not even for family” (139). In the end, Gretel happily betrays Hansel to the witch, sacrificing him for her own freedom. “Only the useful survive” (142), and Gretel is dead intent on making herself useful. The only question is, useful to whom?

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Töpflein, Stehe” by G. Deyke

Review of G. Deyke, “Töpflein, Stehe”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 144-145. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Barely a page and a half, this is one of the shortest stories in the anthology, and as such, it is more a vignette than a story. We never know who the narrator is, or how they have found themself in the situation they have. One expects there to be a clue to the details missing from the story in the title, but alas, that title sheds little light on any of these shadowed facts.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

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