REVIEW: “Bone Song” by Aja McCullough

Review of Aja McCullough, “Bone Song”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Featuring a miller, a dead woman, and a macabre violin, this story has all the pieces of a dark fairy tale. In fact, I recognized aspects of “The Two Sisters,” a murderous folk song with many variants. However, picking up on that reference is not necessary to enjoy the story.

“Bone Song” packs a surprising amount of heartbreak into less than 800 words, but also a lot of beauty. The crux of this story is communication – what the dead woman wants to say from beyond the grave, and what the miller hears, and the vast chasm between the two. It’s a subtle story, as is befitting its brevity.

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REVIEW: “With These Hands” by LH Moore

Review of LH Moore, “With These Hands”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Simeon, a free black man, is working on the construction of the White House, as a bricklayer. While he daydreams about a quiet life after this job, perhaps meeting a nice woman and settling down to have children, his friends Eugene and Clifford are not so lucky. They are slaves, on loan from their master, and will have to return to Virginia when this project is over. The speculative element of this story comes from what they decide to do to avoid that fate.

Simeon is a quietly perceptive narrator, but he can not see everything. Because the story is told through his point-of-view, we never find out exactly what Eugene and Clifford did or who they struck their bargain with. That uncertainty provides the impetus for Simeon to write down this story.

Juxtaposing the White House – symbol and seat of the U.S. government – with the reality of slavery, is a bold and decisive move. It forces the reader to confront just whose labor built so many of our monuments, all while telling an emotionally compelling story.

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REVIEW: “The Small White” by Marian Coman

Review of Marian Coman (Translated by Sebastian Simon), “The Small White”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Overnight, giant painted butterflies appear on the walls of some apartment buildings, to the delight of some seventh grade boys. As one boy discovers the secret behind the paintings, he also discovers the dark secret being concealed by a classmate’s family.

Though this is not South American (the author is Romanian), this story seems to me to follow in the tradition of magical realism. There is a dream-like feeling to this story, a sense that reality may come untethered at any moment, and the narrative does not attempt to explain the strangeness.

The ending felt abrupt to me, on my first time reading it. Nothing is really resolved or explained, yet the longer I sat with it, the more right it felt. I don’t think the mystery of the butterflies is really the point – the heart of this story is how people react to the unknown, how they interpret what they can’t explain, whether that’s impossible paintings, or other people’s secrets.

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REVIEW: “The Great Train Robbery” by Lavie Tidhar

Review of Lavie Tidhar, “The Great Train Robbery”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Train robberies are a staple of the movie western, a genre most people are at least passingly familiar with, and so sometimes they find they way into speculative fiction, warped and changed when divorced from their original context. This is a particularly trippy example.

On one level, this is about two gunslingers –one older and grizzled, the other young and reckless – on a train that’s about to be robbed. That part of the story is normal. Beyond that, we have a mysterious drug that gives people glimpses into parallel lives in another world – our world. We have monsters and thieving acrobats and a war between unexplained factions warping their world.

Reading this, I was tempted to ask which world was real – the fantastical one that contains most of the plot or the simulacrum of our mundane reality – but I suspect that is missing the point. My interpretation is that reality is fluid within this story, and can not pinned down by logic. Both worlds are real. Maybe differently real, but real all the same.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes their fiction on the mind-bending side.

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REVIEW: “The Pulse of Memory” by Beth Dawkins

Review of Beth Dawkins, “The Pulse of Memory”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

It is generally agreed that, on a generation ship, nothing can be wasted. But what about memories? In this unusual story, people have discovered a way to recycle the memories of the dead, so that no knowledge or experience will be truly lost. How is this feat accomplished? Through fish. The fish eat people before they die, and then teenagers eat the fish when they come of age, thus gaining the memories of the people that fish dined on. It’s morbid, but effective.

The brilliance of this story lies not in the idea of memory-eating fish (though that’s a pretty great conceit), but in the way it shows how different people respond to this practice. Society is not a monolith, even in the constrained environment of a generation ship. Some people feel an almost religious reverence for the fish, others are disgusted by them, and some yearn to do away with them entirely. It’s a rich and organic source of conflict, and one that is too rarely used in most stories, making this story all the more sweet for really exploring it.

For such a strange (and at times, confusing) story, Dawkins keeps us grounded with a strong point-of-view character. Cal’s love for the fish, and for the role they serve in society, provides the reader with a hand to hold from beginning to end. This story gives us a unique take on generation ships, a staple of science fiction, and I’m grateful to have read it.

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REVIEW: “Captain Midrise” by Jim Marino

Review of Jim Marino, “Captain Midrise”, Apex Magazine 115 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The Golden Crusader is not what he used to be. His flying is slower, and more unsteady. He never gets more than six stories above the ground, and he seems to float more than glide, a strange balloon bobbing far above the sidewalk. He still foils crimes, still saves people, but tourists and locals alike miss the excitement of the old days, when he was a blur of motion speeding through the city.

This is the story of a journalist trying to understand what has happened to the city’s hero, to his hero. The idea that people would turn against a superhero for a lessening in their impossible powers should be ridiculous, but it’s painfully plausible. People do not like seeing that their heroes can be flawed, can be imperfect, can suffer, and there’s no reason to expect that wouldn’t extend to the kind with superpowers and capes.

I appreciate the restrained tone that Marino used. It sets us up for the ending, where journalist and hero finally talk, and we get a final, uncomfortable glimpse into the truth: that for all his powers, the Golden Crusader is only human. Recommended for anyone who likes superheroes and is in the mood to reflect a bit on what the presence of one might actually be like.

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REVIEW: “Girls Who Do Not Drown” by A.C. Buchanan

Review of A.C. Buchanan, “Girls Who Do Not Drown”, Apex Magazine 115 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

On an unnamed island in the cold ocean, girls grow up knowing that the sea may kill them as they grow up, when glashtyns will come to lure them beneath the waves. That is the way it has always been and the way it will always be. For Alice, this destiny is complicated by the fact that everyone else thinks she is a boy. But when a glashtyn comes for her anyway, she realizes that if the water horse can see what she really is, then someone else may figure it out too. She walks into the ocean.

The writing and the storytelling here floored me. It’s a simple story on the surface, but Buchanan brings forward every ounce of pathos, delivering it to the reader like an offering. There is violence here, and a deep isolation, but it never feels overwrought. If anything, the descriptions are surprisingly restrained, and the mirroring of supernatural and real-world themes is allowed to speak for itself.

I am not ashamed to admit that the ending of the story made me cry. It is a good ending, and more hopeful than I would have believed. I won’t spoil it beyond what you can infer from the title, but this is a beautiful, resonant story.

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REVIEW: “Transcripts of Tapes Found Near The Depot, 06-45” by Laura Duerr

Review of Laura Duerr, “Transcripts of Tapes Found Near The Depot, 06-45”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

One often thinks of “post-apocalyptic fiction” as involving some sort of discrete apocalypse, a single event that separates history into “before” and “after”. Nuclear war, or an asteroid hitting the earth, or something like that. It’s easy to read stories like that as fiction, because people are bad at calculating the realistic odds of events like that actually happening.

But apocalypses can also be gradual things, things where there is no clear starting point, no clear moment where we can say “this is where things went wrong”. Global warming is one of those insidious apocalypses, and the likelihood is high that we’ve probably already past the moment where things first went wrong.

Which makes stories like Duerr’s — clearly in the post-apocalyptic genre, but where the apocalypse is a gradual, continuous event rather than a discrete one — hard to read, because they are a bit too much like truth and a bit too little like fiction. These tape transcripts are from our near future, and describe a world where the rivers have dried up, so there is no water left to power the generators, which means no power, which means no internet, but no one wants to go onto the internet anyway, because all the woe and horror drown out any useful information. They’re a mirror of a potential future, at least, and a scary future it is.

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REVIEW: “The Curse of Apollo” by Diana Hurlburt

Review of Diana Hurlburt, “The Curse of Apollo”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a story of a story, set in ancient Greece where a story teller recites the tales for each season — counting tales “a more pleasant way of counting the seasons than taxes”. This particular story that the story teller tells us of is of two horses born to the same mare six weeks apart. Is this a miracle of nature? Is it divine intervention? Are the horses gods? Or silly young foals to be sacrificed to the gods? No one knew what to do, except one person, and he was not consulted: And so that is how the titular curse came about. No one thought to ask one of the most important twin gods what he thought, and Apollo felt slighted…

The best myths are ones where you aren’t entirely sure what is real and what is not. This story feels like it could’ve come straight out of the Homeric tradition of classical Greek mythology, though it’s not a myth that I recognise — whether this is because of a fault in myself or because the story is truly new, I do not know. Either way, I enjoyed it.

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REVIEW: “Butterflies” by Elizabeth Hinckley

Review of Elizabeth Hinckley, “Butterflies”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Reading this story was like sitting down to tea with someone you’ve never met but with whom you have mutual friends, friends who at one point told the two of you “you would like each other. you should meet up sometime.” So you do, and then you hear the other person’s story and can’t help but be fascinated (and to appreciate having friends who know you so well that they can recommend knew friends to you).

Let’s pretend, dear reader, that I am the mutual friend between you and this wonderful little post-apocalyptic story, and this is me telling you “why don’t you brew a cup of tea and settle down with this story? I think you’d like each other.”

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