REVIEW: “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings” by Daniela Tomova

Review of Daniela Tomova, “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings”, Apex Magazine 103: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Some stories sneak up on you. “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings” is one of them. There are so many tiny details that only have meaning in retrospect, so many moments in the opening that only come together in the final paragraphs. This is a story that makes you work a bit, piecing things together. That’s not a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of in choosing the right moment to read it.

This story takes place in a dying, almost post-apocalyptic, world. The human population has divided into nomads who walk the road, following the mysterious and mostly unseen Wandering Woman, and those who remain in towns, called oases. Anomalies called mouths (which I won’t spoil for you with an explanation) are opening up at random, and their spreading threat is responsible for the breakdown of what we would consider the normal modes of society. Life is in flux, and it’s unclear if a new status quo will ever be achieved, or if this is the end. But there’s also a normalcy to the world. People adapt, they survive, they create relationships and families and tribes. I found it to be surprisingly hopeful, for all that uncertainty.

I must confess, this story did not work for me on my first reading. Too much of the world and the characters were mysterious until the end, and I felt dissatisfied. However, I enjoyed it much more on my second reading, when I was able to fully appreciate the skillful way the author dolled out information.

This is a great choice if you’re in the mood for something cerebral, and well-worth a re-read!

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REVIEW: “Baug’s Hollow” by Cathrin Hagey

Review of Cathrin Hagey, “Baug’s Hollow”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The story has many echoes of the traditional Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” which puts me in mind of Edith Pattou’s East, one of my favorite books. So I really enjoyed reading this. I also enjoyed it for the optimistic view it paints of happiness at the end of life, after the death of a spouse. It is a sweet story of how love transcends boundaries, both literal and physical, and Hagey needs only a few words to paint neat pictures of each of the characters.

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REVIEW: “While it’s Still Beating” by Emma Grygotis

Review of Emma Grygotis, “While it’s Still Beating”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

It’s hard to know whether to describe this story as SF or dystopian, though the unhappy future presented in it makes me lean towards the latter. Sometimes, future-oriented SF can just be so damn depressing.

Reading this, it feels like the tenses and temporal points are not mapped out correctly. There is a lot of past perfect, and a lot of present, and the “once, years ago, Alice could read Lenore’s moods by her eyes” – shouldn’t that really be “once, years ago, Alice had been able to…”? Because surely we are not talking about a single moment in time but rather an extended period. These shifts in tenses and the oblique way with which Grygotis approaches her story combine to make many aspects of the story unclear and uncertain. Both Lenore and Alice know why their insurance premiums are too high, but unfortunately, by the end of the story, I don’t, and the power that the ending might have had is lost on me.

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REVIEW: “Evidence of a Storm” by Mollie Chandler

Review of Mollie Chandler, “Evidence of a Storm”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 17-21. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

This issue is the first I’ve read of LCRW, and it was this story that solidified the thought that I would probably be enjoying this publication for a long time. I have a soft spot for bleak stories, and while this is one that doesn’t smack you over the head with utter hopelessness until you’re curled up crying there is an underlying line of tension and sadness running through the whole thing.

The narrator has recurring dreams that their apartment is a ship lost at sea, filling with water and sea life. Their girlfriend visits them, a perky woman who the main character is clearly having some sort of disconnect from. They’re having trouble communicating, refusing intimacy, referring to the woman as “a collection of hinges and joists.” Over time the dream becomes more real, and the world more surreal, with the water beginning to damage everything it touches while the narrator pushes their girlfriend away.

It’s easy to draw allegory and symbolism of depression and a doomed relationship from this piece: the trouble communicating, the pushing away of a loved one, the recurring dreams of a room filling with water. However, I feel it’s best to leave interpretations such as that to the reader. This piece is subtle in its grief, and it’s all so human. If it were only this story and the two preceding it in this magazine I’d still highly recommend giving a few dollars to purchase a copy, but there’s more in there, including a strange (though compelling) nonfiction piece and some poems. As for this story, like the previous two, highly recommended.

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REVIEW: “The Summer Mask” by Karin Lowachee

Review of Karin Lowachee, “The Summer Mask”, Nightmare Magazine 62: Read Online. Reviewed by Winnie Ramler.

The more horror I read, the more I get to ruminate on what it is that scares us. Sometimes it is the obvious things like spiders, death, or heights. However, some of the things that cause unease in us are not as obvious. Deformities, for example, seem to strike fear into us whether we recognize it as such. Perhaps it is a fear that such a thing will happen to us. Perhaps the ways we characterize monsters as grotesque leads us to apply that characterization to people who look different simply as a reflex. Whatever the reason, body horror like that in David Cronenberg’s movies puts many people off.

Karin Lowachee explores the nature of deformity and humanity in “The Summer Mask”. David, an artist, is commissioned to make a mask for Matthew whose face has been irrevocably altered by war to the point of unrecognizable damage. He wears a crude leather mask during most of the year, but it is during the summer that he is able to walk freely to feel the sun though he cannot see. Before the war, he was classically handsome and the artist seeks to create a mask which recaptures this outside reflection of inner beauty.

During this process, a relationship is formed between the two which (on the artist’s side) was certainly romantic in nature. The artist ruminates on ugliness and beauty and how one must justify its existence but not the other. His love for his subject leads him to give a sacrifice to his artistic work beyond what he is called upon to do. This short story is powerful as it examines love and beauty and the projections we place upon others.

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REVIEW: “Dead Men Tell Tales” by Dave D’Alessio

Review of Dave D’Alessio, “Dead Men Tell Tales”, Broadswords and Blasters 1 (2017): 11-19 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Yana Shepard.

It’s freezing this afternoon as I write this, snuggling my keyboard under my electric blanket as I try to stave off the shivers. The second story of Broadswords and Blasters kept me company when I was in one of my dark moods, a sign that D’Alessio is a skilled writer. It’s no easy feat to get me to enjoy anything when I’m unpredictable and feeling hostile to anyone brave enough to poke their head into my room.

Science fiction is near and dear to my heart, and this got it right. What I loved most was the technology. Nano machines? Love the little guys. There are others, of course, that D’Alessio describes but I refuse to spoil them. They made me smile in glee to read about them for the first time so it would be heartless of me to take the discovery away from others.

The ending felt abrupt to me, however. But, overall, I did enjoy this short story. A lot.

I highly recommend this if you are a SF fan. I also recommend this if you like noir. This being both, you might get a kick out of it.

Yana Shepard3 Comments

REVIEW: “When You Find Such a Thing” by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Review of Suyi Davies Okungbowa, “When You Find Such a Thing”, Podcastle: 496 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Once again, Podcastle demonstrates the value-added not only by presenting certain stories in audio format, but by carefully matching the narrator to the material. I don’t usually call out the narrators in my reviews, but Solomon Osadolo was magnificent in interpreting the rhythms and flavor of this story. (There was one unfortunate technical recording glitch that marred the production values, but that’s neither the author nor the narrator’s fault.)

The protagonist’s ordinarily terrifying experience of meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time is given a fantasy twist by his profession: the newly government-authorized and licensed field of traditional Nigerian wizard. In explaining his profession to his potentially future father-in-law, the listener also receives the essential grounding in what this means and how it works. What confuses him is why he needs to explain it in such detail to the man. Although only recently made respectably legal, surely the man would be familiar with the basic principles? That’s when he discovers the magical shroud clouding the man’s understanding and awareness of wizardry.

Why that shroud exists, and who created it, forms the tension of the rest of the story. It is, in essential ways, a story about consent and about the limits of what is acceptable to do to protect oneself and one’s loved ones from cultural prejudice and danger. As the title says, “When you find such a thing [i.e., love], you do anything to keep it.” But who decides what that “anything” includes? In the current climate of discussion on informed consent and allowing people agency in their own lives, a surface reading of the story puts the protagonist (and the second wizard in the story) in a somewhat horrific light. But life isn’t so simple, as that other wizard points out. Government sanction and legality isn’t the same thing as acceptance, and a history of persecution and prejudice can’t be wiped away by a law and a license.

I was able to step away from the specifics of the story and feel the complexities more when I “translated” the core ethical situation into one of sexuality rather than wizardry (although there’s absolutely no basis in the story for this specific connection–it’s just one that has particular resonance for me). Is it right to deceive your loved ones about some essential aspect of your identity if full disclosure would destroy that love and put your life at hazard? We don’t have the luxury of waiting for an ideal and accepting world in which ethics can be treated purely as a philosophical exercise. We live in the world as it is. And sometimes that world has things that are precious enough that you do anything to keep them. Even if what you do is wrong by certain lights.

A separate, purely technical note on the episode: I have a certain degree of auditory processing disorder, which means that when I’m listening to speech with unfamiliar rhythms and accents, I can have difficulty processing it adequately. I needed to listen to this episode twice: once to calibrate my hearing to the narrator and language structure, and once to actually listen to the story itself. This is a defect in my neural processing, not in the story itself. If you find yourself having a similar experience, I urge you to give the story the benefit of a second listen, or try the text version instead. It’s worth it.

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REVIEW: “The Music of Ghosts” by Paul Jessup

Review of Paul Jessup, “The Music of Ghosts”, Interzone #272: Purchase here. Reviewed by Mark Hepworth

For a short story to take on the story of a generation ship is ambitious, to say the least. This is a tale of several of those generations that interact cleverly with the key being the relationship between the ephemeral biological humans and the permanent uploaded personalities in the ship.

The scope of the story makes for a necessarily spare narrative for each generation presented, creating a rather elegiac effect at times. No character really made a play for my interest though, the closest being the personality Penny, but she is something of a lost soul wandering through the generations.

The ending is bittersweet, as the colonists abandon the tools – the ship, the personalities – that brought them to their new home. You could say that they were callous, but of course they simply didn’t view the personalities as real people. A harsh ending, but I can’t argue with Jessup’s conclusion that humans often act this way.

 

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REVIEW: “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt

Review of Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft”, Apex Magazine 102: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

I am a huge fan of the recent trend of people deconstructing Lovecraft’s work to create new stories, particularly when those stories tackle the racism that crept through his oeuvre. “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” is an excellent addition to that growing collection.

Jim Payne just wants to sell his great-grandfather’s letters from Lovecraft, get his money, and go home. He has no skin in this game (beyond the desire to get out of debt), and no interest in either his great-grandfather or his famous correspondent. But when he drives down the rutted, unmarked, dirt road dotted with bestial statues, and knocks on the door of a ramshackle house in the hills of New England, it’s no surprise that things get complicated.

Everything about this story fits together nicely. Jim is a wonderful narrator: observant, wry, and with a low tolerance for bullshit, which makes it easy to follow him through his adventure. The plot itself is perfectly compressed without feeling either too big for the word count or too small to be interesting; it’s just right. I thought that the racism – both in Lovecraft’s work and in modern America – was deftly handled, but as a white woman, I defer to the judgment of those who have personally experienced it.

Recommended for fans of Lovecraft, low-key horror, or either The Ballad of Black Tom (Victor LaValle) or Lovecraft Country (Matt Ruff).

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REVIEW: “Skin Deep” by Nickolas Ozment

Review of Nickolas Ozment, “Skin Deep”, Broadswords and Blasters 1 (2017): 3-10 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Yana Shepard.

“Skin Deep” was a fun read. It was well written and easy to follow along. That being said, the only problem I have with it was the fact that it’s easy to figure out once the plot is introduced. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however.

He wanted to behold such beauty, nothing more.

This quote allowed me to find the main character likable. He wasn’t a creep, wasn’t focused on lust or prizes to be gained. He had his own reason for this adventure, and I appreciated that. Although, I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t contradict the above quote in an indirect fashion. It’s hard to describe without spoiling, and I would rather not do that. Don’t you just hate spoilers in reviews?

All in all, I enjoyed “Skin Deep”. I recommend this if you like action-oriented fiction.

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