REVIEW: “Deleted Scences” by Chris Cornell

Review of Chris Cornell, “Deleted Scenes”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 73-85 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

There are many ways in which a place can become abandoned — there can be a specific reason, a conscious decision, a particular action; or it can merely the slow ebbing away of any reason, decision, or action that one might have or take to go there. The town of Shetlerville has been abandoned both by choice and by inaction, and this illustrates the central theme of the story, how our choices affect our futures.

I really enjoyed this story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a story that balances upon the precipice between romance and horror. It is only the deleted scenes that determine which it is.

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REVIEW: “The Drowning Line” by Haralambi Markov

Review of Haralambi Markov, “The Drowning Line”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 183-195 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I drive on the way back and tell my husband everything he needs to hear — slowly and with conviction, a recital of sweet nothings. What I really do is think about the man in the water, my family’s legacy and undoing.

The story opens with a man being woken by the ringing of a cell phone, and in the exchange that follows between the first-person POV narrator and the man who has called him, I found I had to flip pages back and forth and reread the scene two or three times until I figured it what was happening and who was saying which words.

But that is pretty much my only complaint about the story. It is breathlessly beautiful and full of love and it caught me up in its wake and made my heart weep and bleed. It is both ordinary — the queer aspect is both foregrounded but utterly mundane — and extraordinary — with the speculative elements providing a framework that blend fantasy and reality seamlessly. Reading this story makes me so glad I bought this anthology, despite my misgivings about my suitability to review it.

(Originally published in Uncanny Magazine, 2016.)

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REVIEW: “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” by A. C. Wise

Review of A. C. Wise, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 259-275 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Do dead boys get boners? Or are they safe from being mortified? Oh, God, pun intended.

This is a classic coming-of-age, boy-meets-dead-boy, high-school-prom-graduation-and-what-comes-after story — oh, wait, that’s not really classic, is it. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the story is, and it was a pure delight to read. Now, I’ve never been a high school boy myself, so I can’t attest to the verisimilitude of the narrator’s (I just realised we never learn his name) experiences, but they feel so very real and genuine, the embarrasment, the longing, the joy, the fear. This is a story I will file carefully away, to keep safely until the time comes that I think “I know someone who needs to read this story,” at which time I’ll pull it out and share it with them. Because everyone at some point in their lives, particularly in high school, needs to read a story that shows them they are not alone.

(I also totally and shamelessly want to see this short story turned into a movie. But only this story, however short a movie it ended up being, and not some story vaguely inspired by this story but with a whole bunch more added to it. Because the twist that comes about 2/3 of the way in is both completely unexpected and entirely perfect.)

There is no way to separate the act of reading a story from the reader. There is no way I cannot read the title of this story without thinking of the same-titled REM song, the song that was my mental soundtrack in the weeks after discovering I was pregnant. I cannot get away from those memories or that song while reading this story, which makes my experience of it individual, singular (but though it is individual to me, it is no more individualised than any other reader’s experiences of the story). So I was quite glad that a nod was made to the REM song at the end of the story. I hope those kids think of that time of their lives every time they hear the song, too.

(Originally appeared in The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, 2016.)

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REVIEW: “My Heart’s Own Desire” by Robert Levy

Review of Robert Levy, “My Heart’s Own Desire”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 199-211 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

He said he was a man of means now hidden to the world, and that he wanted nothing more than to take me back to his place. It is safe, he said, and warm. He also let it be known that he could conjure the most illuminating things, potion-soaked wafers that gave you crystal visions. The Hierophant’s shit is so good, my brother Carter told me later, people say God is his supplier.

Content note: Contains explicit incest.

This was a difficult story for me to read, not the least because of some fairly graphic incest scenes. I’m not a huge fan of graphic sex scenes, but there are some contexts when they feel so right and natural that I do not mind them and even enjoy them. But the context here just feels so wrong.

Often when I’m reading, the underlying question I am continually asking is “Why this story?” Why did the narrator choose to tell this story? Why did the author choose to tell this story? Quite often the answer is a simple — if unhelpful — “because it’s a good one”. But other times, I feel like I must struggle with the story to find the answer, because the underlying premise to the question always is “they must have had a reason, a reason that they thought this story was the one worth telling”. One of the salutary things about fiction is the way in which it can force people to question their defaults and assumptions, to take a second look at why they react the way they do. I found myself doing that quite often reading this story — asking myself “is the repugnance with which I view incest preventing me from seeing clearly the answer to ‘why this story’?” Is there something the author has to say that makes this particular mode of saying it not only appropriate but justified?

At the end, I don’t know. I also don’t know whether the fault lies with me, or with the story — or with both, or with neither. It was well-written — lovely pacing, beauiful imagery, depictions of drug-induced experiences that I can appreciate aesthetically even while I have no point of contact in my own experiences — but I’m not sure that was enough to rehabilitate this one for me.

(Originally appeared in Congress Magazine, 2016.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Propagating Peonies” by Suzan Palumbo

Review of Suzan Palumbo, “Propagating Peonies”, Podcastle: 515 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

How long do you wait for reunion when you and your beloved are out of sync on the paths of reincarnation? Arthi remains near the village waiting for the love who left her to return: as a peony, a butterfly, a cat. She is feared–or appreciated–as a witch as she waits for the cycles to turn. But when what you longed for finally arrives after so much waiting, is it worth it? This is a slow-moving, meandering story, rich in description and detail with more of a slice-of-life structure than a conflict-driven plot. The action is internal and in the end there is more acceptance than resolution.

I’m not sure how I feel about this story. It didn’t grab me by the throat but it isn’t that kind of tale. I kept trying to work out if the setting were inspired by some particular real-world culture or was entirely imaginative. It felt like the latter, so I didn’t worry quite so much about the logistics of how the reincarnation was supposed to work (except for wondering why it only seemed to be relevant for the central characters). Pleasant, but not likely to stick with me as deeply memorable.

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REVIEW: “Most Holy Ghost” by Martin Pousson

Review of Martin Pousson, “Most Holy Ghost”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 155-162 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Maybe that story, and the others, were meant as postcards from a world losing air. A world where living food petrified, untouched, and dying music echoed, unheard. if light was fading on Cajun men, it had burnt out–utterly and completely–on their darker kin, the mixed-blood Sabines, who only lived in folklore now. The Sabine legend was a gray monument razed by time, and my Sabine grandfather was left a relic.

The narrator’s Sabine grandfather, Rex, is a man who mixes truth and myth. The stories told of him are of a man larger than life, but with such minute, precise details that they cannot be myth. He is both god and man. But Rex ran off years ago, and his grandchild is left to follow the trail, listen to the stories, try to find out what kind of a man Rex really was, to find the truth behind the most holy ghost that is all that remains.

This was a lively story, subtly different from the others in the anthology I’ve read so far; but it took me until the very end to realise: This was a story of a queer young man where his queerness was not witnessed by being in a queer relationship. It wasn’t until I realised this that I realised just how strange it is that it should be the only one (so far) like that. I wonder if any of the remaining stories will also break that mold, or if this will be the only one.

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REVIEW: “My Heart the Bullet in the Chamber” by Stephanie Charette

Review of Stephanie Charette, “My Heart the Bullet in the Chamber”, Podcastle: 514 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Oof. Another really gut-punching story from this year’s Artemis Rising series. “My Heart the Bullet in the Chamber” is more of an alternate history than a fantasy, per se. What if a town in a nebulous Old West setting decided that the solution to anarchy and violence was to forbid guns to men and to arm women instead? But that’s a facile description of the premise here. This is a full-out imagining of a woman-centered alternative society reminiscent of the sort of matriarchal/separatist experiments of 1980s SFF, but here the background worldbuilding is all to tell the story of one young woman’s quest to redeem a youthful mistake and avenge her sister.

In the community of Founding, a woman earns the right to carry a gun when she gives birth and joins the Matrons. But Alice has a deeper goal than simply coming of age. She and her sister had gone on a forbidden adventure outside the community. Only Alice returned and the true story would destroy her sister’s reputation. The plot is fairly straightforward: a quest, a duel, a coming of age. What makes this story powerful is how solidly detailed the setting and atmosphere are and how very real Alice feels as a character.

Content warning for sexual assault and violence. Not recommended for those suffering from male fragility.

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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: “Princess Mine” by Darby Harn

Review of Darby Harn, “Princess Mine”, Strange Horizons 19 Mar. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

The irony of reviewing a short story about a TV show reviewer reviewing a TV show is not lost on me.

That said, I really enjoyed “Princess Mine.” It’s framed as a blog post by the narrator, who discovers a heretofore unseen and unannounced third season of a show which featured a has-been actress as both herself and not-herself. The third season makes the narrator realize the emptiness in her own life, the lack of connection she has been experiencing, and in a sense, it saves her life.

Like all the best stories, this one features a relatable main character. The problem she’s struggling with–and the problem the character of the TV show, in turn, is also struggling with–is common in our modern era. With everyone hidden behind a screen, it’s hard to form real human relationships, and that can make it hard to find a reason to keep living. The strange third season of the TV show serves as the narrator’s wake-up call, her warning that she needs to make a change in her life or risk ending up like the TV show character.

It’s a simple framing device, but effective at delivering the message. The writing is sharp and engaging, interspersed with “interviews” given by the actress and the narrator’s own fan script for the actress’s one big role. There are several clever turns of phrase, such as “armed with a blood alcohol level approaching godhood.”

All in all, “Princess Mine” is a strong story about finding connections and combating depression. This is yet another story I’d highly recommend.

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REVIEW: “A Very Large Number of Moons” by Kai Stewart

Review of Kai Stewart, “A Very Large Number of Moons”, Strange Horizons 12 Mar. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

I’m not sure why, but I found this story particularly charming. Maybe it’s the prose, which is clever and witty, yet never pretentious. Maybe it’s the central idea, that of lunonomers and moon collections. Maybe it’s the actual collection of moons, a creative list running the gamut from simple (“flat moon–the moon you find in puddles”) to complex (“the moon over Berlin on August 12, 1961, as the first brick was laid to divide the city”).

Or maybe it’s the simple story behind it, the single interaction between the narrator and his visitor that demonstrates how much emotional resonance these moons can carry. The visitor has come seeking a specific moon that represents a moment of peace in a time of stress, and I think we can all relate. We all understand what it’s like to want to recapture the feeling of a particular moment.

Whatever the reason, this story struck a note with me. Short, sweet and endearing, I highly recommend this one.

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