REVIEW: “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow

Review of Alix E. Harrow “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”, Apex Magazine 105 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

It turns out that most librarians are secretly witches. They can smell what kind of book you need, and intuit the size of your fine from the slope of your shoulders. Our narrator isn’t just a witch and a librarian: she’s someone who cares about her patrons. So when a black teenage boy comes in with waves of yearning billowing off him, she does everything she can to help. But how far will she go?

The whimsical premise caught my attention, but the emotional depth captured my heart. Why do we read? To fill holes in our souls, obviously. To escape from circumstances that have become unbearable. I’ve always been a proponent of the holy power of escape, so I was tickled to see this story directly challenging those who look down upon it.

This story is about more than just the power of reading (I know: there’s nothing “just” about the power of reading, but bear with me). It’s also about rules, and when to break them. The narrator shows us how to do it, too: with joy and conviction. She knows that the consequences are worth it – not just for the sake of the kid she’s helping, but for her own sake, as well.

Highly recommended for anybody interested in the healing power of stories.

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REVIEW: “All the Songs the Little Birds Sing” by T. D. Walker

Review of T. D. Walker, “All the Songs the Little Birds sing”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story has one of those slippery settings where it could be radically other, radically elsewhere or elsewhen, or it could also be just around the corner, today or tomorrow.

Some stories make it clear what kind of stories they are from the beginning; not this one, not for me at least. And yet, even without having any idea of where it started or where it was going, I kept reading. Walker’s language is tight and precise and allows us a very clear insight into Alice’s head. Alice herself is the sort of main character I’ve found myself looking for more and more lately — someone who is older than me, who has found a sense of herself, who understands how she fits into the world. “Alice was everything, and she wanted to live that way,” Walker tells us. That’s the sort of heroine I aspire to be.

There was a lot left out of this story, the history of how things got to be this way only hinted at. In some stories, these gaps can be frustrating. In this one, I wanted to know more, of course, but I was also satisfied with what I got.

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REVIEW: “There are No Wrong Answers” by LaShawn M. Wanak

Review of LaShawn M. Wanak, “There are No Wrong Answers”, Podcastle: 505 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Sometimes a story doesn’t hit my sweet spot, not through any lack of writing quality, but simply because the structure is one that grates on me. “There are No Wrong Answers” was one of those (suggesting, perhaps, that there are wrong answers) due to the use of the interruptive quiz format that framed and was interspersed with the main narrative. Kudos for the experimental attempt, but it doesn’t work for me personally.

Lana has a talent for designing and analyzing personality tests, her neighbor Madame D (a drag performer and fortune teller) is a talented cold reader. Their intersection over a straying Labrador retriever results in an awkwardly developing friendship as Lana gets prickly over Madame D’s suggestion that their occupations have more in common that she’d like to think. Lana gets hired as lead test administrator for an employment counseling firm, which leads to the major conflict in the story.

The overall shape of the story is an overlay of “protagonist is aided to greater understanding of herself and learns to appreciate people she originally looked down on” and “supernatural powers achieve justice for wrongs done.” The genuine supernatural elements would seem to undermine the original premise that psychological counseling and cold reading are twins of the same parentage, but without them, this wouldn’t be a fantasy story at all.

(Originally published in What Fates Impose edited by Nayad A. Monroe)

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REVIEW: “Cuddles” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Cuddles”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 224-226. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Who knows what lies in the depths of the deep dark sea? Well, deep sea survey crews, for one, after all, it’s part of their job to know these things. Most of the time they stick to surveying and studying, but sometimes things go wrong and an animal is injured. That’s how Cuddles, “some sort of cross between squid and octopus, with hallmarks of both but belonging to neither” (224) comes to live at the Seaside Aquarium and Rescue Center, and when his life intersects with Sarita, the narrator’s.

Those who like Cthulhu will probably enjoy this. I did for the most part, right up until the very end when the story commits one of the cardinal sins of 1st-person narration — how does a person narrate their own story after they are dead?

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REVIEW: “The Rocket Farmer” by Julie C. Day

Review of Julie C. Day, “The Rocket Farmer”, Podcastle: 507 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

What raises a story above simply being entertaining to being a “good story” is often the layering in of multiple themes or meanings. On its surface, “The Rocket Farmer” is a fantasy about rocket ships as an agricultural crop: their natural history, the complexities of crop management, the inevitable tragedies of failure. But on a different level, the story concerns the more mundane and eternal struggle of one generation to understand and communicate with another. Sarnai is pulled between the bottomless pit of neediness that is her father’s struggling rocket farm, and the growing suspicion that she has failed to protect her daughter from the lure of the family profession.

The story is told in three voices: Sarnai, her daughter Sophie, and one of the rockets, waiting to fulfil its destiny. The result is a delightfully unexpected and–dare I say heartwarming?–tale of communication failures and eventual success. If the story had focused only on the clever conceit of rocket farming, it would have fallen flat for me, mired in a vast array of technical detail. But as a medium for a story of human interactions, it worked beyond any of my initial expectations.

(Originally published in Interzone #271)

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REVIEW: “Reborn” by Petter Skult

Review of Petter Skult, “Reborn”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 204-207. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Note: If you don’t like spiders, don’t read this story.

This is an unsettling little investigation into the ways in which people can go “crazy”. Seeing God. Seeing things that don’t exist. Seeing things no one else can see. Seeing things that are real and true and are there, but which no one else believes you can see. And when no one else believes you, when everyone else thinks you are already crazy, then sometimes it is the attempts to heal your madness that finally drive you mad.

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REVIEW: “Origin Story” by T. Kingfisher

Review of T. Kingfisher “Origin Story”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a remarkably beautiful story, for one so gruesome. But I think that is at least half the point – there is grace in the blood and the guts, as in everything else, and when you start a story that reads “[t]he last of the fairies worked in a charnel house,” then you have no right to expect something different.

Of course, the fairy doesn’t just do the work the foreman asks of her; she does her own work, as well. After the human employees go home, she uses the scraps of meat and bone and skin to make her own creatures. Mostly, they are small monsters, and are not the subject of this story. No, this story is about her greatest creation.

The fairy in question is explicitly not a good fairy, but I don’t think she is evil, either. Just dark. Different. Her creations are described as frightening, but not harmful. And in this story, she is motivated by a desire for justice. Her actions are not pretty, but they come from a sense of rightness and a desire to bring some justice to one who she perceives died unfairly.

Whether writing as T. Kingfisher or under her own name, Ursula Vernon has a way of combining the magic of fairy tales with an earthy practicality. It shouldn’t surprise me that she could take a story rife with death and fill it with life and the spice of good humor, but somehow, it does. Like fairy magic, her voice transforms what sound like a deeply disturbing tale into something dark but not at all heavy.

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REVIEW: “Onward Christian Soldiers” by G. H. Finn

Review of G. H. Finn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 187-202. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Four things I liked about the story from the very start: First, with a title like that, the story comes with its own soundtrack (hard for me not to read the story without a chorus of booming voices in my head singing out the song). Second, so much fantasy seems so afraid of interacting with religion in any form. Not this story! Third, prior to reading this story, I had no idea that Baring-Gould had also written a book about werewolves. The story’s epigraph was basically an informative footnote in itself, and you all know how much I love an informative footnote. Sometimes truth really is stranger than (or as strange as) fiction. Finally, like the narrator, “I am by nature neither a detective nor a hunter. At heart I am a scholar” (187), and I enjoy reading stories about scholars.

Vampire stories are, perhaps, the exception to the eschewing of religion in speculative fiction, because of the important role religious symbols play in vampire lore. The narrator makes the reasonable assumption that symbols that have power over vampires will also have power over werewolves, as being, presumably, demonic beasts of a similar origin. Unfortunately for him, the narrator is wrong. (Or—as the narrator himself worries—the symbols do have power, but he simply doesn’t have enough faith.)

As befits a story told by a scholar, the first part of the tale is academic in tone, a recitation of dates and places and names and facts. In the second half, the narration turns much more personal, and tells the story of how even a scholar can turn into a soldier for Christ.

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REVIEW: “Silver Noir” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Silver Noir”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 166-167. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is a little vignette about werewolf hunting, centered around the expense of silver bullets and one man who uses up all seven of his in one night. There’s a big cost to pay if you are too profligate with your bullets, but the cost that the unnamed narrator has to pay is greater than the cost of any amount of silver. The story is quite short, but tightly written.

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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.

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