REVIEW: “Three Petitions to the Queen of Hell” by Tim Pratt

Review of Tim Pratt, “Three Petitions to the Queen of Hell”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Apex is really out to make me question my own reading preferences with this issue. I generally do not care for love stories – they’re fine and all, but I bristle at the implication that sexual or romantic love is the most important aspect of our lives. And then a beautiful little love story about the queens of hell shows up, and I’m head over heels for it.

Marla and Zufi, the dual queens of hell (and married, naturally), have been fighting for eight years, and neither is feeling particularly motivated to apologize. One of them decides to alleviate her boredom by re-opening the paths by which mortals can petition them, thus kick-starting some change. Also, ice cream is an important plot element.

The tone is exactly the sort that I fall for, and hard. It’s poetic and sarcastic at the same time, maintaining just enough distance from the bickering queens to recognize that they are being ridiculous, without holding them in contempt (no matter how Marla and Zufi may feel at any given time). There’s also a contrast between moments of formal speech and casual phrases that pleased me. It’s funny, without being a humorous story.

This story also does a nice job of incorporating mythic themes without hewing to any one mythology. It probably draws most from the Greeks and Romans, what with the ties between the underworld and the seasons and the flavor of the guardians set to make it hard for petitioners to get to the land of the dead, but it is it’s own thing, and well executed.

Best of all, this is a queer love story with a happy ending, which is all too rare. Recommended for fans of romance and people who like their love stories with a touch of the macabre.

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REVIEW: “Episode 14” by Shannon Ryan

Review of Shannon Ryan, “Episode 14”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 131-145 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story takes the central conceit of the anthology and runs with it from the very start: A group of Minnesota teenagers take a car and a cameraman and go off to film — not ghosts, but abandoned places. This is not a ghost story and these are not ghost hunters: “We’re not going to run around screaming like girls and taking our shirts off” (p. 131).

This is not the first time they’ve done this. In fact, they’re up now to their 14th episode, and their goal is an abandoned recycling plant that closed up shop quite suddenly a few years ago. It is dark of night when they reach the deserted building, but inside there is a noise.

Of course it’s not a ghost, because this isn’t a ghost story. And it certainly couldn’t be the giant rooster it sounds to be…

This story was a perfect treasure hunt of clues; I was pretty sure I’d figured out where it was going about half-way through, but there was just enough uncertainty that it was resoundingly satisfying when my hunch was confirmed.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” by S. B. Divya

Review of S. B. Divya’s, “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 20 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” is set in a dystopian Arizona where abortion has been criminalised. The narrator and their partner, Chula, have stayed in this dangerous territory with their two children in order to help women recieve safe abortions. The couple fully expect to be found by the law one day, and to have to run, but the narrator, who is disabled, does not expect they will make it out alive. All of their scenarios for the future involve Chula, the woman who is ‘a four-time triathlete, perfect eyesight, no injuries’, getting their children to a safe house. However, everything changes when Chula is killed by a bullet aimed at the narrator. From then on, the narrator has to be the one to survive in order to keep their children alive.

I’ve seen several discussions from disabled commentators about disability and dystopia, and “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” definitely feels like it’s in conversation with those discussions. This story adopts a multi-layered approach to depicting a disabled person’s life when the world is in crisis and they’re being chased by the authorities. S. B. Divya shows the practical issues of surviving in a dystopia when you have various disabilities. She allows her narrator to voice genuine concerns about their ability to survive, and to be less than positive about their situation. The fact that the narrator never offers up their name, and is never asked for it, is a subtle reminder that disabled people often don’t exist in dystopian stories.

At the same time, Divya challenges this lack of surviving, disabled characters in mainstream dystopian stories (or just the lack of disabled protagonists in mainstream dystopian stories). This story pushes back against the idea that there’s no place for disabled people in this genre by centring a disabled narrator, writing the story in their first person voice, giving them the tools to save their children, and sending them home alive, and a minor resistance hero. “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” creates some much needed space for disability while also providing an action-packed story which comments on the erosion of women’s rights. Try it out if you enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Flow” by Marissa Lingen.

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REVIEW: “The Date” by R. K. Kalaw

Review of R. K. Kalaw’s, “The Date”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 20 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

In “The Date” an unnamed, female narrator plucks up the courage to ask an enticing woman called Anna out to dinner. From the first description of Anna, where the narrator focuses on ‘the way she swayed, how the sun played off the velvet gleam of her exoskeleton’ it’s obvious that she is something other than human. It also becomes clear that she is direct, purposeful, and quite possibly dangerous. The narrator is well aware that she may, literally, get her head bitten off, but she chooses to pursue Anna anyway. As the story progresses, it’s easy to see why the narrator is so keen on this woman despite the imminent threat of death.

This story is concerned with the idea that women have to suppress their appetites in order to please men. The narrator explains that she’s used to playing a part when dating. ‘I wasn’t usually so forward,’ she says after asking Anna to dinner; ‘too much, too fast, and people bolted like gazelles.’ Selecting an outfit for her date, she discards a red dress in favour of an outfit which signals ‘I’m chill. I don’t need much, don’t take much, don’t need you.’ Anna, in contrast, is unafraid to take up space: laughing loudly, commanding people, and eating with gusto. She comes across as monstrous, and different, in this world of humans, with her ‘mandibles’ and ‘barbed’ arms. And she is a symbolic incarnation of characteristics leave real life women labelled as ‘monstrous’.  

Despite having  sought Anna out because she is ‘dazzling’, the narrator is unable to claim the same kind of space. She has a fear of being rejected for being ‘too much’, and this has been reinforced, repeatedly, by men. On her date with Anna, the narrator looks for a dish that is ‘small and innocuous’ because ‘Most men disliked it when I showed more hunger than they had…’ Anna laughs at this, orders them both rare steaks, and proceeds to tear hers apart ‘ripping a hunk off the bone.’; setting the narrator on a path to freedom by being herself, and granting the narrator the same freedom. ‘I’m not afraid of your appetites,’ Anna says.

It’s at this point that the story twists a little. Is the narrator, although dressed in human flesh, actually something else underneath? Are we talking about appetites or are we talking about <em>appetites</em>? “The Date” never confirms whether the narrator is inhuman, or whether she has just been suppressing a level of human desire that would be deemed ‘unseemly’ in a woman. Whichever way you read it, “The Date” is the vibrant story of a woman set free from binding social expectations by a ‘dazzling’ monster woman who could literally eat a man alive.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator says ‘It was my first time, dating a woman like her.’ And the fact that she only mentions dating men after that makes it sound like this is the narrator’s first date with a woman. The ending, where the two go off together ‘holding each other close, like lovers, like raptors,’ will put a huge grin on your face.  

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REVIEW: “We Are New(s)” by Bentley A. Reese

Review of Bentley A. Reese “We Are New(s)”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

It’s always nice to be surprised. Case in point: this is not the sort of story I like. Weird dialects, an ambiguous narrator, creepy levels of social stratification, technological connection taken to the extreme: this is everything that tends to irritate me about cyberpunk. But this story? I love it.

The world is a near future cyberpunk, both strange and recognizably descended from our present day. The plot is meet-cute, with a low-class boy approaching a high-class girl, and making a genuine connection. But the narrator, the POV character, is something outside of them, something almost omniscient, tied to the constant stream of social media and news updates the near-future internet. It has a creepiness and discomfort that kept me reading.

Beyond the plot, this is a great story about how we interact with current events and media. It’s not exactly a cautionary tale, but it holds a dark mirror to our modern day obsessions and interests. It shows us our addiction to outrage and violence and viral content. Recommended for fans of cyberpunk and anyone who likes cutting social observations in their science fiction.

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REVIEW: “A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar” by Maria Haskins

Review of Maria Haskins, “A Strange Heart, Set in Feldspar”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 57-72 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I love the title of this piece — it is stuffed full of possibility.

The story is told in alternating points of view, from above, from beneath, from between. These voices provide the shape of the mine that is the titular abandoned space of this story. At first, I thought it was a horror story, with all the horror that comes from being a parent myself and imagining it is not Alice but me in the mine, dark, claustrophobic, uncertain of where my children have gone. (Such simple things so terrifying.) And that horror is just a shadow horror that Alice must face: The choice between whether she wants to find her children or find her way out of the mine. But then, at the very end — I don’t want to say for fear of spoilers, but the ending makes me need to revise my original classification.

A powerful, real, and disturbing story — probably my favorite of the anthology so far.

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “A Jangle of Bells and Voices” by Chia Lynn Evers

Review of Chia Lynn Evers, “A Jangle of Bells and Voices”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 213-228 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The opening scenes are of a sprawling battle field full of armies and weapons and activities all unfamiliar and fell. While the point of view soon zeroes in from generalities to specifics, namely the specific of Remsa Brand of the nation of Lys, I’m still left with a bewildering amount of people and places and nations and rulers. Three pages in and I feel like I’m floundering in over my head; I struggle enough with actual history, and I’ve had three and a half decades of exposure to it! I’m not sure three pages is enough for me to grasp all the necessary nuances of this very elaborately-built world. (The fact that Remsa’s empress is named Mathilde doesn’t help matters, as I keep thinking of the English empress!)

In the end, I had to stop reading this story, and then pick it back up again a few days later. I wasn’t much more enlightened by the end of that, and I’m not sure that a third read would help me much. I suspect other people who can hold details of battles and tactics and politics in their head better than I can will appreciate the story more than I did.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Two Tails” by Ransom Noble

Review of Ransom Noble, “Two Tails”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 86-99 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story relies heavily on the standard tropes about twins (e.g., “their twin connection”, p. 97), unfortunately to its detriment, in my opinion. Landry and Bellamy are twins training to become professional mermaids when an accident befalls Landry, leaving Bellamy — who has always been the follower — behind. I found Bellamy to be rather flat and personless, primarily defined in relation to her twin, who exerts significant (and sometimes problematic) control over her. I’ve read enough twin stories for the tropes to be familiar, but reading them again here it makes me wonder how much is trope and how much is real, and also how much the story needs Landry and Bellamy to be twins — could it have worked if Landry and Bellamy were merely sisters rather than twins? I think it could have.

This was a story that I found, personally, merely “fine”. In the context of this anthology, it seemed a bit out of place; it was not clear to me what was the place that had been abandoned.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “A Priest of Vast and Distant Places” by Cassandra Khaw

Review of Cassandra Khaw “A Priest of Vast and Distant Places”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Many people have observed that there is something mysterious about the liminal space of airports and of flight itself. Khaw takes that observation a step further, with a story about one of their clergy, a solitary priest of the planes, criss-crossing the globe to commune with the vehicles in her spiritual charge, listening to their stories and their woes.

But this isn’t simply a story about a nifty idea (though it is a wonderful idea, building on the real-world experience and wonder of air travel). This is a meditation on love and loneliness and humanity. On connection and isolation (feelings I think we very much associate with airports, and the separations and reunions that occur there) and how those opposing feelings weave together to form a tapestry. Most of all, this is a story about home. It holds all of the irreconcilable dichotomies inherent to that word, all of the mixed up emotions that it can stir up, and doesn’t try to resolve them. I am grateful for that.

This is a quick read (less than 3,000 words) that packs a lot of emotional resonance and some truly lovely moments and resonant images. Well worth reading and rereading.

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REVIEW: “The Money Book” by Lara Kristin Herndon

Review of Lara Kristin Herndon, “The Money Book”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 239-249 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The setting for this story is a vague, unsettling, unpleasant future: After the bombs, after the wars, after the virus, after so many people have died. It is a time when so many things that used to have intrinsic value — like money — are now worthless in themselves, worthful only in so far as they can be used to create something of value, something like paper. Paper to record the past, to provide a foundation for the future.

Herndon’s story comes with a heavy weight of significance, palpable in every action on every page. Yet, I was never quite sure what it was that was significant; and for that reason, this story just didn’t quite work for me.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment