REVIEW: “Call to Mind” by Ella Syverson

Review of Ella Syverson, “Call to Mind”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

If swearing in your stories isn’t for you, then avoid this one — it starts off with a curse word.

But Sam and her traveling companion, Diesel, have something to curse about. Their memories have been wiped — again — and while artificial amnesia is part of the job when you’re employed by the Department of Supernatural Control, that doesn’t mean it ever gets any easier, especially when you know that there isn’t really any out. Even with artificial amnesia, DSC employees know too much to ever not be DSC employees.

Both Sam and Diesel are good at their job, though, and that’s why they’re the ones tasked to track down a rogue human who’s been fraternizing with sirens, werewolves, and witches. Too many DSC agents have been lost in trying to capture this rogue, so it’s up to the two of them to put an end to it.

Of course neither expected the job to be an easy one, but I as the reader also didn’t expect it to be easy, and found that the story came up abruptly rather short at the end. I would have loved to see the interesting premise that it began with fully developed into something more substantial than what I ended up getting.

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REVIEW: “Where Gods Dance” by Ben Serna-Grey

Review of Ben Serna-Grey, “Where Gods Dance”, Apex Magazine 118 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a story about grief, and the unbearable loss of a child. The narrator tries again and again and again to hold onto some small bit of what he has lost, with disastrous results.

This is more of a mood piece than a clear narrative, but that works well for such a short story. It invokes a host of complicated emotions, far more than could be fit if they need to be tied to a strict progression of scenes. I appreciate the way Serna-Grey refuses to shy away from the confusing tumult of the narrator’s feelings, nor from his increasingly desperate decisions.

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REVIEW: “Green is for Wishes and Apples” by Kathryn McMahon

Review of Kathryn McMahon, “Green is for Wishes and Apples”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

From Eve’s apple to the apple the witch gives Snow White, there’s no denying that in myth and story, apples are magic. Abigail knows the Granny Smiths in the tree she loves to climb partake in that tradition of magic — she learned about it from Gram, but Gram herself is now dead. Can even those potent green fruit bring back the dead?

McMahon’s slow, dreamy story of intricate witchery is creepy and unsettling, and I was rather glad the ending was dark rather than hopeful; it seemed fitting.

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REVIEW: “Laughter in the Graveyard” by Mab Morris

Review of Mab Morris, “Laughter in the Graveyard”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Gazev is a young woman who upon the death of her sister, Sonalie, inherited her job as temple cleaner. Wherever she goes she carries the weight of her sister’s death — never explained in the story — as well as the weight of “the years of [the priests’] gaze upon her beautiful, bent shoulders”. She wanders through the graveyard, but cannot escape her sister’s legacy.

I found this a heavy, depressing story. Casual misogyny is so rife in the real world, that one often looks to fantasy and speculative fiction for escape — for there we can explore worlds that are built on fundamentally different principles than our own. But while much of the world Morris builds in Gazev’s story is different from ours and foreign, the same old misogyny is there, as if it is inescapable.

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REVIEW: “Into the Flames” by Jasmine Smith

Review of Jasmine Smith, “Into the Flames”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

It’s always exciting to read the first publication of a new author, and Smith’s story did not disappoint. I found myself wrapped up in a story full of action and intrigue, in a setting evocative of medieval Arabic Egypt. There was a deep thread of uncertainty running through it all — even at the end, I was not sure who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

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REVIEW: “A Promise of Apples” by J. S. Rogers

Review of J. S. Rogers, “A Promise of Apples”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

In this story set during the era of the potato famines in Ireland, 17-year-old Deirdre and her family are fighting starvation after all the crops have failed. One night when it seems that all hope of survival is lost, Deirdre finds herself following strange music into a vale of oaks, where she meets her greatest temptation: Food, freely offered and given. But can she trust the giver?

In the end, what matters is not whether faeries are to be trusted, but whether a faery-cursed fate is worse than living a life uncursed. Deirdre makes an impossible choice, and saves her family — and her whole village — by doing so.

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REVIEW: “Agent of Chaos” by Jack Campbell

Review of Jack Campbell, “Agent of Chaos”, Unidentified Funny Objects 6, 2017.  pp. 76-97. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey

This one is dripping with a lot of writer humor, though it’s not so absorbed in the community that it’ll alienate anyone who hasn’t tried to break into the writing world. The story follows Suzanne, a woman who is following her muse, in this case Calliope, an actual, physical muse who leads her into danger, all in the name of adventure and inspiration. After all is said and done it’s going to be a question of if Suzanne even wants to be a writer anymore.

I don’t want to give too much away, but this story dances just between the line of being clever and being groan-inducing, and luckily never falls into the groan side of things. It’s a funny page turner, which is good since it’s one of the longer pieces so far in the anthology. Definitely recommended.

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REVIEW: “Tyler the Snot Elemental Scours the Newspaper, Searching for Change” by Zach Shepard

Review of Zach Shepard, “Tyler the Snot Elemental Scours the Newspaper, Searching for Change”, Unidentified Funny Objects 6, 2017.  pp. 68-75. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

This one is very, very cute and clever. As it would have you guess, it follows Tyler, a snot elemental, who feels lost in life and tries to make a change. Along the way we’re introduced to his friends, each of whom is a fantasy creature of some sort of variety and this is often used to subvert any built up expectations in some way or another. It does have some poignancy to anyone who is feeling particularly lost or wandering in their own life, and may need a bit of a reminder to seek the comfort of friends once in a while.

Highly recommended.

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REVIEW: “Cold Iron Comfort” by Hayley Stone

Review of Hayley Stone, “Cold Iron Comfort”, Apex Magazine 117 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Amadis believed their father when they said they could come home any time if things didn’t work out with their fairy lover, Kinnear. So when they start to recognize Kinnear’s manipulations for what they are, they find a portal and catch a bus back to their father’s junkyard. The abuse is slowly revealed through flashbacks, until another character in the present day finally calls it what it is. The author does an amazing job of using the trope of the fairy lover as a way to talk about abusive relationships.

It is worth noting that Amadis is not the main characters given name, but one which they select upon returning to the human world, after struggling with their gender identity for years. Though I lack first hand experience of the same, I thought that Amadis’ struggles with gender were well-described, and nicely integrated into the story. It also adds to the appeal of fairyland – the fae, of course, are much more fluid around gender than the average human.

There’s so much more that I could say about this story, from the pleasure of seeing a latinx narrator in a fairy story, to the way the plot incorporate and subverts common fairy tropes, to the wonderful relationship Amadis builds with the older woman who takes her in, but I’ll leave you to discover some of that for yourselves. Overall, “Cold Iron Comfort” is a lovely, thoughtful story about relationship, identity, and true family.

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REVIEW: “The Dead Pirate’s Cave” by Soumya Sundar Mukherjee

Review of Soumya Sundar Mukherjee, “The Dead Pirate’s Cave”, in Catherine Lundoff, ed., Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) (Queen of Swords Press, 2018): 113-127 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

One thing you don’t expect in an otherwise relatively traditional pirate story — i.e., one with revolvers and cutlasses, deserted islands, buried treasure — is robots. Or attempts to obtain immortality by downloading your consciousness and your memories into said robot…

At times I felt that the different threads of Mukherjee’s story fought against each other, not entirely harmonious. Yet at the very end she managed to turn it into something with a delightful, hopeful, happy ending. So I’d say, read it for that, at the very least.

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