REVIEW: “Embracing the Movement” by Cristina Jurado

Review of Cristina Jurado, “Embracing the Movement”, Clarkesworld Issue 177, June (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

A fantastical tale of a strange sort of first contact. Things don’t go the way you may anticipate. There’s delicious buildup about existence in outer space and the different kinds of lives people live. It also features a very creepy payoff.

Different sorts of living spaces, structures and communication types exist in our universe. We have barely begun to understand this universe, and stories like this throw that fact into sharp relief.

A subtle queasiness exists throughout the story. If you enjoy feeling creeped out, this one will be right up your alley.

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REVIEW: “The Scarlet Cloak” by Karen Bovenmyer

Review of Karen Bovenmyer, “The Scarlet Cloak,” Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Bullying, abuse, & harassment; murder ideation; cannibalism; references to rape.

One thing that’s interesting about reading the back archives of a journal is seeing which stories age well (or don’t age at all!) and which don’t. I feel like this one ends up in the latter category: A story where the central heroine is part of the police force is a bit harder to swallow in 2021 than it may have been in 2015.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure I would’ve appreciated this story when it first came out: It is too gruesome, too violent for my tastes.

(First appeared in The Crimson Pact Volume 3, 2012.)

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REVIEW: “The Corn Grows Back Every Year” by Riley Vainionpaa

Review of Riley Vainionpaa, “The Corn Grows Back Every Year,” Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was sci-fi with a good dollop of horror (content note: body horror/mutilation). At first neither Peggy nor Mellie understand what’s going on with Mellie’s body, or why she appears to have developed special powers. But then they agree to systematically experiment, driven by the need to know, to understand.

This was an odd little story!

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REVIEW: “Relapse” by Phoenix Roberts

Review of Phoenix Roberts, “Relapse”, Luna Station Quarterly 47 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Eating disorders.

Katherine is recovering from an eating disorder, and is making a table. The spectre of her ED haunts the earlier part of the story, so that it takes awhile to piece together the offered clues to see that that’s what happened to her. After that, it becomes quite a frank account: I cannot say how accurate because I do not have the experience, but the way her recovery shapes her life smacks of authenticity.

It’s hard to isolate and explain the speculative — almost horror — element in the story, and how it weaves through the more mundane details, so I won’t try; it is best understood by experiencing it, by reading the story yourself.

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REVIEW: “Who Wants to Live Forever?” by Karen McCreedy

Review of Karen McCreedy, “Who Wants to Live Forever?”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“Who wants to live forever?” they asked, and humanity—stupid, unthinking fools that we were—answered, “we do.”

Ange and Bob both work at the Euro-Asian Space Agency, which means that when the humanoid robots sent off to colonise Mars and Jupiter return to Earth offering people the opportunity to live forever — to download themselves into indestructible humanoid bodies — they’re near the top of the priority queue. Only, they never stopped to think what life would be like if all the bits that make them human that come from their corporeal bodies were gone.

This story started off pretty classic SF but continually edged its way closer and closer to horror, as McCreedy deftly illustrates what life would be like if we could, indeed, live forever. Thanks, but no thanks!

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REVIEW: “Them Oranges” by Nicole M. Wolverton

Review of Nicole M. Wolverton, “Them Oranges”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Lettie knows that every summer, when the scent of “them oranges” comes wafting through the windows, she will be called on to perform a necessary sacrifice to protect her village — just like her mother before her, and just like her daughter-to-be will after — whatever the sacrifice might cost her, personally.

This was a bit of a surprising story for LSQ — more to the horror than the SFF side of things. Perhaps that’s why it was one I’d file under “not for me”, because it was stronger on the shock and gore than it was on the world-building and scene-setting. I would have liked to know more about what Lettie’s sacrifice was protecting the village from.

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REVIEW: “Little, Little, Little” by K. A. Tutin

Review of K. A. Tutin, “Little, Little, Little”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a slightly gruesome story of transformation (if body-mod things squick you out, you might want to avoid this), and I almost really enjoyed it — it was suffused with love and freedom and acceptance. But it was told in 2nd person, and in this context, that POV just didn’t work for me.

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REVIEW: “The Adopt a Zombie Program” by Sophia Thimmes

Review of Sophia Thimmes, “The Adopt a Zombie Program”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Zombie stories aren’t really my cup of tea, even if the zombies involved “really were sort of cute”. 🙂 But Thimmes managed to find a distinctive premise, which got me immediately interested in the first few paragraphs. (Got bogged down a bit with the info dump a few paragraphs later, but that was a minor blip.) I give this story a thumbs up, and it’s even my own thumb.

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REVIEW: “Yummie” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Yummie”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 99-108 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

What a strange combination of banal and surreal this was! It reminded me of a Kafka story, where you get pulled along with this growing sense of horror as everything that should be normal goes sideways.

(Originally published in The Weight of Words, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “Running Down” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Running Down”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 55-93 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

One thing I have really enjoyed about Harrison’s stories is the way that he highlights experiences that seem at once very specific and yet at the same time also familiar. In “Running Down”, this manifests in the opening of the story when the narrator, Egerton, explains his relationship with Lyall, his erstwhile university roommate. The details of their story seem utterly unique to them; and yet, the experience of mutually dislike between close friends is one that has happened more than once in my own life (it makes me wonder, now, whatever happened to my childhood bestfriend whom I moved away from age 10. She and I loathed each other more often than not). The deft way that Harrison does this is what makes his stories feel so real, even when — once you get more than a few pages in — you cannot escape the utter unreality of the story being told (especially when an unexpected personage turns up!).

(Originally published in New Worlds Quarterly 8).

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