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?

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

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.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

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.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Aurelia” by Lisa Mason

Review of Lisa Mason, “Aurelia”, Fantasy & Science Fiction 134, 1-2 (2018): 39-60 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Michael Johnston.

This one surprised me.  The first few paragraphs left me cold, seeming to be headed to a place I don’t like in my fiction.  But the moment the despicable-but-charming Robert meets Aurelia, the story had its hooks in me.

I’m not usually a fan of psychological horror, and this story bridges the gap between “dark fantasy” and “horror” quite deftly, but it’s more of an uneasy Gaiman-esque kind of thing than anything actually horrific.  The disquieting story of Robert and Aurelia seems to march on despite the reader’s uneasy feelings, and it ends up exactly where it needs to.

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REVIEW: “Beauty Mortis” by Jaap Boekestein

Review of Jaap Boekestein, “Beauty Mortis”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 147-164. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story starts off with a rather uncomfortable scene of a man exploiting a scantily clad young woman for his own purposes, sending her down to lie on the ice of a frozen stream. “What else could she do?” the narrator asks, and that one question encompasses all that is wrong with the power dynamics between men and women in much of modern society. In this story, we see a woman playing along with those dynamics because the alternate, because what would happen if she refuses to, is so much worse. Except it isn’t: Whether she refuses or she obeys, the end result is the same. She still ends up a corpse at the hand of a man.

If I were reading for pleasure, I probably would’ve stopped reading the story at this point; stories like this are simply not stories for me. I want to see stories that push back against these power structures, that criticise these dynamics, that try to subvert them. But I was reading for reviewing, so let’s plow on.

This is one of the longer stories in the anthology, and it pushes stylistic boundaries more than some of the others. The story is told through a series of numbered vignettes, but they are all out of order; as soon as one realises that one has gone from scene 1 to scene 8, and that the next one after is scene 2, one must face the question: Do I read the scenes in numeric order? Or in the order they are printed?

I opted for numeric order, but only got as far as 6 when I couldn’t find scene 7. So then I went back and reread it in printed order, 1, 8, 2, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 6. In the end, I liked the story; it was well executed. I just wish the opening scene didn’t have to play upon the horrors that it does.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “What Lies in the Ice” by C. A. Harland

Review of C. A. Harland, “What Lies in the Ice”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 103-106. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I always knew mining was dangerous. But…

This story is told through a series of logs, or snippets of logs (we do not know if the entries we’ve been given are excerpts or complete). In fact, there is much we do not know. We never know the narrator, their name, their age, their background (other than that they have previous mining experience), there is nothing to make them feel similar or foreign or familiar or strange. The entire story rides on this narrative anonymity.

What lies beneath the ice? It would probably be no surprise that it wasn’t something happy and cuddly. But the obvious answer isn’t always the right one…

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Demon of the Song” by Ville Meriläinen

Review of Ville Meriläinen, “Demon of the Song”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 337-355. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is a nice, satisfyingly long story full of rich description and characters with complex histories.

Natalie and Siren are linked together in uneasy partnership that Natalie longs to escape. Vanderoy — perhaps — is the one to help her. But can Natalie accept Vanderoy’s help when she knows that Siren is waiting beside her for the moment that she can get Vanderoy in her clutches? Will Natalie save herself at Vanderoy’s expense, or sacrifice herself to save Vanderoy?

The story was finely crafted, with details fed to the reader at just the right pace, until the last of the pieces snapped into the puzzle.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Everybody and His Mother” by Agrippina Domanski

Review of Agrippina Domanski, “Everybody and His Mother”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I struggled with this one. I struggled with reading the story, to the point where I eventually gave up about half-way through, and then let it sit for another month before coming back to reread it. It’s not that it was poorly written, it’s not that it contained elements I found problematic, I just found it a difficult story to engage with. Part of it is that it seems quite atypical for Luna Station Quarterly‘s usual offerings; it very much felt like an ordinary story, of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places and that’s all it was for the first three-quarters of the story or so. In another venue, this wouldn’t have even been worth mentioning; but reading this story in a spec fic journal, I found myself waiting for more, wanting more. So I’m in the strange position of having to say that even if the story itself is good, the venue choice isn’t. It just didn’t work for me, and that ended up affecting my interaction with the story.

The story deals with the permeability of memory, and involves a lot of double-talk; I’m never quite sure what or whom to believe, never quite sure what the truth is. Part of this is because the narrator, Jemima, is not entirely reliable; part of it is simply because many useful pieces of information are omitted from where I would want to have them, or even omitted altogether. For example, both “Jack” and “the kid” play central roles both in the story and in Jemima’s life, but it was unclear for quite awhile what the relationship was between the kid and Jemima, or between the kid and Jack, or between Jack and Jemima. Clues and puzzle pieces were given, but I put them together in the wrong way, only to find a significant portion of the story later that I’d missed the mark. All of these things conspired to my finding this a difficult piece to read.

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REVIEW: “A Taste of Freedom” by Thomas Webb

Review of Thomas Webb, “A Taste of Freedom”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 375-378. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: Probably not the story you want to read if you’ve suffered from abuse.

This story is told in shadows and secrecy, the story of She and of what He did to her. We never know who either of them are; this is because She doesn’t have enough sense of who she is in order to tell us more than what she does.

It’s not a pleasant story, and, to be honest, not the sort of story that I enjoy at all. I tend to think one must have a very good reason before choosing to write a story of abuse — to have some sense of what will be gained from doing so, and that this gain will outweigh any harm done by perpetuating, almost normalising, such behavior. If there was a gain in telling this story, I’m not sure I was able to see what it was.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Passive Aggressive” by Narrelle M. Harris

Review of Narrelle M. Harris, “Passive Aggressive”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 270-274. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

So much drama in fiction (and in reality, if we’re being honest here…) relies on people who say one thing but mean another, hidden, thing. In this story, Harris turns this technique on its head — people say one thing but what they mean is not hidden, it is known to everyone. As a result, there are always two layers of conversation going on, the what-is-said and the what-is-meant, and between this double layer is a layer of tension that continues to build and build until you know it must explode, and how it must explode, but not exactly how. Those exact details are a surprise that makes the story worth reading to the end.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment