REVIEW: “Planet, Paper, Space” by Melissa Embry

Review of Melissa Embry, “Planet, Paper, Space,” Luna Station Quarterly 22 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Max Villafranca is an origami artist who has paid for two weeks’ visit to the orbiting station Gaia, where he is very much the bumbling tourist that the long-suffering crew puts up with because it pays the bill. This was such an utterly charming mixture of the strange and unfamiliar and the ordinary, almost mundane. Max was an extremely disarming hero, and I felt great sympathy for Captain Nguyen having to put up with him. And I loved the way in which this story was slightly more than science fiction, it also had a fantastical element that segued always into horro that I was not expecting.

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REVIEW: “After Colour” by Kiale Palpant and Oliver Herbort

Review of Kiale Palpant and Oliver Herbort, “After Colour”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 63-72 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This was such an unexpected story — unlike any of the other ones in the anthology. On the one hand, it’s probably as close to a horror story as this collection has; on the other hand, I want to describe it as “Exoplanets x ‘It’s a Beautiful Life'”. Even writing that feels like a contradiction! But it’s not, these competing descriptions really are the best way to explain this short, intriguing story.

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REVIEW: “One Cloud at a Time: A Radio Play” by Priyanka Jha and Nanna Bach-Møller

Review of Priyanka Jha and Nanna Bach-Møller, “One Cloud at a Time: A Radio Play”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 21-31. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This play was simply a joy to read. It was written as a dialogue between two scientists, one named Bach, one named Møller, and it moves from the intimate and mundane (trying to create life; trying to decide what to eat for dinner) to the tragic and serious (we try not to think about how often scientists are paid to keep their mouths shut, or the lengths governments will go to shut them up.)

If you’ve ever been bothered at the way conspiracies can take hold in people’s minds, forcing out the understanding that scientific knowledge can bring, this is a piece for you!

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REVIEW: “Larvae” by Kai Taddei

Review of Kai Taddei, “Larvae,” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story combines two things I’m not a huge fan of — 2nd person POV and body horror — into something that I actually rather enjoyed. The mesmerising narration felt more like a person talking to themself, rather than instructions to the reader, resulting in a very intimate and emotionally draining glimpse into a sad and rather sordid life.

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REVIEW: “The Curse of the Stillborn” by Margery Lawrence

Review of Margery Lawrence, “The Curse of the Stillborn,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 295-312 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story — featuring British missionaries living in Egypt — opened with a surprising commentary on colonialism and colonial practises:

“Dammit — why can’t you let ’em bury their dead in their own way?” (p. 295).

Mr. and Mrs. Bond cannot fathom why anyone would refuse the option of a good Christian burial for a child, which they are so generously willing to offer. And yet, Takkari and her daughter Mefren want nothing more than to be allowed to bury Mefren’s stillborn child according to their own practices and traditions.

While usually in western European ghost stories, the refusal of Christian burial is what dooms a tortured soul to walk the earth, in contradistinction here it is the performance of the Christian rite that traps Mefren’s child in ghostly limbo and invokes the curse of the stillborn. A rather surprising story to read, given the time it was published!

(First published in Hutchinson’s Mystery Magazine in 1925.)

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REVIEW: “Anne’s Little Ghost” by H. D. Everett

Review of H. D. Everett, “Anne’s Little Ghost,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 277-292 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story is of that ilk of ghost stories which are sad, rather than scary or haunting. Anne and Godfrey have been married nearly eight years and yet they are still just the two of them; their daughter, born two years into their marriage, died only a few weeks later. So when both are visited by the ghost of a six year old little girl, there is nothing scary at all about the visage, only a deep aching sadness the reader has for parents who have not only lost a beloved child, but with it the future they might once have dreamed of. And this time it is not only the mother’s loss that we are able to mourn, but the father’s too, for is not “the father’s tie as valid as the mother’s, if not so close and fond” (p. 289)?

(First published in The Death Mask and Other Ghosts, 1920.)

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REVIEW: “Two Little Red Shoes” by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor

Review of Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, “Two Little Red Shoes,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 251-275 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This was an extremely intimate, and at times sometimes intensely difficult, story to read. The narrator tells her tale without any guile or hesitancy, which makes her recounting of the abuse of two young children that she witnesses all the more terrible.

It’s an extremely well written story, but not one I could in all conscience recommend anyone read.

(First published in From Out of the Silence, 1920.)

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REVIEW: “The Shadowy Third” by Ellen Glasgow

Review of Ellen Glasgow, “The Shadowy Third,” in Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth, edited by Jen Baker (British Library, 2021): 219-249 — Order here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Margaret Randolph, is a young nurse, newly arrived in New York, who has been selected by the eminent Doctor Roland Maradick to care for his invalid wife, who suffers from mental distress brought on by the hallucination that her husband has killed her daughter. That Mrs. Maradick suffers from hallucinations or delusions Margaret is quite convinced because she has seen the child herself, wandering through the house, playing with her toys, doing all the ordinary things a child does.

But of course, this is a story of ghosts and not of madness and so what Margaret sees is perhaps not all that it appears to be. What I find fascinating in this story, and indeed in many of the ones in this anthology, is how little self-reflection there is about why it is that some people see ghosts, and others do not. There is never any doubt in Margaret’s mind that what she sees — phantasms included — is real.

(Originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, 1916.)

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