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: “Failsafe” by Karen Bovenmyer

Review of Karen Bovenmyer, “Failsafe”, in Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 195-238 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is the longest of all the stories in the anthology, and makes for a stellar capping off of the collection. The pin is somewhere in the Caribbean, and the story is a classic creepy zombie story. It is totally not the sort of story that I would ordinarily seek out to read, because I’m not a zombie story person. I’m also not really a lonely-space-traveler-with-companion-AI story person either, or a horror story kind of person, and this story was all three of these. And yet, it was also exactly the sort of story I want, not because it was a horror-zombie-lonely-traveller story, but because of the way it was these things, because of the diversity of characters, because of the one who thinks like me, because of the roller coaster of hope and despair that Bovenmyer takes us on. It was very satisfying.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment