REVIEW: “A Funnel of Time” by Kris Faatz

Review of Kris Faatz, “A Funnel of Time”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Attempted suicide.

This story hops between 2005 and 1934, and the experiences of two women, otherwise entirely unconnected from each other, each undergoing electro-convulsive therapy to fix them, to make them forget. One woman is schizophrenic; the other, bi-polar. At least, that’s what the husband or the brother says, the one who committed them in the first place. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter, though; what matters is that somehow these two women manage to find each other and support each other, and help each other survive the abuse: “Through a funnel of time, two women hold each other up.”

This was not a typical LSQ story, and the use of real-world people in it (see note at the end of the story) was a bit off-putting for me; but I really liked the premise of women supporting women across time.

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REVIEW: “Turning Song” by Fey Karvaly

Review of Fay Karvaly, “Turning Song”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Underage rape.

The Minstrel is in love with a girl who has become a tree — it’s the sort of premise that you’d expect to find in a fairy tale, and maybe this story is a fairy tale at heart, though on the surface it is something rather odder than that. I didn’t care overmuch for the Minstrel, but I found Plum’s existence fascinating (if the story of how she got there horrifying), and Miss Ursula who is old enough to call a snow-bearded minstrel “young” was equally charming. Best of all was the very satisfying revenge and comeuppance that Plum wrecked on the god that raped her as a child.

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REVIEW: “Inspector 36” by Kristin Hooker

Review of Kristin Hooker, “Inspector 36”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

No one really worries about the arrival of our Robot Overlords, not seriously, not in real life. What worries 21st C first-world residents is the arrival of our Robot Colleagues, the self-checkout machines, the automations that will turn the working class into the unemployed class. Hooker’s story plays on that fear, giving us a world of bots “a quarter of which, which by law, had to represent a real person receiving a real paycheck” — but even those real people aren’t necessarily doing the work themselves, most of them just rent another bot to do the work for them. Short, but sweet, this was an excellent story.

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REVIEW: “Cosmic Resolution” by Hannah Hulbert

Review of Hannah Hulbert, “Cosmic Resolution”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Alcoholic parent.

Thirteen year old Marina doesn’t know what’s harder to deal with — the tentacles that slurp against her bedroom window at night, or about the fact that her mother doesn’t seem to think this is anything out of the ordinary. The opening of this story is weird and creepy, but when even Marina’s mom can’t ignore the tentacles and her whole history spills out, it takes a hard, sharp shift into the deliciously amusing and touchingly poignant. I really enjoyed this!

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REVIEW: “A Test of Trouble” by Catherine George

Review of Catherine George, “A Test of Trouble”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

For anyone woman who has lived through parenting a newborn with an unsupportive partner, or seen a friend live through the same: This will be a hard story to read. Bree’s baby Pippa is 9 weeks old, and her entire world has changed, except for perhaps the one thing that should — she is still expected to be the smart, funny, put-together, beautiful wife who gets supper on the table every day. She’s become a mother — but Max certainly hasn’t yet become a father! (The fact that Max was Bree’s professor when they first started going out certainly doesn’t make him any more sympathetic!) In a sense, this is a horror story, one that I read the whole time hoping that Bree would find a way to get out, to escape, to get Max out of her life. I’m not sure if that’s the angle George was going for, but if it was, she nailed it. This was a deeply unsettling, vaguely disturbing story.

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REVIEW: “Maeve in the Picture” by Clare McNamee-Annett

Review of Clare McNamee-Annett, “Maeve in the Picture”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I really had no idea what was going on in the early paragraphs of this story — they necessitated not one but two rereads before I could keep enough of it in my head to plunge on.

If “gritty realism” and “vampire romance” don’t conflict with each other, then those are the two phrases I would pick to describe this story. It wasn’t a happy, fluffy romance; it’s more of the uncomfortable “how close can you make a relationship sound abusive without actually being abusive” type of romance. But this was definitely unlike any other vampire story I’ve ever read.

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REVIEW: “The Moor” by Elin Olausson

Review of Elin Olausson, “The Moore”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a strange, episodic little story. There wasn’t much world-building, there wasn’t much plot, we learned far more about the main character’s two sisters than we ever did about the main character, Mei, herself, and yet somehow all the bits and pieces summed together into something satisfying.

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REVIEW: “The Graveyard Library” by Anastasiya Sukhenko

Review of Anastasiya Sukhenko, “The Graveyard Library”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

My very favorite short stories are ones that have a good title (check) and a first paragraph that open up all the possibilities for how that title can be understood (check). Three sentences into Sukhenko, and I could not wait to read more.

Writers understand the importance of telling stories, and the ways in which the stories we tell, and hear, are intimately linked with who and what we are. Sukhenko takes this fact literally in “The Graveyard Library” and the result is the creation of something we as writers can only dream of.

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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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