REVIEW: “Call to Mind” by Ella Syverson

Review of Ella Syverson, “Call to Mind”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

If swearing in your stories isn’t for you, then avoid this one — it starts off with a curse word.

But Sam and her traveling companion, Diesel, have something to curse about. Their memories have been wiped — again — and while artificial amnesia is part of the job when you’re employed by the Department of Supernatural Control, that doesn’t mean it ever gets any easier, especially when you know that there isn’t really any out. Even with artificial amnesia, DSC employees know too much to ever not be DSC employees.

Both Sam and Diesel are good at their job, though, and that’s why they’re the ones tasked to track down a rogue human who’s been fraternizing with sirens, werewolves, and witches. Too many DSC agents have been lost in trying to capture this rogue, so it’s up to the two of them to put an end to it.

Of course neither expected the job to be an easy one, but I as the reader also didn’t expect it to be easy, and found that the story came up abruptly rather short at the end. I would have loved to see the interesting premise that it began with fully developed into something more substantial than what I ended up getting.

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REVIEW: “Green is for Wishes and Apples” by Kathryn McMahon

Review of Kathryn McMahon, “Green is for Wishes and Apples”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

From Eve’s apple to the apple the witch gives Snow White, there’s no denying that in myth and story, apples are magic. Abigail knows the Granny Smiths in the tree she loves to climb partake in that tradition of magic — she learned about it from Gram, but Gram herself is now dead. Can even those potent green fruit bring back the dead?

McMahon’s slow, dreamy story of intricate witchery is creepy and unsettling, and I was rather glad the ending was dark rather than hopeful; it seemed fitting.

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REVIEW: “Laughter in the Graveyard” by Mab Morris

Review of Mab Morris, “Laughter in the Graveyard”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Gazev is a young woman who upon the death of her sister, Sonalie, inherited her job as temple cleaner. Wherever she goes she carries the weight of her sister’s death — never explained in the story — as well as the weight of “the years of [the priests’] gaze upon her beautiful, bent shoulders”. She wanders through the graveyard, but cannot escape her sister’s legacy.

I found this a heavy, depressing story. Casual misogyny is so rife in the real world, that one often looks to fantasy and speculative fiction for escape — for there we can explore worlds that are built on fundamentally different principles than our own. But while much of the world Morris builds in Gazev’s story is different from ours and foreign, the same old misogyny is there, as if it is inescapable.

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REVIEW: “Into the Flames” by Jasmine Smith

Review of Jasmine Smith, “Into the Flames”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

It’s always exciting to read the first publication of a new author, and Smith’s story did not disappoint. I found myself wrapped up in a story full of action and intrigue, in a setting evocative of medieval Arabic Egypt. There was a deep thread of uncertainty running through it all — even at the end, I was not sure who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

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REVIEW: “A Promise of Apples” by J. S. Rogers

Review of J. S. Rogers, “A Promise of Apples”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

In this story set during the era of the potato famines in Ireland, 17-year-old Deirdre and her family are fighting starvation after all the crops have failed. One night when it seems that all hope of survival is lost, Deirdre finds herself following strange music into a vale of oaks, where she meets her greatest temptation: Food, freely offered and given. But can she trust the giver?

In the end, what matters is not whether faeries are to be trusted, but whether a faery-cursed fate is worse than living a life uncursed. Deirdre makes an impossible choice, and saves her family — and her whole village — by doing so.

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REVIEW: “Sirens” by Britani C. W. Baker

Review of Britani C. W. Baker, “Sirens”, Luna Station Quarterly 37 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Memories of child abuse.

The titular sirens of this story are not the ones I immediately thought of — tantalising creatures of the watery depths — but ones that strike fear into my childhood midwestern heart: Tornado sirens. The world that Baker populates has been destroyed by tornadoes, everywhere, all at once, and the sirens haven’t stopped since. Through their raging call walk Denver and Isaac.

I found this story left me with more questions than answers — where did the tornadoes come from? What sort of weather could have resulted in that many, all at once, including in places that don’t normally have tornadoes? How is it that vast cities are abandoned and left to scavengers, but the sirens in them are still going off? (This is quite a practical question: I found myself wondering “just how are tornado sirens powered, such that it’s possible for them to still be blaring after two years?”) I also found myself wanting somewhat more than the story had to give — something more speculative than merely a post-apocalyptic setting. However, for anyone who has lived through the sort of abuse that Denver has survived, I can imagine reading this story might be sort of cathartic.

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REVIEW: “Transcripts of Tapes Found Near The Depot, 06-45” by Laura Duerr

Review of Laura Duerr, “Transcripts of Tapes Found Near The Depot, 06-45”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

One often thinks of “post-apocalyptic fiction” as involving some sort of discrete apocalypse, a single event that separates history into “before” and “after”. Nuclear war, or an asteroid hitting the earth, or something like that. It’s easy to read stories like that as fiction, because people are bad at calculating the realistic odds of events like that actually happening.

But apocalypses can also be gradual things, things where there is no clear starting point, no clear moment where we can say “this is where things went wrong”. Global warming is one of those insidious apocalypses, and the likelihood is high that we’ve probably already past the moment where things first went wrong.

Which makes stories like Duerr’s — clearly in the post-apocalyptic genre, but where the apocalypse is a gradual, continuous event rather than a discrete one — hard to read, because they are a bit too much like truth and a bit too little like fiction. These tape transcripts are from our near future, and describe a world where the rivers have dried up, so there is no water left to power the generators, which means no power, which means no internet, but no one wants to go onto the internet anyway, because all the woe and horror drown out any useful information. They’re a mirror of a potential future, at least, and a scary future it is.

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REVIEW: “The Curse of Apollo” by Diana Hurlburt

Review of Diana Hurlburt, “The Curse of Apollo”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a story of a story, set in ancient Greece where a story teller recites the tales for each season — counting tales “a more pleasant way of counting the seasons than taxes”. This particular story that the story teller tells us of is of two horses born to the same mare six weeks apart. Is this a miracle of nature? Is it divine intervention? Are the horses gods? Or silly young foals to be sacrificed to the gods? No one knew what to do, except one person, and he was not consulted: And so that is how the titular curse came about. No one thought to ask one of the most important twin gods what he thought, and Apollo felt slighted…

The best myths are ones where you aren’t entirely sure what is real and what is not. This story feels like it could’ve come straight out of the Homeric tradition of classical Greek mythology, though it’s not a myth that I recognise — whether this is because of a fault in myself or because the story is truly new, I do not know. Either way, I enjoyed it.

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REVIEW: “Butterflies” by Elizabeth Hinckley

Review of Elizabeth Hinckley, “Butterflies”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Reading this story was like sitting down to tea with someone you’ve never met but with whom you have mutual friends, friends who at one point told the two of you “you would like each other. you should meet up sometime.” So you do, and then you hear the other person’s story and can’t help but be fascinated (and to appreciate having friends who know you so well that they can recommend knew friends to you).

Let’s pretend, dear reader, that I am the mutual friend between you and this wonderful little post-apocalyptic story, and this is me telling you “why don’t you brew a cup of tea and settle down with this story? I think you’d like each other.”

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REVIEW: “Wise Woman” by Regina Higgins

Review of Regina Higgins, “Wise Woman”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This wasn’t meant to be a horror story (I don’t think), but there are few things that I can imagine that are scarier than false accusations. When Charlotte finds out from her aunt Sylvia that Mildred, whom Charlotte has been going to all her life, has been accused, Charlotte’s first response is to ask what proof there is being the accusations. Sylvia’s response is chilling:

“Oh, there’s no proof. Not yet. She’s just been accused.”

Behind those words is the chilling truth, that proof doesn’t matter. When a woman is accused, proof isn’t needed. When a woman accuses, proof is required.

It is fear that drives Charlotte to ask Mildred to read the cards: The Empress, the Emperor, the broken tower, symbol of destruction. But while Charlotte fears destruction as a dangerous, harmful thing, Mildred embraces hope: Hope that what is to come is the shattering of oppressive power structures. Mildred’s hope is so calm and steadfast, it is difficult not to believe in it. Hope in the face of oppression is always something worth reading about.

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