REVIEW: “Neon” by M. Raoulee

Review of M. Raoulee, “Neon”, in Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of the City That Never Was, edited by Dave Ring, (Mason Jar Press, 2018): 7–27 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This, as they say, is a story with all the feels. Wonder, uncertainty, tugging at heart-strings, strangeness, confusion, delight, tenderness.

“Neon” is the story of motorcycle-builder, combustion-lover, financial-advisor, heretic Quinn, who lives in a realm where electricity has taken over everything, including and most especially motors; few people, any more, care about the old combustion engines, and those that do — the riders — are tarred as misfits and outcasts. His city is filled with Sylphs and Fulminations and Undines and Shades who travel through the aether, and who can be called from the aether to perform services. Quinn’s world is one where enchantment and sorcery is entwined with electricity and salt and heresy. So much of this we can see on the surface of the story; and so much more is hinted beneath. I loved the way that Raoulee built such a detailed picture of the unknown city, and yet so much of the details to the reader to fill in. I loved seeing the way in which Quinn interacted with his friends, associates, and employers, and from the moment he stumbled into Archae and Archae got onto Quinn’s motorcycle behind him, I loved Archae. A stellar start to the anthology!

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was edited by Dave Ring

Review of Dave Ring, ed., Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of the City That Never Was (Mason Jar Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I first learned of this anthology late fall 2017, when the call for submissions went out. The concept immediately caught my interest:

We are looking for stories that explore the edges of urban fantasy through queer stories. While the city these stories are set in should be vast and unnamed, highly specific neighborhoods and landmarks are encouraged and sought after. We welcome a broad interpretation of the genre that is inclusive of postmodern folk tales, future/ancient noir, and stories that happen both behind closed doors and in plain sight. Throughout, we’re looking for rich, varied and nuanced understandings of gender, family and ethnicity.

I loved the idea of a series of stories that are all connected, but the ways in which they are connected are left to the reader, and not the writer, to specify. So I was extremely delighted to be offered a review copy of the anthology, because now I get to see how that original conception came to fruition.

The 10 stories in this collection spam the gamut of gritty to sweet to sensual to sad. As a whole, they give a sense of a complex and rewarding city, some place I’d like to visit, some place I’d like to set a story of my own in. In his editor’s note, Ring points out the important power of fiction “to bear witness”, and the importance of witnessing queer characters in the forefront of stories, not on the sidelines. These stories come together in a powerful way to bear this witness, and I highly recommend this collection.

As usual, we’ll review each story individually, and link the reviews back here when they are posted:

Sara L. Uckelman10 Comments

REVIEW: “Dulce et Decorum” by S. L. Huang

Review of S. L. Huang, “Dulce et Decorum”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 205-215. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is the story of how Emily Shen seeks out Valentina (sometimes Knyazev; today, Knyazeva), hedge-magician and curator of the poetry of war museum, at the suggestion of her friend Chand, for help dealing with the last remnant of her beloved grandfather — his treasured gun. This gun represents everything she hates — war that goes against her pacifist views, and a reminder of the fact that her beloved grandfather was not what she is:

Besides, the pistol feels like it doesn’t represent Yeye so much as it represents all the pieces of him I didn’t know or didn’t understand (p. 209).

It’s a story of how she must grapple with “the cognitive dissonance” — the cognitive dissonance that comes from being a pacifist raised by a war veteran, of the dissonance that comes from the juxtaposition of the two themes of the anthology: poetry, so beautiful, so vital, so full of power; and war, so ugly, so atrocious, so deadly. Valentina offers to write her a poem of her grandfather, noting that it will be “Messy. And human” (p. 214). Like life. Like war. Like poetry itself.

Huang’s telling of how is so full of piercing sentences that I could write a review just quoting all the ones that cut quick. But then I’d basically be replicating the story here, so I’ll just end this review with: Go read the story for yourself.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Words of Our Enemies, the Words of Our Hearts” by A. Merc Rustad

Review of A. Merc Rustad, “The Words of Our Enemies, the Words of Our Hearts”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 133-148. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“A shiny new story with dinosaurs” is how the author’s note describes this story, and Rustad delivered exactly that — not only with dinosaurs, but also an Ever-Hungry Queen, the tomeslinger Yarchuse who uses a set of neopronouns I’d never come across before (“ae”, “aer”), which I found read surprisingly smoothly and easily for being unfamiliar, a forest fighting for its right to survive, and (tapping into all my own desires) an Unearthly Library that people pray to instead of a deity. There was a lot going on packed into this story.

Yarchuse is the focus of the story, ae and aer quest to find the Ever-Hungry Queen’s son Prince Aretas, and the greater quest to end the war with the trees, but it was the Ever-Hungry Queen that intrigued me the most. Why does she hunger? What does she hunger? Was she the Ever-Hungry Queen three years ago, before the death of her daughter the princess? She remained throughout stubbornly peripheral and absent; I would have liked to have had more of her.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “El Cantar de la Reina Bruja” by Victoria Sandbrook

Review of Victoria Sandbrook, “El Cantar de la Reina Bruja”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 79-92. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Reina Alejandra chained her goddess soul in order to seduce a king. Now she is his captive, and the king is on crusade to woo a new queen, using Alejandra’s magic as his weapon. Submitting to his will is the only hope she has of one day freeing herself.

I found this story perplexing. It was beautifully written but it felt like certain pieces to the puzzle were missing. Alejandra clearly loved her king — or at least did once — not just lusted after him. But never are we shown why; there seemed nothing loveable in him. As a result, Alejandra seemed more to be pitied than to be sad for. I also missed a piece in the way in which she won her freedom; when Alejandra and her rival queen finally meet, it seems as if they must have met already, but we are not told how. Or perhaps it just is that Alejandra loves widely, and without reason.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Economy These Days” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Economy These Days”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 164-179 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content warning: Domestic violence against children

This story seemed somewhat out of place in the anthology, as it lacked anything that struck me as typical of the horror genre.

I did have to laugh when I read this:

He’d submitted résumés and cover letters to no less than two hundred openings. A total of three potential employers requested interviews. No call-backs (p. 165).

Not because it was funny, but because of all the tropes in the book, it is this one that is the most scary, because the most true. They say “write what you know”, and it is clear from this — and from other hints in other stories — that Thorn knows the academic trajectory quite well.

But otherwise this story of a struggling academic seeking to find an alternative means of financial support is violent without being either psychologically or physically scary.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Fear and Grace” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Fear and Grace”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 130-149 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Violence against animals, gore.

This is one of the first stories in the anthology to feature a female main character — and she’s queer to boot — and yet strangely, it is Justine’s teenage flame Herbert, not mid-thirties Justine herself, whom this story is focused upon. This is a continual theme of the anthology, where even stories that feature women do not center them, but place them in an orbit of a man, such as the “erudite, virile Herbert” who “with one expression, with the subtlest of body language…could make you forget just about anything” (p. 132).

Just about anything, but not everything:

She was willing to entertain the notion that people who did bad things were not necessarily bad people, but no matter how hard she tried, it seemed she just could not forget some bad things (p. 133).

We are treated to Justine’s memories of what she cannot forget, and it’s not pleasant. It is gore for the sake of gore, purposeless and banal. Or perhaps there is a purpose, a warning that we can take away — people don’t change.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Wish-Giver” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “The Wish-Giver”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 150-156 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

A young child braves a fiercesome, wish-granting dragon to ask for their heart’s desire — and the one wish the dragon cannot grant because it has already been granted. All the child needed was for other people to see what had always been true.

Every trans child needs a dragon at their back to protect and affirm them. While the stories in this collection are not written for cis people, this is one that spoke strongly to me and I hope will to other cis people as well. Not every child gets a literal dragon, but maybe we can be metaphorical dragons and step up and speak the truth when the truth is needed.

This short story is the perfect endcap to the anthology, encapsulating in it everything that is good and affirming in all the other stories (I think it’s not surprise that this is the only story in the anthology that doesn’t have a content note.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “No Man of Woman Born” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “No Man of Woman Born”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 133-149 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Governmental oppression, mention of emergency C-section and rape.

When Mardoll said in the introduction that the characters inside “break, subvert, and fulfil the same gendered prophecies” that cis characters get in other stories, we were meant to take this quite literally, as is clear in the number of overt prophecies and oracles that occur in the stories. “No Man of Woman Born” opens with a prophecy, that no man of woman born can harm Fearghas. The prophecy was “unambiguous” and had “independent verification” (p. 139). So of course, nothing could possibly go wrong…But of course not. What is human nature but to exploit constraints, to try to find the loopholes? Schools for training women, children, or animals to fight sprang up all over, all headed by someone seeking to harm the king.

This story is centered around the prophecy, and the way it has shaped the lives of the people it does or could apply to. But even as the prophecy dictated the actions of so many, one thing I loved was the recognition that one did not need to have a prophecy to be heroic: “I’m choosing to believe I have the capacity to become the hero until proven otherwise,” Sìne tells Innes (p. 138) when a new prophecy is published that would seem to exclude her.

There are many aspects of this story that I suspect would speak directly to many people whose life experiences are very different from my own. Not having had those experiences, this story did not speak to me as much as some of the others in the anthology, but that doesn’t really matter, because I’m not the intended audience. For the intended audience — people who are coming to terms with their own gender, or newly coming to terms with the gender of a close friend or loved one — there is a lot in this story that provides models for how to react and to behave.

It’s also where we get our third set of neopronouns in the collection: “kie”/”kir”. Strangely, I didn’t find them as difficult as “nee”/”ner”, which makes me wonder about the linguistic psychology of these new words, and why some of them work so easily as pronouns while others are more cognitively difficult. (Someone do a study on this! And then do a follow-up study on how the cognitive load is lessened after repeated exposure, so that we can do things like have cis people read these stories and thereby up the amount of passive absorption of a variety of pronouns!)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment