REVIEW: “Of Anger and Beauty” by Stephen R. Smith

Review of Stephen R. Smith, “Of Anger and Beauty”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 179-181. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Smith’s story is short, and I can see the anger in it. I don’t like reading stories about human trafficking, especially of young girls, but if I have to read them, I want them to be stories of vengeance and come-uppance. This one is, and it ends on a happy note. But while the anger is clear, the beauty is harder to find.

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REVIEW: “A Helping Hand” by Samantha Trisken

Review of Samantha Trisken, “A Helping Hand”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 238-244. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I feel pretty strongly that every story needs to have a purpose, a reason why it has to be told, why this story, rather than another story. Sometimes that purpose is what the story itself has to say, the way in which the world is improved because of something in the story itself; sometimes it is simply that the story gives pleasure to those who read it; and sometimes the purpose is simply that the author is better off for having written it than they would have been had they not.

Given this, everything I read I read with a pervasive underlying question “Why this story?” I thought that a lot while reading the opening of Trisken’s tale, in which a young girl, Tessa, escapes a would-be abductor only to witness his murder.

The importance of that scene is that it introduces us to Dillon, and the centerpoint of the story is Tessa’s relationship with Dillon. It is engrossing to see the complexities of this relationship and how it develops, but the other consequences of the opening — the trauma that the witness of a murder has to have caused — seem nowhere taken up, and I found this made it hard for me to fully engage with the story. The end brings no further resolution: Why this story? I don’t know. Maybe someone else reading it coming with a different background and different experiences might be able to answer that question.

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REVIEW: “Picture Perfect” by Lori Tiron-Pandit

Review of Lori Tiron-Pandit, “Picture Perfect”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 227-236. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Do you sometimes feel like motherhood is just a huge trap? Like you might have made a mistake, but now there is no going back? And you’re locked into this life with a child, and as much as you’d like to escape, you’re just stuck, and there’s no more hope? (227)

This was a scary, scary story, not because it exhibits any of the “scary-story” elements of classic horror, but because it tackles head-on a scary, scary topic, one which is both ordinarily quite taboo but also commonplace in the lives of many women: motherhood regret. Whether it comes in the haze of post-partum depression, or whether it is a one-off thought “Maybe my life would’ve been better if my child(ren) had never been born”, it happens, it’s real, and no one is willing to talk about it. This is where the power of stories come in — it allows us to explore the “what if” without the consequences, to work through how things might have been, both if things had gone worse than they actually did and if they had gone better.

I have a delightful child whom I love very much, who has always been a good sleeper and a good eater, and who was long-awaited, but so many aspects of Larisa’s experiences, and the experiences of the women in her online mothers community, ring true. It’s a glimpse of how things might have gone, but (in my case at least) didn’t, and it’s a scary, scary glimpse.

Goblins and ghosts, zombies and vampires, serial murderers in the dark — none of these scare me. This story did.

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REVIEW: “The Gilded Swan” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “The Gilded Swan”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 357-359. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The opening line “Once upon a time” never fails to exercise its power to thrill over me. I love fairy tales. I love the way those words tap into my entire reading history, and allow the story to draw upon decades of internalized expectations. I love the familiarity of fairy tales that is rooted in those expectations. I love it when my expectations are satisfied, when every aspect of the story could have been found in any of the classic fairy tales.

But what I love even more is when those expectations are dashed, and happily ever after turns horribly ever after. This was a delightfully satisfying little fairy horror tale.

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REVIEW: “All the Songs the Little Birds Sing” by T. D. Walker

Review of T. D. Walker, “All the Songs the Little Birds sing”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story has one of those slippery settings where it could be radically other, radically elsewhere or elsewhen, or it could also be just around the corner, today or tomorrow.

Some stories make it clear what kind of stories they are from the beginning; not this one, not for me at least. And yet, even without having any idea of where it started or where it was going, I kept reading. Walker’s language is tight and precise and allows us a very clear insight into Alice’s head. Alice herself is the sort of main character I’ve found myself looking for more and more lately — someone who is older than me, who has found a sense of herself, who understands how she fits into the world. “Alice was everything, and she wanted to live that way,” Walker tells us. That’s the sort of heroine I aspire to be.

There was a lot left out of this story, the history of how things got to be this way only hinted at. In some stories, these gaps can be frustrating. In this one, I wanted to know more, of course, but I was also satisfied with what I got.

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REVIEW: “Cuddles” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Cuddles”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 224-226. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Who knows what lies in the depths of the deep dark sea? Well, deep sea survey crews, for one, after all, it’s part of their job to know these things. Most of the time they stick to surveying and studying, but sometimes things go wrong and an animal is injured. That’s how Cuddles, “some sort of cross between squid and octopus, with hallmarks of both but belonging to neither” (224) comes to live at the Seaside Aquarium and Rescue Center, and when his life intersects with Sarita, the narrator’s.

Those who like Cthulhu will probably enjoy this. I did for the most part, right up until the very end when the story commits one of the cardinal sins of 1st-person narration — how does a person narrate their own story after they are dead?

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REVIEW: “Reborn” by Petter Skult

Review of Petter Skult, “Reborn”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 204-207. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Note: If you don’t like spiders, don’t read this story.

This is an unsettling little investigation into the ways in which people can go “crazy”. Seeing God. Seeing things that don’t exist. Seeing things no one else can see. Seeing things that are real and true and are there, but which no one else believes you can see. And when no one else believes you, when everyone else thinks you are already crazy, then sometimes it is the attempts to heal your madness that finally drive you mad.

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REVIEW: “Onward Christian Soldiers” by G. H. Finn

Review of G. H. Finn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 187-202. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Four things I liked about the story from the very start: First, with a title like that, the story comes with its own soundtrack (hard for me not to read the story without a chorus of booming voices in my head singing out the song). Second, so much fantasy seems so afraid of interacting with religion in any form. Not this story! Third, prior to reading this story, I had no idea that Baring-Gould had also written a book about werewolves. The story’s epigraph was basically an informative footnote in itself, and you all know how much I love an informative footnote. Sometimes truth really is stranger than (or as strange as) fiction. Finally, like the narrator, “I am by nature neither a detective nor a hunter. At heart I am a scholar” (187), and I enjoy reading stories about scholars.

Vampire stories are, perhaps, the exception to the eschewing of religion in speculative fiction, because of the important role religious symbols play in vampire lore. The narrator makes the reasonable assumption that symbols that have power over vampires will also have power over werewolves, as being, presumably, demonic beasts of a similar origin. Unfortunately for him, the narrator is wrong. (Or—as the narrator himself worries—the symbols do have power, but he simply doesn’t have enough faith.)

As befits a story told by a scholar, the first part of the tale is academic in tone, a recitation of dates and places and names and facts. In the second half, the narration turns much more personal, and tells the story of how even a scholar can turn into a soldier for Christ.

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REVIEW: “Silver Noir” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Silver Noir”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 166-167. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is a little vignette about werewolf hunting, centered around the expense of silver bullets and one man who uses up all seven of his in one night. There’s a big cost to pay if you are too profligate with your bullets, but the cost that the unnamed narrator has to pay is greater than the cost of any amount of silver. The story is quite short, but tightly written.

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REVIEW: “Penumbra” by Chris Brecheen

Review of Chris Brecheen, “Penumbra”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 168-177. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Brecheen’s story is urban fantasy, set in San Francisco, as we can tell from references to BART stations and other familiar aspects of the city. It’s a first-person story, and unlike many first-person stories which start off with a bunch of introspective maundering, here we were immediately introduced both to the personality quirks of the narrator (rather bitter and a bit sarcastic) and of the people the narrator interacts with, such as Dr. Cienica, who “pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies” (168).

I really enjoyed Brecheen’s use of language; there were turns of phrase every paragraph or so that made me smile. If you read for enjoyment, then this is a good story for you. If you read for a creepy feeling of displacement, and the sense that the setting of the story is shifted from our own reality by only a fraction, then this is also a story for you. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder what it would take for people to be able to see the Penumbra here, in our own world.

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