REVIEW: “Running Straight” by E. K. Wagner

Review of E. K. Wagner, “Running Straight”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a story of dreams, of strength, and of slavery, told in beautiful colors. The story draws you in and draws you along at each moment becoming more and more fraught. Brilliantly written, and a brilliant story. The ending that happens is the ending you want to happen, and yet it is still quite a kicker when it comes.

One thing I really enjoyed about the story is how little details can have such a big impact. Sometimes, all that is needed to set a story in a foreign and unfamiliar place is to change one simple thing that is familiar, one thing you would never expect to change. That one thing in this story is the length of the years. Some years are longer than others, some shorter, and because Cinti’s culture, like ours, revolves around the length of a year, this one small difference has a dramatic effect on how strange and foreign the story setting feels.

This one was a good one — best in the issue in my opinion.

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REVIEW: “For the Love of Snow White” by Delilah Night

Review of Delilah Night, “For the Love of Snow White”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 36-68 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

It takes a lot of guts to start off a story “Once upon a time”, but Night should have every confidence in herself: This is one of the most satisfying fairy tale retellings I’ve read.

Fairy tales are rife with shadowy evil step-mothers whose sole purpose in the story seems to be to provide a bad guy. We never find out why they are evil, or what happened to the hero/heroine’s first mother. We do in this story; the narrator here is Snow White’s step mother, and we learn about how she came to the kingdom, ensnared the king, and, ultimately, cast Snow White into a sleep like death.

But the story isn’t just “Snow White told from another perspective”. It is a story of the clash between pagan druidic religion and the coming of a new god, a mix of classic myth/fairy tale with Christian religion and druidic rituals. It is a story of love and familial bonds. There is a very happy and cheerfully ordinary F/F romance.

Only two things slightly detracted from the story. There was some slightly overt erotica, which doesn’t in principle bother me but which felt rather out of place in this story particular story, and there is also one count of attempted incest, which, eugh, but in this case it did work in the story.

Part of what makes the story so successful is its length, one of the longest in the volume. I’ll be very curious to see if any other story can oust this one from its current spot as my favorite.

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Waffles” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Waffles”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 29-34 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I love ambiguous titles, and this one makes you wonder whether it’s about indecision or tasty tasty breakfast food. (Or perhaps even both!)

The story alternates between narration and snippets of emails. There is a specific shift in the voice in the narrative sections which I think was done particularly well — subtle enough that you don’t notice it at first, clever enough to be very satisfying when you do.

Ultimately, though, I felt like the story was trying to be funny rather than actually being funny, leaving the reader wondering just a bit, “why this story?”

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Raw Material” by Brandon Nolta

Review of Brandon Nolta, “Raw Material”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 22-27 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I found the opening few paragraphs of the story confusing because it wasn’t clear what the referent of all the pronouns were. A few paragraphs in, though, I diagnosed the cause of the confusion — none of the direct speech uses any quotation marks. So when the story opens:

It was near the end of LC’s fourteenth summer when her Aunt Chrys went to the family about her magic. My power should have manifested by now, Chrys told her assorted aunts and uncles…

both the “her” in the first sentence and the “my” in the second is Chrys herself, not LC.

I’m not sure why quotation marks weren’t use; there didn’t appear to be any narrative need for such a technique.

Despite this, the story is told in a confident, distinctive voice, and despite being relatively short managed to ease its way through quite a long period of time. The ending comes as a twist out of nowhere, though, because we haven’t been given any hints about Chrys that would make her final actions in keeping with her character.

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REVIEW: “Company for Tea” by Kimber Camacho

Review of Kimber Camacho, “Company for Tea”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 1-11. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This, the opening story of the anthology, kicks things off with a classic speculative story, set in Lovecraft’s universe as is made clear by references to Miskatonic University.

I found the speech cadences of the opening section a bit awkward until I read them as if they were intended to be read aloud, and then suddenly everything sounded a lot better. The opening section is clearly intended to provide a framing for the rest of the story, but unfortunately I found it raised more questions than it answered. What woke the monster? What words are it speaking that are identifiable as words, given that they have not been spoken for untold ages? It is also not clear, from the ordering of the sections, whether the monster in section 1 is the same one as the one in section 2, or not.

The rest is a story I found pleasantly enjoyable, but I suspect it is probably better aimed at people who already know Lovecraft’s universe. For them, though, this should be right to their taste!

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Adapt and Overcome” by Stephen R. Smith

Review of Stephen R. Smith, “Adapt and Overcome”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 13-14. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The length of this story makes it more a vignette than a proper story, and it rather shows up the perils of the very short short story/flash genre. Some of the problems are compounded by the fact that things get going very slowly, so that by the time action happens, more than half the story is over. The story also clearly shows some of the other difficulties that accompany such a short length: There is little space for world-building — what we have is a rather generic SF setting with terraforming — and also very little space for resolution. We find out what Abhrams wants to do, but with no ship and no other people around, how on earth is Abhrams going to make good his desire to adapt and overcome?

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REVIEW: “Too Generous” by N. R. M. Roshak

Review of N. R. M. Roshak, “Too Generous”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 16-20. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Note to anyone who wants to avoid such matters: This story deals with stillbirth.

The story starts off with an “I” narrator having a conversation with an unnamed, mute “you”. The reader? Someone else? If it is a reader, then right away the reader is being told how to feel: “You’re upset.” But maybe I wasn’t upset until you told me I was, dictating how I am supposed to feel and react. The frustrating thing is that this opening, this interaction with the reader, wasn’t at all necessary. The story could’ve started “I was a cleaner at St Joseph’s Hospital then” and the entire narrative structure would’ve been less antagonistic.

Otherwise, this is a classic horror story complete with very creepy monsters, all the more creepy for not being clearly specified. Are they vampires? Zombies? Something other unnamed horror? I’m not a big fan of the horror genre myself, but this story definitely creeped me out so I can conclude that it works.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Heirlooms” by Rosalind Alenko

Review of Rosalind Alenko, “Heirlooms”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 324-332. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Alenko devotes nearly two pages simply to setting the scene, with such attention to detail that when there is a mismatch between expectations and the story, it comes a bit jarring. (Tegan is much more commonly a female name than a male name; given the surfeit of Welsh names, I expected the story to be set in Wales…until a raccoon showed up.) There is a level of detachment that comes with this level of description, which Alenko uses to balance the strong emotional thread that runs through the story. Enid herself is a strange narrator; it is not clear how far we can trust her. She complains about the lack of road to the cemetery that “it’s not the dark ages!” but later seems to accept unquestioningly the existence of ghosts, witches, and faeries. Later, when Enid returns to her grandma, one wonders what story it is she will tell her.

This is the first story where I’ve found any editorial issues, a minor lapse resulting in “it’s” where there should be “its”.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Red Queen’s Lullaby” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Red Queen’s Lullaby”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 321-322. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Ptak’s story includes an impressive amount of scene-setting for being as short as it is, painting a clear and vivid picture of place and history. There is not much to the story itself, but there is a clear resolution at the end. I do wonder, though, if the final three paragraphs are necessary or if, perhaps paradoxically, the story would’ve been stronger with a more ambiguous ending.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Smile” by Irene Grazzini

Review of Irene Grazzini, Joyce Myerson (trans.), “The Smile”, Luna Station Quarterly 32 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

What I often find frustrating about short stories is that they are just so…well, short. It’s hard to do a lot in not many words. So when I get a story like this, where all it takes is the title, a name, and a few words from the first paragraph to make me go “I know what this is going to be about!”, it makes me very happy.

The story did not live up to this initial rush of happiness as much as I wished it would, though. It takes quite a long time to get started, with the narrator spending a lot of precious words on description. Now, this complaint is squarely situated in my mouth as someone who tends to skip over a lot of purely descriptive scenes. In novels, I don’t mind them as much as they’re easy to skip, but in a short story, it sort of feels like a waste. I want the action, not the descriptions!

This story is translated — I assume from Italian but do not know for certain. If there is one thing harder than writing speculative fiction, I’ve always thought it must be translating it, because you have to be true to the original story and the original voice, and neither of these is a trivial matter. There is an added layer of difficulty when rendering a story in another language that arises from distinguishing what must be translated from what must be not. Names, in particular, must be handled with care. Given that I knew from the start of the second paragraph who the narrator was, the naming of her child as “Andrew” jarred me. Knowing what I know about the narrator, and especially given that her husband is named as “Francesco” a few sentences later on, this makes me wonder if “Andrew” in the original was “Andrea”; a later pair of names had me wondering the same thing, where it felt like one had been translated but not the other. Were I standing in Myerson’s shoes, I would probably have translated either all of the names (Andrew, Catherine, Francis etc.) or none (Andrea, Caterina, Francesco, etc.).

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