If I wasn’t such a sap, I wouldn’t be sent on these damn errands, but some mother is sobbing for some lost daughter and a father gritting his teeth and saying “half my kingdom” and the mama saying “please” through tears and snot, and I want to say “yeah sure, lady, everybody’s missing someone”, but instead I gallop away because they expect it, and let the rain worm its way into my boots.

Kelly Barnhill’s “The Confessions of Prince Charming“ is the story that got me started on a cruise through most of her Web-published work. I’d never heard of her before, but “Confessions” ended up being the first short story I’d read in a long while to actually surprise me with how much I enjoyed it. (Which perhaps says that I should spend less time wading through mediocrity on the Internet and just read things that people have already told me are good, but then sometimes I do find excellence in mild obscurity, and it makes me happy…)

The title made me wary since it’s been done so many times before, but Barnhill paints a Prince Charming who’s painfully believable: a secretive little boy with mommy issues grows up into a flippant, self-absorbed, regret-eaten man who’s always reaching and never attaining; his moments of tenderness and introspection serve to highlight all the hurt oozing up through the cracks. He’s backed by a cast of equally wounded and intriguing cameo characters, including a witchy divorcée Rapunzel and a lovelorn wolf. There’s a moment of homoeroticism that came off to me as random and unearned – too many Issues in one small place (bet you thought you’d never see me say that, Kakaner) – but apart from that, I loved it. And lest it sound like it’s just a big Freudian sob-story, there are numerous  moments of luminous description, as per usual for the author, and the traditional elements that she weaves together are playfully reimagined. Also, it’s pretty funny – Barnhill does levity and gravity equally well.

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Kelly Barnhill
“Princess,” “Homecoming”
Tales of madness and depravity

Err, couldn’t think of a semi-clever conglomerate title for this string of short story reviewlets, but onwards!

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Jeanne Desy’s “The Princess Who Stood On Her Own Two Feet” (1981; read 4.19.10) is an obvious but not uncharming feminist fairy tale about a tall princess, her faithful (talking) Afghan hound, and a prince with questionable values.

For a bit of background, this apparently first appeared in Ms. magazine in 1981, became quite popular, and has since been frequently republished. Also, someone pointed me to it when, on behalf of a friend, I was trying to find out the title/author of a story (not this one) about a prince who thinks he’s a dog, and ends up having to be wooed by a princess who also thinks she’s a dog. If anyone’s read that one, let me know! The source remains elusive – the friend’s not even sure if it’s a short story or a side episode within a longer novel.

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Kelly Barnhill’s “Homecoming” (2008; read 4.4.10, from Underground Voices) is a vignette about return from war, and small mercies. Not all of the prose gets to where it’s trying to go (”They tilted their faces to the ground and held their weapons weak, as though they were a great weight that they alone must bear”), but I like the earthy little details of the moment of hedgewitchery on which the story turns.

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Jeanne Desy
Kelly Barnhill
Tales of madness and depravity

I liiiiive! Somewhat. There are still exams to come, but I have a comfortable breathing space at the moment, so I’m going to work on whittling down my absurd backlog of short story reviews. To start, here are two helpings of dark fantasy/sci-fi.

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The nurse said that when I’m moved to my permanent home, there will be mirrors to see my reflection and windows made of glass instead of plexiglass. I do not know what a mirror is. I have read the word in the dictionary, of course, and heard it spoken. I know the press of the “m”, the sensuous delicacy of the “r”, as though biting a very soft peach. But the mechanics of the word — its sensation and definition — are different than the thing itself. I must have looked in a mirror before, although really, who knows?

Kelly Barnhill’s “Tabula Rasa” (read 4.4.10, from The Three-Lobed Burning Eye) plays out a well-worn premise – an amnesiac patient recovering from an unknown operation slowly recovers troubling memories of her past – but even if none of the ideas are new, the execution is suspenseful and atmospheric, with great details and often lovely prose. I can never help imagining a moody graphic-novel adaptation, complete with blotty ink washes and scrawled lettering, whenever I read a story like this.

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Michael S. Dodd’s “The Madwoman” (read 4.4.10, from The Three-Lobed Burning Eye) makes a lot more sense if you read the bit in his bio where he says that it was inspired by Storm Constantine. Transfigurations with cosmic consequences, combined with high-pitched melodrama and mild abuse of the English language – vintage Constantine. Unlike Constantine, though, Dodd creates too-portentous-for-you protagonists who are irritating and implausible rather than endearing.

“If you do not tell me,” Ylsa intoned in a velvet voice, “I shall eat these delicate morsels, one at a time, until you do.” With that pronouncement, she reached into the jar and withdrew a handful of the packets, pressing one to her lips.

“No!” Marisel screamed, and Ylsa shrank back for a moment at the sheer volume of the cry.

Mmm… yeah. It’s a shame because the premise has great potential, and some of the details are fun – I like that the main character is a shady apothecary, for example.

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Kelly Barnhill
Michael S. Dodd

… The Mumbaki came, as did the elder warriors, and they sang of Bugan the sky goddess who descended to earth to marry the warrior Kinggawan. They sang of how the lovers lost each other and how Kinggawan seeks his Bugan to this day. When the Mumbaki poured the wine over your head you did not cry.

It was a good sign, the village people said. But no one could explain why. It just was so.

After this, there was more dancing and feasting, but your mother took you away to the quiet of her hut where she stared into your face and tried to read your future while you suckled at her breast.

“Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan” is inspired by the mythology of the mountainous Ifugao region of the Philippines, where the author was raised. It’s both thematically and aesthetically satisfying, playing on personal and cultural anxieties through parallel narrative threads: the emotional and sexual coming-of-age of a young woman named Bugan, after the Ifugao sky goddess, and the upheaval in her small village as contact is made with Western colonizers.

Loenen-Ruiz’s language is vibrant and wonderfully rhythmical (I’d love to hear the story read aloud), and she skillfully conveys the turbulence of the forces working on the protagonist and her culture. Against the themes of loss and disruption, Loenen-Ruiz sets the heady sensuality of the story’s resolution. Renewal of tradition is coupled with the building of new unities; an act of sexual transgression becomes an act of cultural resistance.

Also, the love interest is hot. Just sayin’.

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Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Fantasy Magazine Author Spotlight with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

“Evil Robot Monkey,” which was nominated for last year’s Hugos, got an “mmm… eh” from me. It’s a vignette framing the emotional experience of an intelligence-augmented chimpanzee who just wants to be left alone to make pottery. Though his warring destructive and creative impulses are viscerally conveyed, the story as a whole relies too much on clichés to do its thematic work – calling something a “hellish limbo” doesn’t do much towards convincing the reader that it actually is. As a character sketch, it’s nice; as speculative fiction, it’s predictable and lacks nuance.

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Mary Robinette Kowal

Bear and His Daughter is a collection of enormously depressing short stories about unhappy people with unhappy pasts and, frequently, drug dependencies. There’s a washed-up poet in Mexico trying to escape his need for the validation of his strung-out friends as they hustle him up the side of a volcano on a putative spiritual quest (”Porque no Tiene, Porque le Falta”); two war veterans struggling with fear and confusion (”Absence of Mercy” and “Helping”); a trepidatious drug-runner (”Under the Pitons”); a hippie mom who has an unnerving encounter with a dolphin at an aquarium (”Aquarius Obscured”); and a widowed woman who channels her grief and anger into macabre nighttime undertakings on behalf of the anti-abortion movement (”Miserere”). Oh, and another washed-up poet, a relapsed alcoholic taking a cross-country trip that draws him closer and closer to his estranged daughter, an erratic, poetical junkie and park ranger who spins myths about the caves where she gives tours (”Bear and His Daughter”).

All told, there’s a lot of rage and fear and aimlessness and rejection of meaning or acceptance of the lack thereof, and the stories end in senseless fistfights on subway platforms or gunshots or suicides or drowning or people otherwise hurting themselves and others. BUT for all that, I did enjoy (…not quite the right word) reading it. Stone delineates his characters’ psychology with finesse, and I was a little in awe of his prose: it’s incredibly lean and stripped-down, with descriptions, particularly of landscapes and seascapes, that are piercingly vivid in their concision. There’s a kind of architectural purity to his writing, coupled with an intense attention to details of setting and sensation.

Sometimes I do worry that this style of writing ends up flattening the emotional affect to such an extent that it can take a hell of a lot of legwork on the reader’s part to actually access it, if the reader is even interested enough to make the investment. In this case I was only warily engaged at first, but got into the style and rhythm past the first story. There are frequent servings of dark, absurd humor to lighten the mood by a few shades of black, and there are also moments when the stories feel much more vital and electric. I particularly liked a sequence in “Porque no Tiene” (one of my favorites) in which the protagonist deliriously careens down a forested slope in the middle of the night. Beautifully described, of course. And though I thought that the theme of the title novella was overly forced, that story in particular is infused with a desolate, deeply moving loneliness and a kind of black, secretive poetry that particularly appealed to me – enough that I was willing to buy the melodramatic reveal and ending. (I cried, actually.)

All in all, I did end up coming away with empathy for all these wounded, lonely people. Under all the tight-lipped irony, there’s a lot of naked hurt, and an occasional glimpse of redemptive beauty, a sense that we can establish uneasy ceasefires with our demons and pick ourselves up and just keep on walking.

Go to:
Robert Stone

Jason Chapman’s “Brief Candle” is a clever, winning tale of an unpreposessing sanitation robot onboard an imperiled ship. In a sort of AI-fueled homage to Flowers for Algernon (down to the name of the protagonist), the robot finds himself taking on much more responsibility than, literally, he could have ever imagined. It’s a marvellously entertaining story, with a quick, crisp narrative that revels in the meticulously imagined details that it unfolds.

Some of the humor was a bit too cute and obvious to work for me, and by the same token, the efficacy of the ending may depend on your willingness to have your heartstrings tugged; I felt a little resistant to the overt emotional appeal, but possibly I’m just being curmudgeonly. After all, I do tend to smile whenever I think of this story – it’s hard to be a grump about something so warm and fun.

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Jason K. Chapman

Theodora Goss’ “Her Mother’s Ghosts,” recommended to me an age ago by Maureen, is a brief, achingly beautiful meditation on family and heritage. The language is simple, rhythmical, and carefully chosen, and the strength and purity of the emotion that it evokes hit me particularly hard since… okay, for personal reasons that I don’t feel like talking about in detail (massive backpedaling there). Suffice it to say that this was one of those stories that I had to read twice for it to really click, but when it did – ow. hurty (but in a good and thoughtful-making way).

I love the feel of the descriptions, too – they feel like late-afternoon sunlight on a chilly day, or one of the story’s faded watercolors.

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Theodora Goss

I originally found “Descending” through Ellen Datlow’s wonderful online selection of classic sci-fi short fiction, and was aggrieved to discover that with the passing of the original scifi.com, it’s now only available with the help of the Wayback Machine. But to get on with the real thing -

I’ve always been vaguely leery of escalators (where are those steps really going, when they sink into one another at the bottom? – I had a childhood fear that my feet would get sucked in with them if I didn’t step off quickly enough); Thomas M. Disch’s “Descending” has ensured that I’ll never trust one again. “Descent” begins with an unrepentant debtor’s delinquent spree in a department store, and ends in a state of perfect horror. It’s pleasingly precise and surprisingly rich in its details both of setting and character, packing a huge amount of atmosphere and subtlety into just about 4000 words, and the humor is wicked and ominous. Great stuff – I’ll have to look up more of Disch’s work.

John Schoffstall provides a wonderful reading and historical contextualization of the story here – also brief and rich – and Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus follows up with a quick consideration of how the story works as a piece of short fiction here.

On a side note, I’ve been running into increasing trouble picking tags for posts, given how frequently the line is all but invisible between, say, dark fantasy and horror, or science fiction and fantasy. (Let’s not even get into the argument that all fiction is fantasy, because there’s nothing there to even argue about, at the most basic [or pedantic, depending on how you want to look at it] level.) Well, I’ll just keep going with the policy of “whatever seems the most helpful.” I just feel horribly reductionist labeling something as nuanced as “Descending” “horror.” Do I need to start a category for “literary horror”? “Existential horror”? “Definitely not splatterpunk”? “Stuff that could be read without derogatory comment by people who don’t make a regular habit of visiting the genre hinterlands in Barnes and Nobles“?

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Thomas M. Disch

I had previously mentioned “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” as being one of my favorite short stories read in 2009, yet had never gotten around to posting a review.

I don’t want to spoil a single bit of it, so I’ll just say that it’s like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell except with Antarctican cartography (yes, duh – seriously, I refuse to reveal any of it, please just go read it if you’ve got the chance), and that it’s funny, delightfully imagined, and ravishingly beautiful. I rather wish it had won the 2009 World Fantasy Award that it was nominated for, but clearly that’s not up to me. So instead I’ll just flail about it here.

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Catherynne M. Valente
“Urchins, While Swimming,” by Catherynne M. Valente (2006) [E]