The Deep, Dark Mines of the Uncanny Valley

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep

Shellshocked veteran Lt. Alex Easton’s sole qualification to investigate unexplained phenomena, is that they’ve seen it before without flinching. But where they previously fought ineffable monsters in their native Gallacia, a mysterious Eastern European land of dismal swamps and forests primeval, this time, they’ve been invited to America. But then, if there’s a place as old and as hostile to humankind as Gallacia, it must surely be Southern Appalachia.

T. Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” novellas, starring Alex Easton, whose unique gender identity doesn’t translate into English, each delve into different horror subgenres. The first retold a Poe classic, highlighting a theme Poe introduced, but didn’t explore. The second followed the conventions of folk horror. This third unpack a theme popular in recent movies: the legend of mysterious humanoids dwelling in the caverns and mines permeating America’s eastern mountains.

Dr. James Denton, a supporting character from Easton’s first story, has telegrammed Easton for their help. He admits Easton isn’t particularly qualified, except that they’ve faced similar conflicts before, and he needs a partner who won’t ask stupid questions. So Easton crosses the ocean, rides America’s rails, and walks into West Virginia’s dark, forested mountains, a terrain from which more intrepid explorers have frequently failed to return.

Many American folk myths speculate that something dark and mysterious dwells underground, a horrible monster which we’ll uncover by mining for hydrocarbons or even just spelunking. This monster is usually whispered to be older than humankind, and eager for small provocations to resurge and take America from us. Of course, this is coded language. We “Americans” know who we stole this land from, and why they deserve to reclaim it.

Kingfisher salts these themes with a Lovecraftian influence which she acknowledges in her afterword, but which she doesn’t hammer needlessly. Rather, she describes two war-torn old souls, walking wounded, who investigate a land older than human conception. There, they discover a cavern that cannot possibly exist, guarded by a force so close to human, that its very existence personifies the uncanny valley. But that force is holding something worse back.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Reading this novella, I’m reminded of Stanisław Lem’s signal classic, Solaris. Both stories feature humans encountering an intelligence so different from themselves that they cannot truly communicate. Though Easton and Denton have more success than Kelvin in making peace, they struggle with some of the same problems. What does it mean to “communicate” with an intelligence that isn’t human? Or to speak individually with a collective intelligence?

But our protagonists bring something to the story that neither Lovecraft nor Lem considered: capitalists’ willingness to burn everything that doesn’t turn a profit. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and Lem’s ocean planet encounter humans primarily through scientists and explorers. Kingfisher’s primordial intelligence comes to light because humans dynamited the mountains and uncorked Earth’s mantle in search of power and money. Therefore, “first contact” means not curiosity, but pain.

I’ve become a particular Kingfisher fan because she reverses widespread cultural expectations. In this case, besides Easton’s blunt defiance of the Anglophonic gender binary, Easton also sees America as exotic and foreign, reading America back to Kingfisher’s audience. Burned out on conflict, Easton sees American glorification of the Spanish-American war as bizarre and uncivilized. America’s much-bandied national youth seems ridiculous amid Appalachia’s uncountable antiquity.

One could continue unpacking Kingfisher’s themes. Cartesian dualism versus the Freudian psyche, perhaps, or the failures of technological triumphalism in the face of Earth’s unimaginable age. Kingfisher plays with these thematic contrasts and reversals like Lego bricks, creating a whole that readers recognize from previous books, but which is entirely her own. Her ability to use common strategies to tell an uncommon story is why I’ve become a Kingfisher fan.

Although this story remains short, it’s the longest yet of Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier novellas, over 170 pages plus back matter. This gives Easton space not only to investigate their themes, but also to confront the monster. But this story also has perhaps the largest company of characters yet, and Kingfisher doesn’t give everyone full development. Easton’s loyal batman Angus, in particular, gradually disappears from the story, which is disappointing.

That said, this story largely maintains the momentum of the previous “Sworn Soldier” novellas. Though I might wish the story was about fifty pages longer, to give every character the space they deserve, that would’ve changed the novella-reading experience. Kingfisher’s distinct voice and nonconformist attitude remain visible and keep the narrative popping. It reads like a slice of popular literature, just seen through a lens like you’ve never read before.

Big Names, Short Stories, Mixed Results

Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan/Richard Chizmar, A Face in the Crowd/The Longest December

Dean Evers, an old New England widower in Florida, has become a reluctant Tampa Bay baseball fan. He whiles away lonely hours, largely estranged from his only son and with few surviving friends, by watching the Rays and reading. One hot afternoon, watching a low-stakes game, he sees a familiar face in the stands. A face from his personal past, which shouldn’t be possible, as its human is long deceased.

I can’t tell how much of “A Face in the Crowd” Stephen King wrote, and how much Stewart O’Nan contributed. King’s short fiction, unlike his novels, follows a reliable trajectory, building not toward some jump scare or twist, but toward a sense of inevitability. Characters see themselves as participants in events, until discovering that they’re mere passengers. Who knows if King wrote this story, or if O’Nan borrowed King’s vibe.

However, King and O’Nan aren’t this book’s star performers. Not only is their page count barely sixty percent of Richard Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” but their story is much more widely spaced and set in a larger font. Cemetery Dance Publications, Chizmar’s indie imprint, presumably put King and O’Nan on the cover to sell Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” which is more thematically ambitious but, ultimately, disappointing.

Bob Howard’s comfortable suburban Maryland life gets upended one snowy morning when local detectives appear at his neighbor’s door. A just-the-facts investigator informs him that his sweet, avuncular neighbor, James Wilkinson, has bodies under the floorboards. Bob finds himself beset on all sides, by suspicious neighbors, greedy reporters, and fair-weather friends. Everybody wonders what Bob knew, when. Then the midnight hang-up calls start.

This story differs from the other by rejecting a reliable beat sheet. Sadly, without a comfortable outline, Chizmar seems uncertain what story he wants to tell. Is this an amateur sleuth mystery in which a neighborhood family man must uncover deep secrets? A satire of the media circus following lurid crimes? A lone man’s descent into madness as the pressures of maintaining middle-class respectability crumble around him?

Yes, all this and more. Chizmar has selected an ambitious slate of themes he wants to address, backed by his admitted fondness for Twilight Zone-inspired narrative, but he seemingly doesn’t know how to keep all the balls in play. He gets just enough of one theme going to wet his readers’ whistle, then caroms onto another. It almost feels like he doesn’t know how to carry the themes forward once he’s introduced them.

As an author, I enjoy writing short stories because they let writers do something novels never permit: they let authors focus on character and plot, and politely ignore backstory. In full-length novels, the physical mass simply demands the author explain everything, or nearly everything, because there’s room enough. But short stories make no such demand. The brevity permits that, sometimes, things simply happen because they happen.

For instance, Dean Evers doesn’t need to ruminate on deeper themes of his buried past suddenly appearing on the Jumbotron. It simply happens because it happens. Evers tries to fight the inevitable but, like Oedipus Rex, his resistance becomes part of his breakdown. Yes, observant readers already know where his story is headed, and everyone except Dean realizes he can’t fight the tide. What tide? Doesn’t matter, the story’s over.

But Bob’s story, simply because it’s longer, has room to address the questions it raises. It just doesn’t, and one wonders whether Chizmar has started something he doesn’t know how to finish. The swarming, shark-like media frenzy gets introduced, then gets forgotten. Similarly, the pressures which the investigation puts on Bob’s ability to do his job, which is high in pressure but low in prestige. And the psychological toll on his family.

Indeed, in the final resolution, I find myself wondering why it stops there? Bob’s story not only isn’t done, but the “conclusion” actually opens more cans of proverbial worms about his family, his past, and his mental health. One wishes Chizmar took some guidance from King, whose notoriously long, family-oriented conclusions at least give readers some sense of where our protagonist now stands in a world forever changed.

These stories are arranged back-to-back, with two front covers, in the style of the old Ace Doubles that kept pulp classics in print during the 1960s. They feature two stories that go in different directions and ask different questions, but appeal to the same thriller audience. Both feel like good narrative introductions. Sadly, both also feel like something the authors intended to finish writing later.

The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge

Toadling, a human foundling stolen by evil sprites, has guarded the nameless castle for 200 years, while civilizations rose and fell around her. Hidden behind an impenetrable thorntree wall and a blighted desert, the keep once governed a pastoral kingdom. But through the centuries, Toadling has secured the fortress, and ensured the old stories were soon forgotten. All for one reason: to assure the sleeper within never wakes.

This is my third T. Kingfisher novella, and each retells existing stories from new perspectives. Here, Kingfisher retells “Sleeping Beauty” as a dark fantasy, in which the princess and the fairy who cursed her dwell in a dysfunctional symbiosis. Except that the story which everyone tells has grown distorted by retelling, and there’s a deeper violence sleeping in the tower. But the fairy Toadling has never told her story.

Into the myth rides Halim, an itinerant Muslim knight without a war to fight. Uninterested in tourneys and too amiable for mercenary work, he seeks another avenue to make his name. So he approaches the fabled castle, pursuing the “fair maiden” supposedly immune to time. Instead, Halim finds Toadling, a half-fairy hybrid who, after centuries of isolation, is eager to confess her secrets. Assuming anyone will believe her.

“Sleeping Beauty” has evolved over centuries. Early forms exist in Italian and Catalan folktales, though the version we know comes mainly from Germany by way of France. The story’s development has taken some weird turns, but all share one characteristic: until the later Twentieth Century, the eponymous princess has no autonomy. She’s merely the passive, often nameless battleground between patriarchy and a dark netherworld.

Kingfisher reinvents the princess as Fayette, too young to understand her own unfettered power. But there’s a second princess, Toadling, a human who learned magic while growing up in fairyland. Toadling came to Fayette’s christening with one simple gift—and promptly fumbled it, trapping herself and Fayette inside the king’s castle. Thus begins a battle for power that threatens to become apocalyptic if they slip out of balance.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Mass-media critic Jude Doyle sees, in many stories of feral adolescent girls, a shared fear of our sweet child becoming a woman. There’s something here. But where conventional stories conflate this fear with sexual maturity, Kingfisher finds something else. Catholic theology and the “age of accountability” lingers in the background. As Princess Fayette becomes old enough to answer for her choices, we wonder whether she really has free will.

Doyle dedicates an entire chapter to the changeling myth. The sweet babbling infant learns to walk and talk, and suddenly, the poor harried mother becomes terrified of what she’s created. This being, once part of me, has become willful, greedy, possibly destructive. Why, this must be a monster from a dark netherworld, not a human child anymore! Toadling and Fayette become diametrical forms of this internal conflict, the good and bad daughters, ego and id.

The story unfolds forward and backward. Toadling knows she out to keep Halim away from the sleeping princess in the tower, to fulfill the enchantment that keeps her safe. But after centuries of loneliness, she permits Halim to carve his way through the titular thorn hedge. As he works, she tells her story, which contradicts the centuries of legend that have accrued to her. Halim must decide who he believes.

Kingfisher writes with a plainspoken style that’s become common in genre fantasy lately. Not for her either C.S. Lewis’ playful voice nor Tolkien’s stern epic storytelling. Toadling, her viewpoint character, is definitely a supernatural being who has survived two centuries alone with an onerous responsibility. But she’s also a young woman, stuck for centuries in her early twenties, desperate for someone to talk to.

On one level, we could read this as a grim, grown-up fairy tale. It’s short enough to read in one dedicated evening, builds to a taut double climax, and pays off with a firm resolution. Kingfisher’s characters are sober without being ponderous, and her revision of a well-loved fairy tale takes risks without veering into silliness. Kingfisher hits Sleeping Beauty’s beats without ever feeling beholden to the old story.

But there’s another level. Toadling tries different tactics to control the other, darker princess, but her internal abilities aren’t enough. Only when she trusts another person with the secrets she’s been carrying, will she finally reconcile the conflict between the good and bad daughters. Only then can she walk away from the thorn hedge she built around her childhood home, and venture out into the world.

Secrets Buried in the World’s Darkest Corners

T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

A wandering soldier returns to the ancestral hunting lodge deep within the Balkan mountains, finding it fallen into disrepair. Alex Easton, a haunted veteran who sacrificed ancestry, home, and even gender to fight for their country, has lost everything except their name and this house. But with no caretaker keeping the house’s dark spirits at bay, something stirs deep within the walls. A shameful past is now walking abroad.

This second novella in Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” series is definitely a bridge volume. The first novella focused on Easton’s struggle to understand what happened at the Usher estate—if you missed it, Volume One retold Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” This one, which doesn’t appear to be based on existing literature, is more driven by character, and by Easton’s inability to grapple with their wartime past.

The village of Wolf’s Ear, at the base of the mountain which Easton’s lodge bestrides, wants to traffic with Easton or the lodge, but nobody will say why. The superstitious, but largely anonymous, population, resembles the massed villagers in Young Frankenstein, terrified of an ancestral curse they can’t actually describe anymore. Easton struggles for explanations, even as a terrifying woman begins stalking the old soldier’s waking dreams.

Though Kingfisher mentioned Easton’s wartime history in the previous volume, she didn’t much go into it. This time, Easton, our first-person narrator, describes more of their autobiography, which mixes trauma and boredom in equal measure. The war left Easton with persistent nightmares and a lingering paranoia, but Easton’s batman, Angus, repeatedly reminds Easton that it isn’t paranoia if monsters really are chasing you.

Kingfisher also delves more into the history and culture of her fictional nation of Gallacia. She depicts a country which has been slowly, persistently sapped of joy, not only by its ancestral enemies, but by its own loaded history. Easton, with their ungendered name, has chosen a life of sexless gallantry, but found themself sucked into old grudges and ancient wounds. Those old metaphors become literal in the events of this story.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

We witness a marked tonal shift from the first volume. In that book, the monster Easton confronts has physical mass, and can be defeated through strength and intellect. This story leaves the scientific elements in favor of folk horror and the supernatural. Easton, Angus, and their supporting cast have to confront the lingering shadows of a medieval past that their ancestors already killed, but which can never die.

This results in a looser, more introspective story than the previous one. Where Easton found themself carried along by Poe’s plot before, this time, Easton must dig into their own trauma and their people’s collective guilt. This means much longer passages of autobiographical rumination than before, passages that feel slow early on because they’re setting readers up for a more substantive reveal later on.

Perhaps most notably, this second volume isn’t freestanding. In contemporary genre fiction, many authors use one of two patterns in series fiction. Either the story is actually a single narrative broken into separate volumes, or each story is independent and individually articulated, letting readers jump into the story already in progress. Kingfisher doesn’t do that. Instead, this is a separate story, but relies upon exposition she provided in the previous volume.

Readers might notice that I’ve said little about the story’s plot, or the monster Easton confronts. Indeed, Kingfisher herself withholds the monster fairly late too (comparatively speaking: the story runs under 150 loosely-spaced pages). In essence, this isn’t a story about a definable monster, like the previous volume was; it’s about Easton’s inability to confront their own demons, and those of their country, until forced into a corner.

Maybe this sounds like damning with feint praise. I’ll acknowledge, readers shouldn’t dive into this one cold; Easton’s introspective ruminations will probably feel long, maudlin, and rootless to anyone who didn’t see their previous accomplishments. But for those who have, this novella will provide the backstory and culture that Kingfisher elided in the prior, plot-centric volume. This is a book for readers who enjoyed Volume One, not intended for newcomers.

Again, this is clearly a bridge narrative, building into another story—Volume Three dropped while I was reading this one. Kingfisher presumably intends to establish Easton’s character for another, perhaps more substantial, confrontation in a pending story. Because I read and enjoyed Volume One, I also found plenty to love here, but only because I’m already invested in Kingfisher’s character and setting. This is a book for fans, not beginners.

One Dark Night in an African Dreamland

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories

A recently deceased wife must choose whether to move onto the next life, or become an ancestral avenging spirit in this life. A civil engineer tasked with building a dam must first defeat the carnivorous spirits controlling the river. When houses begin vanishing from an impoverished slum, one gifted girl discovers the disappearances follow a logarithmic pattern. Refugees seeking asylum discover the immigration people aren’t bureaucrats, they’re a priesthood.

Zimbabwean author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes from a hybrid perspective: one foot in her homeland, one in the West. Ndlovu herself studied at Cornell and Amherst, and many of her mostly female protagonists are graduates of American (or Americanized) universities. Yet Zimbzbwe’s history, both its ancient past and its recent struggles for independence, remain near the surface. For Ndlovu, Western modernism is usually a thin and transparent veneer.

Many of Ndlovu’s stories fall broadly into the categories of “fantasy” or “horror,” but that’s a marketing contrivance. Though many of her stories involve a monster—a primordial horror dwelling under conflict diamond fields, for instance, or carnivorous ants raised to make boner pills—almost never does the monster drive the story. Usually, Ndlovu’s monsters point her protagonists toward a deeper, more disquieting truth underneath the protagonists’ lives.

Instead of outright horror, these stories mostly turn on the friction between expectation and experience. Our protagonists usually start the story believing something rational, or expecting something reasonable. Recurrent themes include meaningful work and graduating from high school, two of the most common aspirations. But life in post-colonial Zimbabwe, with ancient traditions, modern tools of repression, and widespread poverty, always intrudes on those hopes.

In one story, a Zimbabwean student receives a fluke gift from the ancestral gods: she keeps stumbling accidentally into money. But the more money she fumbles into, the more her family expects from her. Soon the escape she sought becomes the burden she resents—until the gods demand an eternal choice.

When a student suffers blackouts, Western medicine cannot help. She consults an oracle, who finds the cure hidden in the past. To escape her condition, the student must time-travel to early colonialism and recover a military queen whom the British historians erased from living memory.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Ndlovu structures some stories more like fables than Western fiction: an island king discovers immortality, but slowly stops being human. A healer erases the burdens of grief, but secretly serves a master whom her patients never see. A handful of newspaper clippings hide the secret pattern governing city women’s lives.

Not every story is “horror” or “fantasy.” In one story, an American college student discovers a common tool of Zimbabwean folk practice, and finds a way to monetize it, at the people’s expense. In another, poverty forces a talented student to leave school and find work; she pays her bills, but watches opportunities flit past.

Concerns of faith and religion recur. Though many of Ndlovu’s characters are Christian, and quote the Bible generously, they do so in a nation where ancient gods might occupy neighborhood houses. She reads the rituals and habits of government as religious rites, which isn’t a stretch. Issues of daily life contain spiritual depth in a nation where nature, death, and hunger always linger on modern life’s margins.

Ndlovu’s stories range from three to sixteen pages. This means they all make for complete reading in one session, with time left over to contemplate her themes. And those themes do require some deeper thought, because she asks important questions about what it means to be modern in traditional communities, or to be poor in a world with more than enough money. She doesn’t let readers off easily.

Perhaps I can give Ndlovu no greater praise than saying her short stories are genuinely short. Too many short story writers today apparently had an idea for a novel, jotted some notes, and thought they had a story. Not so here. Out of fourteen stories, one feels truncated; the other thirteen read as self-contained and thematically complete. That isn’t feint praise, either. I appreciate that Ndlovu crafts fully realized experiences we can savvy in one sitting.

The title story, which is also the last, asks us whether it’s always bad to go unnoticed. The question comes with piercing directness. Characters find themselves disappearing from a society that doesn’t want to see them. But maybe, for those taken away, it’s a Biblical experience. We can’t know, Ndlovu tells us in the rousing final sentences, but maybe that uncertainty is what makes her characters’ lives worth living.

The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour

Jan Miklaszewicz, The Promise: A Narrative Poem

In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.

English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.

Miklaszewicz writes his novella in tanka, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.

The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: as C.S. Lewis pointed out, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.

Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.

And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically hear the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.

In their village home
she senses a subtle shift,
a kindling of hope,
and in the eye of her mind
she glimpses his sweet return,

Jan Miklaszewicz

(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)

Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.

Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.

In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.

I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.

This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.

The Monster at the End of Every Book

Pete Mesling, Fool’s Fire

A learned German physician apprentices himself to a mad scientist in a castle, only to reveal his madness is far more ambitious. The last free-minded neuroscientist on Earth must face the apocalypse of blandness his research has unleashed. A mother fleeing an abusive relationship is trapped in a military bunker with two soldiers, and must determine which of them is lying. A failed Dickensian actor realizes that suicide doesn’t necessarily end all opportunities.

Reviewing horror stories is innately subjective, because not everyone finds the same elements scary. Slasher movie aficionados often find Lovecraftian dread sluggish and unengaging, for instance. So saying whether I personally found Pete Mesling’s short stories frightening doesn’t say much. But I can unequivocally say that it appears Mesling would rather be writing novels, because his stories often read like good beginnings which end abruptly.

This collection lacks a through-line, beyond the author’s effort to cause fear. Mesling samples generously from established subgenres, and adjacent stories carom wildly in style. His opening story, “Imposter Syndrome,” reflects Hollywood’s love of the half-seen monster, in movies like The Descent and Cloverfield. The fear comes from our inability to know the monster, or whether the character describing the monster in grim, portentous terms is trustworthy.

Mesling careens from this directly into “The Private Ambitions of Arthur Hemming,” a deliberate pastiche of classic Universal black-and-white horror films. He plays this one with tongue planted firmly in cheek, giving this story a playful, Young Frankenstein-like flavor. I really enjoyed this one, and felt like Mesling was going somewhere. But then he abruptly ended, with the first-person narrator declaring tomorrow is the big experiment, so he’s sticking this narrative in the trunk for posterity.

Sadly, this pattern repeats itself consistently. Mesling starts several good stories, builds some level of tension, then stops mid-action. I remember, as an apprentice writer, hearing the critique “This story ends just where it should be beginning.” Not until an undergraduate writing workshop did I understand what that meant: your manuscript provides thoughtful, incisive exposition. But your “resolution” should be the inciting action; what you’ve written is simply preamble.

Pete Mesling

One of this collection’s best stories, “Caught In a Trap,” features an unhappily married woman whose angst manifests itself in unanticipated psychic powers. She accidentally makes contact with another psychic, a grandiose personality who promises to tutor her expanding powers. But the person she ultimately meets proves to be a self-important incel. This really felt like the prologue to a supernatural battle between two forms of late-capitalist ennui.

Except Mesling literally ends by having one character muttering: “You’ve won this one, but I’ll be back.” Really? That’s the resolution? This could’ve incited a defining battle for the ages, like Batman and the Joker, except driven by pop apathy rather than self-righteousness. Time and again, Mesling repeats this pattern, laying the groundwork for something epic, then deciding he’s done enough.

I find this frustrating because Mesling is a remarkably good writer. His characters have distinct voices, his stories have their own tones, and the conflicts he establishes are brimming with possibilities. His storytelling choices are clearly influenced by cinema, to the point where one of his stories features a lost classic by Hollywood icon Fritz Lang. But that’s not a knock against Mesling. In today’s image-driven milieu, Mesling makes these Hollywood stories his own.

Until the moment he doesn’t. In “The Dragon’s Tooth,” Fritz Lang realizes the movie he’s just completed couldn’t possibly exist, that it defies the values and mores of post-WWII Hollywood. I’m reminded of Shadow of the Vampire, a Willem Dafoe vehicle fictionalizing the making of the first vampire movie. That movie built dread around the gulf between image and reality, between expectation and disappointment. Mesling’s Lang simply realizes, and the story’s over.

Since we’re discussing films anyway, I realize today’s horror cinema seldom resolves. Today’s movie monsters aren’t beaten, and stories often end with protagonists resigned to fate. That’s a choice. But first, those movies guide us through the protagonists’ struggles, forcing them to resist fate multiple ways before realizing, with the Greek tragedians, that doom is inevitable. They don’t start with characters already resigned.

Mesling reveals, in his preface, that this is probably his last short story collection for now. He’s recently commenced a well-received novel series, which he promises will monopolize his attention. I suggest the novel-writing process already owns his mind. Because time after time, his stories present the promising first chapter of a complex and terrifying novel which he just hasn’t written yet.

Shirley Jackson and the Shadow Self

Ellen Datlow (editor), When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson

When I was in high school, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was part of the standard AmLit curriculum, though it’s apparently fallen out of favor. Jackson combined mystery, psychological realism, and gothic themes into a specific hybrid that’s often marketed, lazily, as “horror.” Her most-loved works occurred in settings so familiar, they could’ve been Anytown, USA, until the moment they weren’t. American audiences loved and feared Jackson in equal measure.

World Fantasy Award-winning anthologist Ellen Datlow collects eighteen new stories inspired by Shirley Jackson. No other theme unifies this collection, and different authors understand differently what it means to be “inspired by” Jackson. Thus the collection is a wild and uneven journey, through several different authors and their relationships with Jackson and the uncanny. Expect only that your expectations at the beginning will be overturned by the end.

Not that no commonalities exist among these stories. They share Jackson’s dedication to the shadow side of ordinary American experiences. The settings could be anywhere; the characters could be your neighbors, clinging desperately to rational explanations amid extraordinary circumstances. Some stories feature monsters and phantoms, others don’t, but most stories share viewpoint characters failing to adequately address the uncertainties and unspoken violence of their lives.

Datlow’s gathered authors are well-known within the world of fantastic, dark, or “weird” fiction. Stephen Graham Jones’ story “Refinery Road” features a man revisiting a memory of troubled youth, only to discover the memory is still growing. Karen Heuler’s “Money of the Dead” similarly has characters trapped in remembrance and regret; given a Monkey’s Paw-like chance to make things right, each character finds unique ways to fatally compound their situation.

Richard Kadrey sets his story, “A Trip to Paris,” during Jackson’s lifetime, and apparently tries to create something Jackson herself would’ve written. Other authors, like Kelly Link in “Skinder’s Veil,” use a contemporary setting, but impose Jackson’s principles of shadow and repression onto our world. Kadrey did well, I think, but the stories least obviously beholden to Jackson herself generally have the greatest depth of feeling. For me, anyway.

Shirley Jackson

Perhaps the best-known author in this collection, Joyce Carol Oates, offers one of the shortest stories. At only four pages, “Take Me, I Am Free” critiques the modern fondness for disposability by asking: where does it stop? Is anything worth saving? She also follows Jackson’s most fundamental precept, that good authors ask questions, but don’t answer them. Literature is something we live with, not something we turn to for guidance.

One hallmark of Shirley Jackson’s writing is that she explained little. She’s one of the few writers under the broad rubric of “horror” to consistently tell successful stories where the monster remains unseen. Scholars continue arguing what, if anything, actually happened at Hill House. Many authors have attempted to recreate Jackson’s talent for withholding the horrible truth, and few have succeeded. Not reliably, anyway.

Carmen Maria Machado’s “A Hundred Miles and a Mile” starts well, full of dark foreboding, but her conclusion feels grafted from another story. Elizabeth Hand’s “For Sale By Owner” likewise has a disquieting set-up, but only the outlines of a pay-off, kept at arm’s length. Seanan McGuire has a resolution matching her premise, but they’re so close together that she resolves her tension before we have time to feel it.

These are highly respected authors, award winners, among my favorites. Unfortunately, they fumble when trying to write in Jackson’s oeuvre rather than their own. I appreciate them for trying, and these stories have seeds of something exciting, which hopefully will germinate in their own stories. They just don’t match Jackson’s almost unique ability to keep the boogeyman visible to the characters but hidden from the audience.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though not every story successfully twigs my sense of the uncanny, this collection has enough stories to keep dedicated weird fiction audiences engaged. The best stories are perhaps influenced by Jackson’s ethos, but aren’t pastiches of her voice. Though no stories feature Jackson directly, some of the best, like Genevieve Valentine’s “Sooner or Later…,” serve as metafictional critiques of Jackson’s work and influence.

Shirley Jackson remains relevant because her works speak to her time and ours. Like now, Jackson wrote amid social upheavals, when family roles and economic principles looked outdated. She forced Americans to directly face our shadow self, collectively and individually. These stories demonstrate how Jackson’s themes remain timely, the questions she asks very current.

These eighteen writers find ways to ask Jackson’s questions in their own voice. How are we going to answer?

The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)

Migrant Life in the New North American Dreamland

Brenda Peynado, The Rock Eaters: Stories

A religious order is formed around preserving teenagers from sin, and the greatest sin is falling asleep and dreaming. An aging Dominican socialite throws away her keys and spends her waning days communicating with her favorite niece through a tiny crack in the door. A toymaker is the only one left standing between a race of lace-winged extraterrestrials and the racist punks who come for them.

Brenda Peynado’s debut collection swings wildly among genres, but her short stories share one thematic question: what if the metaphors that drive our lives were real? What if the stones of sadness that tie us to a place were literal stones we could hold? What if the “thoughts and prayers” we sent up after tragedies went to an actual, listening being? What if radiation turned loyal people into superheroes?

Latin American literature gave us a nearly unique genre, Magic Realism, driven by images of the surreal or supernatural being treated as ordinary. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende gave us stories where the seemingly paranormal is as ordinary as rain. As Hispanic culture becomes increasingly widespread in Anglo-America, American-born Latin writers like Peynado are creating a North American equivalent to Magic Realism.

Peynado’s narrative voice is thoughtful and ruminative, without getting self-consciously “literary.” Most of her stories are told by a first-person narrator, usually female, frequently the young daughter of first-generation immigrants. This youthful, unjaded viewpoint lets us witness a world where wonder and anomaly roam the earth unhindered. Her narrators are too innocent to realize the things they witness are bizarre, or that their lives have been upended.

Several of Peynado’s stories resemble the high-minded fiction published in glossy quarterlies, but with paranormal elements as part of their background. In the title story, “The Rock Eaters,” a generation of ambitious young Dominicans learns how to fly, and uses that ability to flee to America. In “The Man I Could Be,” Peynado’s only story from a male viewpoint, a teenager’s raw potential literally lives in his house, constantly disappointed.

Two stories are out-and-out science fiction. “The Kite Maker” features a woman seeking penitence for the violence she participated in, when the first scared, dying extraterrestrials crash-landed on Earth. “The Touches” asks: what if the machines built The Matrix for benevolent reasons? This story directly, unabashedly nods to Plato, Descartes, and Robert Nozick, while also speaking directly to life in plague-infested America.

Brenda Peynado

Only a few stories don’t directly involve supernatural themes. “Yaiza” deals with a working-class tennis savant whose natural talent upends the posh hierarchy. “We Work in Miraculous Cages” addresses the plight of a young professional, trapped in jobs beneath her capability, because the economy urged her into usurious student debt when she was too young to understand the commitment. Even without magic, these stories describe how reality changes their protagonists.

Though Peynado’s approach is usually sidelong and fantastic, calling these stories “fantasy” is misleading. She doesn’t toss us headlong into another world; instead, she addresses the fears and aspirations everybody has, which we usually keep at arm’s length by discussing them in metaphors. The religious image of staying awake and watchful against sin, in “The Dreamers,” for instance. Or the ghosts living in our basements, in “True Love Game.”

I don’t always like short story collections anymore. Short stories are frequently an afterthought in today’s publishing industry, where the real money comes from novels. Yet the stories Peynado offers are well-thought-out, with remarkably detailed settings; we can imagine how the small changes she offers could have profound impacts on our world. We see one moment in her characters’ lives, usually something catastrophic, but these never feel like orphaned occasions.

The frequency with which Peynado uses children or teenagers as narrators might reflect something in herself. Maybe. Her characters are fumbling with important questions. They haven’t learned to rely on shopworn platitudes like adults do (platitudes made painfully literal in “Thoughts and Prayers”), but they also lack experience necessary to address their problems directly. Again, this is a debut collection; like her narrators, Peynado is still finding her way.

Not that these stories lack sophistication. These aren’t apprentice-level finger exercises; Peynado already has a distinct voice, and an approach that stands out in today’s crowded publishing field. Even in pieces lasting less than ten pages, where the narrator might not tell us her name, it’s still easy to care about what she’s created. I look forward to seeing what she’s able to accomplish as she continues refining her craft.

Existentialism and Hope in the Time of Plague

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In the Dark: a Novel

Deep beneath the melting Siberian permafrost, an archeologist makes a chilling discovery: dozens of perfectly preserved Neanderthal bodies, laid out with precision. As global warming thaws what the millennia have guarded, something wakes up. Despite the scientists’ best efforts, a long-dormant microorganism escapes the site. Before long, the “Arctic plague” threatens the very foundations of human civilization.

It’s slightly misleading to call Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel “science fiction,” though it uses time-honored genre staples to launch its story. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it “a novel,” as it’s basically a short-story sequence, the Winesburg, Ohio of mass-market fiction. Nagamatsu has crafted an experimental form, a postmodern rejection of literal through-line storytelling in favor of immersing yourself in a whirlwind of speculative experience.

The Arctic plague first strikes children. Global civilization (but, in this book, mostly America) struggles to maintain its cultural suppositions about childhood innocence, even as childhood becomes the number-one indicator of mortality. Scientists perform increasingly daredevil experiments to keep children alive, to preserve the illusion that humanity has a future. Some of these experiments test the limits of what defines “humanity.”

It’s exceedingly difficult to synopsize Nagamatsu’s story because, as I’ve already said, it lacks a through-line. Main characters in one chapter emerge as principal protagonists several chapters later; others disappear without explanation. Rather like life, that. The story jumps years, sometimes generations, as Nagamatsu moves onto whatever most interests him. Most stories are set in America, mostly California, though three take place in Japan.

Rather than a straightforward narrative, Nagamatsu focuses on creating a mood. As you’d expect from a novel about a plague, themes of mortality and loss abound. Though one chapter focuses on disembodied souls in limbo, that’s an outlier; nearly every chapter deals primarily with survivors, those forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones slip away. These days, many readers may find these themes disconcertingly familiar.

But despite these themes, Nagamatsu’s storytelling is remarkably optimistic. His protagonists find meaning in survival, in facing a world characterized by bereavement. His characters face the existentialist reality that all human endeavor ends in mortality, sooner or later; then they shoulder that burden and continue. Death, to Nagamatsu’s characters, isn’t the end, it’s their reason to persevere, though they sometimes require several chapters to accept this.

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Even with his cast of thousands and his international scope, Nagamatsu’s storytelling has a personal edge. Several characters are, like Nagamatsu himself, Japanese-American; more than a few are aspiring artists whose parents consider them a disappointment. (Hmmm…) The recurrence of this generational, cross-cultural conflict underlines several stories. During the plague, humanity needs more doctors and scientists; but it also needs artists to make chaotic times meaningful.

Nagamatsu’s story overlaps heavily with current events, but don’t read too much into that. According to the copyright page, this book’s chapters have dribbled out in literary journals and anthologies since 2011, long before COVID existed. Parts of Nagamatsu’s story eerily predict the fear and uncertainty we witness daily, though he probably rewrote portions to remain current. This book is about us, without necessarily being “ripped from the headlines.”

Not everyone will like Nagamatsu’s technique. He frequently uses the MFA workshop trend in ironic distancing, holding his characters at arms’ length. Though all but one of these chapters are told by first-person narrators, Nagamatsu’s storytellers maintain a dry, dispassionate tenor. Faced with dying children and desperate parents, with global warming in the background, and humanity’s brightest fleeing the Earth, his protagonists remain coolly detached, weary of their own emotions.

This approach takes some getting used to. Anybody hoping to read a conventional science fiction potboiler will find this book disappointing. It requires attentive reading, and a willingness to suspend our love of genre conventions. His writing reflects familiarity with Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also Star Trek and Japanese anime. (Seriously, there’s a Starship Yamato.) He uses science fiction parts without really writing a science fiction novel.

However, for readers willing to let Nagamatsu guide their attention, he tells a story both dark and humane. He writes in a near-future setting that’s all to plausible, about themes that are part of our everyday loves; but he doesn’t surrender to cynicism or let despair run his story. He writes about us, with all the disappointment and optimism that entails. He reminds us that, no matter how bleak our present seems, there’s always still a future.

Through it all, through the grief and art and isolation and love, he reminds us that we become human when we believe.

The Disappointment of Small Terrors

Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses: a Collection of Stories

An American tourist in rural France watches secrets unfold by starlight, getting drawn deeper in, until he cannot escape. A childhood game of dares causes lifelong consequences to flare up brutally. A possessed teddy bear appears to have stolen a stillborn infant’s soul, and now sets its sights on the grieving father. A wounded cowboy stubbornly refuses to die, keeping his pardner bound to an old promise.

Brian Evenson comes highly recommended by readers who consider themselves connoisseurs of horror fiction. As a recent convert to the genre, I wanted to experience different kinds of horror, beyond the well-hyped chestnuts of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. Evenson famously merges horror with the understated introspection of so-called “literary fiction,” a fusion that’s earned him loyalty from countless critics and fans. Perhaps I’m just missing something.

Though I wouldn’t call Evenson “formulaic,” his writings have a recognizable pattern. He begins by taking some well-loved genre—Westerns, family dramas, science fiction, slice-of-life vignettes. Then one character realizes something doesn’t add up. A path that should lead straight becomes labyrinthine, perhaps, or an ordinary item becomes somehow ominous. The complication is seldom strictly supernatural, though for Evenson, naturalism is usually optional.

Our protagonist, having realized the complication, chooses somehow to resist. That resistance may involve actively opposing chaos, by trying to kill someone or destroy an artifact. Or it may simply involve obstinately sticking with whatever the protagonist believes to be true, even despite massive evidence and social opprobrium. Whatever form that resistance takes, the protagonist is willing to stand by that choice, no matter the consequences.

Then, usually: nothing. Evenson generally pours energy into creating characters, situations, and narrative MacGuffins, but apparently gets fatigued and quits. His stories frequently suffer the curse of today’s short-story market: the author creates the foundations for something complex and promising, but decides that, because he’s already written the story’s major themes, he doesn’t need to waste time on such fleeting trivia as action, dialog, character, or plot.

Brian Evenson

In “Cult,” a man agrees to help his abusive ex-girlfriend, thinking that makes him the bigger person, only to realize he’s getting sucked back in. Sounds like a great premise, right? Except Evenson writes the relationship entirely in sweeping generalities, long on adjectives, so we never understand exactly what made their bond so compelling, much less why he’d return. They’re simply going through the motions of a paperback cautionary tale.

“Past Reno,” a family drama redolent of Stephen King’s influence, features a man driving back to claim his portion of his sadistic father’s inheritance. Except the protagonist only vaguely defines what he previously fled, what horrific reckoning might await on the old homestead. He neither knows nor cares, and therefore, neither do we. The story culminates in the protagonist smashing a bathroom mirror, basically to do anything besides idle woolgathering.

My favorite story, “The Dust,” reflects cinematic influences like Ridley Scott and John Carpenter. A mining platform on a distant planet, thousands of miles from civilization, becomes infiltrated with fine, powdery dust that seemingly overtakes everything. The skeleton crew becomes isolated and paranoid, forcing the security chief to take steps. Soon, it becomes impossible to distinguish allies from enemies, and reality from one’s own internal demons.

But even this, my favorite story, the one which most utilizes Evenson’s fabled talent for misdirection and unease, ends abruptly, like Evenson lost interest. Time after time, Evenson’s stories tease a Shirley Jackson-like sense of existential foreboding, we barely start to care, and then Evenson moves on. Our emotional investments come to nothing, and I’m left feeling, not scared or disquieted, but swindled. Like he took my money and ran.

In over half of Evenson’s stories, characters don’t have names. Protagonists are identified by pronouns: “he” or (less often) “she.” Supporting characters have titles based on roles: “the doctor,” “the other man,” “his father.” Entire stories happen with no proper nouns. In individual stories, this imprecision maybe induces dread, but as stories accumulate, the vagueness bleeds together, making it difficult to even remember which story we’re reading.

I began reading this collection with high hopes, based on Evenson’s reputation. Before long, reading became an act of rubbernecking, transfixed by the grotesquerie of a train wreck in motion. As my lack of emotional reaction accrued, I realized I was simply going through the motions. Then eventually, I didn’t even have energy enough to do that.

Maybe this book misrepresents Evenson’s corpus. Who knows. After reading this, I won’t be going back to investigate any further.

Living the Latin American Nightmare

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories

A driftless young woman finds an abandoned skull in a Buenos Aires park, and becomes obsessed with reassembling the body. An apparently abandoned house turns out to be full of arcane artifacts and ethereal light, and an unhappy young girl wanders within, never to return. An angry urban husband mocks his wife, scorns the hickish truck driver who rescued them, and apparently packs his bags and wanders into an urban legend.

I can find precious little prior information on Mariana Enriquez. Though she’s apparently a well-respected journalist and novelist in her native Argentina, this is apparently her first book-length publication in English. She comes to Anglophonic readers a virtually blank slate provided we can avoid the temptation to make her resemble Jorge Luis Borges. Her short stories more resemble Edgar Allan Poe or Thomas Ligotti anyway.

Like Poe or Ligotti, Enriquez’s fiction uses foundations in the real world, incidents of the massively commonplace, as entry points into moments of overarching dread. When a woman, a sort of Argentinian do-gooder hipster, reaches out to a starving street child, we recognize a social justice warrior in action. When that child mentions a gripping fear of the monsters living across the railroad tracks, we wonder what monstrosities this child has experienced. And when that child disappears, we start seeking the real monsters.

This sense of creeping dread dominates Enriquez’s storytelling. As we read, we adjust our mental rhythms to Enriquez’s slow, sometimes soporific pace, and enter a sort of dreamland. As in our own dreams, this guided tour of somebody else’s phantasmagoria dwells more on mood than content. We start conjuring images of what could be, and our anticipations drip with creeping dread. We wonder: am I worse than the pending monster?

Some stories include actual monsters. “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt” features a local tour guide having visions of an historic Buenos Aires murderer (an actual person, though English speakers will need to Google this). In “The Neighbor’s Courtyard,” a disgraced social worker looking to redeem herself breaks into a house where she suspects abuse is happening, only to find a cave of horrors worse than her frequently vivid imagination.

Mariana Enriquez

But many stories involve no literal monster, or something glimpsed only in passing. Three young girls on self-destructive benders watch an anonymous woman get off a bus in the wilderness, in “The Intoxicated Years,” only to see her years later, untouched by time, luring them into the forest. Another girl, in “End of Term,” mutilates her own body to appease an invisible man behind the mirror. Is she merely schizophrenic, or is her illness somehow contagious?

Two themes emerge as the stories mount up. In some stories, young women on the cusp of adulthood do something vindictive and ruinous, to themselves or others, and suffer consequences they never anticipated. Or an unhappy wife’s inability to express her gloom leads herself or her husband into a death spiral. Either way, a woman’s inner turmoil manifests itself upon the outside world, often at great cost to human life.

At her best, Enriquez couples this inner violence with Argentina’s history of literal violence. In my favorite story, “The Inn,” two teenage girls, one a closeted lesbian, attempt to gaslight a local hotelier. But the hotel they target was a police academy—read, “torture chamber”—during the Peronist years. When the ghosts of Argentina’s bloody past chase the girls through the present hallways, it’s impossible to not wonder who’s passing judgment upon whom?

Parapsychologists like Joe Nickell and William G. Roll have long noted the apparent correlation between deep emotional turmoil and seemingly supernatural occurrences. This seems especially prevalent with poltergeists; seems the movies weren’t wrong associating this phenomenon with an emotionally high-strung adolescent girl. Enriquez simply assumes these correlations are real, and asks herself: how would they manifest in my homeland today?

As in the best horror fiction, Enriquez conjures the most powerful scares, the most lasting nightmare fuel, by withholding information. She creates rich mindscapes, certainly; her storytelling is resplendent with small but telling details that immerse us in her world. But she conceals the Big Evil. Stephen King this ain’t, and anybody expecting the big reveal moment American horror writers savor waits in vain.

But audiences willing to suspend their Anglophonic expectations will find Enriquez rife with crawling disquiet, the kind that gets under your skin. Like Borges, Enriquez creates an interstitial world on the borderline between reality and dreams. Unlike Borges, she reminds us that our dreams are something to fear.

The Robots of the Rio Grande

Cat Rambo, Altered America: Steampunk Stories

I have mixed feelings about steampunk fiction. I’ve read some really good steampunk, but it’s mostly been anti-modernist nostalgia, boilerplate fantasy with magic replaced with sufficiently un-advanced technology. But I really like short story master Cat Rambo, arguably the truest living successor to genre doyen Damon Knight. So when a beloved author undertook a subgenre I distrust, I had my doubts. The resulting hybrid product truly could go either way.

On balance, Rambo does pretty well. Her work isn’t immune from cliché, sometimes falling into the trap George Orwell called “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” But she owns those clichés boldly, coöpting shopworn phrases to tell superior stories. Sure, she relies on period nostalgia, as paperback readers frequently expect. But she retunes and subverts nostalgia formulae to tell the story she needs, regardless of expectation.

Rambo’s ten stories pinch a medley of influences, and spread across time, from the late 18th to the early 20th Centuries. A mysterious nobleman courts an unconventional inventor from under her judgemental fiancé’s nose. A hospital for Civil War veterans harbors dark secrets, as human soldiers are recycled for parts. A werewolf motorcar enthusiast races a vampire’s train for the ultimate prize: a human woman’s heart. The stories mix recklessly.

Together, Rambo’s stories create a history familiar enough to evoke wistful sentimentality, but distorted enough to challenge preconceptions. By inverting readers’ historical reminiscences, she questions our received narrative. American forces fight an unnamed enemy Out West for control of a powerful fuel, phlogistion. Which isn’t really petroleum, stop saying that. Aristocrats vie to control a deeply class-ridden Europe, but those aristocrats are werewolves and vampires, literally feeding on their people.

The Civil War looms large in Rambo’s history. Her Abraham Lincoln won a Pyrrhic victory by allying with Haitian warlords to create a zombie army. (I’ll forgive her occupation-era stereotypes, provisionally.) But in peacetime, what Lincoln created cannot be silenced, and the racially diverse living find themselves unified against the remaindered zombie hordes ravaging the countryside. Thus Rambo asks readers, is winning worth the price? She revisits this situation repeatedly.

Cat Rambo

By her own admission, Rambo began this collection without realizing she’d commenced a unified alternate history. Thus, some early stories disagree about their timeline: “Memphis BBQ,” about self-propelled mechanical men chasing a zeppelin, offers a different, less dark post-Civil War America than later stories, like “Snakes on a Train” and “Rappaccini’s Crow.” Later stories show greater continuity. Throughout the second half, Rambo’s appallingly grim history develops its own internal equilibrium.

Not that it becomes uniformly bleak. “Snakes on a Train,” which Rambo admits began with its title pun, retains a playful, sexy humor even when emphasis shifts onto monsters. “Rappaccini’s Crow,” by contrast, takes its cues, as you’d expect, from Nathaniel Hawthorne, with distinct hints of Poe. But its “horrors of war” theme arguably shows equal influence from Ernest Hemingway and Dalton Trumbo. This is science fiction consciously as literature.

Rambo doesn’t limit herself to just one form. Despite the Altered America title, her alternate history begins and ends in Europe. She opens with a Regency romance, then spills straight into a Dickensian protest tale. She has two Elspeth and Artemus mysteries, Western thrillers featuring twin outcasts, a clockwork man and a Jewish psychic. From there, she caroms through straight-up Western adventure, train heists, fairy tales, and more sprawling genres.

One theme permeates the entire book. Of ten stories, only two, “Web of Blood and Iron” and “Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing On a Pin,” don’t feature a female protagonist rejecting the romantic ingenue role. Not that they’re opposed to love: Pinkerton agent Elspeth Sorehs, female lead in two stories, openly embraces it, and other heroines fight for love they’re doomed never to receive. But they don’t define themselves romantically.

On one level, like much steampunk, Rambo exhibits flip sentiment and corny nostalgia. Admittedly, readers like that. But Rambo doesn’t make a nest in old history textbooks, she uses history to question readers. Frequently, especially in war-related stories, she threatens our understanding of the present. Thus she rises above a highly stereotyped subgenre to present tales ranging from the merely mawkish, to the downright dangerous, often in the same story.

At this writing, this book is available only in digital format. It has some visible scars from its manuscript formatting, including some editorial notations, that should’ve been removed earlier. These mistakes are few, and pretty widely spaced, so patient readers can simply read around them. But it does take patience.



See Also:
Lord of the Pings
Jane Austen Presents a Sherlock Holmes Extravaganza

The Poet of Hollywood Boulevard

Martin Ott, Interrogations: Stories

A young man, who cannot reconcile himself to married life, must return to Mosquito Island to repair his relationship with the first woman he loved: his mother. An aging mother, whose daughter has been praying to a mysterious Virgin Mary sculpture, realizes she must make her own miracles. A husband and wife, drifting apart, discover their very literal bond when their daughter physically glues them together.Twenty short, powerful snippets, given brief but luminous life.

As a poet, Martin Ott has a distinctive voice. Blending his military experience, society’s suffusion with media, and the intricacies of making a life in entertainment, his verse has a concise punch often missing in poetry written by tenure-track professors. Ott’s fiction somewhat lacks that confidence, appropriating elements from other authors he respects and emulates. Not that his fiction isn’t good; he’s a skilled mimic. Rather, as a fictioneer, he’s clearly early in his career.

And what influences he mimics. Reading his stories, veteran audiences will recognize Ott emulating Annie Proulx, TC Boyle, and Deborah Eisenberg, among others. His eclectic borrowing gives this book an encyclopedic feeling, like a Best Contemporary American Short Fiction anthology filtered through an ambitious student’s viewpoint. Sometimes one suspects he’s imitating established authors because he lacks confidence in his own tale to tell. Other times, it’s like uncovering a lost work by some favorite writer.

Ranging from under two to nearly thirty pages, Ott’s stories span a gamut of styles, voices, and influences. Some stories have overtones of magic realism, especially as characters create their own realities, then drag others with them, willfully or otherwise. Sometimes Ott limits himself to strict realism, hitting readers directly with a jarring overload of detail. Stories occasionally hint at mysteries and thrillers, though he avoids recourse to detectives and other professionals. Ott’s voices swell.

At his best, Ott’s language resembles the poet he usually is. Momentary glimpses of powerful, incisive language strip away characters’ pretensions, especially in his shortest stories, where a single moment becomes an entire life. A little girl promises her faux boyfriend: “We’ll do dangerous things, then we’ll fight about it.” A former military interrogator (not the author himself, surely) “yearned to break men like bread sticks.” This doesn’t just best breaking twigs; it invests family, hearth, and religion into violence.

Martin Ott

Ott’s geography is somewhat uneven. His best stories emphasize two regions: his adopted home of coastal California (some highlight San Francisco, but experienced coast-dwellers will recognize it’s transparently a cipher for Los Angeles), and small-town Michigan, a region he revisits often enough, one suspects it’s his home domain. California, for Ott, represents dreams made manifest, the admixture of sun-kissed opportunity and bitter disappointment, the two experiences most Californians recognize from working overtime in the sun.

Michigan, however, is something Ott’s characters mainly reconcile themselves with. His Michigan stories mostly involve somebody, not always the viewpoint character, returning after fleeing, confronting some long-buried truth. “Home,” to these characters, represents something they escape, even while living there (underage drinking and drug abuse, which numb users to the present, are ubiquitous). But a bad home is still home, and Ott’s characters return because they need stability. Even if they must build it themselves.

Besides these two locations, Ott liberally uses images from Wyoming, Alaska, Seattle, and elsewhere. These sites, unfortunately, are more general and vague than California or Michigan, giving the suspicion Ott has simply elected to imitate other authors (Proulx in Wyoming, or Boyle in Alaska) he finds influential. The locations become more like generalized non-places than actual locations. If we can accept the dreamlike conditions, the places are okay. But they lack Michigan’s detailed, meaty realism.

Thus accepting Ott’s stories requires accepting Ott. Though a master poet, he remains a journeyman fiction writer, and demands an audience that can accept his learning curve. I mostly can; only very late in this volume do Ott’s inconsistencies become prominent enough to bother me. Even when he presents Wyoming, a state I know pretty well, as more archetype than location, I feel only minor twinges. Ott’s still learning fiction, and that’s okay.

At his best, Martin Ott’s fiction peels away the layers of pretense to uncover the underlying facts, like the interrogator he once was. Narrative, for Ott, exposes characters’ inner journey, as most literary fiction does, but it also exposes the factual core beneath subjective experience. And often, Ott exposes the jarring friction between reality and experience. Like an interrogator, Ott pierces pretense, laying reality bare to criticism and to brisk, informed response.

The New Queen of the Smoke-Eyed Dreamscape

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 60
Cat Rambo, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight: Stories

Spirits attack a fort full of despair on the frontier of a mythic kingdom. A girl is cursed to carry flame sprites throughout the land, creating a magical massacre. Tourists on the dingy side of Bangkok meet a woman who may or may not be Andersen's Little Mermaid. An elemental sorceress gambles everything to save her nation and discovers that victory may be the key to her greatest loss.

Cat Rambo, hailed as a leading voice in fantastic fiction, collects twenty stories of the speculative, the bone-chilling, and the uncanny. The tales in this volume are so strange, so evocative, and so different from one another that it's hard to believe they were all written by the same person. Rambo has a remarkable talent for plunging readers into alien realities in only a few pages, a talent that's become lamentably rare in recent short fiction.

The title story features many themes common in Rambo’s writing. (No, she doesn’t use a pseudonym.) Describing a young woman’s encounters with the general of an all-woman army, Rambo delves into meanings of gender and role in worlds where post-industrial Western traditions don’t apply. The story arose from Rambo’s involvement with a multi-player online RPG, underlining the reciprocal relationship Rambo’s writing has with media technologies.

Sometimes Rambo wears her influences undisguised upon her sleeves. “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” has a very Harlan Ellison-esque title, though the story feels more Poe-like in its themes, and Lovecraftian in its imagery. Other times, Rambo’s influences vanish subtly beneath her sophisticated storytelling. “The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race,” told from an animal’s POV, seamlessly combines a slumgullion of fictional and non-fictional, mainstream and fringe sources.

Literary critics and writing teachers frequently pooh-pooh genre fiction as mere escapism—as though there’s anything “mere” about stepping outside our lives and circumstances to perceive the world through new eyes. Okay, sometimes mass-market paperback fiction lowballs its audience’s intelligence. And sometimes audiences willingly live down to whatever expectations well-crafted marketing lays upon them. Perhaps ours is an age of tragically lowered standards.

Cat Rambo

But Cat Rambo, and her shoestring publisher, Paper Golem, represent the other extreme of genre writing. Like gazing into a funhouse mirror, Rambo’s fiction presents us with ourselves from another viewpoint, making us consider our situations from outside our limited, self-important perspective. Though never overtly political, Rambo’s best stories challenge her readers’ status quo. Every story places, or traps, its readers in the spotlight. Ultimately, every story is about us.

Consider “Narrative of a Beast’s Life.” In both form and content, it mirrors 19th Century American slave narratives, like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, while reminding us that the slaveholding mentality persists in post-industrial society. “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish” questions what it means to “purchase” land forcibly seized from its original indigenous inhabitants. Can we ever truly own something stolen by our ancestors?

Also, Rambo continues a tradition in American fiction. From Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, to Lovecraft’s Arkham, Massachusetts, American writers love creating fictional cities which come into existence, not whole and ready to visit, but distant, complex, glimpsed only through characters’ partial viewpoints. Rambo’s distant city of Tabat, a manifestation of the human id, isn’t a place we visit. It’s a place that ambushes, engulfs, and strands mere tourists.

These stories refuse to be limited to one or a few genres. Rambo freely mixes heroic fantasy with psychological horror, or steampunk with westerns. Hers is an innovative mind that will stop at nothing to tell the best possible story, and she writes for eager, curious readers. Every character she creates has a distinctive voice, and every story she tells expands her world, and the reader's as well.

I applaud Rambo for choosing a small press. However, the wing-and-a-prayer budget of Paper Golem apparently leaves Rambo without an editor, and her stories could intermittently use a little clean-up. Several sentences drop important words, and sometimes her punctuation could be called quirky. Though these are distracting, they never diminish my enjoyment. Some of Rambo's story notes, on the other hand, contain spoilers; read her notes only after the stories.

Rambo comes to the reading public with glowing recommendations from luminaries like Jeff VanderMeer and John Barth, and it's easy to see why. Her unconventional fantasy refuses to follow familiar paths, and her writing eclipses most genre fiction coming pell-mell from the major publishing houses. This debut short story collection, signalled the arrival of a bold voice in fantasy literature, promise Rambo, now SFWA president, has fulfilled with aplomb.