I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. Posts will range from flash to novellas. At some point, I might delve into individual stories/episodes of anthology formats in other media, like television and comics, but for the time being, I’m sticking to prose in print and audio.
The fourth issue of Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy came out in late Fall of 2020, and while I haven’t read the entire issue yet, I’d like to throw some attention their way by chatting about the three stories I have read.
“Dreams of Salt” by Cynthia Ward is a lovely bit of Lovecraftiana that moves the Deep Ones aspect of the Mythos back to its Pacific origins (as described in A Shadow Over Innsmouth) but in more recent times (1985). The protagonists are a lesbian couple traveling to Hawaii for one partner’s family reunion. Each woman has family history with ties to the Deep Ones: Abigail Derby, the non-native-Hawaiian half of the pair, recalls her grandmother being called a “fish-woman from Innsmouth.” Nalani Kealoha, her partner, traces her matrilineal family to one of the “forbidden islands” near Hawaii with a questionable history. Abby is also having increasingly vivid bad dreams about swimming through a sunken city towards a large idol. Ward expertly builds the suspense – are Abby’s dreams true visions of her near future? is Nalani’s family history a predictor of her own future? – throughout the story by keeping the focus sharply in Abby’s point-of-view. The reader learn’s Nalani’s family history as Abigail does via conversation at the family reunion. The love these two women share for each other is clearly evident from the start of the story, and so are the differences in their personalities. They are complex people encountering the first real major bump in their relationship after almost 20 years together, and Ward uses the depth of their personalities and relationship to propel the horror and tragedy to a logical conclusion. (No, I won’t spoil the ultimate outcome or the major reveals along the way.)
Charles R. Rutledge’s “Born in Strange Shadow” brings his occult detective Carter Decamp to the legendary tunnels under Copp’s Hill in Boston, although our introduction to the story is via Boston PD Detective Mallory Lee, who catches a late-night call about a lost child found wandering Copp’s Hill Terrace, near the Burying Ground. Lee has a personal interest in cases involving missing or lost children that drives her into the tunnels and a danger she isn’t really ready to deal with. Enter Rutledge’s Carter Decamp, who is as mysterious and secretive as folks like John Constantine and who is not afraid to use mundane weaponry, like rifles, in addition to his supernatural abilities. The very-hard-to-kill ghouls our heroes encounter in the tunnels make for an action-packed story as they set about to solve the problem at its source. Rutledge combines the action with well-written supernatural esoterica and high stakes. Aligning the occult detective with a skeptic is a classic trope that serves this story well, allowing the reader to slowly move into the supernatural aspects of the story. The end of the story implies that this is not Decamp’s only encounter with the strong-willed, open-to-learning Mallory Lee, and I hope to read more adventures of these two in the future.
“Under the Blood” by Darrell Z. Grizzle is a nice piece of rural horror, focusing on two pre-teens and their church’s belief in laying-on-of-hands style healing. The son of the church’s pastor tells the tale, starting with how his friend Billy had managed to bring a possum and a redbird back to life by laying on hands, and how Billy decided to try to bring the church’s Deacon, who had been buried that day, back to life to prove to everyone he had this skill. I don’t want to spoil any of the twists, but this is a horror story so you know things don’t go well. I was pulled into Grizzle’s story by the voice of the narrator, who at times speaks well beyond his years and at other times sounds much younger than he really is; it felt very much like a number of the twelve-year-olds I’ve known. The friendship between the narrator and Billy is also well-detailed throughout, feeling reminiscent of Bradbury, and the horror of the story builds off of the loss of innocence in that friendship as much as the supernatural aspect.
