Sunday Shorts: Transgender Day of Visibility

March 31st is this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility. Rather than just review a story or two, I thought I’d list just a few of the many wonderful transgender, non-binary, and genderfluid short story and novella writers whose work I have enjoyed over the years (in no particular order) and give some links to where you can find their work or more about them. (Also, apologies in advance to anyone I leave off. It’s not purposeful, and this is not meant to be a complete list. I’m working under a little bit of a deadline.

Everett Maroon. I loved Everett’s memoir (Bumbling into Body Hair) and his novel (The Unintentional Time Traveler, which I’m hoping we’ll get a sequel to). His short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies as well as one collection (Spinning Around a Sun).  https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/5759590.Everett_Maroon

Charlie Jane Anders. Charlie Jane has written YA novels (the Unstoppable trilogy), writing advice books (Never Say You Can’t Survive), novels (All the Birds in the Sky among them), and a good number of short stories (many collected in Even Greater Mistakes).  https://www.charliejaneanders.com/

Lee Mandelo. Lee wrote one of my favorite novels of 2021 (Summer Sons), one of my favorite novellas of 2023 (Feed Them Silence) and has another novella out this month (The Woods All Black, sitting atop my TBR pile right now), and his short stories can be found in places like Uncanny Magazine.  https://leemandelo.com/

K.M. Szpara. Novelist (First Become Ashes and Docile) and short story writer (appearances in Uncanny, Lightspeed, and elsewhere), K.M. also edited Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016, published  by Lethe Press. https://www.kmszpara.com/

Jordan L. Hawk. Jordan mixes gay romance and sex with Lovecraftian horror (the Whyborne & Griffin series), supernatural detective stories (the Spirits series), shapeshifters (the Hexworld and Pride books) and more.  https://jordanlhawk.com/

Nino Cipri. Nino Cipri’s short stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Nightmare, and elsewhere and collected in Homesick: Stories. They have also written novellas (Finna and Defekt) and the upcoming YA novel Dead Girls Don’t Dream. https://ninocipri.com/

Bogi Takacs.  Bogi’s short stories have been collected in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation (2019) and Power to Yield (2024). E also edited the 2017 – 2019 editions of Transcendent: The Year’s Transgender Speculative Fiction. Check out eir Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/bogiperson/posts

S.A. Hunt. Samara Hunt is the author of the Malus Domestica horror series along with some short stories. She also has a Patreon. http://www.sahuntbooks.com/about.html https://www.patreon.com/sahuntbooks/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=space

A.M. Dellamonica. Author of the Indigo Springs and Hidden Sea Tales series, Dellamonica’s short stories have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and Uncanny Magazine among other places.  https://alyxdellamonica.com/

Nisi Shawl. Novelist (Everfair and the recently-released Kinning) and non-fiction writer (including co-authoring Writing the Other with Cynthia Ward), Shawl’s short stories have appeared in Apex Magazine and  Nightmare Magazine among many others, as well as in too many anthologies to list.  http://www.nisishawl.com/Index.html

Neon Yang. The author of one of my favorite on-going novella series, the Tensorate series, as well as a novel (The Genesis of Misery), Yang’s short fiction has appeared in magazine like Clarkesworld, anthologies like The Book of Dragons, and on Tor.com (now called Reactor). https://neonyang.com/

Sunday Shorts: Two by Sharang Biswas

Sharang Biswas is a game designer, writer, and artist based in New York City whose stories and poetry have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Sana Stories, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Look him up on his website. Today, I’m going to look at his two most recent stories that appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams. Lightspeed Magazine contents are free to read on the website and e-book subscriptions are also available.

“Real Magic” (Lightspeed Magazine #153, February 2023)

Three townspeople visit the Witch in the Woods to ask for help with their problems. She extracts a different price from each, something either cherished or endemic to the person’s sense of self. Each visitor ultimately finds what they are searching for (or searching for relief from), but not in the way they or the reader expects. The witch uses their ingredients to do real magic. This is a beautifully told story, a fairy tale in style but cloaked in Biswas’ beautiful sense of character and community. Biswas uses the needs of the visitors (and their resolutions) to show that every individual action has an effect outside the moment in which that action is taken or that choice is made. Nothing happens in a vacuum, no one person’s fate is theirs alone. What one person discards (willingly or not) may be picked up by another (who may or may not benefit from it). I also loved how Biswas doesn’t spoon-fed the connections between the villagers’ stories but lets them come out organically and not all at once.

“Season of Weddings” (Lightspeed Magazine #166, March 2024, story goes live on the website March 28th)

Nate receives seven wedding invitations in one year. Okay, two of them are for his job, which is maybe a little less fun than attending as a guest. Especially because it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Nate is Thanatos, god of death. Sometimes, people die at weddings. Still reeling from his most recent relationship break-up (with Thor, who has moved on to loving a mortal woman), Nate must navigate these weddings, new singlehood, his job, his perhaps too-pushy best friend, and a cute guy he keeps bumping into at the weddings. This story is so sweet, so romantic and wistful. I recognized some of myself in Nate’s self-esteem issues around romance and relationships, which made me connect to the work even more. The world-building is also wonderful, bringing together characters from all sorts of world mythologies and religions but tweaking them in new and interesting ways (for instance, the Thor is this story is neither the “drunken jock” we often see nor the blond-tressed super-hero). I won’t spoil who all shows up, because part of the fun of the story is the reveals of Nate’s friends’ circle. I’m a sucker for “deities and personifications of human concepts walk among us and act like every-day people” types of stories (think the classic issue number eight of Neil Gaiman’s the Sandman, illustrated by Mike Dringenberg, among others), and this one fits the description very well. It also fits very well as a paranormal romance, and I love it when authors blend and blur genres.

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past. Click on the Sunday Shorts tab at the bottom of this post to find earlier entries in the series!

Book Review: DEATH COMES TOO LATE

TITLE: Death Comes Too Late

AUTHOR: Charles Ardai

397 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781803366265 (paperback, e-book)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Hard Case Crime imprint, the publishers have released Death Comes Too Late, a collection of 20 mostly noir short stories from across the career of imprint founder Charles Ardai. The author admits the choice of title is a bit cheeky for a collection of stories in which death seems to arrive in a timely manner, if not early and unexpectedly. Regardless, it is a phenomenal collection by an author who I think is truly underrated. I say this as someone who is mostly familiar with Ardai as founder/editor/publisher and who had previously read only one of the stories contained herein.

That story, “Mother of Pearl,” blew me away when I first read it in From Sea to Stormy Sea (edited by the great Lawrence Block), and it blew me away again here. It is one of the few non-noir stories in the collection, if noir must include a crime or double-cross of some kind. There is a mystery at its core – who is this nameless, seemingly genderless, narrator telling us this tale of a young woman’s search for the truth of her father’s death and the mother who put her up for adoption? As I said back in 2020, the story is “a rumination on success, failure, identity, and the search for where we come from,” and upon multiple rereads I continue to find some moment or bit of phrasing or twist in the story that didn’t stand out to me on previous reads. As with most of the stories in Death Comes Too Late, “Mother of Pearl” has layers upon layers, twists to the twists, that keep you wondering where Ardai is leading you right up to the last paragraph.

I think it is safe to say that the whole collection is a rumination on success, failure, identity, and the search for where we come from (sometimes to embrace it, sometimes to understand it, sometimes to leave it behind). And equally safe to say that most of the time, those ruminations take some long, complicated routes to get to that moment of embracing, understanding, or leave-taking.

The book starts strong with “The Home Front,” in which a private investigator hired by the United States government to suss out black marketeers during World War Two is responsible for the accidental death of a young man he’s just arrested – which is just the start of a journey that turns brutal and bloody by the end while our protagonist tries to decide who he is after the tragedy. This is followed by “Game Over,” which starts with a boy’s simple wish to treat his less-well-off best friend to a free afternoon of video games at the local pizza place but whose plan to do so results in wounded pride, misunderstanding, harsh accusations, and yes tragedy. Two quite different time frames with characters of very different ages, both dealing with expectations of who they are based on something someone else has done (or not done). “The Fall of Man” is another heartbreaking story with a teen at the center, a startlingly honest look at suicide and its aftermath.

Charles Ardai is an expert at making sure his stories don’t end where they start – those long, complicated routes mentioned earlier – even when obeying genre dictates. “The Case” starts out as a standard “missing luggage” story but neatly twists through two characters’ points-of-view into something that would be at home on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. “Goin’ West” starts with a classic “Hollywood casting couch” scene (only in New York) that doesn’t quite go where you’d expect but with a conclusion that feels inevitable. “The Shadow Line” opens with our narrator waking up in a room in Mexico with a sex worker, intent on hunting down a man he’s been sent to locate – but not for the reasons that seem apparent. “Jonas and the Frail” is a “bodyguard loses his teenage charge, chaos ensues” tale with a killer reveal and ending; “Sleep! Sleep! Beauty Bright” is a revenge tale writ large; “My Husband’s Wife” is a riff on “disaffected corporate wife has affair” type stories. But they all take surprising turns, and each protagonist faces challenges that reveal something about where they came from or who they really are.

Ardai is also not above twisting his genres. “The Deadly Embrace,” one of my favorites in the collection, is a neat bit of super-hero noir that takes the real-world fierce competition between comics publishers in the 1950s (think the famous DC vs. Fawcett lawsuit over the original Captain Marvel) and combines it with a twist on the Hollywood Studio System in a world where super-heroes are real but under contract to the comics companies, which some of them find stifling. “Don’t Be Cruel” plays with conspiracy theories (particularly around Elvis’s supposed survival) in a noir light. “The Day After Tomorrow” is another tale that is not really noir at all, but more horror.

The collection ends with another decidedly non-noir tale, the mystery “The Investigation of Things.” If any story in the book can be called “Sherlockian,” it is this one. Two brothers in 11th century China, both detectives with decidedly different investigatory styles, are called to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk and stumble upon the invention of something we are all too familiar with as a weapon of murder in our modern era. There are twists upon twists, with one brother looking at minute and seemingly unimportant minute details while the other systematically interviews reluctant peers of the deceased (said brother even utters a variation on Detective Columbo’s famous “oh, just one more question” line, which brought a smile to this reader’s face).

If you love short stories in the mystery/crime genre that are more than just a recitation of the facts of the case or the reveal of the mystery, stories that explore the breadth of human interactions and passions, then Charles Ardai is your man, and Death Comes Too Late is your next must-read short story collection.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Those interested can find my review of From Sea to Stormy Sea, where Charles Ardai’s story “Mother of Pearl” first appeared, HERE.

READING ROUND-UP: January 2024

The first monthly summary of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching in 2024!

BOOKS

I read 10 books in January: 5 in print, 5 in e-book format, and 0 in audio format. They were:

1.       What Moves the Dead (Sworn Sword #1) by T. Kingfisher. (E-BOOK)

2.       Phantom on the Scan by Cullen Bunn, Mark Torres, David Sharpe. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

3.       What Feasts at Night (Sworn Sword #2) by T. Kingfisher (PRINT, ARC (publishes February 2024))

4.       Highlands Book One: The Portrait of Amelia by Philipe Aymond. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

5.       Highlands Book Two: The Survivors of Blackwater by Philipe Aymond. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

6.       We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker. (E-BOOK)

7.       Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. (E-BOOK)

8.       Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire. (AUDIOBOOK, REREAD)

9.       The Birds & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier. (E-BOOK)

10.   Hellstrom: Evil Origins by Gary Freidrich, Herb Trimpe, Don Perlin, Bill Mantlo, and others (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 366 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) this leap year. Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it.

1.       “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones, in Lightspeed Magazine #164, edited by John Joseph Adams

2.       “Shadow Films” by Ben Peek.

3.       “Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel” by Aimee Ogden

4.       “We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World” by David Anaxagoras

5.       “A Saint Between the Teeth” by Sloane Leong

6.       “In the Tree's Hollow” by Lowry Poletti

7.       “Farewell to Faust” by Adam-Troy Castro

8.       “To Be a Happy Man” by Thomas Ha

9.       “The Silver Sea” by Seanan McGuire, on the Author’s Patreon

10.   “Ten Thousand Crawling Children” by R.A. Busby, Nightmare Magazine #136, edited by Wendy N. Wagner

11.   “The Forgetter” by Andrew Snover

12.   “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier, from The Birds & Other Stories

13.   “Monte Verita” by Daphne du Maurier

14.   “The Apple Tree” by Daphne du Maurier

15.   “The Little Photographer” by Daphne du Maurier

16.   “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” by Daphne du Maurier

17.   “The Old Man” by Daphne du Maurier

18.   “The Carnival” by Richard Chizmar, stand-alone chapbook published by Cemetery Dance

19.   “End Game” by Martin Edwards, stand-alone chapbook published by The Mysterious Bookshop

20.   “Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden, from Clarkesworld #208, edited by Neil Clarke

21.   “Down the Waterfall” by Cecile Cristofari

22.   “Willow Wood” by Linda Neihoff, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #398, edited by Scott H. Andrews

23.   “Home Bread” by R.E. Dukalsky

24.   “Miriam” by Truman Capote, Fantastic #2 (1952)

25.   “The Star Dummy” by Anthony Boucher

26.   “Most of ‘81” by ‘Nathan Burgoine, from the Author’s Website

So that’s 26 short stories in January. A bit less than “1 per day.” (January 31st was, of course, the 31st day of 2024.)

MOVIES

1.       Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), directed by James Gunn (STREAMING, Disney+)

2.       Gamera the Giant Monster (1965), directed by Noriaki Yuasa (DVD)

3.       The Birds (1963), directed by Alfred Hitchcock (DVD)

4.       Gamera vs. Barugon (1966), directed by Shigeo Tanaka and Noriaki Yuasa (DVD)

TELEVISION

·       Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1, episodes 4 – 8 (5 episodes) (SEASON REVIEW HERE)

·       What If…? Season 2, episodes 2 – 9 (8 episodes)

·       Slow Horses Season 1, episodes 1 – 6 (6 episodes)

·       Slow Horses Season 2, episode 1 (1 episode)

·       A Hero’s Journey: The Making of Percy Jackson and the Olympians (1 episode)

That’s 21 episodes of television, again not quite the “1 per day” I was shooting for.

LIVE THEATER

1.       Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, NYC)

Summary of Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 0 of 14 read.

366 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  26 read; YTD: 26 of 366 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 10 read; YTD: 10 of 120 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 4 read; YTD: 4 of 52 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 0 of 12 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 1  read/watched (“The Birds”); YTD: 1 read/watched.

Movie Challenge: This month: 4 watched; YTD: 4 of 52 watched.

TV Shows Challenge: This month: 21 episodes watched; YTD: 21 of 366 watched

Live Theater Challenge: This month: 1 show attended; YTD: 1 of 12 attended.

SUNDAY SHORTS: Two from Lightspeed #144

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.

Two From Lightspeed Magazine #144

Grace Chan’s “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” starts out as a simple missing persons thriller: Orin’s sidekick/mechanic Calam, an orphan taken under Orin’s wing a decade earlier, has pulled the disappearing act Orin always suspected he would – but Orin isn’t letting go that easily. The pilot/Beaconer wants answers about who Calam really is and where he came from. And so Orin tracks Calam back to Calam’s homeworld. If this story was a simple “find the missing person / learn their secret” story, it would still be fantastic. Chan paces the reveals wonderfully throughout, threading Orin’s feelings about Calam neatly into the overall narrative. But the story takes on added resonance as Orin learns more about the injustice Calam’s family, in fact entire society, has been dealt. Without spoiling too much: this is a story about colonization, about how the winners write the history books, and about how the colonized are forced to assimilate or be wiped out. I had just recently completed Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States before reading this story, and the non-fiction book heavily influenced my reaction to the events of the fictional story. The reveal of what happened to Calum’s family is not the denouement of the story, however. There’s more to it than that, and Chan kept me riveted up to the final paragraph.

In “The Plastic People,” Tobias S. Buckell extrapolates a future in which Earth is essentially a giant trash heap and the rich have, generations ago, escaped to live in orbiting space stations. Occasionally, the children of these families like to camp amongst the trash-heaps for a bit of adventure. On one such trip, Rhea finds a seemingly-feral child among the trash and decides to “rescue” the boy – after all, bringing the boy to live among the civilized surely must be better for him than leaving him among the trash where his own parents don’t seem to care if he’s fed or lives or dies. Complications ensue, of course. Buckell makes his main character likeable at first, but she’s still very, very flawed thanks to the way she’s been raised. The privilege of Rhea and her friends is on display from the very start of the story, and even though she thinks she’s doing something good and noble she’s still mis-informed about the nature and history of the people still living below – including why families like hers left Earth for … well, not greener pastures, exactly, but certainly for a less polluted life. The story comments on how what’s passed down as family historical truth isn’t always true, how the privileged often take on “rescue” projects that they then lose interest in, and how sometimes the idea of “one life-changing encounter” is just that – a nice idea, but not something that happens as often as one would hope. But there’s also a nice underthread about the resiliency of humanity in general, and how we might adapt physically to survive, even if that survival doesn’t look like the gleaming future we’ve longed hoped for.

Full disclosure: I am one of the proofreaders for Lightspeed Magazine, as well as its sibling publication Fantasy Magazine.

SUNDAY SHORTS: Two from The Deadlands

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.

I don’t think I’ve yet done a Sunday Shorts about The Deadlands, a relatively new (just a year old) online speculative fiction magazine focused on the Afterlife – or afterlives, more accurately. Stories, poems, and non-fiction about grieving, about ghosts, about what happens after, or sometimes as, we are shuffling off this mortal coil, plane of existence, etc. The Deadlands is published by Sean Markey and E. Catherine Tobler is the editor-in-chief. Here are my thoughts on the two fiction pieces in the latest issue.

In KT Bryski’s “This is I,” Elaine, the Lady of Shalott, crosses paths via a magic mirror with a woman she comes to know as “Gug,” but who is really poet/artist Elizabeth Siddal, wife of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. In a story that blurs not only the lines of reality but also of narrative voice (with sections alternating between first, second, and third person points-of-view), Bryski delves into the ways in which men control women and alter the courses of their lives. Elaine has the curse on her that if she stops weaving in her high tower and looks out over Camelot, Camelot will fall, and she will be cursed. “Gug” has been used as a muse, been manipulated into marriage, and told her womanly nature means she can’t create art the same way a man can. Bryski also plays with the various versions of “The Lady of Shalott” that Tennyson wrote, plus interpretations by others. It took me a page or so to understand what the author was doing with the alternating POVs, but then I settled in, and the story flowed towards a perfect ending.

Maria Haskins’ “The Morthouse” focuses on a mother who has lost her teenage son to a horrific winter illness and who is so distraught she cannot do anything but haunt the village “morthouse,” where the bodies of those who die during winter are held until the ground is soft enough to dig graves, with occasional trips to the church she might no longer believe in, and the fields around the village. She regrets not asking the midwife who brought her child into the world during a problematic birth for help in keeping him alive, and eventually goes to ask for help in bringing him back to life. The midwife sets the grieving mother three tasks to gather items that might help. The mother’s grief is palpable throughout, as is her estrangement from her church and from her husband. The author also nicely explicates the traditional distrust in religious communities for anyone who works with nature to cure illness instead of just relying on God, without going the traditional route of showing the midwife (in this case) being abused by other members of the community. The story takes its time before coming to a satisfying, emotional, conclusion.

Book Review: BODY SHOCKS

TITLE: Body Shocks: Extreme Tales of Body Horror

EDITOR: Ellen Datlow

384 pages, Tachyon Publications, ISBN 9781616963606 (paperback, also available in e-book)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being. In this definitive anthology of body horror selected by a World Horror Grandmaster, you’ll find the unthinkable and the shocking: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

Bestselling editor Ellen Datlow (Lovecraft’s Monsters) presents body horror at its most wide-ranging and shocking best. Discover twenty-nine intricate, twisted tales of the human body, soul, and psyche, as told by storytelling legends including Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Nathan Ballingrud, Tananarive Due, Cassandra Khaw, Christopher Fowler, and many more.

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: I love horror as much as I love any other “speculative fiction” genre, but I will admit that when it comes to body horror, I’m one of those readers/viewers who is squeamish but also intrigued. Picture the trope of the teen watching a horror movie through the parted fingers of the hand they’ve raised in front of their face – then age the person up to his 50s and you’ve got me. It’s not so much blood and gore that gets my gag reflex going as it is bodily transformation. For this reason, I’ve long stayed away from the more visceral body horror fiction that gets recommended as exemplars of the sub-genre. But I can’t resist an occasional look, via short stories that I can read one at a time and “palette-cleanse” between. And when those stories are assembled by Ellen Datlow, an editor who has never disappointed me or led me astray, all the better.

Quite a few authors I always enjoy are present. Seanan McGuire’s “Spores” (in which a lab hygienist’s worst fears come true regarding mold), Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Old Women Who Were Skinned” (in which, well … the title kind of gives it away, but there are still surprises), Nathan Ballingrud’s “You Go Where It Takes You” (the basis for an episode of Hulu’s excellent Monsterland series) were all stories I had read before, and rereading did not lessen the dread and discomfort the stories originally inspired in me. I had not previously read Priya Sharma’s “Fabulous Beats” (a herpetologist has a unique connection to the snakes she works with), Cassandra Khaw’s “The Truth That Lies Under Skin and Meat” (people as food), or Kaaron Warren’s “A Positive,” (a child is raised to provide for his father in old age in a way far from what that phrase normally entails). All three creeped me out in delightful ways while also leaving a smile on my face. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a good revenge tale. Which is probably why I also enjoyed Edward Bryant’s “The Transfer” and Alyssa Wong’s “Natural Skin” as well.

Two other stand-outs for me were Tananarive Due’s “The Lake,” in which – surprise – and urban legend about the titular body of water turns out to be true, and Brian Evenson’s Poe-like “A True Friend,” in which the narrator explains that while he could help you out of the predicament you’re in, he won’t and why. Both tales are perfectly paced, playfully teasing the reader with what’s really going on. I suspect that Evenson’s story, told in the second person POV that always discomfits me regardless of genre, is going to be on my “must re-read annually in October” list alongside my favorite Poe stories.

Full marks also go to Terry Dowling for “Toother,” in which a detective, a doctor, and the doctor’s supernaturally talented patient team up to track down a serial killer. I would gladly read any more tales featuring Dan Truswell, Peter Rait, Henry Badman, and Philip Crow. The characters and their shared history intrigued me. (Admission: I have not yet looked to see if Dowling has more stories with these characters.)

But, if I had to choose the most disturbing story in the anthology in terms of body transformation and trauma, it would be a three way tie between Simon Bestwick’s “Welcome to Mengele’s,” which involves bodily abuse of clones; Cody Goodfellow’s “Atwater,” which contains both the most disturbing birthing scene I’ve read and a scene reminiscent of the climax of the movie Akira which made me physically ill the first time I saw it on VHS; and  Michael Blumlein’s “Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report,” which is a very slow and methodical report of surgery, practically an autopsy, on a perhaps-unwilling patient while that patient is still alive and aware of everything he’s losing. These are perhaps the most graphic stories in the book. Blumlein’s tale is also the closing story and will linger with you long after you’ve set the book aside. Even reading over my story notes several months after reading the book, the images from this story appear clear in my mind’s eye.

There are plenty of other stories I haven’t called out specifically that are equally as good and as diverse in tone and genre as the ones I have mentioned. Some of the stories are lean more towards science fiction or fantasy than outright horror, and some are more graphic than others. I don’t think fans of body horror as a sub-genre will be disappointed with what Datlow has put together here, and I think that folks not accustomed to body horror will find this an excellent testing ground for “just how gross is too gross.”

I received an electronic Advanced Reading Copy of this book from Tachyon Publications via NetGalley well before publication in hopes of a fair review, but personal life stuff delayed my posting this review until well after the publication date.

Review of DYING WITH HER CHEER PANTS ON

TITLE: Dying with Her Cheer Pants On: Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

304 pages, Subterranean Press, ISBN 9781596069978 (deluxe hardcover; also available as ebook)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): Despite its humble origins, there is no more challenging or physically dangerous sport in the world than cheerleading. Cheerleaders are seriously injured and even killed at a higher rate than other high school sports. Their stunts are performed in skimpy uniforms without the benefit of proper safety equipment … and yet they love them, glittery eyeshadow, spirit bows, and all. And then there are the Fighting Pumpkins, who take that injury rate as a challenge. Students of Johnson’s Crossing High School, they answer to a higher calling than the pyramid and basket toss, pursuing the pep rally that is rising up against mysteries and monsters, kicking gods with the pointed toes of professional athletes chasing a collegiate career. Meet Jude, the half-vampire squad leader; Laurie, who can compel anyone to do as she asks; Heather, occasionally recreationally dead; Marti, strong enough to provide a foundation for any stunt; Colleen, who knows the rule book so well she may as well have written it; and Steph, who may or may not be the goddess of the harvest. The rest of the squad is ready to support them, and braced for the chaos of the big game, which may or may not have a big body count. Prepare to jump high, yell loud, and look pretty with the Fighting Pumpkins, those glorious girls in the orange and green, whose high kicks could still be enough to save the world. And if they’re not, it isn’t going to be for lack of trying.

MY RATING: Five stars out of five

MY THOUGHTS: Although the book is already available in ebook format and Subterranean Press has started shipping the deluxe hardcover, this review was written off of a print Advance Review Copy provided by the publisher.

The Fighting Pumpkins are not as well-known as most of Seanan McGuire’s on-going urban fantasy series (the October Daye and InCryptid books, most notably). But I have hopes that the release of this collection, which includes six previously-published stories and four new adventures, will begin to change that. This is a world and characters that deserve more attention. I’m not advocating for a Fighting Pumpkins novel, mind you – I think this concept works wonderfully at short story to novella length, as the collection shows. I just think there should be more FP stories. A lot more.

Seanan’s original concept for the Fighting Pumpkins was as a “horror movie comedy sendup, with the entire squad dying at the end of the adventure, only to be replaced by a new squad who has no memory of the previous one.” By her own admission, that plan quickly fell to the wayside as the current squad (Jude, Colleen, Marti, Heather, and Laurie) seem to have taken up space in Seanan’s heart and brain and don’t want to shuffle off the page just yet. It’s been 10 years since the first FP story saw print (featuring the ill-fated previous squad) and 9 years since the first story featuring the current squad – so I’d say most of the current group is safe for the time being, as Seanan builds towards these girls fighting whatever Big Bad there ultimately is. (I say “most,” because this is Seanan and you never know when she’s going to surprise you and murder one of her darlings.)

I remember reading that first story, “Dying with Her Cheer Pants On,” and thinking “wow, that’s a morbid ending. Everybody dies … but at least they go out on their own terms and pretty heroically.” And then, because I sometimes am not good about picking up every single anthology Seanan has stories in, several years went by before I came across “Fiber” on Tor.com and thought “wait, didn’t they all die?” Then came “School Colors” in 2017 (in the anthology Little Green Men – Attack!) and “Away Game” in 2019 (in the anthology A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods). With each story, my interest in the characters and setting, and my intrigue about how all these stories fit together chronologically, and my questions about how these later stories dovetailed with the first one, grew exponentially. I discovered I had missed “Gimme A ‘Z!’” and “Turn the Year Around,” but hadn’t gotten around to tracking down the anthologies they were in (Zombiesque and Harvest Season, respectively) when Subterranean Press announced this collected edition with the intent to include four new stories.

The four new stories (“Tryouts,” “Trial by Fire,” “Switchblade Smile,” and “Compete Me”) go a long way towards fleshing out the current squad’s connection to both the squad that preceded them and much earlier squads, as well as filling in some of the gaps in the current squad’s history. All of the stories are presented in character-chronological order (new stories interspersed with the reprints), with the exception of “Switchblade Smile” which flashes back to an earlier squad and is positioned at a point where learning that earlier story answers some questions other stories have raised.

The style of the stories varies from light-hearted (my internal eternally-13-year-old loved that the action of “Fringe” hinges on impending stomach distress and potty humor) to poignant (the denouement of “Compete Me”), the threats range from earthy (“Turn the Year Around”) to extraterrestrial (“School Colors”). Some stories are narrated in first person by a particular member of the squad (“Gimme A “Z”!” among them) and some by a more omniscient narrator. In other hands, I’d be worried that the shifting of tone and narrators’ voice would make the collection feel disjointed. But one of Seanan McGuire’s many talents is making disparate elements (like physical comedy and emotional drama) work together.

Taken together, it strikes me that these stories are very much about dealing with loss and finding ways to move forward. Jude knows that a squad has been lost, even if no-one can remember who that squad was or how they died. Heather copes with being dead (for a while at least), Steph with the absence of memory or any real sense of self. Marti … well, Marti’s loss is such a vital part of “Compete Me” that I don’t even want to talk about it; it’s a stunningly beautiful reveal that had me in tears. Jude’s mother, the vampire, is one of very few previous squad captains to have survived beyond high school and it weighs on her but doesn’t stop her from raising her daughter. The Fighting Pumpkins’ history is one of loss and being forgotten, but that doesn’t stop Jude and her team from living every moment and hoping for a better future (or any future at all).

There are so many aspects of this world that Seanan has yet to reveal. We get hints about why the Fighting Pumpkins are tasked with saving their town from supernatural (and extraterrestrial) threats both large and small. We get glimpses at the squad’s history and its place in a much larger networks of cheer squads and little league teams and retirement home sewing circles. And for now, at least, we get to hope that Jude’s team will be the team that survives past high school and goes on to happy adults lives. I’m very hopeful that Seanan will get to reveal much more of this world in the near future.

The deluxe hardcover is not yet sold out on the publisher’s website, and the ebook is available from all the usual suspects. Check it out if you like urban fantasy, strong teen female characters, and a bit of comedy thrown into your metaphysical threats.

Review of THE GRAND TOUR

TITLE: The Grand Tour: A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection

AUTHOR: E. Catherine Tobler

202 pages, Apex Book Company, ISBN 9781937009816 (paperback, ebook)

DESCRIPTION: (from the Goodreads page): Step right up! Come one, come all, to Jackson's Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. The steam train may look older than your great-grandmother's' china, but within her metal corridors are destinations you have only ever dreamed. They're real, friends, each and every one—and yours for the taking.

Witness Rabi, Vanquisher and Vanisher Extraordinaire, who can make coins and the past vanish before your very eyes. Dare to visit the Beauty and the Beast, our conjoined twins who are terrible and tortured by turns. Sample Beth's marmalade, the sticky sweetness containing the very memory of the day you turned sixteen, and your beloved's lips touched yours once and never again. It's worth the price, traveler. Jackson's Unreal Circus is where you can be whoever or whatever you want. Whether it be a ride on the Ferris wheel, slipping inside a skin that is not your own, or the opportunity to live as you never have before—it is all possible on this, the grandest of tours. The train beckons you—come, come!

For the first time, E. Catherine Tobler has compiled a collection of her popular circus stories. With nine stories ranging from the first publishing within this universe to a previously unpublished piece, this is your ticket to her magical world. Welcome to The Grand Tour.

MY RATING: five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: The stories that comprise E. Catherine Tobler’s The Grand Tour are ethereal and luminous, delicately woven character studies that shine a light on the complicated nature of relationships. Found families and blood families, unrequited and requited love, past and present, mundane and magical, all can be found dissected and interrogated in these pages. But ethereal does not mean these stories lack weight and luminous does not mean they are sunny and happy. The nine Jackson’s Circus stories in The Grand Tour explore the dark edges of community and personal responsibility, the ways in which we act selflessly or selfishly and in which the universe responds.

The denizens of this traveling circus are a “found family,” cobbled together as people join and leave over the course of the stories. Some members stay only long enough to resolve whatever issues they are running from (for instance, Rabi and the little girl he befriends in “Vanishing Act,” which starts the collection) and some have been with the circus so long they seem to have forgotten – willfully or not – exactly how or when they joined up (Beth, the eponymous character of “Lady Marmalade”). But some members are actual family: the light-and-dark sisters Sombra and Gemma, for instance, or the aforementioned Beth and at least one sibling (the identity of who I will not spoil). What is obvious, even if he never directly says it, is that Jackson will never turn away someone who needs what the circus can provide: a haven, a respite, a place for self-discovery, a place to help others. The cohesiveness of the family unit is evident in the way characters appear in each others’ stories, sometimes in larger roles and sometimes smaller. Sombra and Gemma provide Rabi and the little girl emotional support in “Vanishing Act,” and Rabi’s woodworking and vanishing skills figure in “Lady Marmalade.” Gabrielle, the main character of “Artificial Nocturne,” plays a brief but pivotal role in “Every Season,” while the bird-woman Agnessa, who takes Gabrielle under her wings in “Artificial Nocturne” also appears in “We, As One, Trailing Embers” and “Blow the Moon Out.” Beth’s marmalade appears, if not the woman herself, in almost every story. Other circus folk appear in small roles without getting a feature of their own. I’d love to know more, for instance, about the dwarf Eammon (who appears in “Lady Marmalade” and “Every Season”) and the dog-man Dean from “Blow the Moon Out.”

Jackson himself appears more often in cameo or supporting roles than as a main part of the action. His history is hinted at a couple of times, and comes closest to being detailed in “Ebb Stung by the Flow,” but if you want to really know Jackson and learn how he came to run the circus, you’ll have to read Tobler’s novella The Kraken Sea (also from Apex Book Company). In these stories Jackson appears as a distant father figure (“Vanishing Act”), a controlling ringmaster (“Liminal”), and a barker/pimp (“We, As One, Trailing Embers”) and even as the character through home other characters see (“Lady Marmalade” and “Ebb Stung by the Flow”). He can be warm and inviting or cold and capricious (most notably in “Artificial Nocturne” and “We, As One, Trailing Embers”), often in the same story and always driven by his sense of justice for the outcast and downtrodden.

Whether Jackson is an active participant or not doesn’t change the effectiveness of these stories. The characters are often at crossroads (physically or metaphorically): confronting personal flaws, past bad decisions, what they’re running or hiding from. Being a part of the circus, or interacting with it, may help them come to terms with grief or find their way into their own identity or find the path from who they’ve become back to who they were (not necessarily regressing in personality so much as finding the good in the past and melding it with the present). With so much connectivity between characters’ past and present, I think it’s important that the structure of the collection is not chronological. The stories bounce between decades and locations, with more than one story strongly implying that the circus train itself is capable of jumping in time in space as it needs/wants to. And several stories take place primarily in locations outside the circus environs. “Artificial Nocturne,” “Blow the Moon Out,” and “Every Season” all start with characters in or near their homes making a decision to visit (or not visit) Jackson’s Circus; these stories focus on the lives of the main characters and how visiting the circus results in positive, if sometimes incremental, changes to those lives.

Like the members of the circus itself, these stories are hard to categorize. There are modern fantasy elements in many, but not all. There’s an SFnal tinge to several. There are call-backs to ancient mythologies (the fates, the Maenads, phoenix imagery, some Celtic imagery as well). My second favorite story in the book, “Blow the Moon Out,” reads as if it is Tobler’s all-girl urban-setting take on Stephen King’s “The Body” (four kids sneak out to go on an adventure, encounter a dead body and danger and learn a lot about themselves).

My favorite story in the book, “Every Season,” is about a gay couple, Sam and Harper, and Harper coming to terms with his past self while grappling with whether Sam could love him if he knew the truth. Harper is drawn to the circus despite knowing it has the potential to unveil his hidden secrets; the marmalade Sam buys from Beth every time the circus comes to town is dangerous enough in his mind. This is a story about closets, about memories (false and true), about internalized transphobia, about the ability of music to move us to take chances and to guide us towards healing … and I cried more than once.  It’s also the one story that has not appeared elsewhere and in my mind is worth the price of admission on its own.

Tobler has several more Jackson’s Circus stories that are not collected in this volume. I can only hope this volume sells well enough that Apex commissions a second volume with the rest of the extant stories and the two more that Tobler hasn’t had published yet.

I received an Electronic Advance Review Copy from the publisher without expectations.

Sunday Shorts: Two by Beth Cato

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Recently on Facebook, I commented that Beth Cato is one of those authors who expertly breaks this reader’s heart on a regular basis, and yet I constantly go back for me. This was precipitated by reading two of Cato’s stories almost back-to-back, one a recent publication and one a reprint. Both stories are about struggling with the impending loss of a loved one, making hard decisions about whether it’s better to try to delay the inevitable or give in to it, and about what good may come, in time, from such a loss.

“Perilous Blooms” (Daily Science Fiction, May 26, 2020) takes place in a world where super-abilities are just common enough to be taken advantage of by a government that only wishes to remain in power. People who develop these extra abilities are corralled up, shipped off to war off-planet. The narrator of the story, a grandmother now, lost her own mother in such a way. We realize very quickly that she has reason to fear losing her very young grand-daughter the same way. Mother and grand-daughter are both struggling with the impending death of the woman who connects them. Grand-daughter thinks she can heal her mother, keep her from dying. Part of grandmother wishes this could be true, but most of her hopes her grand-daughter is just imagining the ability as a way of coping with the fact that her mother is dying. I won’t spoil the outcome, as I think the spooling out of what is true and what is imagined is part of what makes the story so heartbreaking. Cato keeps the POV very tight, gives us no more world-building than is absolutely necessary to understand the narrator’s quandary and the threat to the grand-daughter in a world where even pretending to have a super-ability is enough to get you snatched up by the authorities.

“The Sweetness of Bitter” first appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show’s September 2013 issue and will be reprinted in an upcoming anthology I had the pleasure of proofreading. The setting is post-apocalyptic: what the apocalypse was is vague, but there’s little in the way of electricity, communities are barren, and what people the main character encounters are distrustful of strangers. The main character, Margo, and her daughter, Tara, are making their way towards a facility Margo hopes will stop her daughter from dying a second death. Second, because we learn very quickly that this daughter is a “sim,” an android recreation of the daughter she’s already lost once to leukemia. In the days before the collapse of society, repairing sims was fairly easy. But now, Margo’s only hope is a headquarters of the company that made the sims in the first place. The signs of Tara’s impending system failure become more apparent as the story progresses and the two encounter unexpected roadblocks. Those roadblocks made the story even more poignant to me, made me feel Margo’s anguish at yet another delay in healing her daughter. Backstory (where is Tara’s father? what else has Margo tried before getting to this point) are sketched in as the story progresses as well.

Back in December 2004 through February 2005, I was primary caregiver for my mother, who was slowly finally succumbing to the cancer she’d been fighting for the previous four years. In restrospect, the end was more apparent in December and even early January than I wanted to see – in fact, it was probably more apparent months earlier than any of us, even her doctors, wanted to admit. I see that struggle of mine to accept the inevitable, to make peace with it and start deciding what positives could come from her passing (for instance, we caught my own colon cancer just seven months later thanks in part to me “listening to my body” in a way my parents hadn’t), reflected in the main characters of these two stories. Neither of them wants their daughter to die. Neither of them wants the world to be the way it is. But both also find strength, to do what needs to be done (for me, that need was to acquiesce to my mother’s wishes to die at home surrounded by loved ones instead of in a hospital). There is hope even in their despondency.

And that is why I say that Beth Cato, especially in her short fiction, has the ability to rip a reader’s heart out and yet keep us coming back for more. In the past few years, largely due to her Blood of Earth trilogy, she has become one of my favorite writers.