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Review: City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell

  I’ve loved Tara Campbell’s wonderfully strange and often sly short stories (for instance, the marvelously weird and delightful “A Turtle in Love, Singing ”—read it if you haven’t!)    And so I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of her forthcoming novel, City of Dancing Gargoyles, due out in September of this year. It’s every bit as delightful and weird as I hoped, a post-apocalyptic road trip through an American West ravaged by both climate change and secret “alchemical” testing.   Three storylines converge in this novel. In the first, two sentient gargoyles, E and M, flee their church in a drought-ridden land in search of a new home. A few chapters in, they meet up with another questing pair: Rose and Dolores, a mother and her teen daughter who are also fleeing—in their case, fleeing a series of cities ruined by alchemical disasters, including a disaster brought about by dragons. Dolores and Rose are also looking for a new home, a place of stability. The quartet are a
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Book review: Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray

  Beauty and pain are entwined in this gorgeous book by Lee Murray, winner of the 2023 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize. This is a book that weaves together myth and history, the real and the unreal, poetry and prose. It describes the tragic stories of nine Chinese diaspora women in New Zealand from the early 1900s to the present day. Connecting these nine stories is the figure of the fox spirit—a liminal creature of Chinese mythology. In some tellings, a fox spirit can take on human form through wearing a human skull that perfectly fits its head. A fox spirit can also cultivate to immortality through arduous trials. In Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, the story-framing device is that of a nine-tailed fox spirit who must find nine skulls to wear, nine human lives to live, before she can reach celestial heaven.   The nine lives the fox spirit lives through in this book are harrowing. Here are brides brought reluctantly from China to New Zealand, Aotearoa--“the land of the long clou
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Short fiction recs! April-May 2024

  I'm late with this, and the last month or so left me with less time to read than usual. But here are some of the stories that I loved in April and May.    “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline Yoachim at Lightspeed This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.   An alien species—fleeting, ephemeral compared to humans—reaches out to us in their decline with a message. But can we humans understand it? As Yoachim says in the accompanying Author Spotlight (which I urge you to also read), in this story she wanted “to somehow train people to do something that, cognitively, we simply do not do.” The attempt she makes here is fascinating. Read it, and then listen to the accompanying stellar podcast for a different perspective, for a different format which conveys the author’s ideas in a completely different (but very effective) way. This is a mind-bender of a story, an experimental tale of ideas, which in
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Quote: George Orwell, from 1984

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ―  George Orwell,  1984
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Short fiction recs! Feb--March 2024

  Some wonderful stories that I read in Feb and March.    “ Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.   There have been so many response stories to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” that they practically constitute an entire subgenre in themselves. But Kim’s latest riff stands above the rest: a brilliant, blistering, darkly humorous tale that updates Omelas for our current social media age. And fittingly for this age, the story becomes one that’s not
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Book review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

  I have loved everything I’ve read from Sofia Samatar, and her latest work, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is no exception. It’s a strange, slippery, mesmerizing tale, a story that can feel like an abstract allegory, but then veer into wrenching intimacy. It’s science fiction, mysticism, fable, and also academic novel (or novella, to be precise).   In the dark Hold of a mining space ship, an unnamed boy is enslaved as part of an entire caste of people who are literally chained. But his artistic talent catches the attention of those above him, and he’s chosen for the recently revived University Scholarship for the Chained. His chain is struck off and replaced with a blue anklet. And he’s literally brought out of the darkness into light, into a world of air and light and campus quads, green lawns and classrooms and a flowing river. His mentor is a professor whose own father was from the Hold, and who was himself a recipient of such a scholarship. The boy’s new mentor, the dau
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Haunted Neighborhoods: Book reviews of Gwendolyn Kiste's The Haunting of Velkwood and Ai Jiang's Linghun

The haunted house is a staple of horror tales. But in their new books Gwendolyn Kiste and Ai Jiang bring us haunted neighborhoods —Ai Jiang’s work actually involves an entire town—that threaten to entrap and swallow their protagonists whole, keeping them locked in with ghosts of the past. Both books are confrontations with loss and trauma; they’re both about making peace with the dead and letting them go (if you can). They take different forms in these explorations and approach these themes from different angles and with differing outcomes. But they are both gorgeously told works, and haunting.   The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste Twenty years ago, Velkwood Street—a little block of eight houses, in a “blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision”—disappeared from the face of the earth. Or rather, it part-way disappeared: it’s still visible, glowing, half-there and half-not, a kind of suburban Brigadoon behind an invisible, supernatural barrier. Scientists, government agencies, and p
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