It's a Jumble

  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

  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

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

  Late, but here are some stories I read and loved in December 2023 and January 2024.   Published in 2023 (many from earlier in the year)   “What is Owed and What Can Never Be” by Ariel Mark Jack in Beneath Ceaseless Skies “I am owed this death.” All that is around Viktoriya halts as the words exhale into whiteness against the winter-bleached sky. She squeezes the chilly trigger between steady beats of her sturdy heart. The rifle, held tight to her shoulder, kicks like a storm. The five-legged deer crumples into the brush. A young woman ekes out a living for herself in a harsh wilderness, hunting to feed and clothe herself and pay off a contract debt that she was tricked into as a child. But what starts off as a gritty, compelling tale of survival and debt bondage takes on an unexpected turn toward the end, becoming a beautiful, hopeful tale that asks: what is owed to us in life? What do we owe? What is owned, what is ours, and what can never be taken away?   For Howeve

I have a new story that’s out and free to read today! “The Cold Inside”   is published at the lovely Metaphorosis Magazine as part of a special issue of returning authors (check out the other writers in the Winter Issue of 2024 !)  “The Cold Inside” is about grief and cold and a ghost in white. It’s set in the woods of northern Michigan, in an unnamed town but based on a region I know and love. The artwork that Candra Hope c reated for my story is perfect , and I’m so pleased to be part of this magazine. 

Five collections/anthologies of short stories that I read and loved in 2023.    Like Smoke, Like Light: Stories by Yukimi Ogawa The title of this collection is apt, for Ogawa’s stories are indeed like light or smoke: delicate, shifting things of beauty; slippery, hard to pin down or grasp, hard to capture into boxes or labels. These are strange, hybrid stories that blend fantasy, folklore, horror, and science fiction. There are wonderful monsters galore, as in “Hundred Eye,” a story about a thief with a hundred eyes on her long arms, and “Rib,” a story about a skeleton woman who helps an orphaned little boy. In “The Flying Head at the Edge of Night,” a head does indeed fly about unconscious each night and must be tracked down by its body each morning. There are misfits and outsiders of all types in these stories, including an artificial intelligence (AI) in “Nini,” who discovers a forgotten goddess in a space station. Some of these misfits are merciless, wreaking a deserved and c