It's a Jumble

  My latest story is out! “ That Small, Hard Thing on the Back of Your Neck” appears in this month’s issue of The Future Fire, alongside a great lineup of writers and artists. It’s a weird little bit of body horror, and a story about the masks/skins we wear.

Some stories I’ve read recently.   Tales of Strangeness, Beauty, and Horror “Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti in Strange Horizons  I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt. Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into.   A fierce, angry, bloody tale. An orphaned girl has lost her mother and moved from the city to a small, stultifying village. Watching the cicadas, she learns that she can slip into a cicada’s skin. She can find herself in the skins of mice, birds, and more. And she can teach the other children of the village to do the same. An angry tale of wildness, of desperation and freedom, of seeking escape from the judgmental eyes of the village prie

“Bao-yu had from early youth grown up among girls. . .As a result of this upbringing, he had come to the conclusion that the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings. To him, therefore, all members of his own sex without distinction were brutes who might just as well have not existed.”       --Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin (1710-1765), translation by David Hawkes (Volume 1 of the Penguin Classic Edition)  

  I loved Ephiny Gale’s first collection of short stories, Next Curious Thing , and so I jumped at the chance for a review copy of her second, Pick Your Potion . It’s a worthy follow-up of strange and beautiful stories, by turns gentle and warm and then harrowing and brutal. The book’s back cover copy describes it as “a full apothecary’s bar of speculative stories,” and it’s an apt description. Gale showcases a range of moods, styles and genres in this book, ranging from science fiction to fantasy to horror and hybridities among these three.   Some of my favorite stories in this collection embrace warmth and comfort.   New lovers find one another on a divided generation spaceship in “Solace” and in a magical orchard in “The Orchard.” In other stories, old lovers find one another in different forms, or friends finally recognize the romantic spark between them. One of my favorites was “All the Times I’m Ten,” a twist on the “chosen one” trope that manages to feel both fresh and poign

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story that’s al

  Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park, Washington state. Ten days in the Pacific Northwest, among mountains, sea, and moss-draped forests. And while I was there, I had two new stories come out and two new stories accepted.   “The Red Queen’s Heart,” at Lightspeed is a story about a magical night market. It’s also about a conquering queen, and what we give up to survive. I go into some detail about inspirations for the story in the accompanying author spotlight, and there’s a fabulous narration by Stefan Rudnicki in the podcast.   My second story of the month is “Remembering Day” at Uncharted Magazine, and this one is particularly dear to my heart. It’s a far-future story about mind-uploading, but it’s really an ode to the bodies and minds that we have right now. Finally, I have a weird little dark fantasy/horror piece out this October in The Future Fire , and another weird fantasy/horror piece coming out in The Deadlands at some unspecified date. Story publications and ne

  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

  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

  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

“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

  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