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Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

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[Hell] doesn’t exist, no more so than the entities that are called Satan and the Devil.  They’re all…storybook constructs…Know this: there is no such thing as a ‘cosmic evil.’ Evil is a human matter, fashioned by ignorance, brutality, addiction, emotional trauma—the list is endless. The cosmos doesn’t feel anything, it is just a space, it doesn’t care about either good or evil, it is simply, like Heaven, indifferent.

“For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” by Gary A. Braunbeck

p. 275, 285

That pretty much sums up my personal view of a universe indifferent to ongoing human folly.  That said, I’m fascinated by the notion of faith and its ethical implications, so a short story collection entitled Dark Faith co-edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon naturally got my attention. People rely on faith to provide an orderly framework to their lives, to infuse meaning to their existence. What these  stories (as well as several poems) share is a consideration of what happens when the assumptions that underpin faith unravel. For the most part, the results are not good

The opening story, “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland, considers the afterlife of those who made the horrific choice to jump from the Twin Towers rather than remain in a burning buidling about to collapse. The whole subgenre of 9/11 fiction is tricky, given  our collective memory of something so frighteningly incomprehensible that’s been trivialized over time with the endlessly surreal replaying loop of the imploding skyscrapers, but Pelland’s take here is vividly disturbing in suggesting that memorializing the dead can make matters worse.

Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.

But there was no clarity for her, no calmness, no life flashing before her eyes in a montage of joy and regrets.  There was just pure animal terror, screams torn from her throat as she plummeted toward the ground in the longest ten seconds of her life.

And then there was an explosion of pain.

p.2

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Short Fiction Review #27: Conjunctions 52

Short Fiction Review #27: Conjunctions 52

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conjunctionsThe Spring 2009  issue of Conjunctions (yeah, I know, my reading is way behind) edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson, the twice yearly literary magazine published by Bard College, is a follow-up to its New Wave Fabulists issue of about eight years ago. This time around there’s less effort expended in attempting to define a “new” subgenre. Instead, there’s a simple page-and-a-half introduction and a title, Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism, that I find more concisely descriptive of this type of  fiction than the extensive critical commentary contained in its predecessor. Alas, I found the fiction selections overall less compelling than when the earlier volume was trying to prove something.

Part of the reason I didn’t connect with some of these stories may be the underlying premise of the objective here. I don’t have a problem with the premise. I just don’t think it was fulfilled. According to the editors,

Betwixt the Between investigates ways in which, on the one hand, works of fiction treat the impossible as if it were the solid groundwork of the real or, on the other hand how the ineffable can sometimes flash lightning-quick through the realms of the real, leaving everything the same and yet unaccountably changed. Worlds and concomitant models of logic are offered here that reveal something about our daily existence and yet turn away from it to forge disjointed realities that strike the reader simultaneously as familiar and anything but.

p. 7

I get that. But a number of these tales don’t strike me as weird for the purpose of explicating the wondrous underpinning of human existence that otherwise seems mundane, they strike me as weird just for the sake of being weird.

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Short Fiction Roundup: Bull Spec

Short Fiction Roundup: Bull Spec

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bullspec-01-page001-200x256There’s a new magazine devoted to speculative fiction with the unfortunate name of Bull Spec, which I hope for the sake of the editorial team does not become known as “BS” for short. I haven’t read any of the contents, though you can get a pdf version (there is a print edition as well)  Radiohead-fashion, i.e., pay what you want. Fiction  by C.S. Fuqua, Peter Wood, Natania Barron, Michael Jasper, with a serial graphic story by Mike Gallagher.

Its stated quarterly mission in exploring new fiction is: “Bring the best of speculative fiction with a focus on Durham-area authors and stories to a wide audience for shared discussion.” One critical comment: a particularly ugly website that looks like something coded in 1999.

Short Fiction Roundup: WLT

Short Fiction Roundup: WLT

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may10coverWorld Literature Today (WLT), a publication of the University of Oklahoma, has an issue devoted to “International Science Fiction,” though a cursory review of the contributing authors makes it seem that “international” has a mostly eurocentric slant. In any event, you can read Kij Johnson’s story, “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” as well as various non fiction pieces and a poem that have been posted on line.

Short Fiction Roundup: Serialization

Short Fiction Roundup: Serialization

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apex-blogReturn with us now to those thrilling days of yesterday, when publishers employed serials as a way to keep reader interest in wondering what happens next.  Apex is presenting a 20 part serial of “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” by Lavie Tidhar.  You can start reading here.

On Reviewing

On Reviewing

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sh_headJustina Robson’s review of Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes in Strange Horizons struck a number of resonating chords for me. For one, her ambiguous feelings about reviewing echo my own. It’s not only wondering if you’re getting it right, it’s how one offhand sentence can be taken to mean something entirely more than what you intended. I, too, had my problems with Bold as Love (which you can read about here and here and here).

I also share with Robson that Gilman is undoubtedly an interesting and possibly profound writer, but it’s much too much work to appreciate it (“This brings us to the real doorstop of the collection, both in terms of page count and prose density. “A Crowd of Bone” by Greer Gillman invokes Celtic myth concerning…this is the longest story here; it is also the hardest to read… English majors who’ve ploughed through Beowulf in the original Old English may find the language fascinating. This English major found it tedious, and at one point just stopped reading it and went on to the next story. I did eventually go back to finish it, but still considered it rough going”).

Finally, I too struggle with balancing mixed feelings about books I actually like, or should like more, at certain levels, as, for instance, my review of Robson’s latest novel.

Short Fiction Review #26: Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Vol. 3

Short Fiction Review #26: Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Vol. 3

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best-unrealI don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with  Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States).  Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the same magazines.  While I haven’t read the previous editions of Best American Fantasy,  knowing that the series editor is Matthew Cheney and the co-founding editors were Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, I knew what to expect from guest editor Kevin Brockmeier (notwithstanding that Stephen King is the top author listed on the cover page; indeed, his funny riff on the “mysterious telephone call from the dead,” is more in keeping with “traditional” fantasy). This is a collection of _____(New Weird, slipstream,  literary, you fill-in-the-blank),  the “Real Unreal” about the fantastical state of human consciousness.  No elves or adolescents on a quest.

What I didn’t quite expect was the number of authors totally new to me as well as  the breadth of source materials, ranging from the tried-and-true  (Fantasy and Science Fiction) to the literary (Kenyon Review) to another anthology (Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy) to a few I’ve never heard of (The Fairy Tale Review, Pindeldyboz).  And the only story I’d previously read was Jeffrey Ford’s “Daltharee,” about the creation of a bottled city and the arrogance and irresponsibility of scientific bureaucracies.

Ramona Ausubel sets the stage with the opening tale of “Safe Passage.” A group of grandmothers find themselves at sea, with no clue as to how they got onboard ship or why. Presumably, they’re dead. Okay, been there before. But the protagonist’s reaction to the banal behavior of her shipmates, and her ultimate decision to take action that results in a sort of enlightened view of her plight, makes the “unreal” here quite “real.”
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