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A to Z: “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” by Xia Jia

A to Z: “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” by Xia Jia

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A to Z ReviewsKen Liu. Liu also translated Xia Jia’s story “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” for Clarkesworld, and then reprinted it in the anthology of Chinese science fiction Invisible Planets.

Xia describes Ghost Street as a long, narrow ribbon of a street and the home to numerous ghosts as well as one living person. The ghosts, which are departed souls residing in mechanical bodies, represent all ages of China’s history and living in an almost carnival like atmosphere. They also have a need to interact with living humans, which is where Ning, the living narrator comes in.

Ning has a relationship with most of the ghosts, but most especially Xiao Qian, who was mother to several children in her previous life and who have provided him with everything he has needed since he was orphaned. At the same time, Ning allows the daily pageantry of Ghost Street to take place.

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Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

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Folk Horror (Flame Tree Publishing, August 27, 2024)

Folk Horror is one of those terms that’s never quite fashionable or unfashionable.

To me there’s only either good or bad horror fiction, and that’s what really matters to the readers.

This anthology — part of the Beyond & Within series from Flame Tree Publishing — fortunately is very good, regardless of labels. So kudos to the editors (excellent horror writers themselves) for assembling such an amount of creepy and entertaining material.

To be precise the book includes two little poems and fifteen stories.

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A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

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A to Z Reviews
A to Z Review

Brennan Wysong’s “The Sin-Eater’s Tale”  opens with the introduction of the sin-eater in the post-Civil War  south.  The  sin-eater’s task is to go around to the funerals of the boys whose bodies have been returned home after their deaths and force people to confront the evils that their sons and brothers and friends had done. Once all the sins were enumerated and the sin-eater wrote them down, he would charge the family and eat the paper, thereby giving the family closure and providing absolution to the dead for the evils they committed during their lives.

Reading the story, the sin-eater is, in some ways reminiscent of the role Orson Scott Card provided Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, a way of summing up a person’s life, warts and all, although Wysong’s sin-eater also offers a means of expiation for the dead. Once the sin-eater is paid and the sins are swallowed  , the family and friends can pretend the cruelties and crimes of the dead no longer exist.

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Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin Books, February 1, 2005). Cover by Tal Goretsky

Shadow of the Wind is the English rendering of  La sombra del viento, the 2001 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the first (though a standalone story sans cliffhangers) in his five book Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, translated by Lucia Graves (a serendipitously appropriate last name and, as it happens, the daughter of poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, he of I Claudius and The White Goddess fame). I hope this is a literal translation as Shadow of the Wind perfectly captures the story’s gothic and noirish essence. We can’t actually see wind, nor does wind cast a shadow; rather we feel the wind, detecting by inference the sometimes destructive aftereffects of high winds. Or, to paraphrase as someone else famously put it, the allegory is blowing in the wind.

The titular Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a somewhat fantastical labyrinth repository of rare books. Unlike Julia Alvarez’s Cemetery of Untold Stories, where texts are buried and talk to one another in their afterlife, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books could be some idiosyncratic bookshop with obsessively weird stock accessible only to certain people, which is not that all different from certain kinds of booksellers.

But the touch of fantasy  is when our hero, Daniel Sempere, taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his bookshop owning father, is tasked to select one volume, and one volume only, he feels drawn to from among a complex maze of shelvings. That book is Shadows of the Wind  by Julian Carax, and, yes, we’re getting metafictional here. What kicks the plot off is that there are no other surviving copies of the work, Carax’s output having been destroyed in a warehouse fire of mysterious origins.

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A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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Impossible Creatures (Knopf Books for Young Readers, September 10, 2024). Cover by Ashley Mackenzie

Katherine Rundell is a British writer who has been publishing YA novels for some time now, though I was unaware of her. Last year she published the first novel of a prospective series in the UK: Impossible Creatures. This became a big hit, and has now been published in the US. The book is quite good, fun to read, clever, also serious and quite moving, with real consequences to the characters.

There are two protagonists, Christopher Forester and Mal Arvorian. They are children of roughly the same age (early adolescence or just on the cusp of it, I think … somewhere between 10 and 13, I suppose.) Christopher lives in London, but has been sent to Scotland to stay with his grandfather, while his father is away on business. (His mother is dead.) Mal lives in an island in the Archipelago, with her great aunt. (Her parents are dead. Dead or absent parents, of course, being one of the most common situations in YA novels.) Both Christopher and Mal are special, of course. Animals of all sorts are attracted to Christopher, to an unusual degree. And Mal — Mal can fly (with the help of a magic cape.)

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A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

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A to Z Reviews

Peter J. Wacks’ short story “Black Box” appeared in the 2023 anthology High Noon on Proxima B, edited by David Boop, a collection of stories that mix tropes of the Western with science fiction to varying results. Unfortunately, spaceships are horses, planets aren’t ranches, and treating them as interchangeable results in stories that feel as if they were written for the early to mid twentieth century pulps. “Black Box” falls into that category.

“Black Box” is set in a world where spacecraft are used to travel between planets, but once landed, horses are used to cover the terrain rather than motorized vehicles. The Crystal Colony, the solar system’s governing organization, has sent multiple ships to visit a planet (or planetoid, Wack’s terminology changes). After a ship from the planetoid opens fire on them they shoot it down a dn discover that the pilot is the sole survivor of the planetoid, which has apparently suffered an apocalyptic war amongst its inhabitants. The survivor doesn’t view himself as a member of the Crystal Colony and refused to help with their inquiries.

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Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

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The 23rd Hero (Castle Bridge Media, August 13, 2024)

Hybrids are hardly unknown in the long history of fantasy and science fiction literature. It could easily be argued that the genre itself is a hybrid. In the case of Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s The 23rd Hero, this mixing of literary media is an essential element, baked in from the ground up.

The story begins by wearing its dystopian stripes firmly on its sleeve. The characters we meet in near-future Vancouver, including our hero, Sloane Burrows, live in a world of ecological collapse. Outdoors, everyone wears a filtration mask, and the last working farm in Canada closed just months before when the last of its livestock died from drinking tainted water. The handbaskets of hell, if I may mix a metaphor, have most definitely come home to roost.

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A to Z Review: “You Go Too Far,” by Ray Vukcevich

A to Z Review: “You Go Too Far,” by Ray Vukcevich

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A to Z Reviews

Ray Vukcevich’s “You Go Too Far “ is the sort of story that makes writing these reviews difficult. The story, which appeared in  issue 17 of the second incarnation of Pulphouse Magazine, is only about 250 words long.

At its most basic, “You Go Too Far” is the story of a man receiving oral sex. The set up is a portrayal of the couple’s relationship, with the woman trying to set a romantic mood for the two of them. Told from the man’s point of view, he praises himself for his witty repartee, even as she tries to let him know that his sense of humor is more a barrier in their relationship than an endearment.

Told to him in an intimate moment, he reflects that it isn’t the first time he’s heard this sort of criticism. In fact, he understands that it can be a problem, not just in this sort of situation, but in other aspects of his life and he has attempted to rectify his short-comings, by reading books and attending seminars, although that action doesn’t necessarily mean that he fully embracing the fact that his sense of humor might actually be a problem.

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Besting the Beast and Other Fantasy Tales: Scott Forbes Crawford’s Weirdly Accessible Adventure

Besting the Beast and Other Fantasy Tales: Scott Forbes Crawford’s Weirdly Accessible Adventure

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Besting the Beast by Scott Forbes Crawford
(2024, Kindle); Cover art by Ben Greaves

Besting the Beast is Grimm-like tales for Grimdark readers

Fantasy readers often seek escapism and encounters with the unknown, but those adventures can become too weird to be accessible. Shorter forms help. Incorporating some grounding in history or reality helps too. One of the most accessible styles is the fairy tale, and Scott Forbes Crawford delivers five remarkable fun, and easy-to-read, adventures bridging the short story and fairy tale form in Besting the Beast (Aug 2024). All are rooted in Asian history/myth and feature relatable human protagonists to lead the way.

The cover art by Ben Greaves is appropriately derived from “Recovering the Stolen Jewel from the Palace of the Dragon King” (1853) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861). Don’t let the friendly style fool you. The beasts herein are pleasantly weird and gory. Excerpts from all the stories are below so you can get a flavor of the horrific creatures and antagonists you’ll experience. Sword & Sorcery and Grimdark fiction fans will enjoy these (indeed, Besting the Beast is Grimm-like fairy tales for Grimdark readers).

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A Land Two Stars to the Left of Middle-Earth: Breath Warmth & Dream by Zig Zag Claybourne

A Land Two Stars to the Left of Middle-Earth: Breath Warmth & Dream by Zig Zag Claybourne

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Breath, Warmth, and Dream (Obsidian Sky Books, May 17, 2024). Cover uncredited

In the land of Eurola, an ancient evil preyed on the people of Waterfall. Then along came Khumalo, Amnandi, and Bog – a mother daughter pair of witches and their warrior companion – to set things right. Plotwise, it’s damn near a western. If someone were to tell you that this was the whole story of Breath Warmth & Dream, that someone would be a thief. They tried to give you a penny while palming the mountain of gold.

It starts with the characters. Read Breath Warmth & Dream and your understanding of the word “witch” will be forever changed. Mother Khumalo and her daughter Amnandi are the kinds of people you want to grow up to be, even if growing up means becoming a child again. They aren’t perfect by any means because that would be boring and Zig Zag simply doesn’t do boring. It’s an imperfect and dangerous world and they make decisions without the foresight of plot armor.

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