Paula Guran Reviews The Sunday Morning Transport, Tor.com, The Deadlands, and The Dark
The Sunday Morning Transport 5/7/23; 5/14/23; 5/18/23; 5/28/23; 6/4/23; 6/11/23; 6/18/23
Tor.com 5/10/23; 5/24/23; 6/4/23; 6/7/23; 6/11/23; 6/18/23
The Deadlands 5/23, 6/23
The Dark 5/23, 6/23
The Sunday Morning Transport continues to publish excellent fiction. Victor Manibo’s “An Incomplete Catalog of the Birds of New York” is a sweet and optimistic story. A young woman, Amaya, learns how to help the birds crashing into the glass of New York City skyscrapers from an old man with the gift of being able to communicate with birds.
In “Office Auntie” by Rachelle Cruz, a temp worker is guided through an outpost office for a large company, Phil’s. A tragic accident has recently claimed lives and, despite the supposed humdrum, there’s much more going on than mere paper-shuffling. Both futuristic and fantastic, a truly intriguing and poignant story.
“Hibernation Heirloom” by Chelsea Mueller is a beautiful story in which a harried new mother finds release through a transformational bearskin her late mother bequeathed to her.
Callers, in Trent Jamieson’s “Fierce Happening”, have a gift for calculating the distances and severity of the monster storms that beset its world. The storms now approaching are so fierce a house must be sacrificed to save the rest of the neighborhood. Accompanied by Whisp, a small flittering being made of “light and the breaths of ancient science,” caller Pet takes the doomed house into the horrendous maelstrom. Original, imaginative, and written with the poetic lilt of a legend.
An AI video game character – a large dragon – escapes its game in the highly entertaining “Friday Night Dragon Adventure” by Neon Yang. Lia, a gaming company employee, decides it is unfair that this, at least, technological milestone (and perhaps something more) should be written off as a glitch and erased.
Musician Leonard has won all the important awards in Sarah Gailey’s “Such an Honor”. Now, he’s garnered the most prestigious: the Ganymede Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Composition. Just as with all the previous awards – each a valuable gem – it will be embedded in his body. Terrifically creepy.
Kemi Ashing-Giwa packs a bunch of bloodthirst and ruthlessness into the less than 5000-word part-epistolary “The Puppetmaster” (Tor.com), a dark space fantasy. Temaru’s “treacherous worm of an uncle” has murdered his imperial demon-fighting warrior sister and seized her throne. Now, he has ordered his niece to be slaughtered, but there’s a chance that Temaru may have the last word. Perfectly toned, enthralling, and deserving expansion into a trilogy of novels.
“Pretty Good Neighbor” by Jeffrey Ford is a great tall tale about a couple of junkies some Jersey gangsters intend to dispose of in the “Hackensack River where it turns into a marsh.” The location is not only “a giant cesspool of horror” polluted with chemicals and industrial and military waste, it’s home to the Stumps, “flesh-hungry giant newts, big as a man.” Gruesome, but giggly too.
Michael Swanwick’s “The Star-Bear” is, like all of Swanwick’s work, admirably well written. While living in Paris, “Russian émigré poet and fabulist Alexei Zerimov” – an escapee from Soviet oppression – has several encounters with a certain bear. He feels the bear is significant in some way. Months pass, and one evening the bear shows up at the writer’s favorite café wearing a “military uniform with a Soviet star on one pocket” and urges him to return to Russia. Clever and full of hidden meanings.
Deadlands #26 offers two originals. Vera, in “There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead” by Sarah Pinsker, works at the Land of the Dead, a roadside attraction. It offers a boardwalk through the woods with interactive displays about various cultures’ beliefs about death, as well as gleefully death-themed outdoor rides and arcade games with similar motifs. Her ex-girlfriend has started a new relationship and Vera’s life, in general, is going nowhere. Adelaide, Vera’s boss/friend, takes her on a night hike to a place she’s never been before – the real entry to the Land of the Dead. A charming, darkly humorous tale about making life changes. A.C. Wise explains “Death Is a Diner at 3:00 a.m.” – the place where the deceased “gave up, and simply let everything unravel.” This vivid reminder of how depressing the protagonist’s life had been is not, however, easy to leave. Then Elvis shows up. Well, not the real Elvis, but an Elvis, and his presence leads to some new insights about life and now, death. Profound.
“Place of Four Winds” by Gabriel Mara is one of two new stories in Deadlands #25. A father is puzzled that his daughter’s body is not decomposing. The dead woman is in a stormy place of monsters but avoiding walking the path the dead take. Even though she knows it is forbidden, she feels she must communicate with her father to warn him and her people of a coming danger. Evocative prose serves this moving story well. There’s more excellent writing in Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Memoria”. A dead husband cannot bear leaving his beloved still-living wife completely. Although he “is beyond all worry, and yet somehow he worries.”
The Dark #96 features two originals. In the interesting “A Toitele” by Celia Rostow, Rochel’s beloved sister-in-law, Chana, left their Orthodox Jewish life six years before and died in Europe. All that is left of her is a necklace in a box. While Rochel’s husband is gone, Chana returns via the necklace and changes Rochel’s life. Fernanda Castro’s “The Inside Is Always Entrails” is translated by H. Pueyo. The daughter of a taxidermist decides to preserve her father’s body. During the process she faces truths about him and her own life. Considering the subject, it’s an oddly engaging and even, ultimately, positive tale.
The two new stories in The Dark #97 both tend toward traditional horror. In “The God of the Overpass” by Orrin Grey, the unnamed protagonist survives an automobile accident that kills her companion. Before she passes out, she sees a creature hanging from a nearby overpass. Its shadow stays with her even after she recovers from her injuries. The first time she and a new boyfriend happen by the overpass, the creature is there and waiting. “Matchstick Girl” by Lucas Santana (translated by H. Pueyo) is set in a town in Brazil. A rich gringo family buys the abandoned sugar mill and its surrounding land. They supposedly intend to help the local folks, but their actions impoverish and ruin lives instead. It’s a place with a very bloody history and, not surprisingly, past and current evils are eventually punished. The protagonist, Marina, who we first meet as a thirteen-year-old, becomes the family’s maid at 17 and is witness to it all. It’s a familiar story to me, except the locale, and it’s told well enough to keep you reading.
Recommended Stories
“The Puppetmaster”, Kemi Ashing-Giwa (Tor.com 5/10/2023)
“Office Auntie”, Rachelle Cruz (The Sunday Morning Transport 6/18/2023)
“Pretty Good Neighbor”, Jeffrey Ford (Tor.com 5/24/2023)
“Such an Honor”, Sarah Gailey (The Sunday Morning Transport 5/7/2023)
“Fierce Happening,” Trent Jamieson (The Sunday Morning Transport 5/28/2023)
“An Incomplete Catalog of the Birds of New York,” Victor Manibo (The Sunday Morning Transport 6/11/23)
“Place of Four Winds”, Gabriel Mara (Deadlands 5/23)
“Hibernation Heirloom”, Chelsea Mueller (The Sunday Morning Transport 6/4/23)
“There’s a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead”, Sarah Pinsker (Deadlands 6/23)
“Death Is a Diner at 3:00 a.m.”, A.C. Wise (Deadlands 6/23)
[edited 9/15/23 to correct error re non-fiction piece]
Paula Guran has edited more than 40 science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and more than 50 novels and collections featuring the same. She’s reviewed and written articles for dozens of publications. She lives in Akron OH, near enough to her grandchildren to frequently be indulgent.
This review and more like it in the August 2023 issue of Locus.
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Vijayalakshmi Sridhar’s “Be Like Sesame” is nonfiction.
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