Alex Brown Reviews A Feast for Flies by Leigh Harlen

A Feast for Flies, Leigh Harlen (Dancing Star Press 978-1-73214-186-5, $11.99. 163pp, pb) November 2023. Cover by Vitalii Ostaschenko.

Leigh Harlen has only published a collection and one novella, but I loved the latter so much that they immediately became one of my auto-buy authors. Queens of Noise is a riot of a novella, a fierce, funny story about were-punks trying to stop a corporate takeover of their favorite bar. A Feast for Flies, their second novella, is more serious than funny, but just as fierce.

Floating in the great expanse of space is a col­lection of spaceships. Generations ago, they fled a destroyed Earth in search of a new planet to call home, but that dream seems even further away now than it did all those years ago. Whether any­one is still even searching, Zira doesn’t know. Her whole life has been spent trapped in an oversized tin can controlled by casino bosses. For three decades she eked out a nondescript life, until her father turned her in for reward money.

Zira isn’t just a regular person: She’s a Reader, someone who can psychically sense emotions. With a touch, she can see a person’s memories and even erase them. Those who commit a crime have their memories erased; they live the rest of their sentence out as drones working menial jobs. After her father turned her in, Zira was conscripted to work as a Reader for the local law enforcement agency. She’s stripped bare the minds of dozens of people who ran afoul of the law, and the toll that psychic violence is taking on her is getting worse. The only good thing to come out of all this is Bea, a service dog who has tech of his own to aid Zira in blocking out ambient brain waves.

Zira dreams of escaping to one of the more inclusive ships, but it seems as out of reach as her other dream: rekindling things with her ex, Marlyn. When Zira gets caught in the crossfire of two warring crime lords and is accused by her cop boss of criminal negligence, her dream becomes a necessity. Both crime lords press-gang her into service to work against the other, and Zira and Mar decide to use the violence to plot an escape. But as the threats increase, Zira and Mar’s chances dwindle.

This is one of those reviews where all I want to do is write ‘‘I loved it! It’s great!’’ enough to meet my word count and turn that in. Because I really did love it and it really is great. The science fic­tion elements were light, just the way I like them. The murder mystery elements were thrilling yet grounded. The action was evocative but not too intense while the romance was charming yet realistic. Harlen also managed to write Bea in a way that made it clear he was more than just a pet without falling into the trappings of anthro­pomorphizing.

Harlen knows how to write relationships in compelling ways. It’s not just the queerness, but the way characters interact with each other. The tensions of an antagonistic relationship, the pull of a romantic relationship, the honesty of a deep, true friendship. All I want in life is to hang out with Marlyn and Zira and Bea at Marlyn’s bar, drinking beers and telling stories.

If nothing else, Leigh Harlen’s A Feast for Flies is a fantastic re-introduction to Dancing Star Press. The only other title of theirs I’ve read is L.D. Lewis’s A Ruin of Shadows – a stunning fantasy that I cannot recommend highly enough – but this novella has bumped the rest of their catalogue up in my TBR. It’s really that good.

This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.

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