Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Cast of Wonders, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons and Baffling

Baffling 1/24
Cast of Wonders 12/17/23, 12/29/23, 12/30/23
Escape Pod 12/14/23, 12/23/23, 1/4/23
Strange Horizons 12/18/23, 1/1/24, 1/8/24

I’ll kick things off with the January Baffling, which (as always) features flash fiction with queer themes and characters. The issue starts strong with D.K. Lawhorn’s bittersweet ‘‘Steinway & His Sons’’, which centers a dead man watching his husband mourn for him. It’s a premise that’s already heavy with emotion, and is beautifully rendered as the ghost watches the man he loves strive to keep one last promise to him – to compose a song that might express something of their time together and their love. Lawhorn pulls no punches in exploring the distance, loneliness, and aching grief that the characters are caught in, while also leaving room to steer away from an ending dominated by tragedy. And while one probably can’t describe the result as a happy ending, given everything, it’s still lovely and tinged by joy and memory. Mo Usavage changes things up a bit with a sci­ence fiction story featuring alien sex workers in ‘‘The Six Most Common Questions Asked by Customers in Rubian Brothels’’. It’s a creative use of the list format and does the complex work of exploring the desire, disgust, and power dynamics between the insect-like Rubians and their human clients. And more, it captures lay­ers of hunger – the human hunger in the form of lust, dominance, and ownership, and the Rubian hunger for sustenance which they must repress to work with humans, alongside their own hunger for freedom and identity. Usavage really digs into the ways people treat each other when one group is exoticized and dehumanized, leading to a kind of performance that goes far beyond sex and money. It’s very much a story worth spending some time with.

Cast of Wonders closed out the year with ‘‘The Woods in the House’’ by Amanda Cecelia Lang, a novelette spread across two episodes that fol­lows a narrator called Buster by his little sister trying to find out what happened to Tina (said little sister) when she goes missing on Halloween. The story leans a bit more into horror than many at the publication, but it’s still quite appropri­ate for children while being grim at times and tackling heavy issues like grief, abuse, and death. Buster’s situation is at once defined by guilt and desperation – no one will believe that he saw his sister disappear into a witch’s apartment, and every attempt he makes to either convince people or get his sister out meets with disaster and people assuming he must have done some­thing to his sister. And, in the aftermath of their mother’s death, Buster was cruel enough that those insinuations and suspicions only deepen his misery. But he has to confront them, and his own hurt and trauma, in order to be the brother he needs to be to save Tina, and himself, from becoming too lost to ever be found. It’s a tense and suspenseful story with a great sense of fam­ily in all the messy and real ways families are.

Escape Pod’s December included ‘‘Emotional Resonance’’ by V.M. Ayala, which centers Arbor and Crowe, two people serving thousand-year contracts as giant mechs. It’s not a fate they chose, really, because after debt caught up with them there weren’t many options. And even for Arbor, who has been a consciousness in a mech for cen­turies, the prospect of getting to retire back into a flesh body doesn’t really seem possible – just another carrot on a string to keep them compliant. When the two meet, though, they find that all the emotional blocks programmed into them can’t prevent something from building between them. A desire to be together. A protectiveness. And, despite everything, a defiance that allows them to contemplate the greatest sin of all – disobedi­ence. The relationship between the characters is wonderfully rendered and paced, and Ayala does fine work in building the world with its familiar corruptions and aching need for escape.

Strange Horizons’s final 2023 issue included, among others, J.D. Harlock’s poem ‘‘I Thought the End of the World Would Be a Bit More Ex­citing than This’’, which finds a narrator whose partner has just ascended via the Rapture, leaving the narrator in a strange legal and emotional posi­tion. And the poem explores this world where the forces of Heaven and Hell are in open and super­natural conflict – something that seems would be a rather big deal but which the poem and narrator regard mostly as more of the same. And there is where I think Harlock does some really interest­ing work, implying that in the face of the crises we humans face on a personal, communal, and international basis all the time, the ‘‘actual’’ end of the world is just more of the same. And it’s a deep way to close out another year that has been defined by conflicts large and small, against which a lot of things might seem, well, boring. And opening up the new year, leena aboutaleb underlines one of those conflicts in ‘‘Hijacked Interiors’’, a poem without stanzas, that is presented as a block of text but that grows or shrinks depending on the size of the screen window. The effect underlines that the poem is confined, like the narrator, who speaks to their past in the form of their grandfather about what it means to them to be Palestinian – to have a country but not a nation, or a nation but not a country, or to have neither. And the narrator describes their own grappling with their identity, and how where they’re from changes how they are seen, and how they see, and the anger wrapped around everything. It’s a powerful work, and aboutaleb leaves readers with a closing question, asking them not to look away, not to ignore, not to remain complicit.

Elle Engel stays with themes of catastrophe, identity, and responsibility with the novelette ‘‘Half Sick of Shadows’’, which focuses on Lena, a young girl brought up in a tower built by a very wealthy man to survive a global annihilation. After said annihilation, though, the tower quickly shifted into a kind of religious community, each new generation passing along enough to keep the tower maintained but also run through de­privation, obligation, and repression. When the generation before Lena opts for group suicide, leaving just her to care for the declining tower, the training and trauma she’s endured meets a sudden freedom, and the discovery of all the entertainment stockpiled in the tower that Lena was never allowed. Engel explores the push and pull of stagnation and change, looking at the role of entertainment in the need to take action, and finding in Lena someone both lost against the scale of what has happened but also denied any way to push off the responsibility of action onto anyone else. She’s been made the end of a line, but that doesn’t need to define her, not if she’s willing to step outside the boundaries she’s been taught in order to reach for a world where she can have a future. It’s a great read!

Recommended Stories
“The Six Most Common Questions Asked by Customers in Rubian Brothels”, Mo Usavage (Baffling 12/23)
“Half Sick of Shadows”, Elle Engel (Strange Horizons 1/24)
“Emotional Resonance”, V.M. Ayala (Escape Pod 1/24)

This review and more like it in the March 2024 issue of Locus.

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