Paula Guran Reviews The Deadlands and Uncanny
Uncanny 5-6/24
The Deadlands Spring ’24
Seven new stories in issue 58 of the always-commendable Uncanny. “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine may or may not be your cup of tea. I slurped it up with glee, but its complex construction, multiple styles and points of view, and academic angle may turn some off. Part of the premise, as Martine writes, is “Historians are liars.” The whys and wherefores thereof are combined with multiplayer RPG, “mass story” events, and complicity in genocide.
Traditionally, even with a happily-ever-after ending, any variation of the tale of Hansel and Gretel is dark even for a fairy tale. There’s no real way to jolly up cannibalism, child abuse, and abandonment. Sarah Rees Brennan’s masterful retelling in “Happily Ever After Comes Round” is flat-out stygian. It has arresting takes on the siblings’ relationship and adult female characters who seem to be intertwined.
“Mirage in Double Vision” by Tia Tashiro begins with the narrator Jocelyn (Joss) Cole jumping out a window just after Adelle (Dell) Tremaine has told her their personal and professional relationship is over. Dell is a lovely but empty actress, Joss her lover and stunt double. It’s a compelling relationship story with no fantasy element until the end.
In Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Loneliness Universe”, all the people Nefeli cares about begin physically disappearing. She can’t see them in the real world or face-to-face through her phone. She can only see their avatars and pictures on social media. She can text/message or email them or interact with them in a video game. People she knows casually or not at all still inhabit what she soon terms her “Loneliness Universe.” Eventually, the entire world is affected. Considerable food for thought about human relations and modern society is served up in this evocative tale.
At age ten, the first-person narrator of “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra takes “a wrong turn for the public library” and ends up in the Market of Dangerous Books. She is forever changed. Over the years she visits many of the Markets of the Otherworld, but can never stay. Now it is time for her to visit the Death Market: “There is no finding this market; it is the market that finds you if you are worthy.” If, like the narrator and me, you were a misfit “child of a particular bent of mind,” you’ll be as enchanted by this narrative as I was.
The setting of K.S. Walker’s “Hands Like Gold and Starlight” conflates two aspects of the slightly altered true history of Martha’s Vineyard: the two-century existence of a now-extinct sign language used by Deaf and speaking communities alike and the Massachusetts island’s legendary status as a safe vacation spot for Black families. Two young women find summer love in a sweet story that turns into mild horror when one of the pair transforms.
An absent father provides “Five Answers to Questions You Probably Have” by John Wiswell. Wiswell actually provides no solid answers about anything, but inspires a great deal of curiosity in the reader. One seldom finds a very short story that is so very intriguing.
Issue 34 of The Deadlands (now publishing quarterly) offers six new stories. Denzel Xavier Scott’s “The Slave Boy” reads like the beginning of something longer as it introduces the enslaved nexian Haikwan Yar. He is a resident of Vega, a nontechnological country located on an un-Earth planet populated by people who practice, at varying levels, a magical craft. Humiliated and insulted, even by the talking equine animals who are just as enslaved as Haikwen, his life is miserable. A different, though still enslaved, life begins for Haikwan as the story ends. Two fascinating characters and an innovative world.
Jennifer R. Donohue’s “doorbell dot mov” is a terrifically creepy tale of uncanny things that look like five deceased friends that come nightly to the narrator’s door. They pound and plead to be let in, beating on the door until dawn.
I’m a pushover for retold myths, and Anna-Claire McGrath’s “I Love Him Artichoke” does a nice job with her version of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. I have a quibble with mixing calf sacrifice with otherwise modern details, but how can one not like a story that points out how good the name Eurydice is to sing since it ends with a vowel like Persephone and Beyoncé.
After the witches and wizards fail to rid New York of the plague in the clever “The City Unsleeping” by Anya Leigh Josephs, the city turns to the healers. They earn only a partial success, so the city reluctantly turns to the necromancers. The resurrection of New York becomes “the greatest feat of necromantic magic known to the modern age.” But that’s not exactly what was hoped for.
After a village makes a bargain to avoid disaster in Marc Joan’s “The Clockmaker”, a clockmaker tries to cheat the Devil – or rather, in this language-rich story set in North Wales, an entity known as the Pilgrim – out of what is owed. Nothing new here except for the distinctive setting and the resplendent manner in which it is told. And that’s enough.
Recommended Stories
“Happily Ever After Comes Round”, Sarah Rees Brennan (Uncanny 5-6/24)
“doorbell dot mov”, Jennifer R. Donohue (The Deadlands Spring ’24)
“The Clockmaker”, Marc Joan (The Deadlands Spring ’24)
“Three Faces of a Beheading”, Arkady Martine (Uncanny 5-6/24)
“Markets of the Otherworld”, Rati Mehrotra (Uncanny 5-6/24)
“The Slave Boy”, Denzel Xavier Scott (The Deadlands Spring ’24)
“Five Answers to Questions You Probably Have”, John Wiswell (Uncanny 5-6/24)
“Loneliness Universe”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 5-6/24)
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 July 2024 issue of Locus.
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It looks like there’s a copying error here? It’s displaying a review of The Deadlands along with a repeat of last week’s Apex review.
Thanks, Jay!