Paula Guran Reviews Uncanny and The Deadlands
Uncanny 5-6/24
The Deadlands Spring ’24
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.
Apex #144 features five original stories. “Those Left Behind” by Kanishk Tantia is a deftly written SF story about two robotic caregivers crafted to look and act exactly like dead human spouses. When their elderly humans permanently leave Earth (along with every other human on the planet) the robots realize that that those they cared for did not care for them. A journey of self-discovery commences. It’s touching and insightful, but I was left pondering matters I doubt the author intended me to consider. This future cannot solve Earth’s ecological crises, but evidently provides an extremely high level of technological comfort customed tailored to every single inhabitant. All of whom are then transported into space. Hmm.
Ekaterina, in Monica Joyce Evans’s “At Night She Dreams of Silverfish”, is a scientist who wanted to get away from it all and did so by accepting a position on an ocean-covered world no one else wants to work on. Now she’s desperately lonely with no way to escape her situation. The story takes a horrific turn – or maybe it’s all in Ekaterina’s head. Interesting, but the scare comes before the dread has had time to build.
Derrick Boden’s epistolary “Down the Dust Hatch” is set in a mining base on an asteroid that can no longer manufacture breathable air. While awaiting resupply, the Syndicate running the show has a cost-effective solution: Prove your productivity or lose your air. Profitability rules, but the clever (nameless) narrator has an angle. Scammers, of course, inevitably get scammed. The swindler has good reason to stay alive. But, since everyone is justifiably desperate to survive, can the reader sympathize enough to care about the story?
Considering desperate nameless narrators, we meet another in the cyberpunkish “The Clown Watches the Clown” by Sara S. Messenger. This one dresses up as a clown and lets people beat them up in the alley behind a shady cybermotel on the spaceport where they live. There’s more than need-based masochism going on here. Striking port workers wear clown getups and, to protest, clown instead of work. The narrator supports them but dares not strike. Messenger packs a lot – addiction, racism/speciesism, social/political action, repression/oppression, damaged and damaging relationships – into 4900 words. Vivid, depressing, illuminating.
In the charming “The Jukebox Man” by Natalia Theodoridou, a woman meets a man in a bar. He is a living jukebox: records spinning in his chest, music playing through his open mouth. As the relationship continues, she realizes how “regular, almost rhythmical, everything about her is, timed down to the minute.” He is the Jukebox Man; she is Metronome Woman. But love, and music, is not enough.
The issue also contains three flash pieces. Spencer Nitkey’s “The Art the Owls Can’t Swallow” deals with an artist obsessed with owl pellets whose marriage has deteriorated to scat itself. Nitkey uses the character’s art to creditably tell a nicely dark take. Wen Wen Yang tackles colonialism and a dehumanizing relationship reminiscent of “Madame Butterfly” in the brief but poignant “Out of Print”. In the lovely “To Rise Again” by Kelsea Yu the sky, or at least the sunset, literally falls.
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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