'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 38

Short Stories 366:218 — “Caught Looking,” by Adriana Herrera

[image error]The blurb of this novella from He’s Come Undone caught me on this one: When best friends Yariel and Hatuey’s gaming night turns into an unexpected and intense hook up, Hatuey can’t wait to do it again. Yariel is less certain–the major leaguer might seem to all the world like he has a heart of stone, but he’s been carrying a torch for his friend for years, and worries this will ruin the most important relationship in his life. I went in expecting a friends-to-lovers, and maybe some nerdery or geekery (turns out the gaming night was video games, but whatever), but it wasn’t long before I hit a wall of something I really, really shy away from: the set up for this novella is a Gay-for-You; in the first moments, Yariel feels like he’s completely messed things up because Hatuey is straight.

Oh no.

I considered stopping, but I know it’s possible to write a gay-for-you that’s more of an out-for-you and doesn’t drop the straight-men-are-just-sexier garbage, and I’ve been listening to Herrera’s Dreamer series on audio and really enjoying them, so I took a deep breath and kept going. First, the good (and I want to be clear here, the good is really good): the chemistry between these two, and the building blocks of a life-long friendship, combine into a great burn. They want to be together, but Yariel is in his own way for multiple reasons (none of which he seems capable of expressing to Hatuey), and Hatuey is so very willing to do anything to make this work (other than directly telling Yariel that, since he believes—and maybe rightly so—that Yariel needs to get there himself). Herrera also doesn’t downplay the impact of being out as a major sporting professional, nor does Hatuey completely disregard how this may affect his own life if he does move forward as Yariel’s lover in public. They do a will-they/won’t-they dance that feels built on their own baggage rather than invented drama, and there’s also a hinted-at issue from the past that is revealed closer to the end that makes Yariel’s hesitation make a lot more sense, too. And it’s a romance, so you know the will-they is going to win. That’s the deal. And if you’re a lover of angst alongside your sizzle, Herrera delivers a truckload of both within the short turnaround of the novella.

One last time, I want to say I did end up enjoying this almost entirely, because I’m also going to mention the thing that left me really frustrated in the “but he’s straight” plot: there are zero uses of the word bisexual or pansexual in the whole story. We get “curious” as a negative (in the sense that, curiosity sated, Yariel might thereafter lose Hatuey), and there is a single line, “So you’re going to use 1950s gay-slash-straight bullshit to talk me out of what I know I’m feeling? Is that what we’re doing now?” from Hatuey himself that at least kinda-sorta references the non-binary nature of sexuality, but Yariel has multiple conversations with friends about Hatuey, and the word is never raised. Most curiously, this included talking with a friend I think I’m supposed to infer is bisexual or pansexual himself (at least, it sounds like he cares about the woman he has an off-again, on-again relationship with, and he also has hooked up with Yariel), where even just a single “Dude, maybe he’s bi like me?” would have been the perfect open door to avoid what otherwise just struck me as omission. That said, I know Gay-for-You is a thing I react strongly to, and your mileage may vary, and honestly, the rest of the story is strong enough that I otherwise had a good time.

Short Stories 366:217 — “Death and Two Maidens,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

[image error]I keep saying this about Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction, but I’m going to say it again: the stories in this collection compliment each other while ranging far and wide in tone and feeling. By the time I finished “Death and Two Maidens,” I found myself wondering if I’d read a ghost story, a love story, or something akin to a chosen family across the barriers of life, death, and spirit. Either way, I truly enjoyed the story, and like all of Gidney’s stories, the weaving of the magic with the realism is so seamless it draws the reader right into the tale.

In “Death and Two Maidens,” we meet Prothenia Jenkins as she takes her own life, then spin backwards to find out what led her down the paths of misery and loneliness, and then we return to her in her new state: formless, alight on the mist, and aware that she’s not alive, but she’s not gone, either. Prothenia was a maid and childminder for a family, and as she flits around in her afterlife, she is drawn back to her former chambers, and sees her replacement on the day she’s hired.

What follows is a connection Prothenia couldn’t have imagined, a terrifying danger in the form of a spirit that wants to take possession of all that remains of Prothenia, and an unexpected ally and protector. The forces collide in a battle for Prothenia’s existence, and Gidney raises the stakes one twist at a time, with shudder-worthy descriptions of the evil force after her spirit. Ultimately, though, for a tale that begins with death and never quite leaves the realm, “Death and Two Maidens” does indeed feel like the start of something loving or the gathering of a found family, rather than an ending, and that’s just another example of the kind of magic Gidney writes.

Short Stories 366:216 — “At the Roots of the World Tree,” by Catherine Lundoff

[image error]I feel like I keep saying “this story was so very much my thing” when I talk about Out of this World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories, but it’s because… well, this story was so very much my thing. First off, we’ve got an esoteric bookstore that’s more than it appears, and even seems to nudge the bookseller in one direction or another at times. Second, said bookseller is a socially awkward queer bookseller, and, I mean, hello. Oh, and also the fates personified just walked in, which is so unfair because his co-worker usually gets super hot elves and he instead gets a trio of women who can tell him his fate, complete with how he’s going to shuffle off the mortal coil. Bookstore customers, am I right?

Sometimes the store speaks to Ash, and when it does, Ash generally listens. And in this case, maybe it would get three three fates to, y’know, leave before anything cataclysmic (or personally terrifying) happens. Instead, upon perusing some of the more, uh, special texts, we learn our somewhat-bumbling Ash is just the fellow to delay Ragnarok a bit. Would he mind?

Of course he minds, but also, the end of all reality—or at least some version of it, Ash isn’t sure—is sort of motivating no matter how awkward you might be, and so Ash is off on an adventure. A terrifying, awkward, totally-out-of-his-depth adventure. All he wanted was a shift at the bookstore, but instead he’s going to try to delay the end of the world and hopefully not die in the process. The tone of “At the Roots of the World Tree” is so lighthearted and amusing throughout, and I adored it from the start. I also love how the queerness in this particular tale is so beside the point, but still flavours the whole of the tale (and there’s even a little nod to a happy-for-now for Ash at the end).

When I asked Lundoff where this one came from, she was kind enough to tell me. Bookselling, folks. It just stays with you.

I used to own my own queer/feminist bookstore and I’ve worked at a few. Never met any Norns, though, more’s the pity. I suspect this one came up one day was I wondering why I’d never done anything with Norse mythology or bookstores.

Short Stories 366:215 — “The Resident,” by Carmen Maria Machado

[image error]I’m not sure I’ve ever read a story as grounded in identity and self-reflection as I have as “The Resident,” in Carmen Maria Machado’s amazing collection Her Body and Other Parties. This is a very discomforting story, with—as is often the case with these stories—a simple narrative set-up: an author has won a place at an artist’s residency, and she goes to take her place there to write her novel. There is an unfortunate coincidence that is, I believe, barely an aside at the start of the story, that she has been here before, when she was much younger (as a brownie), but there’s a tremor of something in the declaration, and is later revealed to be much more important than it seemed.

I don’t want to spoil this story at all, so it’s hard to speak in more than broad strokes, but this is a story about a woman who’s thoughts and feelings and sensory reactions to the world run high and immediate; she glances at a doorway, for example, and immediately dislikes it, knowing it will take time for her to conceptualize exactly why, and mentions almost in passing that this is a facet of her personality her wife doesn’t always understand. She also falls into spirals of thoughts around specific words: first resident, and later colonist. Both fracture and shift her frame of reference to how one exists in their own head versus the perceptions of others, and these passages are some of the most incredibly well-written moments in the collection as a whole. I loved them.

Ultimately, this is a story without a solid closing, and while I think some readers might find that a bit of a let-down, I found myself oddly relieved. More, the voice shifts to directly interact with the reader, to ask questions I honestly felt even less confident to answer after the story than I would have before, but somehow more informed about the ideas as a whole. It’s basically a brilliant piece. (Also, this story has one of the best—and I mean, emotionally satisfying on a visceral level best—take-downs of someone dismissing this woman as “crazy” that I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.)

Short Stories 366:214 — “Will of the Nebokan Fates,” by Natalie Reinelt

[image error]A ticking-clock, on-the-run, survival story set in the Clan Chronicles universe, Natalie Reinelt’s (debut!) short story “Will of the Nebokan Fates” does a lot in a short span of time. Like all the tales in The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, it takes place at least in part in the interstellar supermarket of the same name, but the story itself is focused very specifically thanks to the biology Reinelt spins into her Nebokan alien character: he and his mate are expecting, and right now he has the child in his pouch, and it needs to be transferred to her pouch, and soon. Except she’s been taken.

Soh’im is not a courageous sort (you get the impression as a reader that Nebokans aren’t really known for their bravery, but rather their survival instincts and ability to hide/outlast danger). Instead, Soh’im has to draw on resources that feel uncertain, even considering the danger he’s in and what he’s already survived prior to the story’s beginning. We follow him as he tries to figure out where his mate could have been taken—stubbornly refusing to consider other options—and doing what he can to get to her.

Ultimately, the story has a little turn at the end, and it’s both sweet amusing. More, the quick glimpses we have of an alien race where gender, biology, and procreation aren’t locked into any sort of real binary was kind of refreshing as a queer reader, frankly. And the seedier, darker side of Plexis was well placed in this tale, along with those who use the supermarket to terrible results. All in all, I look forward to more from Reinelt.

Short Stories 366:213 — “Ignition,” by John M. Floyd

[image error]With this story, Crime Travel returns from its darker duet of stories to something a bit more hopeful, and as a reader, I was glad to go there. That’s not to say “Ignition” doesn’t have a few harrowing moments or some dark turns, but more that ultimately, we’re on Eddie’s side from the get-go, and he manages to turns a series of odds-stacked-against-him in the right direction (at least, a little).

Eddie works at an institute about to unveil a time machine, and the day before it’s about to be announced to the world, one of the other men who works there (and is higher up on the food chain than Eddie is likely to ever be) asks him to lunch and proceeds to offer up a plan to use the time machine to travel back in time and steal a cash delivery that went awry in the past and was destroyed. When Eddie demurs, the other man resorts to blackmail, and Eddie is left involuntarily involved with a time heist.

The twists of this one are really well done, playing with time travel in a very specific way that I enjoyed and found plausible (and all the more enjoyable for the somewhat karmic payoff that is delivered through said time travel fallout). The story is told while Eddie is being debriefed by the company so the reader knows he gets caught in some way, but as Eddie spins the story for the interviewer, it’s impossible not to root for the guy. He didn’t this; he just wanted to keep his job and do his work. That tiny slice, the blackmail, is entirely enough to paint him in the role of someone we care about, which makes the ending pack just that little bit much more satisfaction in the delivery.

Short Stories 366:212 — “Wayside,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]Lot: Stories, Bryan Washington’s brilliant collection of short fiction, has a character who spends most of the stories unnamed, but who is revisited as the collection continues. He’s the lens through which about half the tales happen, and every visit with him nudges his life a bit further forward. He’s back again in “Wayside,” and the tension dials higher again (which was already beginning to creep up in the last visit we had with the young man). His brother—does he know?—explains to this character ‘what happened to fags,’ and I flinched away from the text, recognizing all to easily those moments of hidden-hate, where you can’t react except in the way the one spewing the hatred needs to see you react. It’s a visceral moment, a sudden sharp shock to the system at the end of the story, and for that moment alone, I’d sing “Wayside”‘s praises.

But there’s a lot more going on here, too. The restaurant now in the hands of his mother is still running on fumes, and so the brothers supplement income with drug sales; the sister is barely present, the father is now long gone, and the brother seems destined for a dark fate—this is telegraphed to the reader a few times. You get the sense that this man’s life is about watching those he is connected with fall away, one by one, and as a narrative design, each story seems to do just that: show you a little more loss, another lost connection, and it’s so damn effective.

Again, if you’ve not picked up this collection, you should. The voices in the stories are so incredibly strong, and as a queer reader, the people and settings are ones we don’t see nearly enough in queer fiction. “Wayside” is one of the shortest tales in the collection, but it packs one of the hardest punches, and the prose—not spare, but the economy of words—is just a master class in “exactly enough.” The whole collection is wonderful. “Wayside” was brilliant.

Short Stories 366:211 — “Valediction at the Star View Motel,” by Nathan Adler

[image error]From the previous story of a far-future failing Earth with seed-ships and non-humans, the next story in Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time drops us right back into our contemporary Earth with “Valediction at the Star View Motel.” We start around a campfire with a group of teens and a fight started (and quickly ended) by the adopted, kind of spread-between-two-worlds, Eadie. Eadie defending her step-sister’s character from the racist snark of a white girl is just the first step in getting into Eadie’s head, but Adler has this way of wading into Eadie that builds as the story goes. First, she is angry (and with good enough reason, even on the surface), but then we start to see the depths of what has come before with Eadie, and it builds and builds. It’s a lovely progression, even when painful.

At the same time, we learn about Ghost Lake, and a particular hotel that used to be owned by Eadie’s family, and we meet another girl, who strikes Eadie as fascinating, and the two eventually sequester themselves off together, to talk, and then for more. In some ways, this story could easily have read as a YA or NA meet-cute, and it does so quite successfully even on that front, but Adler includes the lightest of traces of something speculative, and what could otherwise be completely grounded in the here-and-now gains a spark of something “other.”

This isn’t an expansive story, like so many of the rest of the tales in the anthology, but rather a character-driven one, and sum of the anthology is all the greater for including this particular part. Eadie’s “between worlds” sense of self is tested, and there’s potential for loss in the waking moments after a night where she makes herself vulnerable, but the ultimate destination Adler brings us to is both hopeful and just enough to satisfy (but, I won’t lie, I’d love more from these characters).

A note: I found this story in Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An LGBT and Two-Spirit Sci-Fi Anthology, but I need to point out this is one of those anthologies I’ve had in my collection for, well, years. It’s been sitting on my iPad, and it was only when someone asked me if I’d read it that I went to look and found out the publisher is defunct due to the publisher, Bedside Press, being shuttered when the editor confessed to sexual misconduct and sexual assault. After I went looking online and hit that roadblock, I was looking through my digital library to see what other anthologies I had and found my copy. Accordingly, I’m going to suggest you check out anything by Nathan Adler via his web-presence, as I can find no information about where support for this anthology goes.

Short Stories 366:210 — “Zora’s Destiny,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

[image error]Oh, how I loved this one. “Zora’s Destiny,” found in Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction, is the kind of contemporary (or recent historical) fantasy I love the most: a single character coming face-to-face with the sense of something other behind the normal sheen of the world, but it’s also a twofer, in that it’s also a story about that same character leaning about themselves. We meet Zora when she’s made up her mind to visit the local “witch” when her mother’s migraines show no sign of passing. She has heard gossip between other women in the town about Miss Hattie, specifically in her ability to undo pain, and so Zora gathers her courage and sets out.

This core of wanting to help carries Zora beyond where her own bravery might have ended, and the interaction between the two women is steeped in Zora’s mix of “I want to believe” and “I know I’m being desperate and this is likely a hoax.” But as the two women talk, and Zora learns of what it takes to have belief turn into power, the conversation takes a different turn, and things stop being about Zora’s mother, and turn to Zora herself.

Another way in which “Zora’s Destiny” is a favourite sort of story for me is how it could easily be the first chapter of a novel about Zora. That’s not to say the tale is not complete, which can easily be a flaw of stories about discovery. “Zora’s Destiny” ends with possibility, but it does end, drawing a loop in narrative closed even as I wish I had chapters and chapters more to go.

Short Stories 366:209 — “The Egyptian Cat,” by Catherine Lundoff

[image error]If there’s a trope in contemporary fantasy that I love the most, it’s the “revealed to be a guardian/warrior/chosen one” trope, where Someone-Who-Feels-Pretty-Darn-Average finds out they’re magical/psychic/otherly-powered and will shortly be defending the world from some unknown evil. Cue the training montage. I love them even more when the person involved is so very much not the sort who’d choose this, at all, and is—at best—reluctant to take up the mantle. What Catherine Lundoff does in this latest tale from her collection, Out of this World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories, is go a bit further and make the main character one-step-removed from the whole guardian-against-evil thing, and still drop them in the middle of some awfulness going down. So, of course, I was on board.

It’s one thing to have an ex you pine over, and it’s another to be in your home-town in your family home and trying to stay ahead of the bills, and it’s yet another to look at an exceedingly small dating pool and want to date but—well, again, small dating pool—but sometimes needs must and you make do. That’s more-or-less the situation our heroine is in, with the added potential interest of a fellow next door, but you get the impression she’s not really that into him so much as she’s trying to be more outgoing and social and maybe things will grow? And then the one-that-got-away (or, rather, vanished-without-so-much-as-a-goodbye) comes back, an ancient evil is looming, and the one-that-got-away turns out to be very much a chosen-to-hold-back-the-darkness and really, reunions are already difficult enough, aren’t they? World-devouring evil shouldn’t just back the hell off.

There are so many lovely touches of sly wit in “The Egyptian Cat,” and I found myself chuckling throughout. Lundoff has a way with understatement that really works with the tension to create little releases in the form of those snorts and giggles. It’s a refrain I think I’ll repeat quite a bit with this collection, but here it comes again: I’d happily read more with these characters, in this setting, facing down evil while they awkwardly reconnect.

Oh! And as always, I was able to ask the author where the story came from, and this was a case of being requested (and then having to find a new home):

A lot of my short fiction pops into my head when editors ask me for things. In this case, it was for an anthology of lesbian supernatural horror with Lovecraftian and Clark Ashton Smith influences. I believe the editor got 3 submissions for that anthology. Fortunately, this story went on to have another life in Tales of the Unanticipated Magazine, then in this collection.