'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 46

Short Stories 366:137 — “Chicken,” by Elizabeth A. Farley-Dawson

[image error]Yay, Whix! Uh, I mean, a-hem. Okay, so one of the best things about The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis is baked into the premise: it’s a shared-world anthology, set in The Clan Chronicles universe as written by Julie E. Czerneda, and that means we get to explore side-characters in short fiction—specifically, in this case, Whix!—and that’s just basically the best ever, really. I adore this sort of set-up for collections, and I love the bird-like alien Whix so very much. This glimpse into his past, and how he ends up an Enforcer and partnered with Terk is just so much damn fun.

Now, I should also say if you haven’t read any of The Clan Chronicles, it won’t matter for this story. That’s one of the joys of anthologies like these as well, when they’re done well (and this anthology is done very well). Farley-Dawson writes Whix at the end of a particular training period in his life, coming face-to-face with a grisly murder (of one of his own alien race, no less), and teaming up with a particular large burly human for the first time and figuring out the whodunnit. It’s a mystery short, basically, and the setting is definitely baked in The Clan Chronicles worldbuilding, but Farley-Dawson gives all the details you need to understand.

Whix is just such a great character. A scientist who lives and breathes to keep his brain stimulated, bumping up against other aliens and a murder, and a situation he wasn’t really imagining himself in, and finding it truly challenging (in all the best ways). It paints a backstory for Whix that suits perfectly, and if you’ve never read Whix before, it’s a perfect opportunity to “meet” him. It’s basically the big-alien-bird-science-sleuth story I never knew I needed, but am so glad to have discovered, is what I’m saying.

Light is the daily deal at @BoldStrokeBooks

[image error]Hey all! Every day Bold Strokes Books does a daily deal at their webstore, and today said deal is my very first novel, Light, (and it’s truly a daily deal, as it ends today at 11:59pm EDT).

Kieran Quinn is a bit telepathic, a little psychokinetic, and very gay—three things that have gotten him through life perfectly well so far—but when self-styled prophet Wyatt Jackson arrives during Pride Week, things take a violent turn.

Kieran’s powers are somewhat underwhelming but do have a habit of refracting light into spectacular rainbows for him to hide behind. Even so, it’s not long before Kieran is struggling to maintain his own anonymity while battling wits with a handsome cop, getting some flirting in with a hunky leather man, saving some drag queens, and escaping the worst blind date in history. It’s enough to make a fledgling hero want to give up before he even begins.

One thing’s for sure: saving the day has never been so fabulous.

If you want to check it out, here’s the link at the Bold Strokes Books webstore.

 

Short Stories 366:136 — “The Mariachi’s Serenade,” by Julian Lopez

[image error]As much as I’m not generally a fan of horror, I do love a good ghost story. And this next tale, from Julian Lopez’s Cirque des Freaks and Other Tales of Horror, is a really good ghost story. It begins with Adrian bringing his boyfriend Tristan to meet his abuelita, Elena, and introductions turn to a bit of family history when Tristan mentions how he loves the way Elena says Adrian’s name, and Elena reveals Adrian was named for his grandfather’s youngest brother, Adriano. Oh, and he was involved with a man, and their family paid for the man to leave to America to make sure there was no scandal and Adriano tried to follow but the story ended in tragedy.

Needless to say, Adrian hadn’t heard this story before, and is a little shocked, but truly appreciates how welcoming and loving his abuelita is. They tour the city where Adrian once lived as a child, and then, at night, he hears a singer outside. What follows is the slow, teasing seduction: Adrian can feel the music this man sings deep in his soul, and in ways he never felt connected to his history or culture. And, of course, the man is beyond charming and beautiful, and asks him to follow him.

As it’s a horror story in a horror collection, you know things aren’t going to end well for everyone, but I really, really liked how Lopez set up the reader for a zig, and then ended on a zag. And I loved the story being so steeped in a specific time and place, and with music. Lopez does such a beautiful job in his descriptive writings, painting vividly the world around his characters, as well as the tone and cadences of sounds and scents of the city, the music, and the temptations of a connection from beyond.

Short Stories 366:135 — “Who Will Greet You at Home,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

[image error]Sometimes you bump into a short fiction piece that is just so freaking incredible you lean back once you’re done and just sit. You let the words settle and just feel it all in your head and think, ‘Well, good game, good game. Everyone else can go home now.’ Such was my experience with “Who Will Greet You at Home,” from What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. I don’t even know where to begin to explain the set-up of this story, but my terrible attempt is this: we are in a world where mothers craft daughters out of material—any material, sticks, mud, porcelain—and life of a sort is breathed into the baby via a blessing from a mother, which must then be cared for for an entire year before it transforms into flesh.

Yeah.

We meet a young woman who was made from mud and clay, and her desire to do better by her own potential baby has her seeking out alternate materials, and her mother’s rejections of considerations such as prettiness or softness in favour of, well, mud and clay and other strong things. Their relationship doesn’t survive the mother’s continual destruction of the daughter’s attempts, and so the daughter leaves, determined to find another way and another baby.

What follows is one of the most chilling, moving and—at times—borderline horrifically disturbing—stories as the daughter finds a place to eke out a living, gains the blessing of a grasping, coldly calculating “maman” at a terrible price, and ultimately decides to do something taboo: she uses the castoff hair from the hair salon where she works to make a baby, hiding it from everyone. The chilling progression of this narrative is so freaking incredible, the ending is sublime, and honestly, from a world-building point of view, this story was a goddamn masterclass. I’ve already said you should read this collection a few times already, but this story? This story alone is reason enough to buy a copy.

Short Stories 366:134 — “Alone,” by Nathan Fréchette

[image error]I’m trying to remember how many stories I’ve read with a dissociative identity character where (a) the character isn’t some sort of revelation/plot-wrinkle, (b) and/or they’re not the villain, and/or (c) where the resolution isn’t about aligning them under one self and I’ve honestly got nothing—that is, until I read “Alone” in Nothing Without Us. Here, Max is dealing with a major loss of a loved one and finds themself overwhelmed—and the plurality comes to the foreground in a different way.

As Max struggles to navigate the loss they’re facing down, their other selves surface in different ways at different times, and I think what’s done so incredibly cleverly in “Alone” is the balance: the story doesn’t paint Max’s D.I.D. as a singular thing (ie: it’s not a curse, it’s not a blessing) but rather a facet of him that shapes his world, and gives him certain coping strategies that from the outside—especially that of his big brother—might appear one way when they’re in fact exactly that: coping strategies.

It’s this sense that there are strengths in Max’s plurality that I loved all the more for Fréchette’s not shying away from the less fortunate aspects: I had a good smile at the tummy-ache part of the story, where one of Max’s plurality binged on ice-cream, but another made sure Max knew they’d also taken antacid already. The ultimate resolution of Max’s journey in this story was both realistic and hopeful, and I think that’s a recurring tone touched on so well throughout this collection.

Short Stories 366:133 — “Housecleaning,” by Greg Herren

[image error]There are some first lines that just snatch your attention, and “Housecleaning,” the next story in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Tales from Greg Herren, has one of them: “The smell of bleach always reminded him of his mother.” It’s a statement that, in another collection, could feel mundane, but here it comes through the lens of the tales that have come before and I found myself immediately uneasy. There are a lot of reasons to use bleach, and some of them… well.

What follows is the story of a man cleaning his kitchen floor while remembering his upbringing with a woman who—to put it mildly—did not display many characteristics of caring or compassion. She did put a roof over his head—many roofs, in fact—but their temporary homes always ended the same way: leaving in the dead of night, assuming new names, and starting over. The man cleans, remembers, and as more and more of his past with his mother is revealed, her compulsion to remove all trace and leave and start over gains a sharper and sharper edge.

I’ve mentioned it before in this collection, but one of Herren’s real strengths is leaving the narrator’s revelations on those edges, right up to the point of revelation. “Housecleaning” is one of those stories. Even as we feel for the boy (now a man), there’s the sense of something bad looming over the whole of the narrative, and the final moments of the story are shudder-inducing. Also of note in this tale is the descriptiveness of the man’s home (a place he finally isn’t at the whim of a mother who randomly forces him to move on) where the tiniest of details—some grease here, some dust there—gains such weight in the space of narrative as the man, well, cleans.

Short Stories 366:132 — “Slough Dog,” by Jess Faraday

[image error]Linked queer short mystery stories aren’t something I get to enjoy very often, which makes me all the gladder to have Jess Faraday’s Shadow of Justice to enjoy. The second tale in the collection, “Slough Dog,” sees Constable Simon Pearce dealing with some of the fallout from the first tale, where he added friction with his boss by daring to investigate what was the deaths of those not really considered valuable, but he did bring praise to Scotland Yard in the process, and the end result is a kind of hostile détente where Simon is getting terrible shifts and assignments, which brings him to the opening of this particular story: a train trip to Edinburgh.

I’ve been to Edinburgh, and I love how clearly Faraday evokes the city’s quirks, which are beautiful and old and cherished (and also super confusing to navigate). Simon’s job is to deliver a police dog, “a slough dog,” to the Edinburgh police, and then to come straight home. Alas, things do not go as planned, and not only does the dog get away, but there’s a murder to investigate. Ordered to find the dog, Simon nonetheless can’t help but take two opportunities: the first the rare opportunity for a gay man of the time to find some temporary companionship, given his being far away from home; the second to try to figure out what is really going on in the city.

Multiple things seem awry from the get-go: not the least of which is the rumour of a supernatural family curse in the form of a large black dog not unlike the one Simon needs to recapture. These tales of a gay constable in the late 1800’s are really charming, and I think what I like the most about Faraday’s depiction is Simon’s practicality about his own situation being every-so-slightly teased toward a kind of hope or possibility with each tale. He knows the reality he faces, absolutely, but as these tales unfurl, he also starts to wonder what he could make for himself that goes beyond the frantic moments he sometimes finds, and I’m really loving the progression.

Short Stories 366:131 — “Living on Borrowed Time,” by Melissa H. Blaine

[image error]Cracking a new anthology today, and if the first story sets the bar, I am so ready for this ride. Crime Travel (that title, amIright?) is an anthology of short crime fiction with the admixture of, well, time travel. I love spec-fic (this is no surprise to anyone who’s read this blog, I imagine), but I love seeing spec-fic mashed in with other genres. And if this first story, “Living on Borrowed Time,” is any indication, I am in for a brilliant ride.

We open with a woman, Jennifer, who spots two fellows who totally don’t belong, not the least of which is because they’re wearing jerseys for a hockey team that doesn’t exist. Her roommate being a conspiracy nut, she considers a possibility: time tourists. But the thing is, she’s in the middle of an unexceptional day in not-exactly-noteworthy Missouri, and the appearance of time-tourists can only mean one thing: something big is about to happen.

What follows is a fantastic twist on both time-travel and a murder-story. Finding out a horrific crime is about to happen is one thing, but finding out you’re the victim is another, and soon Jennifer is trying to figure out if there’s a way to change things or—and I love this so very much—at least have the bastard go down alongside her. Extra kudos for some casual queer inclusion, a wonderful moral dilemma Jennifer quickly realizes she cannot be on the wrong side of, and “Living on Borrowed Time” knocks the start of this anthology right out of the damn park.

Short Stories 366:130 — “Jilly,” by Paul Baughman

[image error]One of the things about reading (and writing) short fiction is how I get to see the magic happen with an editor when it comes time to put stories into some sort of order. There’s a lot of work to it to make sure the tales flow well into each other, or that tonally there’s not a heavy front end, say of dark and depressing stories, when the majority of the anthology is nothing of the sort. Editors have to anchor the anthology at the beginning and the end with stories for impact, and then string the rest in between in an order that works for the emotional, narrative, and thematic cadence. It’s… a lot. Finding “Jilly,” from Paul Baughman after Fiona Patton’s story is a great example of this: we go from a story with young teens fighting the power to kids running on their own in a small gang, which starts out with a similiar notion, but then shifts in tone from Patton’s caper-esque story to Baughman’s darker tale of the carried weight of pain, loss, and—maybe—hope from vengeance.

As with all the stories in The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, “The Pack” (the aforementioned gang) are running through the space market; they’re working to track someone down. A young fellow is working with Jilly most closely, a girl he’s known for about a year, and they communicate excellently with The Pack’s tricks of nonverbal cues, hand-gestures, and the like. He likes Jilly, who began overconfident and has since cut some solid skills, so he’s surprised when she seems to change course and act strangely. He cares enough to follow and try to figure out what’s going on, and what’s going on involves one of the more cruel and awful alien races in Czerneda’s universe.

“Jilly,” doesn’t pull punches, and shows a darker side of the setting, but does so in a way that empowers the young kids. It’s a delicate balance, and the shift in the narrative from trying to figure out what Jilly’s up to, to the realization of why she’s doing what she’s doing, to the final solution the main character comes up with all touch on a similar note of love and found-family/chosen-family that is basically my catnip, really. Show me a group of people who’ve had to figure things out on their own coming together to right a wrong, and I am there. “Jilly” does just that, and while it’s one of the first stories to go overtly violent in the anthology, it didn’t dwell there, and the end result was moving.

Short Stories 366:129 — “A Masked Camaraderie,” by Julian Lopez

[image error]Recently, I took part in and watched a Bookathon (a series of online author panels with Bold Strokes Books), and I ended up learning about Julian Lopez’s debut collection of dark/horror tales, Cirque des Freaks and Other Tales of Horror. Now, you all know I’m not a huge horror reader, unless that horror is of the slower-build, more-disturbing-than-visceral sort, but I nabbed a copy, cracked the first story, and settled down in the bright, bright sunlight of day to see where things would go.

“A Masked Camaraderie,” is set in the 30’s, and tells the tale of a man part of a trio of school friends who have since separated by chance and, in the case of one, marriage. He’s a bit of the odd-man-out of the trio, but he knows it, and knows he doesn’t come close to the relationship the two other men always seemed to have. The subtext is pretty clear: although one of the men married, there were feelings at play between the other two, and an invitation for the two of them to join the married couple in Venice strikes our narrator as a bit affected: likely, it’s the company of the other man truly desired, but he goes on the journey anyway.

The subtle interplay of the four people is so incredibly well written. The narrator’s voice, connecting with the wife somewhat, but also knowing more than he wants to tell her, is really nicely written. And then comes the darkness in the tale: the wife decides they must go to a masked party, and is pleased to finally have a use for four beautiful masks she found sealed away, perhaps for centuries. They don them, and not only does it free the quartet from being their usual selves, it invites someone else—or something else—along for their evening. The horror here is in the narrator’s discovery of the true nature of the being and the masks, in the reality of potentially being too late, and that put it squarely in the kind of horror I like. Onward to the next tale…