'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 48

Short Stories 366:118 — “The Ghost of St. Sebastian’s,” by Jess Faraday

[image error]Okay, a brief moment to gush about Jess Faraday’s The Affair of the Porcelain Dog, which I adored on audio: a Holmes-era tale in London at it’s most coal-caked and financially stratified, also Holmes-esque in its execution. You should grab it and listen to it if you’re at all a fan of audiobooks and period-piece gay romance.

Ahem.

Okay, now to Shadow of Justice, which begins with this first story, “The Ghost of St. Sebastian’s,” and has, at least tonally, so very much in common with Affair—we’re back in historical London, and we’re among the less-than-elite, but this time we walk with Constable Simon Pearce, a gay policeman trying to climb the ladder of influence in Scotland Yard, all while keeping his queerness safely out of the line of sight of anyone who’d use it against him.

In “The Ghost of St. Sebastian’s,” we learn a lot about Simon as he’s presented with a strange case indeed: they toss an angry cutpurse woman into the back of their wagon as much for her own safety as anything else, and are driving her to the cells, but upon her arrival it seems she’s been beaten to death, inside the locked wagon, where she was alone, which was exactly what she’d claimed had happened to two other people she knew: killed by the ghost of St. Sebastian’s in locked rooms where they were alone. Almost immediately, Simon dismisses the paranormal aspect, and we learn he’s a man who pays attention to science journals, tries to keep up with what will eventually be considered forensics and psychology, and—more importantly—is a man who cares about those whose deaths would normally get no attention from the police.

In part, this is because he knows he’s also a vulnerable person (a gay man, a constable no less, for whom the truth could lead him to a terrible end were it to come out), but it’s more his sense of justice that’s piqued, and soon Simon is trying to figure out not only what happened to her, but to the other two friends she mentioned in her yelling about the so-called ghost. What follows is a wonderful introduction to Simon, Scotland Yard, his peers and superiors, and the sense of a London where death is waiting for the less fortunate, and no one is there to defend them, except perhaps for Simon himself. It’s a great start, and the resolution of the mystery itself is grounded in something that strikes close to home for Simon, giving him all the sharper a sense of character.

I was lucky enough to reach out to Jess Faraday and ask how this collection came to be, and she was kind enough to let me know.

From the Author:

It’s amazing the things that can come out of a simple conversation.

Several years ago I received an email from Nicole Kimberling of Blind Eye Books. She had just read my second novel, The Left Hand of Justice, and wanted to know if I would be interested in writing something like that for BEB. What came out of that conversation was Blades of Justice, which is a lesbian historical shared-world anthology of novellas featuring a pair of magic scissors that avenge wronged women. My contribution was a novella entitled “The Kissing Gate.”
 
Later, Nicole thought it might be fun to provide a short story as a free teaser for the anthology, and thought that Simon Pearce, a side character in “The Kissing Gate,” might make a good protagonist. The conversation that followed that saw the idea blossom into eight connected short stories with a personal arc for Simon. It worked out so well that I’m currently mapping out stories and story cycles for other characters in Shadow of Justice, in particular a certain librarian who still had a lot to say, even after his role in SOJ had ended.

Working in short form was a difficult learning curve. Short stories are not just small novels! I had to learn how much detail to put in, what to leave out, and I had to completely re-learn how to pace the story. But it made me a better and more versatile writer in the end.

This collection was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I’m really proud of how it turned out, and I hope people will enjoy reading it.

You can find Jess Faraday on Instagram and Facebook, and at her website, JessFaraday.com.

Short Stories 366:117 — “Lone Women,” by Victor LaValle

[image error]One of the more contemporary of the stories in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, “Lone Women” brings us to 1914 Montana, and a lone woman homesteader, and a trek that’s somewhat miserable on the back of a wagon.

We meet Adelaide Henry on this trek, and though she is heading to her new homestead alone after the loss of her parents, there is a widow traveling with her with four blind sons as well, and there is a sense that Adelaide is afraid in a general sense and a specific one: she’s trying to outrun something, perhaps? Their group stops for the night, and she feels quite vulnerable unless she is near her three-locked steamer trunk—and at this, it becomes clear that Adelaide has definitely brought something with her to try and start her new life.

The unfolding story is one of betrayals both minor and major, of the harshness of trying to start over, and doing so completely unprepared in both skill set and finance, but also of others reaching out and offering support and aid. But it’s also about the secret in the trunk, and how things we’ve long considered evil and wrong might indeed be something else in the right place, at the right time, with the right circumstances.

There was more than a helping of sadness and repression and failed potential in Adelaide’s story (as well as the story of the trunk) thus far, and it was nice to see at least the hope of an uptick at the end.

Short Stories 366:116 — “Second Chances,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

[image error]The tales in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky cross through a few different genres throughout the collection, but “Second Chances” landed in my favourite place: somewhere between spec fic and contemporary. Here we meet a woman at a perfectly benign moment in her life: she calls her father to come help her buy a bed (and specifically, needs his financial help a bit), but he arrives with her mother. Now, that doesn’t sound particularly unusual, until the daughter lets the reader in on a fact: her mother is dead.

What follows is a story of family, and especially mothers-and-daughters or sisters (a recurring theme in the collection), and specifically things left unsaid and unhealed after anger and disappointment. Getting back to the mother’s last moment’s alive is a slow wind, and as the daughter and her younger sister and her father all react in very different ways to the return/resurrection/revisitation of the mother, the daughter places the moment from which her mother has returned: a single photograph, and begins searching for it.

Ultimately a tale drawing on regret and pain and the impossibilities in the path of finding peace after someone with whom you have regret is gone, “Second Chances” walks a line right up to hopelessness and pain, but doesn’t quite leave the reader hanging there, instead ending with just enough to consider there could be healing, or their might be relief, or—maybe—forgiveness, if there’s any to be had of any meaning. The speculative elements of the photograph and the revisitation align to this course, and it’s wonderfully done.

Short Stories 366:115 — “A Traded Secret,” by Donald R. Montgomery

[image error]If there’s a commonality starting to pop up by the third tale in The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, it’s this: the characters are facing the universe more-or-less alone (even when they’re in a crowd), and they’ve already had to cope with odds and situations stacked against them in some way. The next tale, “A Traded Secret,” by Donald R. Montgomery, is another example: Morrab is a human (technically) who was sold to scientists and raised in a high-grav environment to see what would happen. He survived (and does have some benefits from the experience, as well as drawbacks), and now makes his living on Plexis, working for Plexis herself (the woman who turned a failing ore mining and processing facility into an interstellar market boasting: “If You Want It, It’s Here!”)

Morrab doesn’t work a typical job, though. He moves through the tunnels beneath the more open areas, dealing with threats and problems and vermin, alongside a direct line to and from Plexis herself, who sometimes connects with him to ask particular tasks be accomplished. Those meetings are face-to-face, and one is about to happen as the story opens. And Morrab is a little worried (like he has been for quite a while) that maybe Plexis has learned more about him than he’d like her to know.

As a character study, the dynamic between Morrab and Plexis when they meet is superb, and I liked the one-upmanship between them from the get go. Each is feeling out the other, trying to figure out who knows how much, and what leverage that might offer, and the end result is a kind of scoundrel-esque story about two people with dirty hands, one of whom now has access to the appearance of cleanliness, the other part of the reason that’s possible. From a point of view of a reader coming into the anthology, however, I would say this story doesn’t quite stand alone, unlike the first two tales, which someone could read without knowing the Clan Chronicles series at all, really. The revelations of “A Traded Secret” are pretty heavily invested into the world building of Czerneda’s Clan Chronicles series. This is not a bad thing by any means, but I imagine someone reading this story without the knowledge would find the last few lines less impactful.

Short Stories 366:114 — “Flight of the Hydro Chorus,” by A.J. Fitzwater

Okay, let’s be clear: I love a good pun. When I hit this final tale about the anthropomorphized capybara pirate, Cinrak, in this delightful collection, The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper, and saw the title? I legitimately had to put down my e-reader for a second and just salute. Because, come on. That’s brilliant.

Ahem.

Okay, so here we are at the end of this collection (sniffle) and Cinrak is trying to succeed at something tied to the movement of the heavens and there’s a limited window and it really matters, because it really matters to one of Cinrak’s extended chosen family/crew—Agnes, the leviathan—and maybe, just maybe, Cinrak’s mix of salty magic, chosen family, crew, and deep sense of daring will be enough to succeed at a task no one actually might understand in the first place.

“Hydro Chorus” (snerk) is such the right ending for this collection, as it seems to circle back around to all the things Cinrak wanted out of life in “Young Cinrak”: to have this circle of chosen people, especially pirates and a ship, but also to help and to build and to make connections, and by the end of the tale? Well. I refuse to spoil it for you, but there was magic enough in it to almost blunt the sadness of knowing it was my last visit with Cinrak and her kin.

Because I loved this collection so very much, I asked A.J. Fitzwater for insight into the various stories one last time…

From the author:

[image error]

Oh, did I have fun with this title! I had to put a pun related to the scientific name for capybara somewhere in the book, and what better place than a story about songs and stars, bringing it all back to where it started. 

Can you imagine Agnes in the years before she met Benj and Cinrak straining to leap into the night sky, arms reaching out to the stars, skipping like an enormous squiddy stone across the ocean surface when she couldn’t defy gravity? Again, here is the loving interconnectedness of the magic and people of this world. They all need each other to thrive. And eventually the stars recognize this, coming back to share what they’ve learned of their hubris and the sky beyond the sky.

Find The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper at Queen of Swords Press, or Books2Read.

Find A.J. Fitzwater on Twitter, or at pickledthink.blogspot.com.

Short Stories 366:113 — “Backbone,” by Madona Skaff

[image error]One of the cool things about Nothing Without Us is how the theme of the anthology—ownvoice disabled authors writing stories ‘by us and for us’—is how widely the range of the tales reached outside of that commonality. There’s speculative fiction, some harder science fiction, some horror, some humour, and, as in this case, some contemporary-set crime/thriller style stories. We meet Ian with blood on his hands and a dead body in the room and the police arriving and the ominous words from his best friend that he “won’t get away with it.”

Skaff then spins the tale from the early days of childhood among a small group of friends, and then fast-forwards through the years of triumph and trials to bring them back to that singular moment. Ian’s childhood of being cared for and “helped” (often against his wishes), the arrival of Petra (the first person to call him out for anything and definitely the first to challenge him to stand up for himself), the popular kid, Lucas, and the class bully, Jordan, who both intersect with his life in different but important ways. By the time we get to the present, it’s clear something has gone horribly wrong, and there are prejudices in play that will make everything turn out for the worst… unless.

The “unless” of the tale is a clever little twist, playing on assumptions (especially that of the police), and the way the tale unfolds from something the reader expects to something entirely different left me grinning. I love the idea of Ian turning the tables the way he does, and the supporting cast are fleshed out enough in such a short space of prose that I want everything to work out well for everyone (even when that seems impossible). Also, extra props for the most Canadian of murder weapons.

Short Stories 366:112 — “Keeper of the Flame,” by Greg Herren

[image error]If there’s an unfolding theme of Greg Herren’s Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, it’s in his use of the unreliable narrator, or in his slow twists of character into noir revelations. This is put on layered display in “Keeper of the Flame,” where we meet Colleen, the daughter of an author who had a kind of flash-in-the-pan almost celebrity in the world of noir fiction, but was waylaid by an editor on his third book. She is not in a good place; specifically, she’s in Las Vegas, but she’s also hungover, obviously emotionally barely holding it together, and struggling to make it past the morning hours without drinking.

Colleen has agreed to meet with a blog reporter to discuss her father, and it’s clear she considers it her duty to maintain the image of her father as a man who could have been so much more, but instead was ruined at the hands of an editor, despite loathing what has become of journalism and knowing this blog reporter will likely be just another in an endless stream of lesser people she’d rather not deal with at all. As their interview progresses, Colleen’s disdain for the blogger shifts when he asks questions of her narrative that most don’t. She realizes she’s a bit too drunk and a bit too raw for the conversation, but it’s too late and as she spins her usual tale, the reader gets glimpses into the reality of the situation with the author, the editor, and Colleen herself, among other major players in the truth of her father’s downfall.

Herren’s dark turns here happen with a kind of one-two punch throughout “Keeper of the Flame,” where the revelations melt into each other, growing a tale more disturbing with every new drip of truth Colleen finds herself remembering despite herself. The tale runs to an end that feels both inevitable and shocking, which is no small feat, and ultimately this tale of terrible people and the broken left behind is a shudder-inducing one.

Short Stories 366:111 — “Stars Swimming in the Ether,” by Genevieve McCluer

There’s a place somewhere around horror (but not horrific) with speculative fiction and satire admixed that I really, really enjoy as a reader. It’s an odd spot, and it’s wonderful finding a new author who writes there (like finding Paul Magrs’s Brenda and Effie series), and so I was delighted when I bumped into “Stars Swimming in the Ether” from Genevieve McCluer (which you can read online at that link). Victorian era, Lovecraftian overtones, and a healthy dose of men being dense and blind to the capabilities of the women who work with them mix together into a delightful tale of a doctor, an alien, and an opportunity.

Doctor Priscilla von Muller doesn’t want to suffer fools, but she’s working with a group of men who, well, suit that particular bill, even if some of them are somewhat decent scientists. Her reaction to being asked if she’d be willing to offer her advice on a creature the men can’t seem to figure out—“Have you tried vivisection?”—sets the tone for the rest of the piece, which is full of a dry, amused sort of humour.

But it’s when von Muller comes face-to-uh, tentacles? with the creature that things take their first real turn, and the opportunity for the doctor proves to be more than she had imagined. Victorian era scientist and being from the far beyond strike an accord that transcends species, and I delighted in the interplay between the two as they realize just how much they have in common. More, the story ends on just the right note, leaving the reader with a sense of a great deal more to come.

I was lucky enough to touch base with Genevieve McCluer, and she had this to say:

From the author:

“Stars Swimming in the Ether,” was somewhat of a Lovecraftian parody, portraying what would normally be a figment of horror in any of his stories as instead one of fascination and attraction. The main idea had just been a Victorian semi-romance starring a mad scientist, but given Lovecraft’s obsession with England, I couldn’t help but poke a bit of fun at him with the body of the story. The scientist group, however, had nothing to do with any of his stories and was instead an homage to AIM from Marvel comics. I’d always wanted to write something Victorian, so I had a lot of fun with it.

You can find Genevieve McCluer at her website, and on Facebook.

Short Stories 365:110 — “Medu,” by Lisa Bolekaja

[image error]This week, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History drops us in 1877 in Ellsworth, Kansas, and we’re on a cattle drive. I feel like I say this over and over, but I adore the settings and time periods of this anthology, and especially the attention to detail the authors paid in doing so, and this particular story really hit the mark—the scent and food and feel of grit practically fell off the page.

We meet a young black woman, Lil Bit, traveling with her father in a cattle drive, and right off, we know something is different about her. She hides her scalp for some reason—we learn first it’s because she has no hair, but later because she has something other than hair below her skin—and next, the venom of an accidental snake bite does nothing to her.

What unfolds is a slow reveal of this young woman who—like her mother—is unique in a different (and dangerous) way, and has learned early to hide that difference, but who might be forced to rely on these hidden abilities because she is not the only different one around, and someone—or something—is killing cowboys and leaving nearly emptied bodies for them to find. The juxtaposition of the two of them also being on the run from bad business chasing them down, and worried about how her mother hasn’t managed to catch up with them draws a second tension across the story, and he whole is immensely satisfying as things finally come to a head.

Short Stories 366:109 — “Light,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

[image error]Oh man, this story. I listened to What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky on audio, and as I’ve mentioned, the narrator does a brilliant job inhabiting the emotionality of the characters, and so when you layer that on top of Arimah’s already wonderful writing, the result is basically emotional gut-punching, and “Light” is a fantastic example of what I mean by this. The opening lines alone were enough to give me goosebumps (I’m not going to paraphrase, as I refuse to ruin them, but holy crap, as opening lines go, “Light” is a master class).

Here we meet a man who is raising his daughter more-or-less by himself right now while his wife is overseas earning a degree. He adores his daughter, loves her nature and joyousness and everything about her that seems so very different than himself or his wife: she’s outspoken, joyful, emotionally vibrant, can’t hold a grudge for very long, and their interactions are full of amusing (and heartbreaking) moments where he steps forward and does his (not likely great) level best to handle conversations around such massive milestones as her first period and, y’know, the sex talk and the whole boys thing.

She is fourteen, and over Skype with her mother, things are growing tense. His wife is finding fault in many of what he considers his daughter’s best qualities, and their own married relationship is straining. What follows is the slow and painfully all-too-real clash between who his daughter is, and who the world will accept his daughter to be. And as he is outnumbered and outwilled by said world, it all comes crushing down to a moment and I was just gutted for him, his daughter, and pretty much everything. So, y’know, not a story for a pick-me-up moment, but it’s so beautifully crafted and so damn viscerally emotional that I loved it.