Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

“Cordyceps zombii”, Ann K. Schwader

Schwader’s literary output is these days confined mostly to poetry, although she still writes the occasional short story. I would recommend her first collection of stories, Strange Stars & Alien Shadows . Since I only read the occasional poem, I feel like a bit of a fraud making any judgments about this entry. That said, I liked it well enough; nice imagery and use of language.

✭✭✭½

“Out of the Blue”, Ian Rogers

Like Fiona, I consider myself a fan of Rogers’ stuff, including his Felix Renn stories. To anyone looking for more stories featuring this character, I would recommend SuperNOIRtural Tales . Unfortunately, “Out of the Blue” is probably my least favorite Renn story.

✭✭

“Letters to a Fungus”, Polenth Blake

This is one of the better stories I’ve thus far read in this anthology. (view spoiler)[Blake gives us a waggish tale told in the form of a series of letters. Jane, a self-centered and entitled woman seemingly at odds with all of her neighbors, finally encounters one she cannot defeat. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

“A Monster in the Midst”, Julio Toro San Martin

The author provides us with a Steampunky sort of tale set in an alternate reality roughly contemporaneous with pre-Revolutionary France. The ideas expressed (specifically, those revealed in the denouement) are mildly interesting, but the narration (this is essentially one of those manuscript-in-a-bottle tales) is pretty clumsy.

✭✭

“Dust from a Dark Flower”, Daniel Mills

This is easily the most “traditional” story thus far in this anthology. I can easily envision a story like this one appearing between the covers of one of the old pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Strange Tales, or Unknown. My overall reaction is, I think, a bit like Fiona’s — this a respectable enough tale, but just that. It’s a bit too by-the-numbers to be truly memorable.

✭✭✭

“Where Dead Men Go to Dream”, A. C. Wise

(view spoiler)[At one point in this story Amaryllis tells Jonah that “there’s an imbalance in every relationship, one person who loves more than the other.” That tragic imbalance seems to be at the heart of Wise’s story. Unfortunately, although I liked some of the ideas, I found the story’s trappings a bit too florid and angst-ridden for my tastes. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Our Stories Will Live Forever”, Paul Tremblay

(view spoiler)[I’ve always dreaded discussions of postmodernism, although I get that Tremblay is using the concept here as a vehicle through which to discuss man’s impermanence and, in the author’s words, our “existential, nihilistic, and cosmic aloneness”. The idea of contrasting that with the timeless quality of the mushroom is somewhat interesting, although the manner in which the transformation of the passengers is engineered struck me as extremely arbitrary. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Wild Mushrooms”, Jane Hertenstein

(view spoiler)[I expected that this was going to be another story falling into the horror/dark fantasy camp, but turned out to be mistaken; it’s really more a mainstream literary piece. The author shows us in this gentle, melancholy story that we are the children of our parents, no matter how much we would pretend otherwise while we are growing up. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

“Tubby McMungus, Fat from Fungus”, Molly Tanzer & Jesse Bullington

(view spoiler)[I had wondered why the book’s editors seemed to labor so much over the coy introduction to this story; the intro’s purpose becomes more clear when the reader discovers that this is a fable that is ostensibly about merkins (but actually about class differences). There are enough scattered references in the tale to suggest that Chester II is the feline analog of England’s “Merry Monarch”, Charles II; it was, for example, in Charles’ time that the periwig became a staple fashion item amongst the aristocracy.

I didn’t actively dislike this piece, but neither did I enjoy or fully appreciate its positive qualities. Maybe that has in part to do with the rather cavalier way in which Miss Mousha is tossed on the scrap heap. If there’s any moral here, it is perhaps summed up in the line “...as is always the case, no one thought to blame the aristocracy.” (hide spoiler)]

Incidentally, I actually knew what a merkin was before reading this story. I first encountered the term in an early sci-fi story by John Varley, “The Barbie Murders”.

✭✭½

“Goatsbride”, Richard Gavin

(view spoiler)[On one level this story is, I suppose, about ergotism. I remember being intrigued by this disease as a kid, primarily because retrospective analyses of behavior that elicited accusations of witchcraft have sometimes invoked ergotism as a hypothetical cause of said behaviors (e.g., the Salem witch trials). The kicker in Gavin’s story is that there is, in fact, some sort of supernatural agency at work. I wish I had liked this story more. There are elements/ideas that I found interesting, but in the end I think the story needed to longer than it was. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”, Jeff VanderMeer

This is one the author’s Ambergris tales. It’s possible I might have appreciated this one more if I was more familiar with that universe, but as an isolated story it didn’t create much of an impression.

✭✭

Lena said:

Canavan, I grabbed the “new version” of The Night Ocean from NetGalley and was unimpressed. Though one likely had nothing to do with the other.

I’ve heard a bit about Paul La Farge’s novel, but was kind of on the fence as to whether or not to pick it up. As I recall, Lovecraft, Barlow, and William S. Burroughs are all characters in this novel, right?

Fiona said (in part):

Yeah I'm with you both - terribly behind but somehow even though I'm getting nothing done I'm always busy??

When we transitioned into telework earlier this year in response to the pandemic, I naively thought that I might at least be able to leverage the situation so as to complete some personal goals/projects. Instead, compared to the pre-pandemic era, I seem to be working harder for longer periods of time, yet accomplishing less. And the amount of time devoted to purely personal activities continues to drop.

Lena said (in part):

While I am now curious to read Lovecraft’s collaborations with Barlow let me save you time (or challenge you to search harder than I did), there is no story called Ignoble Rot and no collection titled Memories of Leng and other Pieces.

About a zillion years ago I read Barlow’s 1936 story (supposedly lightly revised by Lovecraft), “The Night Ocean”. I don’t recall many of the plot specifics, but do retain the general sense of a rather amateurish story that was fairly dull.

“Midnight Mushrumps”, W. H. Pugmire

The experience of reading this story was not unlike being forced to listen to someone recount their not very interesting fever dream.

✭½

“Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror)”, Steve Berman

A part of me wants to ask the author just what effect he was striving for when he wrote this rather baffling quasi-story. It reads like a mediocre and rambling Wikipedia entry and is thus completely bereft of any real excitement or suspense. Which is sort of sad; I can easily imagine that a story written around the tragic life of R. H. Barlow might be a compelling one.

★

“The Pilgrims of Parthen”, Kristopher Reisz

Reisz’ story plays with ideas about addiction and how it affects interpersonal relationships. I wish the story had delved into those ideas a bit more deeply; I found them interesting, but thought they could have been more so.

While reading the story, I had the feeling throughout that things were not going to end well, but yet the denouement proved to be an unexpected gut punch. (view spoiler)[I’m still pondering whether it makes much sense or not. More specifically, why go through the elaborate charade of forcing your intended victims to explore/traverse this series ziggurats? Why not just grab ’em, so to speak, right off the bat? (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

“Last Bloom on the Sage”, Andrew Penn Romine

This is, as noted by Lena and Fiona, a weird western. I’m okay with that subgenre, but didn’t find this story to be a particularly good example. Once you strip away the fungal trappings, you’re left with a fairly hackneyed plot.

✭✭

“His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”, Camille Alexa

There’s the germ of a decent story here, but there wasn’t enough to sustain my interest. None of the characters, even Morel, are much more than two-dimensionsal. There’s a bit of cleverness in Alexa naming her characters after different mushroom species, but that wasn’t really sufficient to redeem the story.

✭✭

“The White Hands”, Lavie Tidhar

I really liked the concept behind this piece. There’s an audacious quality to it that I admire. But I also agree with Fiona and Lena. This is a story with no clear plot.

✭✭✭