The_Mad_Swede’s Reviews > Fen > Status Update

Read "The Lighthouse Keeper", a fable of sort, with hints of a metamorphosis theme that echoes off the first story, "Starver", in some senses, creating a nice sense of bookends. It all centres around the lighthouse keeper, one of Johnson's Fen women, with quirks and foibles of her own.

Read "Birthing Stones" and found myself yet again drawn in by Johnson's ability to relate the mundane and everyday of the weird. The geolocality of her Fen breathes through these stories, and anchor them.

Read "The Scattering: A Story in Three Parts" (After the Hunt/The Scattering/The Hunt), about Matilda and her two older, twin brothers, Marco and Arch, fundamentally different to one another. And also about foxes.

Read "A Heavy Devotion", which is a fascinating Messianic (or quite possibly Antichristian) tale, told by the proverbial figure's mother to an unknown narratee whose identity is all part of the story.

Read "The Superstition of Albatross" and find that I am more and more drawn into these stories by Johnson's narrative voices and uses of focalisation.

Read "Language", the story of Harrow Williams and Nora Marlow Carr. It is sublime weird fiction with notes of horror woven into it.

Read "How to Fuck a Man You Don't Know", an interesting story, written in the second person, and structured as nine numbered parts counting down in reversed chronology, from the end of a relationship to its beginning.

Read "How to Lose It", a mother-and-daughter story told in two time layers (1999 and 2014) and involving the allure and myth-making of first time sex, but also its consequences and the imagination of what life could be (but perhaps never is or can be).

Read "A Bruise the Shape and Size of a Door Handle", which shifts from the use of a homodiegetic narrator, and instead uses levels of internal focalisation. The odd world building continues, however, and the result is still really, really appealing.

Having read the first two short stories, "Starver" and "Blood Rites", I am left with the sensation that Johnson is building a world, not by recurring characters (at least not thus far), but by a wider sense of location and atmosphere. And it is all very, very good. I am very much looking forward to reading the rest of these stories.