Cheng Bogdani’s Reviews > See the Elephant, Issue 4, Beyond Death > Status Update

"Wren's Flight"
by Darka Malcolm-Clarke
This is a really good story from a technical perspective, and I think a lot of people will rightly give it 5 stars. But it's a three star story for me because, frankly, I just wanted the author to wrap it up sooner. I feel like I lost some emotional impact waiting for the inevitable conclusion.
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"Mulch"
by Vajra Chandrasekera
I stopped reading this story near the end to read some other stuff. When I came back to it I had no recollection of the first part of the story. This one simply missed all my buttons - it passed through me without any reaction at all. One star for technical competence and another star for finishing it.

"A Manual of Care for the Unliving Child"
DNF after skimming the first few pages. It's an interesting premise but I could not get into the 'three ring binder SOP' format.

"Headdressing"
That was surprisingly hard hitting, given the cliched first sentence. Five stars. I'm looking forward to reading more Benjamin C. Jenkins.

"My Cremation"
This is written in second person POV, so it was immediately skipped over with prejudice. No stars.

"Snapshots of Aleppo"
Prenumbral ghost stories are the best kind of ghost stories. I would like to see this as a novella. Five stars.

"Margaery the Wolf"
To paraphrase the Battlestar Galactica reboot - 'This has all happened before, and this will all happen again'. Three stars.

"Welcome to the Graveyard of Dead Lilians"
Generally, I really like the mechanic of pointing out humanity's shortcomings by using a lens made from aliens, but this one fell flat - I just couldn't quite get into the plot or the characters. Two stars

"Blindness"
This felt overwhelmingly Orwellian, specifically 1984ish - rebooted through the lens of 21st century misogyny. Five stars.