The Next Big Thing: Reviews

            Though this is late-coming, I was tagged about three weeks ago for The Next Big Thing meme, though I have to admit I wasn't aware of it until Zachary Jernigan tagged me. Zack is an acquaintance of mine from Stonecoast, where I met him my first semester, his last semester. His book, No Return, is coming out from NightshadeBooks in Spring of 2013, and I can't wait to read it, but I guess I'll have to.

            So now it's time for me to be the tagger. I'm going to do this a bit differently, in that, for the purposes of keeping this blog short story-related, I will briefly review the short stories of the authors I tag. All of these writers are fellow Stonecoasters, but all of them are also writers who I respect, read, and root for.

            Adam Mills lives in a bowling alley in the Missouri Ozarks and writes some great stories. He is Managing Editor as Weird FictionReview and an editorial assistant for Cheeky Frawg Books. In December, his short story "The Artist in the Tower" was published by Ideomancer. Inspired by a Borgesian dream, the story definitely seems Borges-inspired; it has the same playfulness of all the best Borges, mixed with the dark and fantastic. The story's narrator is a professor who wishes to tell the story -- long considered mere myth -- of a great artist, Armin, and his role in destroying the tyrannical reign of the fictional Campano regime. The professor's retelling of the artist's confinement in the tyrant Raoul's tower is peppered with footnotes; these footnotes often give fictional sources for the information, but they also give more personal details of the narrator's father. These details feel at first like digressions, until the ending, when the two tales intertwine in a goosebump-inducing final footnote. "The Artist in the Tower" melds our world, with references to Salvador Dali, Samuel Beckett, and religious mythology, with a fantastic world in which the artist's paintings become a tool for his survival.

            Adam also has work in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. You can find him online at his blog adamwmills.wordpress.com.

            Caspian Gray lives in Columbus, Ohio. Two out of three stories I've read by him are nightmarish horror stories featuring insects, which I find unusual and refreshing . His story "Insect Joy" was first published in Interzone #237 and reprinted as a podcast by PodCastle in July 2012 -- which you can download for free from their archives. "Insect Joy" is about a young woman who can hear the thoughts of insects. When her boyfriend returns disabled from the war, she is confronted with guilt over her urge to leave him, until she makes a startling discovery of the solution to her problems which, it turns out, comes at a heavy price. His story "Centipede Heartbeat" is about a woman who begins to suspect that the reason for her girlfriend's coldness is the presence of centipedes nesting in her heart and desperately searches for a way to exterminate them; it is forthcoming from Nightmare Magazine. Both of these stories are eerie and sad, and both left me feeling the characters' grief and desperation. Check out his stories at the links below:

            ---"In Bloom"

First appeared in the July 2009 issue of ChiZine. Reprinted in PseudoPod:

http://pseudopod.org/2011/08/05/pseudopod-241-in-bloom/

            ---"The Robber King's Wife"

First appeared in Scheherezade's Bequest, Issue 13, May 2011:

http://www.cabinetdesfees.com/2011/the-robber-kings-wife-by-caspian-gray/

            John M. Shade is a fellow Texan and a graduate of the Viable Paradise writer's workshop. I've read two stories by him, both published on Daily Science Fiction. "Selecting", published in October of 2011, is a flash fiction which explores the fantasy trope of sword selection in an original way; it's also a story about revenge. Published in August of 2012, Shade's "The Colors" is, at its heart, a superhero story, and it is one of the most innovative superhero stories I have ever read. "The Colors" tells, in prose which reads at time as beautiful as poetry, of a traveling superhero circus where the performers are trapped; Mother Circus is the leader of the caravan, and she is a terrifying villain, both motherly and evil. The world of the circus feels tangible, while the world outside the circus -- revealed in tiny, subtle snippets to be in ruins -- feels far away, like a world we've only ever heard of in stories. The main character here is overcoming the grief of losing his first love, and when a new hero joins the circus, he is given a second chance.

            You can follow John M. Shade on Twitter.

Now here's the part where I answer some questions about my own stories, two of which are forthcoming in the next year:

What is the working title of your next book or story?

            I'll answer this question for my two stories which will be coming out soon.

            "The Siren" is a short story coming out in Strange Horizons in April.

            "An Exodus of Wings" is forthcoming from Daily Science Fiction.

Where did the idea come from for the book or story?

            For "The Siren" -- which centers around a love triangle among a teenage girl, the girl's mother, and the mother's new girlfriend, all three struggling with grief -- the idea came from a song: Bat for Lashes' "Siren Song."

            "An Exodus of Wings" is told in three sections, each section a new point-of-view, and each part is connected by the characters and their inability to communicate and connect to others effectively as well as by the faerie pests which take over homes like insects. It was inspired by the roaches which infested my house when I first moved back to Texas last July, and also a phrase which popped into my head.

What genre does your book or story fall under?

            I would call these stories slipstream or magical realism.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

            You know, I'm just not sure. Right now I can only imagine them as I wrote them; it's difficult to impose an actor's face onto them, and I'm not sure I want to before anyone else has read them and formed their own images.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

            I wrote "The Siren" in about a week. I wrote "An Exodus of Wings" in one day; once I started, I didn't want to stop.

What other books or short stories would you compare this story to within your genre?

            Well, rather than compare these stories specifically to other stories in the genre, I'll list a few authors who I admire for their ability to twist genre conventions and mythology/fairy tale into new and interesting shapes, which is what I am attempting to do in my own stories: Kelly Link, Theodora Goss, Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Karen Joy Fowler.

What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?

            Well, "An Exodus of Wings" is written in three sections, three points-of-view. The first section is in 3^rd, the second in 1^st, and the third in 2^nd (say that ten times fast). I was hoping, with this technique, to slowly decrease distance between the reader and the characters, so that in a story about connecting to people, the reader will slowly become more and more connected to the characters.

            "The Siren" is a modernization of the old Greek mythology, which I always love doing and reading. 

 

Stonecoasting: John Crowley's Novelties & Souvenirs

It's Stonecoast week--which is the MFA program I'm currently in--so in honor of the residency in Maine I'm at right now, this week's Short Story Review is an annotation I wrote for my second semester. The book? John Crowley's Novelties & Souvenirs. 

            I’ll admit I have yet to read John Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big. It’s on my list, certainly, but I always prefer reading a writer’s short stories before delving into their novels. Novelties & Souvenirs therefore served as my introduction to Crowley, and I was in no way disappointed.

            There are fifteen stories in this collection written over twenty-five years – one, “Great Work of Time,” is a novella – and the stories are presented in the order they were written. Looking for a general progression of Crowley’s storytelling ability, I could find none; the stories in the front of the book seem just as well written as those at the back, written further along in Crowley’s career. The only trend I noticed was that the stories at the end of the collection seemed to deal more with abstractions. In his earlier short stories, there seems to be little in the way of abstract concepts. In his later work, such as “In Blue,” “Lost and Abandoned,” and “The War between the Objects and the Subjects,” there is more to puzzle over in terms of plot and deeper meaning, though as in all the Crowley stories here, there is certainly a great deal of depth.

            My favorite in this collection would have to be the novella “Great Work of Time,” in which Crowley proves that the time travel story has certainly not overstayed its welcome. The story, which begins with the origin story for the time machine itself, soon moves to bigger and more complicated matters, such as a secret society of time travelers who work to maintain the British Empire and the values that their benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, held dear and a man, our protagonist, chosen to complete a task he has, in a time travel world, already completed. Complications, of course, arise.

            “Great Work of Time” is partly so interesting because of the structure, being broken up into different sections and told out of sequence. It’s not the only story where Crowley plays with structure. Two stories, “Antiquities” and “Missolonghi 1824,” are told almost entirely in dialogue format, set up beforehand as a meeting between two individuals. In “Antiquities,” those two people are friends meeting in a club; one relates the story of the possible supernatural reason behind a plague of inconstancy in a nearby town. In “Missolonghi 1824” the dialogue is between Lord Byron and a young Greek boy. Both are intriguing in both the present of the story and the story being told.

            The other stories to keep an eye out for in this collection: “The Nightingale Sings at Night,” a creation myth in which the nightingale and the moon are central characters, and though it shares similarities with the story of Adam and Eve, it makes those similarities its own. “Snow” explores a new technology that allows loved ones to record 8,000 hours of one’s life in case of death, to remember them. “Gone” is an original first contact story in which people are more than willing to let the aliens into their lives. “Exogamy” is Crowley’s take on the fairy tale.

            I wasn’t crazy about every story here. “Novelty,” while beautifully written – Crowley’s prose is often goosebump-inducing in its splendor – didn’t engage as much in the middle. Told from the perspective of a writer who is so concerned with the ideas of his stories that he finds himself thinking on them more than writing them, the story dwells too long on the idea he’s stuck on. Though incredibly poignant in places, especially the end, this story isn’t one of my favorites. “The Reason for the Visit,” Crowley’s homage to Virginia Woolf, interested me in its conclusion, with the question of how far in the past each individual can truly imagine how life was lived, as the quickly accelerating rate of technological makes such imagining more difficult. However, by the end I still wasn’t sure what the reason was for the visit.

            Woolf’s influence in Crowley’s work is evident and would be even without the inclusion of aforementioned story. His prose style has a very classic style to it, which makes me feel as if I am reading a modern sort of classic. Crowley can certainly be considered as much.