2010 Stories 176 - 188
More from Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia
176. Sammarynda Deep by Cat Sparks. It took me a page or so to really get into this story, but that slow start more than pays off by the end with the depth of mood the author establishes. The story works for me on so many levels. The main character is absolutely a fish out of water; she's come to this port town in search of something, dropping names to get her into certain social circles in a society she doesn't really understand. As the story progresses, the mystery of why she's really there builds until the reveal sucker-punches you not just with the characters' emotions but with the understanding that even when we get the answers we think we want, we don't really get what we need. In the course of building interesting characters, Sparks also builds a world you're both comfortable and uncomfortable in.
177. The Title of This Story by Stephanie Campisi. It's possible the world Campisi describes here is our own, post-Apocalypse. I can see this story sitting comfortably in John Joseph Adams' Wasteland anthology for that reason. It also fits in Paper Cities because ultimately the setting sets the tone. Throughout this story of Regent, the eminent Downtown "onomstician," (a person who, through means both mundane and mystical it seems, teases out the real names of objects -- and a term I wish I'd invented just for how cool it sounds), I always had half a thought on wondering how his world got the way it is -- half-drowned with society scattered and shattered into pieces. Knowledge in this world is both a coveted commodity and a dangerous thing to possess, and it certainly seems that too much knowledge can also cause the psyche to crack. I don't think "tense" is the right word for this story, but I can't quite put my finger on what the right word is.
178. The One That Got Away by Mark Teppo It's no secret that I like "stories within stories." One of the classic forms of that genre is the "club story," where a bunch of guys, usually rich and somewhat older, sit around drinking and smoking and telling each other stories. I think I was first introduced to this type of story by Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story. Teppo tweaks the convention a little bit (similar to the way Neil Gaiman has done in a couple of short stories). The club here is called The Alibi, and it is more a local dive than it is an exclusive club. Patrons come to the club to tell stories about themselves, and those stories are never the truth. The club, in my mind, has a certain light aroma of desperation even before the main action kicks in. Teppo toggles between "reality" at the bar, and a "fantasy" world in which the town park has flooded and drawn mystical creatures from the woods into it. The four friends telling stories in the bar feature in a tale of hunting a unicorn in the park. The toggling (rather than straightforwardly inserting the unicorn story in the middle of the club frame) helps build the tension as both stories progress and come to a head.
179. Alex and the Toycievers by Paul Meloy. I think it's rare for a story to leave me feeling completely on the outside of an in-joke. There are stories I don't "get" or can't follow, and there are songs that just don't work for me on whatever level. In genre anthologies, there are typically stories that are part of well-created and published worlds that I'm not familiar with. I expect all of that. And when a story leads off with a blurb explaining that is it both the first chapter of a forthcoming novel and the culmination of a series of stand-alone stories, at least I have a heads-up that I might feel lost. I think the reason I felt so outside this story was that, despite the warning, it reads like a first chapter of a novel. And by that I mean while there is building tension, there no sense of immediate resolution and not much in the way of actual character development, all of which I assume is left to later chapters of the book. I don't think I'll ever know how it all turns out because I felt too disconnected with the characters to seek out the novel.
180. Godivy by Vylar Kaftan Kudos to Kaftan for the clever title / character name. That's about the only part of the story that worked for me. There's a sort of "extreme sf / horror" strain that I just don't connect to. Warren Ellis typifies it -- the kind of story where the more shocking the image, the better. This story features a lot of outright shocks -- corporate bigwigs who maintain their power by having sex with photocopiers, "coffee whores" whose breasts feed men coffee instead of milk, etc -- that I'm sure mean something to the people who like this kind of story, but it all seems sort of forced to me. The story seems to want to say Big Things about corporate whoring mentality and how Mother Earth will overrun us all in time, but it gets lost in among the Shock Stuff.
181. Painting Haiti by Michael Jasper Although it's a completely different genre, Jasper's story felt like a companion piece to Edwidge Danticat's " Water Child." Both stories feature women who have left Haiti behind for a new start in America but who cannot seem to escape the pull of family and traditions and their past. In this story, the threat is real, palpable, and very immediate. Jasper also does a great job of contrasting the bitter cold of winter in the northeast with the main character's teenage experiences in a much hotter, but no less dangerous, climate.
182. The Funeral, Ruined by Ben Peek. The concept of the Necropolis is nothing new -- even in our own world history we've had cities devoted to the dead, and in fiction those cities usually become larger, grander, more sprawling -- sometimes more glorious, sometimes more pristine, sometimes more dangerous. The necropolis in which Peek's story takes place doesn't seem to be too dangerous (the world outside of it seems to be far more so), but you get the sense early on that the city itself is in danger. Not from natural disaster or from construction / gentrification, but from a changing society; a change the main character absolutely does not condone. You get the feeling that, as with our own world, the societal shift in question has been slow to build but that it's not far away from reaching critical mass, and at the point it does this city of the dead will be a dead thing itself. As with several other stories in this collection, this story works because the emphasis is on character, and the characters bring the city/society to life.
183. Down to the Silver Spirits by Kaaron Warren Modern suburbia finally rears its head in the collection. The suburbs had to show up sooner or later in an anthology about cities. And no story about suburbia is really a story if there's not a certain amount of suburban ennui. Thankfully, that ennui doesn't take hold until the end of the story, where it belongs and makes sense. The main portion of the story addresses the modern obsession with child-bearing as a status thing. The characters in this story, whether they admit it or not, on some level feel less-than-accomplished because the one thing they have not been able to fix is their inability to have children. A solution, in the form of a counselor/motivational speaker, presents itself. But of course, one should always be careful of what one wishes for. The introduction of the complication is a bit heavy-handed at first, but pays off towards the end.
184. They Would Only Be Roads by Darin C. Bradley This one seems to take place in the near future (or perhaps in a slightly askew present) and combines science with magic. Again, not necessarily a new conceit, but a well-played one here. The desperation of the main character to be successful really comes through, and you can tell from the opening sentences that he's a miserable loner who can't make a relationship work and can't catch the really good contracts. So he takes a job he's been warned off of by someone whose opinion he should trust, and of course it backfires. Half of the story is the build to that point, and the other half is the resolution -- there's a sort of rain-soaked slow burn to the story that works really well. I can't say either of the main characters is particularly likeable (it's just that one is more successful than the other), but perhaps that's part of the point of the story. The story feels like an anti-technology story to an extent, but I don't think that's really where the author is going; I think it's more about relying on the technology to make our decisions for us, and ignoring our own (usually correct) instincts.
185. Taser by Jenn Reese. There is nothing like the bond between a boy and his dog, whether in a rural farm setting or an urban back alley. This bond, however, between the narrator (an urban boy) and a dog (described as a demon-dog, probably not an overstatement) is not at all average and perhaps not all that laudable. Even the first sentence knocks away any chance at a nice nostalgic little "dog and his boy" story. It's dark, oh so very dark, as the dog asks the boy to do things that are unconscionable. The boy's decision is the hinge of the story, so I won't give it away. I will say (and I hope Reese intended this) that for most of the story I was somewhat convinced the boy was a classic "unreliable narrator," interpreting actual events through his own off-center perspective on the world. But the reactions of another boy in the story seem to put the lie to that line of thought. Of course, if the narrator IS insane, we can assume his description of the other boy's actions is also not completely accurate. I like stories that draw you in but still sort of keep you guessing.
186. Somnabulist by David Schwartz Interesting concept (a mysterious husband uses his sleeping wife to accomplish superhuman-ish tasks) wrapped in an interesting execution (an arch sort of narrational style where the characters are not, at least at first, called by their names but rather by their roles -- The Somnabulist, The Squirrel, etc). I liked the story, but I didn't love it. It satisfied, in terms of plot development and resolution and so on, but it didn't stick out from the crowd for me. While I liked the attempt at telling the story in a different fashion, that same attempt made it hard to emotionally connect with the main character. Yes, the husband is revealed as thoroughly unlikeable but that wasn't enough to keep me invested.
187. The Age of Fish, Post-flowers by Anna Tambour This one almost reads like "Escape from New York," only without the escape and without Snake Plissken. The narrator and her neighbors are trapped in a New York cut off from the rest of the world; originally cut off to save itself from almost alien-life forms invading from the sea, but that security seems to have died on the vine as the invasive species are discovered around town. The author does a great job of describing a totally dystopian, virtually post-collapse society that is part free-for-all and part police state. The narrator has an effective and expressive voice, but ultimately I think there's just too much squeezed into too short a space, a case where the city-building seems to overwhelm the other narrative concerns.
188. The Last Escape by Barth Anderson The story is narrated in first person, as though someone were standing in front of you telling you the story, but you never really learn anything about the narrator himself. Mostly he refers to the "We" of the citizenry, and you can attribute much of the crowd's action to himself. I love the fact that the focal point of the story is a traveling escape artist named The Scarab -- such a great pulp magazine name -- whose legend builds and builds until he is overshadowed by the arrival of another pulp trope, a Plague Ship. The story also features Crowd Mentality, wharf-side discussions and a fun mix of non-fantasy genre staples ... or does it? The dark undercurrent of the story makes it stand out from any typical escape artist, pirate, or plague ship story.
176. Sammarynda Deep by Cat Sparks. It took me a page or so to really get into this story, but that slow start more than pays off by the end with the depth of mood the author establishes. The story works for me on so many levels. The main character is absolutely a fish out of water; she's come to this port town in search of something, dropping names to get her into certain social circles in a society she doesn't really understand. As the story progresses, the mystery of why she's really there builds until the reveal sucker-punches you not just with the characters' emotions but with the understanding that even when we get the answers we think we want, we don't really get what we need. In the course of building interesting characters, Sparks also builds a world you're both comfortable and uncomfortable in.
177. The Title of This Story by Stephanie Campisi. It's possible the world Campisi describes here is our own, post-Apocalypse. I can see this story sitting comfortably in John Joseph Adams' Wasteland anthology for that reason. It also fits in Paper Cities because ultimately the setting sets the tone. Throughout this story of Regent, the eminent Downtown "onomstician," (a person who, through means both mundane and mystical it seems, teases out the real names of objects -- and a term I wish I'd invented just for how cool it sounds), I always had half a thought on wondering how his world got the way it is -- half-drowned with society scattered and shattered into pieces. Knowledge in this world is both a coveted commodity and a dangerous thing to possess, and it certainly seems that too much knowledge can also cause the psyche to crack. I don't think "tense" is the right word for this story, but I can't quite put my finger on what the right word is.
178. The One That Got Away by Mark Teppo It's no secret that I like "stories within stories." One of the classic forms of that genre is the "club story," where a bunch of guys, usually rich and somewhat older, sit around drinking and smoking and telling each other stories. I think I was first introduced to this type of story by Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story. Teppo tweaks the convention a little bit (similar to the way Neil Gaiman has done in a couple of short stories). The club here is called The Alibi, and it is more a local dive than it is an exclusive club. Patrons come to the club to tell stories about themselves, and those stories are never the truth. The club, in my mind, has a certain light aroma of desperation even before the main action kicks in. Teppo toggles between "reality" at the bar, and a "fantasy" world in which the town park has flooded and drawn mystical creatures from the woods into it. The four friends telling stories in the bar feature in a tale of hunting a unicorn in the park. The toggling (rather than straightforwardly inserting the unicorn story in the middle of the club frame) helps build the tension as both stories progress and come to a head.
179. Alex and the Toycievers by Paul Meloy. I think it's rare for a story to leave me feeling completely on the outside of an in-joke. There are stories I don't "get" or can't follow, and there are songs that just don't work for me on whatever level. In genre anthologies, there are typically stories that are part of well-created and published worlds that I'm not familiar with. I expect all of that. And when a story leads off with a blurb explaining that is it both the first chapter of a forthcoming novel and the culmination of a series of stand-alone stories, at least I have a heads-up that I might feel lost. I think the reason I felt so outside this story was that, despite the warning, it reads like a first chapter of a novel. And by that I mean while there is building tension, there no sense of immediate resolution and not much in the way of actual character development, all of which I assume is left to later chapters of the book. I don't think I'll ever know how it all turns out because I felt too disconnected with the characters to seek out the novel.
180. Godivy by Vylar Kaftan Kudos to Kaftan for the clever title / character name. That's about the only part of the story that worked for me. There's a sort of "extreme sf / horror" strain that I just don't connect to. Warren Ellis typifies it -- the kind of story where the more shocking the image, the better. This story features a lot of outright shocks -- corporate bigwigs who maintain their power by having sex with photocopiers, "coffee whores" whose breasts feed men coffee instead of milk, etc -- that I'm sure mean something to the people who like this kind of story, but it all seems sort of forced to me. The story seems to want to say Big Things about corporate whoring mentality and how Mother Earth will overrun us all in time, but it gets lost in among the Shock Stuff.
181. Painting Haiti by Michael Jasper Although it's a completely different genre, Jasper's story felt like a companion piece to Edwidge Danticat's " Water Child." Both stories feature women who have left Haiti behind for a new start in America but who cannot seem to escape the pull of family and traditions and their past. In this story, the threat is real, palpable, and very immediate. Jasper also does a great job of contrasting the bitter cold of winter in the northeast with the main character's teenage experiences in a much hotter, but no less dangerous, climate.
182. The Funeral, Ruined by Ben Peek. The concept of the Necropolis is nothing new -- even in our own world history we've had cities devoted to the dead, and in fiction those cities usually become larger, grander, more sprawling -- sometimes more glorious, sometimes more pristine, sometimes more dangerous. The necropolis in which Peek's story takes place doesn't seem to be too dangerous (the world outside of it seems to be far more so), but you get the sense early on that the city itself is in danger. Not from natural disaster or from construction / gentrification, but from a changing society; a change the main character absolutely does not condone. You get the feeling that, as with our own world, the societal shift in question has been slow to build but that it's not far away from reaching critical mass, and at the point it does this city of the dead will be a dead thing itself. As with several other stories in this collection, this story works because the emphasis is on character, and the characters bring the city/society to life.
183. Down to the Silver Spirits by Kaaron Warren Modern suburbia finally rears its head in the collection. The suburbs had to show up sooner or later in an anthology about cities. And no story about suburbia is really a story if there's not a certain amount of suburban ennui. Thankfully, that ennui doesn't take hold until the end of the story, where it belongs and makes sense. The main portion of the story addresses the modern obsession with child-bearing as a status thing. The characters in this story, whether they admit it or not, on some level feel less-than-accomplished because the one thing they have not been able to fix is their inability to have children. A solution, in the form of a counselor/motivational speaker, presents itself. But of course, one should always be careful of what one wishes for. The introduction of the complication is a bit heavy-handed at first, but pays off towards the end.
184. They Would Only Be Roads by Darin C. Bradley This one seems to take place in the near future (or perhaps in a slightly askew present) and combines science with magic. Again, not necessarily a new conceit, but a well-played one here. The desperation of the main character to be successful really comes through, and you can tell from the opening sentences that he's a miserable loner who can't make a relationship work and can't catch the really good contracts. So he takes a job he's been warned off of by someone whose opinion he should trust, and of course it backfires. Half of the story is the build to that point, and the other half is the resolution -- there's a sort of rain-soaked slow burn to the story that works really well. I can't say either of the main characters is particularly likeable (it's just that one is more successful than the other), but perhaps that's part of the point of the story. The story feels like an anti-technology story to an extent, but I don't think that's really where the author is going; I think it's more about relying on the technology to make our decisions for us, and ignoring our own (usually correct) instincts.
185. Taser by Jenn Reese. There is nothing like the bond between a boy and his dog, whether in a rural farm setting or an urban back alley. This bond, however, between the narrator (an urban boy) and a dog (described as a demon-dog, probably not an overstatement) is not at all average and perhaps not all that laudable. Even the first sentence knocks away any chance at a nice nostalgic little "dog and his boy" story. It's dark, oh so very dark, as the dog asks the boy to do things that are unconscionable. The boy's decision is the hinge of the story, so I won't give it away. I will say (and I hope Reese intended this) that for most of the story I was somewhat convinced the boy was a classic "unreliable narrator," interpreting actual events through his own off-center perspective on the world. But the reactions of another boy in the story seem to put the lie to that line of thought. Of course, if the narrator IS insane, we can assume his description of the other boy's actions is also not completely accurate. I like stories that draw you in but still sort of keep you guessing.
186. Somnabulist by David Schwartz Interesting concept (a mysterious husband uses his sleeping wife to accomplish superhuman-ish tasks) wrapped in an interesting execution (an arch sort of narrational style where the characters are not, at least at first, called by their names but rather by their roles -- The Somnabulist, The Squirrel, etc). I liked the story, but I didn't love it. It satisfied, in terms of plot development and resolution and so on, but it didn't stick out from the crowd for me. While I liked the attempt at telling the story in a different fashion, that same attempt made it hard to emotionally connect with the main character. Yes, the husband is revealed as thoroughly unlikeable but that wasn't enough to keep me invested.
187. The Age of Fish, Post-flowers by Anna Tambour This one almost reads like "Escape from New York," only without the escape and without Snake Plissken. The narrator and her neighbors are trapped in a New York cut off from the rest of the world; originally cut off to save itself from almost alien-life forms invading from the sea, but that security seems to have died on the vine as the invasive species are discovered around town. The author does a great job of describing a totally dystopian, virtually post-collapse society that is part free-for-all and part police state. The narrator has an effective and expressive voice, but ultimately I think there's just too much squeezed into too short a space, a case where the city-building seems to overwhelm the other narrative concerns.
188. The Last Escape by Barth Anderson The story is narrated in first person, as though someone were standing in front of you telling you the story, but you never really learn anything about the narrator himself. Mostly he refers to the "We" of the citizenry, and you can attribute much of the crowd's action to himself. I love the fact that the focal point of the story is a traveling escape artist named The Scarab -- such a great pulp magazine name -- whose legend builds and builds until he is overshadowed by the arrival of another pulp trope, a Plague Ship. The story also features Crowd Mentality, wharf-side discussions and a fun mix of non-fantasy genre staples ... or does it? The dark undercurrent of the story makes it stand out from any typical escape artist, pirate, or plague ship story.