Friday short fiction #23: the 2011 storySouth Million Writers Award, part 1
Neal Gillis Stacked 2009
After a few delays the ten finalists for the 2011 storySouth Million Writers Award are up. The award is given by popular vote for the best short story that first appeared on the internet in 2010. As I've already read and commented on the two that were also Nebula finalists (Adam Troy Castro's 'Arvies' and Amal El-Mothar's 'The Green Book') I've looked at four this week and will look at the remaining four next.
Daphne Buter, 'Hell Dogs' (FRIGG MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2010)
New Weird is alive and well and living in Holland... What an attractive oddball this is: a large woman wants to become an Amsterdam postman complete with bright red uniform, and the one blight on her daily route is the pack of genetically engineered dogs that threaten to devour her whenever she tries to deliver mail to a particular house. There's a meta-twist to the end that I still haven't quite got my head around, but otherwise I admire this story no end.
Roxane Gay, 'Do You Have a Place For Me' (SPORK PRESS, 24 MAY 2010)
Stories written in the future tense are few enough and far between, and while it can be a gimmick the plot and setting need to somehow echo the tense to have any positive bearing on the story's success. This one works well: a sensitive piece of lesbian fiction in which the tense is used to imagine what will happen as well as emphasise the narrator's anticipation. Roxane Gay is a name I'm beginning to see in good places (McSweeney's included); I've read quite a few of her stories now, and none have disappointed.
Spencer Kealamakia, 'Here is David, the Greatest of Descendants' (ANDERBO.COM, 2010)
A boy growing up in an apartment block in Hawaii with his disintegrating family struggles to keep himself together, and the religious dimensions that are intruding on his life don't help him much (bound up with his folklore belief in the night marchers), nor does his comic book fantasy life. This understated story took me somewhere interesting and gave me a viewpoint on the kind of life the boy must be experiencing, but after finishing I felt I'd perhaps overlooked something important that would give the ending a more rounded resolution, as it seems to leave both the boy and the reader hanging.
Eric Maroney, 'The Incorrupt Body of Carlo Busso' (ECLECTICA.ORG, JULY-AUGUST 2010)
A teenager dies on the streets of Rome in 1990 but his body somehow becomes divine after death, and the present-day response to the discovery of his perfect remains differs markedly from what it would have been just decades before. Says author Maroney: "This story was inspired by the changing responses to the repeated re-emergence of an older element of a culture. We see this in cultures of every time, place, and religion, all over the globe." It's an interesting theme for a story and Maroney has embedded it in some sufficiently well-observed Italian/Catholic attitudes, but to work properly I felt the ending needed more fleshing out and would have benefited from being less hurried in order to get the point across without the above explanation. But otherwise, yes, nice one.
Favourite short story of the week: China Miéville, 'Covehithe' (THE GUARDIAN, 22 APRIL 2011)
The last of eight stories The Guardian commissioned on the theme of oil (and I'll certainly be reading the rest). This is trademark Miéville, with things emerging Godzilla-like from the sea in a melancholy, post-industrial lament. If this appears in Miéville's next collection of short fiction it may well turn out to be a highlight as it's fantastically visual.