Good reading
I've been reading my way through Strange Horizons magazine. So far, I'm very taken with two stories:
"Cory's Father", Francesca Forrest. Strange and sad, managing in a brief tale to hint at a world beyond what it tells. It uses a concept I particularly enjoy, setting off the supernatural and otherworldly with concrete real-world details and a child's straightforward voice as narrator. I think of Forrest's stories as New England mythology--I've never seen another writer who had such a vivid grasp of the way the woods and countryside can seem otherworldly, even among the most everyday trappings.
Around that time, I remember Mom always used to stand in the door in the evening and look across Route 9, and her eyes weren't seeing the gas station or the package store or the hair salon. She was watching the border between here and there rippling closer. The border comes rolling in like the shadow of a cloud moving across the land. It feels like the air before a thunderstorm, and it smells like sweet fern.
"The Mad Scientist's Daughter", by Theodora Goss. (It's in two parts, with the link at the bottom of the first half.) This hit me squarely in my love for the characters and narrative tropes of mad science, and the overlapping genres of nineteenth-century SF/horror/fantasy. sovay and joannesopercook , I think you would particularly get a kick out of this.
In London, we formed a club. It's very exclusive. There are only six members. Five of us live on the premises. Helen, who is married, lives in Bloomsbury, but she comes to have dinner with us twice a week. We need each other. None of us has sisters, except Mary and Diana in a way, so we take the place of sisters for each other. Who else could share or sympathize with our experiences?
(I'm all the more pleasantly surprised, as I had sorely underestimated Theodora Goss. Before now, whenever I encountered her short stories, it was usually in the same magazine with dull, unimaginative retellings of fairy tales.
*mounts soapbox*
You know how the fad for postmodern fairy-tale writing got really big about fifteen years ago, and has been going strong ever since? A thousand fatheaded writers flooded the world with necrophiliac Prince Charmings, wolves on motorcycles, and ill-used young women with rose tattoos. I find almost all such fiction to be lazy writing. Oh, some stuff I like came out of the movement, I'll admit. And some predated the movement--Tanith Lee's "Red as Blood" combined the Snow White story with vampire folklore long before Neil Gaiman ever got his hands on it, and for my money she did a much better job. Anyhow, like any artistic movement, postmodern fairy-tale writing is mostly done by unskilled bandwagon-jumpers.
*descends and has a glass of water*
I'd never bothered to read Goss properly, because her stories tend to have titles like "The Rose in Twelve Petals", and I would think, "Another friggin' Beauty and the Beast," and turn the page. Well, after liking "Mad Scientist's Daughter", I checked out a book of her short stories from the library. I'm happy to report that I was completely wrong about her. Come to find out, Goss is a very good writer--witty, suble, and an excellent storyteller. And when she does do a riff on a classic fairy tale, she's imaginative enough to make it original. I'll definitely seek her stories out in future. What a lovely surprise!)
"Cory's Father", Francesca Forrest. Strange and sad, managing in a brief tale to hint at a world beyond what it tells. It uses a concept I particularly enjoy, setting off the supernatural and otherworldly with concrete real-world details and a child's straightforward voice as narrator. I think of Forrest's stories as New England mythology--I've never seen another writer who had such a vivid grasp of the way the woods and countryside can seem otherworldly, even among the most everyday trappings.
Around that time, I remember Mom always used to stand in the door in the evening and look across Route 9, and her eyes weren't seeing the gas station or the package store or the hair salon. She was watching the border between here and there rippling closer. The border comes rolling in like the shadow of a cloud moving across the land. It feels like the air before a thunderstorm, and it smells like sweet fern.
"The Mad Scientist's Daughter", by Theodora Goss. (It's in two parts, with the link at the bottom of the first half.) This hit me squarely in my love for the characters and narrative tropes of mad science, and the overlapping genres of nineteenth-century SF/horror/fantasy. sovay and joannesopercook , I think you would particularly get a kick out of this.
In London, we formed a club. It's very exclusive. There are only six members. Five of us live on the premises. Helen, who is married, lives in Bloomsbury, but she comes to have dinner with us twice a week. We need each other. None of us has sisters, except Mary and Diana in a way, so we take the place of sisters for each other. Who else could share or sympathize with our experiences?
(I'm all the more pleasantly surprised, as I had sorely underestimated Theodora Goss. Before now, whenever I encountered her short stories, it was usually in the same magazine with dull, unimaginative retellings of fairy tales.
*mounts soapbox*
You know how the fad for postmodern fairy-tale writing got really big about fifteen years ago, and has been going strong ever since? A thousand fatheaded writers flooded the world with necrophiliac Prince Charmings, wolves on motorcycles, and ill-used young women with rose tattoos. I find almost all such fiction to be lazy writing. Oh, some stuff I like came out of the movement, I'll admit. And some predated the movement--Tanith Lee's "Red as Blood" combined the Snow White story with vampire folklore long before Neil Gaiman ever got his hands on it, and for my money she did a much better job. Anyhow, like any artistic movement, postmodern fairy-tale writing is mostly done by unskilled bandwagon-jumpers.
*descends and has a glass of water*
I'd never bothered to read Goss properly, because her stories tend to have titles like "The Rose in Twelve Petals", and I would think, "Another friggin' Beauty and the Beast," and turn the page. Well, after liking "Mad Scientist's Daughter", I checked out a book of her short stories from the library. I'm happy to report that I was completely wrong about her. Come to find out, Goss is a very good writer--witty, suble, and an excellent storyteller. And when she does do a riff on a classic fairy tale, she's imaginative enough to make it original. I'll definitely seek her stories out in future. What a lovely surprise!)