Evil Has Many Forms!
Review of The Four ??? of the Apocalypse and Others
Because few things are more evil than a pony. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a black one…
Review: FIYAH 25
This issue leans into horror…the one real exception is “We Grew Tall and Strong by the Water,” which is a ghost story. The other three stories – “A Small Bloody Gift,” “Tet Fe Mal,” and “The Plaster” are all about blood, and two of them are about blood sacrifice.
I assume the editors did this on purpose. There’s also three poems and two articles – one about African magical realism and the other about the afrofuturism in Cyberpunk 2077.
Solid, but there’s a lot of blood in this issue, you have been warned.
Review: FIYAH 26
Four stories – and I liked the first and the last the best. The issue opens with M.H. Ayinde’s hilarious “Night of the Living Spa Weekend” and ends with Eboni J. Dunbar’s lovely fantasy “Spell For Grief and Longing” in which a root worker gives her client what he needs, not what he wants. “Homo Minimalensis” by Tasha Schumann reminded me why I never use glue traps.
The non-fiction article (there was only one) was a good explanation of the Abiku myth for non Yoruba and I appreciated it.
Review: FIYAH 27: Carnival
This themed issue contains just four (longer) short stories, one of which crosses over barely into novelette territory. All were good, with my favorite a tie between the novelette, “Sentience” (SF horror) by Nkone Chaka, and “Capsule of Souls” by Dexter F.I. Joseph, which is about love and sacrifice. I liked the two darker ones better, which probably says something about me.
Review: FIYAH 28: Belonging
A more abstract theme produced some truly awesome stories. My favorite was “Knoxmarion Burning” by Erin Brown, in which a group of ethnic minority boys are chosen to integrate the snooty, haunted magic school. Bad things happen. It reminds me of that image of the little Black girl with the police escort. But I also really loved “Akabore Be Quiet” by Bryan Adaare, about two boys who have to hunt monsters to become men…but their battles aren’t what you expect. Beautiful stories, all, and some lovely poetry too. I think it was the best issue of the year.
Review: The Four ???? Of The Apocalypse ed. Keith DeCandido and Wrenn Simms
I’m slightly mad I wasn’t invited to join in on this one. Most of my friends were! Which is the disclaimer here.
I enjoyed this, a lot. The stories range from horror to humor to, well, both (Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore’s “Prepocalypse Now” is genuinely horrific and also mocks Florida Man).
Mary Fan has clearly tried to get musicians to work together in “The Four Opera Singers of the Apocalypse.” I also really loved “Live, Laugh, Apocalypse: A Tale of the Four Karens of the Apocalypse” by Patrick Thomas.
There isn’t a bad story in this anthology…and it’s 350 pages per my ebook reader, so that’s pretty impressive. Kudos friends, you did a good one.
Review: Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups ed. Jonathan Maberry and Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is a tie-in anthology. Sort of. The authors were tasked to write team-ups between two or three public domain characters that don’t normally belong together. So we have Van Helsing fighting Medusa, Frankeinstein having a run-in with Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus.
Most of the stories were enjoyable as what they were…pulp stories by authors who were just playing with combinations. I particularly liked Bast, Sekhmet, and Fenris fighting Quetzalcoatl and Smoking Mirror, even if it did have a bit of a colonial problem there in “The Serpentine Schemes of Sibling Strife” by Ben H. Rose. I also liked “Plants And Animals” by Scott Sigler.
It’s entertaining, not great literature but exactly what you would expect from the premise.
Short Fiction
Planetesimal by Marisca Pichette (Small Wonders)
What if meteorites were alive? And you could rehab them and send them back into space? Pretty.
Time Zone: A Story of the Future by John Walters (Astaria Books)
Much better than his telepathy stories, this story is about gambling. It’s about addiction. It’s also about slowing down and doing something different…which kind of dilutes the addiction message.
As somebody at high risk of gambling addiction, I’d actually rather it had been more about that.
Slow Time Between The Stars by John Scalzi (Amazon Original Stories)
…dang. Humanity builds a starship to colonize a planet and be mother/father to new humans. The starship is sentient, because how else can it make the right decision.
Which it does. Snag is, it’s not the decision humanity wanted… When Scalzi goes serious, he goes serious. Not what you’d normally expect from him, but brilliant nonetheless.
The Key Turns Once and Once Only by Brian Hugenbruch (ZNB Presents)
Superstitious people are superstitious. A word is being destroyed by a global fire (Not quite sure I buy the science), and a stranger comes with a door to rescue everyone.
She gets only a few because, well, people think she’s a witch, a devil…exactly how people would react.
Labyrinthine by Michael Bailey (Never Wake)
Surreal horror written very poetically, but I found the prose got in the way of the story some. Your mileage may vary.
We Are A Little Hotel by Ai Jiang (Interzone)
I normally love Jiang’s work, but found this one a little opaque…I could tell there was some point there about hotel staff and how we treat them, but this one slightly missed for me.
Your Ballad From Within His Gourd by Ai Jiang (Monster Lairs Anthology)
A young woman born to be a demon hunter discovers her mother is a demon. (More specifically, a kitsune). And she finds that her father trapped her mother in his gourd.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but ultimately she makes the wrong choice (IMO), and that’s the power in the story.
Mazu – Goddess of the Sea by Ai Jiang (Horror Library)
Being in love with the sea when you’re a sailor is not a good thing. Really, no, it’s not.