SHORT STORY REX July 2024
jfc is this month over already
1. “Saurophaster in Oculus”, JF Gleeson
Surprise, surprise, another story from ergot.! This one messes around with all sorts of povs and forms, dipping into epistolary, bare unmarked dialogue, etc before the closing lyrical explosion, all in service of that good, dread-inducing creepy shit. having had to visit Urgent Care once due to some bit of crap that got stuck in my eye, i felt this one
2. “Memories of Europa”, Aaron Thorpe
I loved how this story from back in April in Apocalypse Confidential fulfills that classic sf duty of “telling stories about the future to comment on our present” and how it does so in such fitting fashion, using the wonder of first contact as a window onto how the promise of the future has a strange way of folding back onto the mistakes and hurts of the past. Cinematic in a good way, a dreamy, water-logged way
3. ”Commander Boomerang’s Day at the Dentist”, Lee Pearson
Just what it says on the tin, or at least at first it is. the titular commander visits the titular dentist’s office but all is not as it seems. Hi-tech weaponry is engaged, assholes are flexed, top-secret communications rendered in “morse pig-Latin”:
The captain takes my hand and shakes it eagerly. “..- - -... .- -.-- / .. -.-- .- -.-- / --- ..- --. .... - .... .- -.-- / --- ..- -.-- .- -.-- / .. . -.. -.. .- -.-- / . . - .... .-. .- -.-- / . .- .-. ... -.-- .- -.-- / .- --. --- -.-- .- -.-- / .. -. -.-- .- -.-- / .- - - .... .- -.-- / .. .-. . ..-. .- -.-- / .. -. -.-- .- -.-- / . .-. .-.. .. -. -... .- -. !”
“Not quite. It’ll take a lot more than some German gimp with a bazooka for an arm to kill me, Captain […].”
I wasn’t really seeking it out but lately this sort of fucking around with action-novel/spy-yarn convention has my number (see Not-short story rec below). Author Lee Pearson is working in a comedic vein here reminiscent of Mark Leyner or such classics of the bizarro subgenre (y’all remember ‘bizarro’?) as Bradley Sands’s Rico Suede Will Fucking Kill You. I’d be remiss not to mention that Pearson also, as his bio notes, "has been ineptly running God's Cruel Joke literary magazine since late 2022”, which if you’ve never read before you should!1
4. “An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried”, Debbie Urbanski
Now that social media (okay, Twitter mainly) has become near impracticable and/or a drag for various reasons (ranging from “not working like it used to” to “being clogged with toxic horseshit”), i am finding it harder and harder to keep up with my little short stories the way I’d like to. Perhaps that's what prompted me to suddenly wonder one morning whilst eating my toast, “i wonder what Debbie Urbanski’s up to”
For those unfamiliar Urbanski is a writer whose work is just as likely to appear in, say, The Kenyon Review or Gulf Coast as it is in Lightspeed or Strange Horizons. An enviable space to be working in, if you ask me! I didn’t want to interrogate this bolt from the blue any further, and so in my fit of anti-socmed web-browsing I navigated directly to her website and began reading stories of hers I’d missed. I could recommend any number of pieces (and will, in fact—check out “When They Came to Us” in The Sun, the first i ever read of hers, or “How To Remain Safe During A Conversation If You’re Somebody’s Wife” in Uncharted) but on the day in question I landed on this deceptively simple story.
I don’t wanna give away too much but it starts like so:
Human extinction.
The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus.
The no-child laws.
The launching of the Colony into space, no final destination in mind, for those able to afford the journey.
Retraction of health care services for the ill and/or “undesirables.”
Resurgence of prayer.
The litany continues in reverse chronological order, and the farther it goes, the closer we get to the present day and the clearer it becomes how wholly inadequate our response to the present existential threat has been and is, all the more horrific for the familiar mundanity of it all. It’s really something.
Also, I learned Urbanski had a novel out last year entitled After World, which is yet another one I’ll have to add to the list
Not-short story rec: Dr. No, Percival Everett
Finally got my hands on my first Everett novel, a writer I’d been meaning to read for a long while. A very ‘meta’ story about a math professor roped into an African American billionaire's scheme to harness the power of Nothing to become a Bond villain. And even in this kind of silly James Bond parody book, it's clear Everett is a master of the form.
Dr. No manages to take a lot of broad, Austin Powers-level comedic moves (damn funny in spots, ngl) but also folds in some philosophical hijinks and a critique of race in US media and historiography, without sacrificing a whit of propulsive-pageturner energy. I finished this book in like, three sittings which for me is fucking unheard of
Not-a-story rec: Infinite Danger
I might be tenpted to say this podcast reminds me of Garrison Keillor—that is, if instead of soporific nostalgia for a mythologized mid-century American Midwest, Keillor’s programs dealt with an obscure Canadian TV series from the 1980s which may or may not have grown from humble beginnings to fully conquer all of global pop culture 40-some-odd seasons later.
The only problem with that comparison is that i have never actually heard Garrison Keillor, only heard of him secondhand via impressions and parodies. But that actually may not be a problem when it comes to Infinite Danger.
After all I, like most people in our timeline, have never even seen Danger Bay, and that fact is not the least bit relevant to my enjoyment of Infinite Danger. On the contrary. The dryness of the humor, the unflappable delivery, and some first-rate sound design make for a listening experience that is inviting, weirdly chill, and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. And i know this isnt Podcast Rex, but the intro to episode 2 (pretty much all the intro bits, actually) is Literature, to me