SHORT STORY REX March 2023
Christopher O'Halloran, Robert López, Paula D Ashe, J Billings and more
1. “At the Bottom of the Burlap”, Christopher O’Halloran
The latest issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly kicks off with this little gem from Christopher O'Halloran. The story is written in second-person pov, so before we get into it, let me get something off my chest *takes deep breath*
I always found the aversion to 2nd-person pov odd. The most common objection I’ve seen stated is that its an obstacle to suspension of disbelief ie, a reader sees the sentence, I dont know "Youre in a hospital waiting room" and their immediate reaction is "psh no im not, this is dumb, im out" but by the same token, one could just as well read a fairytale in third person pov that starts "Once upon a time there was a dragon" and go "psh, no there wasn't, this is dumb" etc, and the reaction would be just as silly imo.
I could go on but anyway 2nd pers pov seems popular in horror because of its potential for dread, for inevitability: “YOU are doing this whether YOU like it or not and how fucked is that?” And this, I think, is the dynamic at work in this story.
It’s a straight-up horror story of fathers and sons, of friends and enemies, of fences and neighbors, and also features one of the most uncanny, if not *the* most uncanny ice cream scoops ever depicted in all the annals of short fiction and that alone is worth your time and attention dont you think?
2. “Tax Returns,” Robert Lopez
This story chanced across my timeline a couple weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. I love the use of repetition, that weird obsessive quality one associates with like, a villanelle, but there’s a line of corrupted code in the file, a mutation with every iteration.
It begins: "It was yesterday when they shot him in front of his home," and then four paragraphs later: "It was one hundred years ago when they shot him yesterday outside his home in New York City". Workaday routine explodes into violence, community and alienation yin-yang in opposition, spiraling subtly inward. A short, vertiginous read.
3. “The Ladies Room,” Paula D. Ashe
Very late to the party but the 2023 Black Women in Horror Magazine was my introduction to the work of Paula D. Ashe, the leadoff story entitled “The Ladies Room”.
Remarkable how it takes a concept one typically thinks of as, like, fodder for an 80s stand-up routine—“So why do chicks always go to the bathroom in pairs?”—and transforms it into a locus of terror and loathing
Without wanting to spoil it too much, its one of those stories that takes an early left turn tonally and stylistically that’s at once both so subtle and so sharp that the effect is viscerally unsettling, a fascinating trick
Girlboss revenge overkill, demonic possession, whatever’s going on, it’s a bad time (complimentary), and there is more where that came from (I already copped mine).
4. 'Someone Coughs in the Darkness', J. Billings
I loved this story from ergot. It starts with a finger inside a condom and progresses from there, you take the finger on a road trip to Oracle, Arizona but who is doing the taking?
Another second-person story this month, though I don’t remember seeing the word ‘you’ more than a handful of times, it’s like there’s a black hole in my memory where the word ‘you’ used to be
There's barely any nexus of POV to speak of, more like an inventory of uncanny sensations and objects, a bombardment of noun phrases and voices speaking to us (to me?) in riddle and prophecy.
Other short story rex
I recently picked up a copy of Tender by Sofia Samatar, which is amazing and I’m enjoying revisiting some of her stories that I’d read before (like “A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals” or “An Account of the Land of the Witches”) as well as reading others new to me, notably “Honey Bear” or the incredible “How to Get Back to the Forest”), can’t recommend it highly enough
Speaking of great SFF short stories of decades past, I was prompted by an episode of the Podside Picnic podcast to check out “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” by Kij Johnson, an example of speculative fiction intersecting with/incorporating folklore far more convincingly what one often sees these days
Aaand speaking of Podside Picnic (and speaking of speculative fiction intersecting with/incorporating folklore), host Karlo Yeager Rodriguez recently made his novelette “As the Shore to the Tides, So Blood Calls to Blood” available as an ebook on itch.io, billed as a “shadowed tale of brothers, blood magic, and bad blood”. It’s a sweeping subversion of the chosen-one narrative that doesn’t jump up and down and go “hey look at me everybody i’m subverting the chosen one narrative.” And dammit, just look at that cover for god’s sakes, look at it
Not-short story rec: Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
I read this book once before, my entire adult life ago, and its been so long and I remember so little I might as well be reading it for the first time. Or rather, I am a completely different person from the one who first read it, either way it feels like an appropriate predicament for reading this classic: returning to a city one has no memory of ever having visited.
I’m not crazy about the cover art on my copy (a more recent edition) so I did a google image search of the one I’d read before, which I remember being black with silver art and lettering (the same font as pictured above, also not from my copy, sidenote: can we please go back to a time when display fonts were commonly as extra as this font it). But I couldn’t find it. Maybe the edition I thought I read never existed, which again feels pretty appropriate.
This book is delightful and is also full of delights, which I submit are two different things. “Delightful”, to me, connotes if not frivolity a certain jollity, a leaning back and going “Ho ho, isn’t this grand?” whereas “full of delights” suggests something else, something more sensuous, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a panoply of stimuli meant to provoke pleasure and, as I say, this book is both things. It’s utterly fanciful and deeply truthful. If you’re the type of person who’d like Invisible Cities you’ve likely already read Invisibile Cities. but if you haven’t: read Invisibile Cities.
