SHORT STORY REX sep 2023

Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, June Martin and not one but two Thomases (Ha and Ligotti)

1. “Up in the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter, Deep in the Ground”, Karlo Yeager Rodríguez

Once more I am psyched to see a praiseworthy story out there in the world, specifically this one from Strange Horizon’s Childbearing Special Issue that came out in late July.

After you’ve read it, this interview with Karlo by Ivy Grimes is thoughtfully done and illuminating, and this review at tor.com goes very deep into the backstory behind this updated version of the Grimms' fairytale "The Juniper Tree", specifically the nightmarish episode in Puerto Rican history that is "la operación"

All this is rendered in writing that is earnest and heartfelt and worldly-wise without ever falling into or even skirting close to corniness, and is unafraid to lay bare dark truths about human nature and human institutions

2. “9/11 Was the 9/11 of Stories About 9/11 but This Story Is the 9/11 of Them Being Terrible”, June Martin

Dont't be misled by what the title might appear to imply, this story is not terrible, quite the opposite imo:

At this point its not callous or even controversial, I don’t think, to point out how mass media's repeated electronic reproduction of the Twin Towers falling led to a collective desensitization towards same, and similarly social media's annual rehashing of 9/11 discourse and memes etc has drained said event of much of its impact and meaning.

This story holds a mirror up to our present predicament regarding 9/11, positing an infinitely large city where plane after plane crash into tower after tower and no one can stop it or even understand it. Not for nothing June is the self-styled "worlds greatest writer".

3. “Window Boy”, Thomas Ha

Been seing Thomas Ha's name pop up several times recently and i hope it continues to pop up more in the future cause this story from the August issue of Clarkesworld is really good.

Classically dystopian SF told in fitting economical style, very much informed by the pandemic: a world where work-from-home luxury contrasts with the squalor just on the other side of a screen-mediated existence, a world that exacts a unequal toll from the children on either side of the divide. And it’s telling how, in a story where screens dominate, where they actively filter what the characters can see, the real horror takes place "offscreen", that is, offstage where not even the reader can see.

The worldbuilding also is expertly done, how the puzzle pieces--the Mailmen, the grackles--shift their positions and change their shapes as the story progresses. Anyway, i look forward to reading more from Ha very soon

4. “The Clown Puppet” and “Teatro Grottesco”, Thomas Ligotti

I was not able to bring back as many books on my trip back from the States as I would have liked, but I did snag a copy of Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti. I was a relative newcomer to Ligotti, having only read two stories ("The Red Tower" and "Mrs Rinaldi's Angel") prior to this collection, and was very eager to crack it open.

Unsurprisingly, I adore it. Ligotti's prose most often consists of these long strings of precisely interlocking clauses and sentences and paragraphs that border on the labyrinthine, but all the while he's holding your hand, patiently and laboriously explaining, and his technique of persistently repeating phrases and keywords has this effect that’s like when you're lost and go "wait, haven't we passed by here several times already?" and before you know it, he's led you somewhere you didn't know you were headed to but where you should have always known you were going to end up.

I love "The Clown Puppet", the faint ridiculousness of this walking nightmare where the key word is "nonsense" (most often, "outrageous nonsense"). I'm reminded of Franz Kafka, twentieth-century literature's icon of alienation, anxiety, and gloom, describing himself in a letter as a "great laugher", and I cant help but imagine Ligotti (another paragon of literary gloom) seated at the keyboard composing "The Clown Puppet" and giggling uncontrollably every time he types the word pantaloon (which, again, is repeated numerous times).

"Teatro Grottesco", meanwhile, concerns our narrator, "a writer of nihilistic prose", and his obsession with the titular troupe (or perhaps ‘organization’ is the word) which exerts an uncanny influence on the lives of his cohorts in the 'artistic underworld'. The story seems to examine the phenomenon of writer's block, or of a friend or colleague deciding to abandon their artistic vocation altogether. (Most of us have known or witnessed such cases, or have been such cases ourselves.) Ligotti takes up this languishing and/or death of the creative impulse and elevates that malaise to the point of existential terror.

If "The Clown Puppet" is about a protagonist of a horror story who is absolutely enervated by the idea that he must go on being a horror story protagonist, "Teatro Grottesco" tells the story of a horror writer quietly horrified to discover his own story is coming to an end. I read the end of this story on the metro and when i finished i closed the book and said out loud: "holy shit", and if youre a writer and you elicit that response from a reader, well, congratulations

Not-story rex: Prince and Big Black

Recently I saw not one but two people boldly admit that they didnt like Prince. As the little man himself said, “Does not compute/ Something wrong with you".

This triggered a weeks-long Prince obsession that, for whatever reason, found me mainly fixated (in the early stage of the spiral, at least) on the demo version of “Do Yourself a Favor”. God damn i love it so much.

(Jesse Johnson’s version is also quite charming, though it lacks the raw magic of the Prince demo imo.)

In the interest of fairness and balance, I feel I should also include a link to this song, which was my introduction to the oeuvre of Steve Albini when a friend put it on a mixtape for me back in the eighth grade.

Fuck it, gonna link this one as well as it’s too good not too. (Just kind of ignore the band name and concentrate on how goddamn insane Rey Washam’s drumming and the time change at 2:10 is.)