Category: Short Fiction

Stephen Bacon, ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’ (2010)

7th December 2010 / / 1 Comment

In 1938, young Scot Tullis’s family are on a motoring holiday in Germany when their car breaks down. Scot falls asleep, and wakes to find that his parents have disappeared; going off in search of them, he instead finds a house inhabited by an old man and his seven children, and full of strange toys. The old man offers Scot a place to stay; the days turn into months, with no sign of Scot’s parents. I like the idea of this story, but it doesn’t quite flourish for me in practice, as the prose doesn’t reach the level of texture and atmosphere for which it seems to be aiming.

Rating: ***

Cameron Pierce, ‘Broom People’ (2010)

6th December 2010 / / 1 Comment

The newly-single narrator  opens his dresser-drawer to find a tiny wooden girl who announces herself as ‘a broom…come to clean the cobwebs.’ Oh, but our man doesn’t know the half of it. This story is wonderfully creepy and odd, and leaves one guessing just what’s going to happen up to the very end.

Rating: ***½

Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’ (2010)

1st December 2010 / / 1 Comment

An artist recalls his friendship with an aristocratic photographer, and recounts the tragic fate of the model who became his friend’s chief subject. The object of fear in this story is nothingness, and ‘being nobody’; there’s also a subtext of people being driven to destruction by others in the pursuit of fame or success. It’s interesting as it goes along, but I never really felt the emotions underpinning the tale.

Rating: ***

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ‘Icarus Above…’ (2010)

27th November 2010 / / 1 Comment

Like ‘Apotheosis’. this story draws very much on its context, though in a very different way, as Pulver makes use of not only the title of Null Immortalis, but also the name of its publisher and the wind-turbine imagery on the book’s jacket. So, the assemblage of eight turbines becomes ‘the Null Immortalis of Megazanthus’, which a young Scott Tullis sees at the age of eight. He is immediatley drawn to it as a symbol of the wind (he’s also saving up for a kite), but the Null Immortalis will cast a long shadow over his life and family.

Pulver’s prose is oblique and fragmentary, making for a dense four pages. I didn’t grasp everything about ‘Icarus Above…’, but I do appreciate its singular atmosphere and the rush of its telling.

Rating: ***½

Richard Gavin, ‘Only Enuma Elish’ (2010)

24th November 2010 / / 1 Comment

A man’s elderly neighbour believes herself to be the incarnation of the Babylonian goddess Tiamat; there are tragic consequences. This story hinges on the question of whether the old woman is correct; the trouble is that character names and other surface details force us into making a particular interpretation, but there’s no true sense of otherness at the heart of the tale. Furthermore, the story brings in a very real natural disaster, in a way that I find frankly distasteful.

Rating: **

Mike Chinn, ‘A Matter of Degree’ (2010)

18th November 2010 / / 1 Comment

The Scott Tullis of Chinn’s tale has invented a set of highly effective suction cups, and uses them to cross a suspension bridge, in a bid to obtain ‘immortality, of a sort’. He gets his wish, though not necessarily in the way he intended. ‘A Matter of Degree’ is crisply told, and its ending raises a wry smile — good stuff.

Rating: ***½

Margaret B. Simon, ‘Troot’ (2010)

17th November 2010 /

In the aftermath of a future war, a woman approaches narrator Tullis, asking for the ‘troot’ (truth) of what happened to her daughter. Truth being a rare commodity in his world, Tullis must decide whether to reveal what he knows. Simon sketches her future efficiently (the story is only three pages long), but ultimately I feel that the prose doesn’t have enough density to compensate for the brevity of the piece.

Rating: ***

Derek John, ‘Oblivion’ (2010)

14th November 2010 / / 2 Comments

‘It is Tuesday the 43rd of March and I have hanged myself.’

So begins the narrator of ‘Oblivion’, as he relates how he tried to take his own life, but finds himself still alive, dangling from a tree. The story then goes backl to uncover how our man ended up in that situation; he was an antiquarian investigating the Tullis family, whose gravestones suggest remarkable longevity, and sometimes bear impossible dates. John’s explanation for all this is intriguing, and its consequences within the story bring a shiver to the spine; but the prose is frequently overstuffed (e.g. ‘the bizarre dates on the stones were beyond any conjecture I could fashion – their mystery stood impenetrably obscure like hieroglyphs from a forgotten language’), which reduces the impact of the tale as a whole.

Rating: ***

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