Three pages in the mind of a man in front of a firing squad: short but intense. A superbly pitched voice, and very effective ending.
Rating: ***½
Category: Short Fiction
Rachel Kendall, ‘Holesale’ (2010)
The short tale of a market trader selling handy portable holes leading to a pocket dimension that can be used for storage. This is a bit of a shaggy-dog story, but it’s fun and does its job well.
Rating: ***½
Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’ (2010)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
‘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: ***
Opening The Portal
This weekend saw the launch of The Portal, a new website reviewing sf, fantasy and horror short fiction –both Anglophone and non. Besides its intrinsic interest, the site is relevant to my blog because I’m one of the contributors.
My first review for The Portal is of the September issue of the webzine Ideomancer, covering stories by Catherine Krahe, Lenora Rose, and Sandra Odell. The review is here, and the issue of Ideomancer under discussion is here.
Gary Fry, ‘Strings Attached’ (2010)
Fifty-something Tullis travels to the seaside town where he plans to open his own burger bar; there’s just the little problem of the locals not being too happy about it — and the nagging feeling of a childhood memory just out of reach, which points to something rather disturbing about the theatre annexe that Tullis has bought.
Over the course of these Null Immortalis posts, I’ve talked a couple of times about stories whose elements I’d wish cohered a little more than they do. ‘Strings Attached’ is the opposite: a tale which is all the stronger because its elements don’t quite cohere. Fry hints at something dark, then suggests an explanation; but the events of the story don’t support that explanation fully — and there’s a sense that what’s happening here will not submit to any straightforward analysis, whcih makes the story all the more unsettling.
Rating: ***½
Elsewhere
Gary Fry’s website
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