Category: Short Fiction

Gary Fry, ‘Strings Attached’ (2010)

10th October 2010 / / 1 Comment

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

Tony Lovell, ‘The Shell’ (2010)

6th October 2010 / / 1 Comment

Stephen Peters is troubled by vivid dreams of a life he doesn’t recognise with an old woman who is apparently his wife; though she’s not his actual wife, Carla, with whom he’s about to go on holiday in the hope that he can relax for a change. But the cares of life are still nagging at him; and those dreams aren’t going away, either. Lovell’s prose flows nicely, but I don’t think the two strands of the story mesh together as strongly as they might.

Rating: ***½

Tim Casson, ‘The Scream’ (2010)

1st October 2010 / / 1 Comment

An estate agent finds that people who were once close now seem to be distancing themselves from him, at the same time as a painful growth has appeared on his neck (yet apparently no one else can see it), and he’s showing properties to a mysterious stranger who sells remarkably popular kebabs. These disparate elements are, it seems, connected; but in ways I can’t quite piece together in my mind — though I’ve thought the story over, its parts won’t coalesce into a satisfying conception of “what’s going on”. So, for me, ‘The Scream’ has some interesting ideas, but is less successful as a whole.

Rating: ***

Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’ (2010)

24th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

A publisher rejects the manuscript of a struggling writer; the next submission they receive from him is a thinly-disguised tale of his taking revenge. The threatening MS is promptly sent to the police; but the narrative has changed – and may reflect the writer’s next move. This story has elegant flourishes typical of Lane (‘[As] a publisher…people assume the past is all that matters to you. They forget that you still have to breathe’), but the metaphorical underpinning isn’t as satisfying as that of (say) his ‘Black Country’.

Rating: ***

Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’ (2010)

8th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

At some point in the future, when life has become more regimented and emotions repressed, an ordinary family man buys a drug named ‘conflict’, and finds himself experiencing feelings he has never known. Hook’s tale is an interesting combination of a subtly oppressive future (for example, instead of booking leave from work as we might, people are told when to take ‘time-owed’ leave) and a depiction of the human psyche that suggests (chillingly) just how far the world of the story has moved away from what we know.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Andrew Hook’s website

Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’ (2010)

8th September 2010 / / 2 Comments

Pflug’s narrator travels back and forth across the Atlantic, in search of someone seen (and loved) in dreams. That person remains elusive, but the protagonist does encounter someone else from those dreams — a woman named Tullis, who has in turn dreamt of the narrator. This whole story has a suitably dream-like quality, and a final line that leaves proceedings nicely open to interpretation.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Ursula Pflug’s website

David V. Griffin, ‘Violette Doranges’ (2010)

6th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

A senior employee of a philanthropic organisation finds himself with the phone in one hand and the name ‘Violette Doranges’ in his thoughts, as though he’s just had a conversation with someone of that name, though he remembers no such thing, and knows no such person. In the subsequent days and weeks, the name of Violette Doranges crops up again and again; it turns out that she is a glamorous young socialite who moves in similar circles to the protagonist, though they’ve never knowingly encountered each other. Our man resolves to find a way to meet this mysterious woman, but doing so proves harder than he expected.

Early on, I thought I knew where Griffin’s story was going – his protagonist was not going to meet Violette; she’d always be nothing more real than a whispered name to him – and settled down for a dance towards and away from the revelation of Violette’s identity. But it was not to be so: towards its end, the story takes a turn that opens up the possibilities of interpretation, and leaves the tale alive in the mind for quite some time afterwards.

Rating: ***½

Vandana Singh, ‘Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ (2010)

3rd September 2010 / / 1 Comment

Trying to untangle this week’s selection for the Torque Control Short Story Club (published here at Strange Horizons) is not something I’m going to be able to do completely, and perhaps not even in large part, for ‘Someadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ is like a kaleidoscope of story: tales within tales, refracting as far as the eye can see.

To start with the history: Somadeva was an 11th-century CE Brahmin who collected and retold the tales of the Kathāsaritsāgara for the queen Sūryavati. In Singh’s story, his personality and memories are recreated centuries later by a woman named Isha, who has read the Kathāsaritsāgara, and wants to collect the stories belonging to the peoples of her galaxy, Sky River. Isha’s hope is that she may discover her origins, all knowledge of her past having been erased from her memory.

The structure of ‘Somadeva’ mirrors that of the Kathāsaritsāgara, in that it consists of a number of interlocking stories, some embedded within others (Singh also writes herself briefly into the story, as the authors of some texts did and Somadeva here wishes he had). One result of this is to make it more-or-less impossible to tell for sure whether Somadeva is in the future with Isha, or in the past telling all this to Sūryavati, or perhaps somewhere else. It’s handled elegantly by Singh, the effect is not so much disorientation as a satisfying recognition of the shape of the whole.

One of the main themes of ‘Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra’ is the extent to which stories can – or should – be pinned down to one definitive interpretation. Isha is excited to discover that a tribe named the Kiha tell stories that can be interpreted as describing fundamental scientific processes; it’s an appealing way to read them, but then Somadeva reminds us that those tales could just as easily be read in other ways – none necessarily invalid.

Perhaps, following on from this, it’s best to leave one’s interpretation of this story open. But there is one thing I think I can say with some certainty: at the start of the tale, Somadeva says,’ I was once…a poet, a teller of tales’; by its end, he’s declaring that he is those things. Whatever else stories do, they bring Somadeva to life.

Elsewhere
Vandana Singh’s website

David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ (2010)

2nd September 2010 / / 1 Comment

Julia Trafton discovers that her late husband, the wealthy but cruel Lucien Kane, has been unexpectedly generous in his will: he has bequeathed Julia’s family home (which she gave over to Lucien when they married) to her. There’s a condition, however, Julia must remain in the house for one night, without moving any of fifty-two marked objects. This may seem straightforward enough, but the objects turn out to be the fruits of Lucien’s interest in taxidermy – including his own stuffed corpse, proudly on display in the bedroom.

The idea behind ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ is creepy enough, but what makes Fitzpatrick’s story work even better is a wonderful ambiguity over the exact nature of the events taking place. Nicely done.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
David M. Fitzpatrick’s website

S.D. Tullis, ‘The Return’ (2010)

31st August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A girl who disappeared to who-knows-where, for who-knows-what reason, returns home as mysteriously as she vanished. She is different – withdrawn and unresponsive; nothing her parents try is able to bring their old daughter back. And then they discover that she has changed in ways far stranger than they could ever have imagined. I can’t quite piece together in my mind a conception of everything that goes on in the story; but Tullis’s writing is wonderfully unsettling.

Rating: ***½

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