Adventures in reading
I’ve got to be honest: even after several readings, I haven’t been able to puzzle this one out. The lives and identities of a green dog, a man, and his mirror image flow into and out of one another. I couldn’t get under the skin of this story, but the prose is lovely.
Rating: ***
This month at The Portal, I review the November issue of Expanded Horizons, a webzine which seeks to “increase diversity in the field of speculative fiction, both in the authors who contribute and in the perspectives presented”. The authors featured in this issue are Malon Edwards, Zen Cho, Eliza Victoria, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Omar Zakaria, and Csilla Kleinheincz.
My review is here, and the stories are available to read here.
Valentine’s subject is J. Milton Hayes, author of the dramatic monologue ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’, here cursed with immortality and obscurity. What makes this short piece works so well is the narrative voice, which combines old and contemporary in a way that utterly convinces as the voice of a man who has remained physically young for a hundred years. There’s also an effective contrast between the vein of humour running through the narration and the more quietly spoken terror of the events described.
Rating: ***½
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: ***
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
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
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
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: ***
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
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: **
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