Fantastic Stories of the Imagination #223: December 2014

By Warren Lapine, Shariann Lewitt, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and 6 more

Original Short Story: Chocolateland by Shariann Lewitt —When they wanted to eat, to really enjoy a good pig out, they could go to Chocolateland Short Story:Sleepers by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam —Where did they come from? Where do we go from here? Short Story: Monitor Bot and the King of Pop by Jess Barber —When life gives you lemons… dance like Michael Jackson. Short Story: Floaters By Robert Lowell Russell — Darkness and light collide in an unlikely redemption. Reviews: The Fan: The beautiful, the sweet, the inspirational, the meaningful, the melancholy. Reviews: The Remake Chronicles: By Adam-Troy Castro — A-T C reviews The Rover (2014) Directed by David Michod Reviews: Area 51 1/2 December, 2014 by Steven Sawicki. Reviews: New & Noteworthy Short Genre Fiction: December, 2014 by Gillian Daniels — Join us as Gillian explores what’s new in short Fantasy & Science Fiction. Make sure you go to www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com every months for lots of great, free content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633846920

Book preview

Reviews:

New and Noteworthy Short Fiction: December 2014

by Gillian Daniels

Candy Girl by Chikodili Emelumadu (Published: November 2014) Apex Magazine

This story is a scream. Whether that scream is funny or horrifying is difficult to say. Regardless, Candy Girl effortlessly balances magical antics and post-colonial entitlement.

Muna is an Igbo woman who has recently married. After being cut by an umbrella, however, she and her cousin discover that she’s begun to turn into a life-sized chocolate woman. Muna’s ex-boyfriend, a white man named Paul, is horrified at her predicament, but only because he meant to cast a love spell on her rather than turn her into candy. But the act of treating her like a prize to be won, a cultural artifact rather than an individual, has made her into the thing he loves best rather than the person he lusts after.

With its humor, this story comes off as sweet as its heroine. Underneath a cute idea and a tightly structured plot, though, is a sharp indictment of privilege. Paul is an uncomfortable portrait of people who fetishize cultures without any thought to the comfort of the people within them. He’s too secure in his worldview to understand how his pursuit of Muna has harmed her, whatever the outcome.

Mothers by Carmen Maria Machado  (Published: November 2014) Interfictions Online

Last month, I read Machado’s story for Granta Magazine, The Husband Stitch. The style was fluid and the narrative devastating. A nameless woman in an unspecificed time period filters an otherwise conventional marriage — a lustful courtship, pregnancy, and sad betrayal — through ghost stories and old wives’ tales.

Machado’s story for Interfictions, Mothers, feels like a further exploration of these themes. Again, the prose is tight and gorgeous, but here, the marriage in question is the tumultuous relationship our main character has with her aptly-named girlfriend, Bad.

Bad shows up at the narrator’s home with a baby, claiming it belongs to both of them. The narrator is unsure how to argue this. Instead, she parses out her memories with the naiveté of a soft-headed Pollyanna, trying to piece together how the two of them could create a baby much less how they could be a functional couple. This opens up the idea that the child may, indeed, be something more sinister. Wherever it comes from, the baby becomes a catalyst for the main character to explore her own decisions.

I enjoy Interfictions because of its interest in the space between what is considered literary and genre. Their fiction is less concerned with why something takes place than presenting what has happened and what it means to their main characters. An excellent example of this is Debbie Urbanski’s Touch, another piece from the November issue, where the main character, Pearl, is trapped in a free love utopia without the enthusiasm for free love. The specific details of how her society developed the way it did are less central to the plot than how she reacts to the situation presented in the moment. Pearl and the main character of Mothers function in worlds where explanations hide behind curtains that are never lifted. They can only do the best with the circumstances offered to them.

If You Were a Tiger, I’d Have to Wear White By Maria Dahvana Headley (Published: November 2014) Uncanny Magazine

I worry that between this month’s recommendation and last, this column has become Headley-heavy. However, since reading the playful Marx brother autobiography, Harpo Speaks, at a tender age, I’ve loved fiction that can capture old, Hollywood-style glamour in all its marvelous seediness.

Maria Dahvana Headley nails that tone with ease. Here, a young journalist explores Jungleland, a sort of retirement community for talking animal actors. Except, of course, the gates are padlocked.

Our main character is after an interview with the roaring MGM lion, Leo. He’s not entirely prepared for what he finds, though, certainly not when he speaks to Mabel Stark, The Greatest of All Lady Trainers in History and a former stand-in for Mae West. The character and her conclusions about the nature of Jungleland are fascinating. In a staggering reveal, according to Headley’s interview in the issue, Mabel Stark was a real eccentric, custom white leather cat training suit and all.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everything about this story lives and breathes, even the warm ending. Like my favorite stories about certain parts of California, the beauty of Hollywood shines through the tackiness.

In its maiden issue, Uncanny Magazine has chosen a line-up that will be tough to follow with stories like Ken Liu’s melancholy meditation on aging, Presence, and Christopher Barzak’s delightful and firmly-YA, The Boy Who Grew Up, where a teenager shucks his disbelief in Peter Pan in favor of following the strange boy into his fairy tale world. I look forward to more issues to see how the tone of the publication develops and where it goes from here.

A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone (Published: October 28, 2014) Tor.com

A Halloween story that has stuck in mind all month. Here, a vampire desperately tries to fit into the role of husband and father in a mortal marriage in a very mundane world. It’s endearing to watch Vlad (yes, Vlad) pretend he’s flawed, human, and dependent on breathing when he very much isn’t.

He’s walked the halls with steps heavy as a human’s, squeaking the soles of his oxblood shoes against the tiles every few steps — a trick he learned a year back and thinks lends him an authentic air.

His pantomime is a little sad. It speaks of genuine alienation even though he gets along wonderfully with his human wife, Sarah, who knows exactly the nature of the man she married. In so many ways, Vlad’s far too old and too wise to know he will ever comfortably fit into the role he’s cultivated for himself. Unfortunately, the identity he’s meticulously created threatens to disappear all together when he considers giving into bloodlust. The comic part of the story seems to be that Vlad has entered a sort of midlife crisis, but the less than hilarious core is that there’s so much he’s in danger of losing.

A Kiss With Teeth is an excellent after-the-happily-ever-after story and a humane look at what one sacrifices for their loved ones. Of course, this involves monster that has so saturated the fiction market, it’s difficult to find stories that cover new ground. Still, Gladstone manages to reframe the vampire in a way that’s approachable without shortchanging the creature’s otherworldliness.

❑

Gillian Daniels is a writer of prose, poetry, and criticism. After attending the Clarion Science Writing Workshop in 2011, her poems and fiction have been published in Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Flash Fiction Online, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine among others. Her reviews are available at The New England Theatre Geek blog and other venues. She is a transplant from Northeast Ohio and is highly suspicious of her home in the New World, i.e. Boston.

Reviews:

The Fan: The beautiful, the sweet, the inspirational, the meaningful, the melancholy

by Carole McDonnell

Beautiful, sweet, inspirational, melancholy, meaningful, and adventure are major elements of a good children's story. Here are a few I read this month.

The Feral Child by Che Golden, Quercus. Hardcover.  ISBN 9781623651206, 272 pgs.

I like faes. There’s just something about them and the world they inhabit. Maddy — and everyone who knows fae-lore knows that long ago, faes, wee folk, dryads, faeries, etc., roamed the world freely, but after Christianity came, they were forced to leave the lands they knew and live in their own realm. And the fae world and the human world overlap. That’s the lore anyway. Most everyone discuss it but only a few people actually know that this is the truth and not just bedtime stories. Folks like Maddy’s grandfather, for instance, and also humans who are really faes in disguise.

The trouble is, faes sometimes visit villages and steal away young children, replacing them with fae changelings. And this is what happens to young Stephen. And, if we are to be totally honest about it, Maddy is the one who caused young Stephen’s kidnapping by going to the castle after dark when her grandfather specifically warned her not to.

Maddy is living with her grandparents after the death of her mother and father, and she is not liking it one bit. It also doesn’t help matters that her cousins, Danny and Roisin, and their priggish mother, are giving her a hard time. And now a fae-kidnapping happens. Maddy is not going to put up with that so she rushes off to find the portal between both worlds. Her whiny cousins end up being pulled into the portal with her.

There they meet a stag guide who tells them that they already know the rules of the fae world... intuitively. Human imagination, human expectation, and belief will guide their way. The stories they have read are alive within them and will lead them. Thus,