Science fiction abounds with stories of chosen ones, space messiahs, and figures whose stories and histories are inexorably linked to destiny. It’s made for some of the genre’s most well-known works, but it’s also served as an excuse for lazy writing and tropes that, after several decades, can feel utterly exhausting. It’s gotten to the point where the subversion of this can feel revolutionary: numerous reviews of last year’s Blade Runner 2049 singled out its handling of this trope for […]
Aphrodisiacs and Flaming Arrows: A Review of Andrew J. Stone’s “All Hail the House Gods”
Imagine a world where children grow up in a government tent facility, taught to practice breeding with each other until the day comes they are actually able to reproduce, at which point they will marry and be forced to produce a child for the government to take away from them every year, and so on and so on. Now, imagine sentient houses who rule as gods and require children chosen lottery-style to be offered up as sacrifices. Andrew J. Stone […]
A Sky Full of Spiders: Jaroslav Kalfar’s “Spaceman of Bohemia” Reviewed
In Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia, it’s 2018 and things are even more unsettling than they are in the real 2018, because the nighttime sky has been permanently veiled by a purple haze, a cloud of cosmic dust leftover from a passing comet.
Uncanny Americana: A Review of David S. Atkinson’s “Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep”
Though awfully brief, the hundred-plus fictions in this collection all have be considered tall, as in “tall tales.” All of them stretch plausibility till it snaps, sketching quandaries of a surreal bumptiousness far beyond what we read in most flash fiction. The short-short form tends towards quieter epiphanies, the hurts and discoveries of the ordinary, but David Atkinson is having none of that. In one story a bizarre super-creature, more or less immortal, “replaced the bricks of the Pyramids with […]
Hollywood Babylon: A Review of Ross McMeekin’s “The Hummingbirds”
The opening image of Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, captivated audiences when it premiered in 1950: a man’s corpse floating in a swimming pool owned by a faded Hollywood starlet. How did he end up there? Who killed him? The tone was ominous, the danger real, yet due to decades of screen and print copycats, the same scene today has become a crime story cliché—think, for instance, of the needlepoint parody of the facedown murder victim in the […]
Of Patterns and Memories: On Tao Lin’s “Trip”
Tao Lin’s readership quantified him into fame at the end of this squalid century’s first decade when he stripped every literary conceit (abstracted lingual pretenses and absurdist Joy Williams / Lorrie Moore whimsies) from his work and governed the hip with a Gmail transcript they could all instantaneously relate to before turning thirteen. One method of throttling cliché is to be as incessantly literal as an online talkbalker. That is how Lin embarrasses his detractors: he repeats the terrible fact […]
The Poetics and Pain of Brandon Hobson’s “Where the Dead Sit Talking”
Like the tone of my favorite guitarists, some authors possess voices I immediately recognize. Brandon Hobson belongs to that list. Gloom, bizarre events, and beautiful-yet-unpretentious writing are the translucent shellac covering of a style that hides a raw, beating heart full of longing at it’s center. In Where the Dead Sit Talking, Hobson is once again in fine form, delivering a lyrical, somewhat brutal, and very touching coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s.
Reinventing the Gothic: A Review of Colin Winnette’s “The Job of the Wasp”
There is something bizarre and unsettling at the core of Colin Winnette’s oeuvre, and whatever magical thing that is, it displays its power like the tail of a peacock in his latest, The Job of the Wasp. Released by Soft Skull Press, an indie press that ranks amongst my favorites, The Job of the Wasp is what would happen if William Golding’s Lord of the Flies crashed against Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone at high speed in a room […]