Aurilly

I continue to read lots of short fiction this year. I have realized, extremely belatedly, that I prefer short fiction collections to have a Theme, whether that theme is "weird sea fantasy" (review upcoming) or "works by a single author." You'd think that described most collections, but I came to SFF through the old school short fiction magazines (like Asimov's and F&SF) and Year's Best collections, all of which were a total hodgepodge, thematically.

Anyway! Here are two single-author collections I have read this summer.

Black Juice (2004) by Margo Lanagan

I remember people raving about this collection when it came out, and I think I tried it and found it offputting and too dark. No surprise, it's now very much up my alley.

It's also really fucking good. Everyone was right. All the words I can think of to describe Lanagan's writing here are cliches: stuff like "fearless" and "confident." Almost every story is set in its own brand new world unlike anything you have ever visited or imagined, told from the perspective of an inhabitant of that world to whom all this is commonplace.

That's what a lot of fantasy and science fiction try to do, but Lanagan does it better. She never gets bogged down in explaining her settings. She is an absolute master of the flow of information, an underrated but vital skill for the speculative fiction writer: in her stories, you know exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it, no more and no sooner. There are no tedious expositional openings here.

And most importantly, her perspectives are truly alien in a way that very few authors can manage. The most memorable example to me is "red nose day", the story of two revolution-minded young men with a rifle, determined to take out as many of those oppressors of society as they can: clowns. Because in this story, clowning is where the greatest social power lies, and our POV character was so traumatized in his youth by his experience with one or more of them that he wants to burn the whole institution down. The story treats this premise with utter seriousness and never blinks. The clowns are not metaphors for anything. They're not a joke, and the story is not ironic. There's no implication that the guy's clown trauma involved something ordinary like sexual assault. This world of clowns simply is, on its own terms.

And the clown story isn't even one of my favorites! It's just the one that most readily illustrates the point: that every story here commits to its premise 110%, while leaving the actual point to the reader. There is no didacticism here.

Favorites
"singing my sister down" is the story in this collection you are most likely to have heard of; it won a bunch of awards that year. A young woman's extended family of children and adults make a mournful picnic on a tar pit to keep her company as she is executed by sinking into the tar until she suffocates, while the rest of the village watches from solid ground.

Nails that horror premise trifecta of simple, horrible, and completely original. It's incredible difficult to hit all three, and Lanagan makes it look easy.

In contrast, "sweet pippit" is probably the lightest story in the collection, about a herd of what are clearly elephants, though the word is never used, who break out of their enclosure to go rescue their their favorite human handler from prison. The elephant perspective here is just really delightful, showcasing that alienness Lanagan is so good at without ever leaving you in doubt about what is happening.

And "wooden bride" is about a young woman who never finishes things but is determined to complete her years of elabroate bride training, even when on the final day when she takes a wrong turn and gets lost in her own city on the way to the ceremony. There's some stuff going on here about patriarchy and slavish commitment to tradition, but honestly I think most of all it's about how sometimes we choose a goal for no reason that makes sense to anyone but us, and that's okay.

Least favorite:
"perpetual light" is the most conventional story in the collection, about a dystopian future of disease, destroyed environment, and mechanical animals to replace the wildlife long extinct. It's fine.

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This'll Make Things a Little Easier (2026) by Attila Veres

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I read Veres' first translated collection earlier this year and reviewed it here. The man himself translated this second collection.

This collection is shorter than the first and contains only six stories, all of around the same novelette length. I'm sorry to say there isn't a single one I loved, versus loving three or four in the last collection. This collection is also angrier and more focused on class inequality, and so the horror is more allegorical, I guess? Which is not my favorite mode.

Stories I liked okay
My favorite story is, unexpectedly, "Damage D10+7," about a young man who manages his all-encompassing existential terror via an elaborate series of daily dice rolls that together construct and operate his self-designed RPG. This works great until a) a player decides to rape a secretly all-powerful NPC, and b) the DM chooses not to record it, which causes both his game and the world to unravel.

I'm going to be honest with you, as someone who has only played D&D a couple of times and wasn't really into it, it hadn't occured to me until this story that D&D players would roleplay raping NPCs... but of fucking course they do. Of course they do.

Anyway, I think the point of this story is that even more than allowing the roleplay rape to happen in the first place, what really destroys the fabric of reality is our DM denying that it happened. Sexual violence aside, this story has a strong Philip K Dick cosmic dread vibe to it that I liked.

Meanwhile, "'a pit of teeth'" is about a man whose short story is translated into the language of a lost, possibly apocryphal tribe that doesn't believe in the concept of fiction. I didn't totally follow the mechanics of the fantasy element here, but I'm always down for a horrifying lost language, so.

Least favorite
"The Summer I Chose to Die" is about two thrillseekers who are getting high on every drug they can find while killing as many of the invading, sea-people as they can. Unfortunately I hated the main character and was deeply unmoved by his journey. A bummer, since it's the only explicitly Lovecraftian entry, and usually I like those.

The Wrongs Girls (2026). Stoners Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and Molly (Alia Shawkat) accidentally acquire some cutting-edge psychedelic drugs that cause telepathy and find themselves chased by Danes up to no good.

I went into this thinking it might not be my thing, and indeed, it was not my thing. I mostly saw it because I like Stewart, and because her wife directed it. It's in the low 60s on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think the problem was only that it was not my genre. There just seemed like a lot of places where there should have been jokes, or more of them, or funnier ones.

Kristen Stewart was very hot, though, and there was an Oasis joke, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026). A filmmaker tasked with rebooting an 80s slasher franchise visits the reclusive retired actress Billy (Gillian Anderson) who played the final girl in the original film, and learns some things about sex, movies, and herself. This is Jane Schonbrun's third film, her follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow, which I know really spoke to a lot of my friends, especially my trans friends. but which I still haven't seen.

I know this movie is doing a lot of things. I'm not sure I understand what most of them are. Like, there's a lot of stuff about kink and roleplay and identifying with the girls in slasher movies as a kind of escape, but I don't know that the movie is about that. There's also stuff about disassociation and sexual dysfunction, but I'm not sure the movie's about those things either.

It's very meta and self-aware. It's very gay. The visual design is interesting and intentional, like the fact that the abandoned camp where the first movie was filmed and where Billy now lives has painted backdrops as landscapes: the camp as fantasy. The movie totally escapes any sense of realism by the end.

It's not really a horror movie. It's about horror movies and our relationship to them, so by necessity there's some gore, but all those usual aspects of horror, the dread and terror, are absent.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to glean something from the fact the the clips of the 80s movie that we see are clearly not an 80s movie. The music is wrong, the camera work is wrong, the gore is all obviously digital. Is that part of the Theme (tm) or just budget constraints?

I look forward to seeing other people's analysis of this. My fingers are crossed that the Dead Meat folks will do a podcast on it.