"The Visited" by Anaea Lay :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My story recommendation of the week is for "The Visited" by Anaea Lay, from the April 2013 issue of Lightspeed magazine. This is Anaea Lay's second SROTW.

"The Visited" is the obituary of musician Manuel Black, written by a former fan and lover. Black became a huge celebrity, because his music somehow helped people to make sense of the "Visitation," when everyone in the world had a vision of an unnaturally beautiful man or woman, accompanied by an intense sense of longing. But our narrator was a devoted fan even before the Visitation; here she describes his earlier work:

It’s still him, but now he’s angry. He hasn’t found his Morrisonian black leather pants yet, but he’s not afraid of the audience anymore. Curls fly around his face as he stares them down, challenging them to answer the questions he raises with his lyrics, to justify the world in the face of his seething despair and melancholy. Critics of the time wrote the music off as angst-ridden wankery. Audiences found it unpalatably depressing and turned instead to catchy dance pop. Listen to it now and you’ll realize his melancholy was a foreshadowing of the post-Visitation malaise waiting for all of us, that his anger was founded in an optimistic belief that things could be different if we’d just bother to acknowledge they ought to be.

In this elegantly written story, Lay makes no attempt to explain what the Visitation really was. Her focus is on the enigmatic Manuel Black, and how an artist's work can transform the meaning of what is happening in his audience's lives, to tragic or transcendent effect.

I once had a friend, who had been a Deadhead in an earlier phase of life, try to explain what compelled fans to follow The Grateful Dead from concert to concert, but I didn't understand the communal experience he was describing. "The Visited" is a piece of fiction, a form of art, yet it enables me to appreciate my friend's real-world experience in a way his factual words couldn't——and oddly enough, that's just what this story is about.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Your Cities by Anaea Lay

The Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Your Cities" by Anaea Lay. "Your Cities" first appeared in the June 2011 issue of Apex Magazine, but I didn't stumble across it until a year later. Luckily, it's recently been republished in audio form at Tina Connolly's Toasted Cake podcast, which gives me a fresh opportunity to recommend it.

"Your Cities" is set in a near future when cities have inexplicably started wandering about, trampling folks in their paths. The narrator addresses the tale to a former lover, who she(?) believes is somehow responsible for these bizarre occurrences. The lover vanished in New Orleans, just before that city awoke:

I’ve tried to picture it ever since, you strolling into a city anybody with any sense had long since fled. You whistled; I’m sure you whistled. But then what? Did you crawl into the city’s bed and stroke its shoulder, nibbling on its ear and whispering tidings of morning, the way you would for me? Did you wrap your arms around it and speak of love and sex and waffles, coaxing it past the foggy stages of fresh wakening and into the warmth of your voice?

In the space of only about 1500 words, Anaea Lay creates a wonderful mood to this piece, effectively using the collapse of our urban and suburban civilization to frame the narrator's personal loss. Who can't identify with a failed relationship that makes you feel like the whole world is crumbling?

I believe "Your Cities" was Anaea Lay's first professional sale, but she has since appeared in Penumbra, and has stories forthcoming at Strange Horizons, Apex (again), and Shock Totem. I met her at Worldcon and told her I liked this story——she adamantly denies instantly turning beet red, but her giddy tweet moments later about her first fan contact is a matter of public record. I believe Anaea will soon be winning over a great many more fans.