Story of the Week :: Losing Your Grip at Linger Fiction

I won't cheapen the Story Recommendation of the Week by giving one to myself, but I will at least pause to note that my story Losing Your Grip has been posted in the February 2011 issue of Linger Fiction. Check it out!

This is my third fiction sale, and my second publication, since Writers of the Future, Volume XXVII isn't out yet. Will there be more???????

Writers of the Future Field Completed

The Fourth Quarter results for the Writers of the Future contest have been released -- apparently the judging for this quarter was hurried along to accommodate moving the award ceremony up to the spring, so this quarter's finalists were deprived of the pleasure of waiting month after agonizing month for their results.

Huge congratulations to Jeffrey Lyman, Patrick O'Sullivan and Adam Perin. I'm looking forward to meeting you at the Writers of the Future workshop this spring.

Book Review Teaser :: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

New on Fantastic Reviews is Aaron's review of Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal.

From Aaron's book review of Shades of Milk and Honey :
"It's refreshing to see a fantasy novel based on Jane Austen that takes Austen seriously, rather than merely as fodder for a goofy parody like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and all its imitators. Shades of Milk and Honey, the first novel by Campbell Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal, is part fantasy, part romance, and all Jane Austen homage. It should appeal to every Austen reader and to anyone who enjoys light fantasy or romance; zombie fans may stay away."

"Shades of Milk and Honey takes place in an alternate version of Regency England, where one can learn to use "glamour" to create impressive optical illusions, such as bringing indoors all the images and sounds of a beautiful garden complete with birds and waterfalls. In this universe, glamour is nearly always employed for artistic effect and seldom used for military or commercial applications. British society as a whole is little changed by the existence of glamour...."

To read the entire review -> Shades of Milk and Honey

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: A Game of Lost Boys by Aaron Polson

My story recommendation of the week is for A Game of Lost Boys by Aaron Polson, from the January 2011 inaugural issue of Linger Fiction.

The ten-year-old protagonist of "A Game of Lost Boys" is still coming to grips with the loss five years earlier of his father, missing in action in Vietnam. Now his orphaned best friend is moving away, transferred to a different foster home. On one of their last nights together they wander a dark forest, trying to spook each other with scary stories, but the tales begin to strike too close to home.

I've read plenty of tales of mysterious, frightening things in the woods, but this one works particularly well because Polson brings it to a personal level. He conveys the parallels between the characters' boyish fears and their personal losses very effectively.

Aaron Polson has been publishing fiction for only a couple years, but has already sold short stories to Blood Lite II, Apex, Shimmer, and many other publications. His horror novel Loathsome, Dark and Deep is recently out from small publisher Belfire Press.

Linger Fiction is a new webzine, which I have a self-serving reason for promoting: the next issue will contain a story of mine. But I gladly admit that Linger must have lowered its standards for me, since my story has nowhere near the emotional impact of "A Game of Lost Boys."

Writers of the Future Update

The third quarter winners for this year's Writers of the Future contest have been announced.


Huge congratulations to Australian Richard Johnson and Seattleites Geir Lanesskog and Keffy R.M. Kehrli!

I'm looking forward to meeting the three of them at the WOTF workshop and award ceremony in the spring. Incidentally, Keffy Kehrli received a coveted Story Recommendation of the Week at this blog about a year ago for his excellent story Advertising at the End of the World, so can I pick up-and-coming authors or what?

Book Review Teaser :: The Devil Inside by Jenna Black

New on Fantastic Reviews is Amy's review of The Devil Inside by Jenna Black.

From Amy's book review of The Devil Inside :
"The Devil Inside by Jenna Black is book one of the Morgan Kingsley urban fantasy series. There are four more books in this series -- The Devil You Know, The Devil's Due, Speak of the Devil, and The Devil's Playground."

"I thought The Devil Inside would be about a female exorcist battling the Devil. But it isn't, even though it features demons. The Devil Inside is mainly about a heroine running from one bad situation to another while having a titillating sex life."

"The book's first-person protagonist, Morgan Kingsley, is a Philadelphia exorcist, although she only performs two exorcisms in this book. Morgan likes to dress daringly and she has a tattoo, which seems to be the norm for an urban fantasy heroine. Months earlier, bad guys drugged Morgan and got a demon inside her. Slowly she realizes that she is possessed, which is her worst nightmare. But her demon can't do anything initially, because Morgan is so strong...."

To read the entire review -> The Devil Inside

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz

The story recommendation of the week is for As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz, published November 18, 2010 at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

If I blurt out the story concept of "As Below, So Above," it will sound silly. And the story would have been silly if not handled so adeptly, right from the opening lines:

Up at the shimmering edge of the sky, where the water met the air, Son spread his tentacles out beneath the terrible shadow of his father. They were waiting for the ships. Son felt the approaching heart-thrum bouncing off the coral-crusted hulls below as the ships crested the painwall.

You don't really know what's going on yet, but you know it's pretty darn strange. Some of the strangeness is misdirection —— water is meeting air in the sky simply because the narrator lives underwater, so to him the surface of the sea is the "edge of the sky" —— but it helps put you in the right frame of mind to take in the real strangeness: our narrator is a giant kraken, who with his father guards the mysterious island home of their scientist creator.

More accurately, the scientist created the father and his late wife, and they in turn created the son. This layer of separation from their creator makes all the difference in enabling the son to begin to evaluate the krakens' place in the world dispassionately, just as the greatest assault yet on their master's hideout begins.

The proof of how well Steinmetz gets you into the skin, er . . . scales, er . . . I just don't fucking know, of his characters is that you really start to care about what happens to the giant-squid father, and about the narrator's potential moral dilemma when he meets the mad-scientist creator. Good stuff!

In the past two years, Ferrett Steinmetz has published about a dozen pieces of short fiction, including two pieces in Asimov's and a story forthcoming in Shimmer. Another name to add to the watch list.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt

My story recommendation of the week goes to Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt, published November 4, 2010 at Daily Science Fiction.

I typically have little use for flash fiction, because it is so difficult for an author to draw the reader into the characters and events of such a short work of fiction. But every so often, an author does draw me into a short-short story, and I can only marvel at his or her skill in pulling it off.

Remarkably, Christopher Kastensmidt's "Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow" tells an absorbing story in under 400 words, barely longer than this blog post. All we learn in that length about the main character is that she is a computer programmer working in a cubicle farm. Yet her yearning to escape her mundane existence strikes a universal chord.

In his author notes, Kastensmidt tells us that "Dragon Dreams" was inspired by Leonardo Amora Leite's painting "Meu Dragão I" (My Dragon I), which the artist has graciously permitted us to reproduce here (click for a larger image):

Christopher Kastensmidt is an American living in Brazil, who designs video games when he is not writing fiction and poetry. He has co-written a Little Red Riding Hood parody with Jim C. Hines and appeared in various publications including Realms of Fantasy and Every Day Fiction. Judging from "Dragon Dreams," I suspect we will be hearing much more from him in the near future.

Daily Science Fiction is a new site that publishes a story every weekday, at professional rates, and has already featured work by such excellent authors as Mary Robinette Kowal, David D. Levine, Tim Pratt, Cat Rambo, Lavie Tidhar, and Greg van Eekhout. Most but not all of Daily SF's stories are flash fiction (their pattern seems to be to publish longer pieces on Friday), so I'm not their ideal reader, but they got me with "Dragon Dreams."

I highly recommend "Dragon Dreams," and since it won't take you but two minutes to read, what possible excuse can you have for not checking it out?

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: When I'm Armouring My Belly by Gemma Files

The recommended story of the week is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files, from the Edge anthology evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The glut of vampire fiction in the past several years has left vampires too commonplace, too familiar. In evolve, Nancy Kilpatrick has recaptured some of the strangeness of vampires by asking her contributors to imagine the next step in vampire evolution. As a result, the stories in evolve are less predictable than most vampire tales——you never know just what sort of creature will emerge. The authors in evolve are all Canadian and few are well-known (notable exceptions include Kelley Armstrong and Tanya Huff), but the stories are nearly all well-written, and I recommend the book to anyone looking for vampire fiction with a twist.

Despite their originality, however, to me most of the stories in evolve fail to recapture the ominous and disturbing nature of vampires. Through familiarity, the idea of someone sucking the very blood from your arteries has lost much of its power. Without that sense of dread, most vampire stories now feel now like fantasy rather than horror. (The same is true of werewolf stories.)

That's why my favorite story in evolve is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files. This is a horror story, profoundly disturbing right from the opening line ("Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name") and the initial scene of sexual abuse ("Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow"). This unpleasant eroticism is far more interesting than anything we get from most of the current crop of dashing, romantic vampires.

For reasons that gradually become apparent, the protagonist of "When I'm Armouring My Belly" has a strange affinity with vampires. He is drawn to vampires and tries to aid them, even though he receives little in return but abuse and contempt. The tables eventually turn, but Files leaves it ambiguous whether the story's outcome is anything to celebrate.

Gemma Files has a knack for unsettling fiction. She is the co-author with husband Stephen J. Barringer of the striking story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death," which was on my Hugo recommendations list last year, and she won an International Horror Guild Award for "The Emperor's Old Bones." Her first novel A Book of Tongues, a weird Western, is just out from ChiZine Publications.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Near the Flame by Erin Cashier

My story recommendation of the week goes to "Near the Flame" by Erin Cashier, from the recently released Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine. This is the second SROTW to come from the pages of Shimmer, one of the best (and best looking) semiprozines in the market.

Written in the style of an African folk tale, "Near the Flame" is the story of Nygibe (meaning "Near the Water"), later renamed Nygawa ("Near the Flame"), greatest of the Women of Agawa. The Women of Agawa possess the discrete but surprisingly powerful magical talent of telling a story with smoke. Nygawa is conflicted when the new king commands the Women of Agawa to use their magic to help conquer their land's neighbors.

Wasn't this like the stories that she'd learned, the stories that she'd told? Weren't there always battles, and didn't battles always have a losing side? But those stories had just been stories, smoke high in the sky and whispers on the wind. This was life, red and real. As the fighting went on, as they walked south and south and south, whipping the fire before them like a beast, Nygawa realized that just like stories, battles needed ends.

"Near the Flame" is a memorable tale featuring a powerful narrative voice. Erin Cashier is a subtle author, yet the nuances of her writing never distract from the story (a complaint I occasionally have with Shimmer fiction, some of which employs literary techniques too self-consciously).

I am delighted to say Cashier is a fellow winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Among other places, her stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIV, and Footprints, with another forthcoming in InterGalactic Medicine Show. Shimmer is a great place to find up-and-coming writers, and Erin Cashier is definitely one to watch.