March Story Update
Ten stories I read back in 2024. How long ago that seems.
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1. Nine Tenths Of The Law by K J Parker in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
It turns out you cannot be convicted of murder if you are possessed by a demon. This has been the law for hundreds of years. This lawyer has been using the ruling for a while, and is unhappily surprised to discover that there are far too many domestic cases. With divorce banned, unhappy spouses are willing to take desperate measures.
Measures such as hiring this lawyer, and also his partner, the demon Euphrosyne.
A funny fantastic legal drama story, that is also a meditation on institutions, law and precedent, damnation, rules, and doing what you can.
Read This: Darkly funny satire on law, sin, and demons
Don’t Read This: Legalised murder
2. That Small Hard Thing On The Back Of Your Neck by Vanessa Fogg in The Future Fire
When you are thirteen you discover a small hard thing on the back of your neck. Your mother asks what’s wrong with you, and though this is a general question, you know it’s the thing on your neck. The thing that feels like a zipper.
Your mother wants you to fit in. To act like everyone else. To make your face a mask and hide what is inside.
One day you will pull the zipper.
Read This: A story of hiding what is within… until it comes
out
Don’t Read This: The monstrous resolution breaks the
metaphor wide open
3. The Honey Witch by Kathryn McMahon in Psuedopod
Melissa makes honey. She keeps the bees in her farmhouse, cool in the summer and safe in the winter. They make honey from the blossom on her apple trees. She makes everything from the honey, and preserves things with the wax.
She hides her despair when her friend Tanith is going to leave, sell her farm, move to Manhattan and open a dance studio. She has to go, as a storm is coming. And the next day she finds Tanith didn’t get ahead of the storm. Cut off, the only thing to do is preserve her with wax.
Yet Melissa’s work is not that of a normal beekeeper. Wax and honey and bees, they animate Tanith once more. She dances, as the bees do, her humanity merged with bee life.
Read This: Haunting story of trying to hold onto, and bring
back, something that’s lost
Don’t Read This: Bees are creepy insects
4. Beasts Of The Desert Wild by September Woods Garland in Crow And Cross Keys
In the south west territories there are rumours of women becoming beasts. The pimp has an opinion, one he shares with his whore around the campfire, while the two of them are taking peyote.
Her opinion is otherwise, though he is uninterested. Still, he will share it before the night is out.
Read This: Short sharp weird western about monsters
Don’t Read This: Drugs and cannibals
5. The Read by Preston Lang in Tough
Lila has a party trick; she reads fortunes in packs of Ruffles chips*. She plays it straight while reading, but admits that it is just a game, a gimmick. It’s Jordan who’s the enthusiast, who encourages her to do it at parties She has had one or two startling successes.
Karl, a newcomer to the group doesn’t like it, doesn’t like the reading he gets. Though he says he knows it’s fake, and it didn’t upset him. So where’s the problem? Lila gives up on it, avoids Jordan, avoids Karl.
Until her birthday when they make her read Rene, Karl’s girlfriend.
Read This: The dangers of false divination and the perils
when it becomes real
Don’t Read This: Grim crime story
* For British readers, these are a brand of crinkle-cur crisps.
6. Safe Now For The Moment Returned To The Arms Of God by Adam Fell in Coffin Bell
In 1844 a missionary travels out to Reliance in Wisconsin Territory, to preach and to use his medical knowledge. He finds welcome and work, especially with the Fisk family. Then he is caught out by a snowstorm and stranded for months with a remote Ho-Chunk family of Christian converts. When the weather breaks he travels slowly back to Reliance, some of the outlying farms have done well, others suffered tragedy.
Returning to Reliance he discovers the men, wracked by consumption, sacrificing their women. Robert Fisk believes his daughters Liberty and Malvina now demons. But Liberty will not stand to be sacrificed, and the Minister takes them to the church where they must find their fate. And a stranger and still bloodier fate than expected it is.
A sprightly historical tale slowly becomes dark, strange and horrifying. The formal, mannered language counterpoints neatly with the slow slide into madness.
Read This: Brilliantly realised historical weird fiction
Don’t Read This: Just another horror piled on top of settler
colonialism, inevitably eating itself
7. Lycanthrope Baby by Eli Rahm in Coffin Bell
A love poem about gentle beauty and doing things for each other. And at the end a sharp twist.
Read This: Poem about domestic affection and an animalistic
intrusion
Don’t Read This: Cute poetry not for you (or wolves)
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8. For The Pollinators by A D Sui in Seize The Press
There is a man with bees in his head. They have been there for years. They buzz, sometimes warning him of danger, more often driving him to do things, things that cause problems. They like to be in warm and enclosed places, but that didn’t pay the bills.
They’re sending him up the hill to a place they’d like. A place where maybe he can rest.
Read This: Fabulist story of transformation and insects
Don’t Read This: Awkwardly romantic allegory for mental
illness
9. Tell The Bees by Varsha Venkatash in Exposition Review
They ask their ex-lover, after they die, to tell the bees. It was the ex-‘s idea to get bees, who knew that they needed to be told. But it was the narrators who kept them who nurtured them. Though they will not see the first harvest.
A dissection of a relationship through the aftermath; an elegy to what was and could have been.
Read This: Beautifully sharp farewell that does not spare writer,
reader or the ex it is sent to, offering both rebuke and remembrance
Don’t Read This: It’s for the bees not you
10. The Very Long Death Of Katherine Ainsley by Marlan K Smith in Fusion Fragment #23
Charles Beasley is an artist in 19th century England; short on money he takes a job as a painting tutor for Mrs Ainsley. She is a widow who lives in the isolated Parrot Hill manor, a strange place filled with machinery, or perhaps built of machinery. She has only one servant, Agnes. Mrs Ainsley wears a veil, her dress trails black ribbons and reveals that her hand is a prosthetic; nevertheless she paints with it.
As they paint Mrs Ainsley reveals more of her life, and how she would have died, except her husband was able to save her. He used Mesmeric Fluid to keep her prosthetics working, and each day she must use the machinery of the house to renew it.
Beasley is let go early with a letter and a year’s pay; able to buy new equipment he gets a job at a gallery in London. He thinks this part of his life is over until he meets Agnes, who tells him to check his old art case, where he will discover the final explanation of the strange events.
Read This: Elegant Victorian style slow burn weird fiction
Don’t Read This: Slow, long, ambiguous, self-harm
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