Stories Catch Up 5

More stories I read this year. Does this complete the series? No it does not as I still have more so this will spill over into 2024.

1. Little Red Hands by Jonathan Louis Duckworth in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Loaf arrives at Ree’s cottage. Ree keeps sheep. She says she has two sisters but Loaf doesn’t see them. Loaf says he’s a wood splitter but he doesn’t have an axe. On the night of the hands when the two pieces of the moon match up she locks him in her bedroom while strange things happen outside.

Loaf used to be with the Kai-Oats. They were a gang, reavers, and Loaf would go in and put people at ease before they came. Then he left them, the betrayer betraying them. Now they’re back and they might have more revenge than they can cope with.

Read This: For a bloody tale of acceptance rather than redemption
Don’t Read This: The backgrounds sounds fascinating, while the story itself mostly hints and winks

2. Oven Fresh by Luis Paredes in Crow And Cross Keys

Mother bakes batches of children in her oven. They all have gifts, but most of the gifts are of no use to mother. She can’t keep unuseful children around, not in her conflict with father. Matthias’s gift is to see the gifts in other children, so they can be assessed as soon as they come from the oven.

This latest batch has little until he comes to one, Celeste Morningstar, his sister. A Seer, whose gift is to see the future. And if she can see the future then Matthias, who can see one thing in the present, is redundant.

He may not be the only one.

Read This: Pitch black golem child fantasy
Don’t Read This: A Mother who destroys her creations is not for you

3. Harborville by Robert Lopresti in Tough

A man comes to Harborville (there’s no harbour, it’s named after Josiah Tiberius Harbor who founded the town in 1893). He looks like a bear. He goes into the inn and asks for someone, showing around a picture.

Harborville’s a long way from anywhere. There’s no signal, or at least not for strangers. And the man he’s looking for, well Mace says he’s been buying camping equipment. Maybe he’s out with one of the cabins out in the hills.

The Bear will make it worth his while. He really wants to find the man. So he’ll need the right gear as well.

A clever, layered crime story, about greed and survival.

Read This: The story comes together, as various characters saunter deeper into crime and darkness
Don’t Read This: It’s just bad people doing worse things

4. Life Wager by Lucy Zhang in Apex

A daughter is gambled away to a stranger. The stranger is a dragon who takes her away to the heavens. She is a superlative dancer and so makes her way there, gaining blessings of longevity and wealth.

They have a child.

The child chooses to leave the heavens. On earth she plays mahjong, the very game that her mother was lost at. She’s good at it.

One day the Emperor comes to challenge her. He is a superlative mahjong player, who wagers his life. He discovers in her a player who can offer him something new in the game.

She lacks desire, lacks avarice or ambition, lacks the ability to love. He takes her to his palace to play mahjong.

Read This: A tale of mahjong and mistakes from before people were born
Don’t Read This: The game as metaphor belies the central concern and difference of the protagonist, and maybe you don’t care about mahjong

5. The Canterville Ghost

Hiram B Otis the American Ambassador (“Minister To The Court Of St James”) buys Canterville Chase. He’s warned by Lord Canterville that there is a ghost, and several people have had horrible deaths after being haunted. Otis says he will take the ghost along with the furniture at valuation. None of the Otis family – Mr and Mrs Otis, eldest son Washington, teenage daughter Virginia nor the younger twins – believe in ghosts.

When Sir Simon Canterville begins his haunting campaign they deal with it matter-of-factly. The bloody stain they remove with patent stain remover forcing him to put it back every night, eventually running our of red. When he rattles his chains Mr Otis offers oil to lubricate it. When he tries to frighten or play pranks, the twins terrorise him in turn.

After several rounds of this Sir Simon becomes depressed at these Americans who not only can’t be scared but actively haunt him back. Then he encounters Virginia and this light-hearted tale of spooks and hard-headed Americans turns into a sincere story about forgiveness, devotion and the mystery of death.

Read This: A classic story of fun spooky hi-jinks and a serious if conventional meditation about death and the afterlife
Don’t Read This: They’re all silly caricatures, so the final section falls flat

6. Burst Balloons And Sugared Milk by Marie Louise McGuinness in Gone Lawn

There are two children and their mother is wrapped up in grief. They tried to break through it, tried and tried until they could not.

There was another child once, Jamie. And it’s not Colly’s fault for walking on the cracks, it’s the fault of the woman in the 4X4. The woman on the phone.

The mother is wrapped up in grief. The father grieves outside the house. Colly and the other, the narrator, they know that Jamie was the brightest one, the shining balloon. “It was difficult to accept that one child was worth more than the sum of their siblings but we could not deny it was fact.”

Read This: The brokenness of grief so beautifully summed up in vivid scenes and metaphors
Don’t Read This: Death, child neglect, and insufficient answers

7. The Travelling Fayre Of Señor Monteluz Comes To The Occidental Archipelago by J M Cyrus in Swords And Sorcery

Mino sees the flotilla arrive on the island. The travelling fayre. It’s a mismatched fleet, some drawn by sea cows, from all over the long continent. They come ashore, obviously strangers, and strange, and with odd skills and performances.

It’s there for one night only. And MIno has dreamed of this. It’s like the Long Continent in microcosm. He’s dealt with the goats and he’s going to visit. It will be magical.

An excellent magical fair story and if it’s more about the description than the plot none the worse for it.

Read This: To find out, with Mino, what the Travelling Fayre has to offer
Don’t Read This: You were hoping for a mystery or plot or something

8. Something Beautiful by Cathy Ulrich in Ghost Parachute

Someone is dead. Someone has been killed. Someone has been murdered and abused and had everything taken from them.

Still, what if we didn’t let that happen. What if we took it back. What if we took all the hate and fear and death – and the guns – what if we took them away.

And gave everyone involved something beautiful.

Read This: For the story to be told in the negative space of what is being erased
Don’t Read This: Someone got killed

9. The Final Girl Wolfs Down Red Lobster by Chelsea Stickle in Passages North

In slasher films, the horror sub-genre which involves a group being stalked by a single guy with a knife, the Final Girl is the one who survives, the one who puts down the monster*. This Final Girl has escaped the hospital, still in the gown, and is eating in the Red Lobster car park.

Red Lobster is an American seafood chain restaurant.

The Final Girl has had to face down men before, tell them to back off, tell them to leave her alone. There was always the question. What if they didn’t? What if they insisted? What would she do?

A guy came at her and she’s alive, eating seafood in the parking lot.

Read This: For a meditation on what the idea of the final girl means
Don’t Read This: It’s horror movie tropes and chain restaurant seafood

* Oh hey, did you know there are entire books written about slasher films and the construct of the final girl, and how genres get created and prescribed imperfectly, as those from before it was codified always contain elements outside the bounds, and those later are influenced by the description? And if you disagree with my working definition of slasher films, final girls and genre then I feel you; still I’m here trying to orient people who don’t know anything about this stuff in a single sentence. Work with me.

10. The Magazine Of Horror by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki in Apex

There is a horror magazine. It only has one story in it, the greatest horror story in the world at the time. And it pays $100,000 if the story is accepted.

There’s some other requirements, the story stays up so long as the author is alive, and they’ll die if another, greater horror story is published, but that’s hardly worth worrying about. I mean $100,000 and being acknowledged as the greatest horror story. It’s got to be worth submitting.

Read This: A very funny and creepy story about submitting stories to magazines
Don’t Read This: You don’t know or care about how stories get into magazines