I spent most of July reading stuff I can’t talk about! Four as-yet unpublished books for friends: three sci fi, one horror. Looking forward to having them on my shelf in a few years.
This month, I also read and reread several articles by Eirik Gumeny, a friend-of-a-friend. He recently passed after a lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis.
His blog is here.
And his Cracked article about the double lung transplant he received a decade ago is here.
He was a great, comedic voice in weird horror fiction, and we lost him too soon.
Short stories:
I also read more from Grist’s Imagine 20200 collection. Click through to see the gorgeous art at full size and quality.
“A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans
I loved this one so much that I shouted at one of my writing groups about it while reading. TONS of fantastic lines, including these:
What is Passover?
Basically, you get all your family in one room, deny everybody food until you’ve made it through a two-hour interactive lecture, while constantly drinking more and more wine, and then act surprised when a fight breaks out.
Also from Grist, “The people who feed America are going hungry,” by Ayurella Horn-Muller
I read a lot of articles every month. (By wordcount, probably more of that than anything else.) I’m noting this one here because it’s important. American farming is propped up by horrifically mistreated workers who experience wear and tear on their bodies, pervasive exploitation, and deprivation. Their sub-minimum wages can’t absorb the greedflation-driven price increases for groceries. These are people in our communities who perform critical jobs, and we’re totally failing them.
Back to short stories:
“Father Ash” by Rachel Hartman
A senile old man is led back home by a woman he almost recognizes. Featuring witchcraft and heartbreak.
“Artists and Fools” by Paolo Bacigalupi
Conman Pico has cause to run naked down an alley with his butt cheeks dyed blue. It was in defense of his pride, you see.
“All Belknaps Go Under the Mountain” by Margaret Dunlap
The prose in this story is great: clear and clever. A lawyer visits her family’s farm and is confronted by something strange and unexpected. The goat is not the strange and unexpected thing, but it’s the star of the opening lines, which are fantastic:
“I found Granddad in the barn, pinned under a hay bale. The hay, in turn, was pinned by the goat, because insult naturally follows accident, and the goat had never in her life met a stationary object she didn’t feel the need to see the view from the top of.” – Margaret Dunlap, “All Belknaps Go Under the Mountain”
The prose here was good enough to get me to stick it out despite this story featuring two of my biggest turnoffs: 1) Lots ‘o POVs and 2) a DnD-style world. While that worldbuilding has a creative twist at the end, this still gives major Dungeon Meshi and Order of the Stick vibes. Those being the only two DnD-sphere stories I feel like I need in my life. Sorry, Baldur’s Gate.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury
I did not think a short story about a smarthouse would get to me, but it sure did.
“The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy”, “Without the Option”, “Helping Freddie” (and a modern rewrite, “Fixing it for Freddie”), and “Clustering Round Young Bingo” by P. G. Wodehouse
More Jeeves and Wooster stories. These usually make me laugh.
I don’t know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of—well, it’s difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or whatnot, and managed to shin up a tree, and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal’s slavering jaws. – “The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy”
“The Wrong House”, “The Knees of the Gods” by E. W. Hornung
I’m losing stamina for the Bunny and Raffles stories. I’m more than halfway done with the whole series, and they get conveniently delivered to my email inbox, so I’ll keep at it. But I’d felt like it’d been a while since there was something new that genuinely interested me. However, “The Wrong House” shakes things up by transplanting our gentleman thieves to retirement in the countryside, escaping an old flame of Raffles’s who identified him in London. It also has a couple passages where Bunny discusses the practical methods of thievery—which I do enjoy—that precede him and Raffles immediately getting caught. By a pack of teenagers. Oh, irony.
“The Knees of the Gods” then really shook things up, by sending Bunny and Raffles to fight in the Boer War. Published in 1901, the collection it appears in marks a halfway point in the Raffles canon— And the demise of its hero. Raffles is killed in action at the end of the final story. Hornung would revisit his character later, with a 1905 short story collection and a novel published in 1909. But these narratives are set before the Boer War, making Raffles’s last words, to the wounded Bunny laid out under enemy fire, absolute.
Select essays:
“Pop Culture” by Edward Zitron
An article summarizing a 31-page report from Goldman Sachs about why generative ‘AI’ is a bubble and a grift. None of this was new information for me, but occasionally I have to unsubscribe from a ‘writer’s newsletter’ that pops into my inbox with a demonstration that, somehow, there are people in existence who haven’t gotten the memo, and are eager to breathlessly tell me about how a mediocrity machine that regurgitates text based on best-guesses can somehow contribute to my creative process. (It won’t, fuck off.) (And I’m not interesting in killing the environment for it either.)
“Anxiety is Like Exercise” by Richard A. Friedman
A very validating write-up on how stress can turn toxic.
Comics:
Motherlover by Lindsay Ishihiro
A sweet comic about two moms falling in love that just published its final page online!
This comic is sooooo good. The city of Yoalca has a mafia problem, with corruption at the highest levels. Alejandra Estrella, the new IT girl at the Yoalca PD, knows all about it. Because she signed on with an agenda: steal police data, expose organized crime, and bring her kidnapped best friend home. Acting as the vigilante Cometa, she’ll become a beacon of hope for Yoalco in its fight against human trafficking.