Sunday Shorts: Two by Sharang Biswas

Sharang Biswas is a game designer, writer, and artist based in New York City whose stories and poetry have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Sana Stories, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Look him up on his website. Today, I’m going to look at his two most recent stories that appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams. Lightspeed Magazine contents are free to read on the website and e-book subscriptions are also available.

Real Magic” (Lightspeed Magazine #153, February 2023)

Three townspeople visit the Witch in the Woods to ask for help with their problems. She extracts a different price from each, something either cherished or endemic to the person’s sense of self. Each visitor ultimately finds what they are searching for (or searching for relief from), but not in the way they or the reader expects. The witch uses their ingredients to do real magic. This is a beautifully told story, a fairy tale in style but cloaked in Biswas’ beautiful sense of character and community. Biswas uses the needs of the visitors (and their resolutions) to show that every individual action has an effect outside the moment in which that action is taken or that choice is made. Nothing happens in a vacuum, no one person’s fate is theirs alone. What one person discards (willingly or not) may be picked up by another (who may or may not benefit from it). I also loved how Biswas doesn’t spoon-fed the connections between the villagers’ stories but lets them come out organically and not all at once.

 

“Season of Weddings” (Lightspeed Magazine #166, March 2024, story goes live on the website March 28th)

Nate receives seven wedding invitations in one year. Okay, two of them are for his job, which is maybe a little less fun than attending as a guest. Especially because it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Nate is Thanatos, god of death. Sometimes, people die at weddings. Still reeling from his most recent relationship break-up (with Thor, who has moved on to loving a mortal woman), Nate must navigate these weddings, new singlehood, his job, his perhaps too-pushy best friend, and a cute guy he keeps bumping into at the weddings. This story is so sweet, so romantic and wistful. I recognized some of myself in Nate’s self-esteem issues around romance and relationships, which made me connect to the work even more. The world-building is also wonderful, bringing together characters from all sorts of world mythologies and religions but tweaking them in new and interesting ways (for instance, the Thor is this story is neither the “drunken jock” we often see nor the blond-tressed super-hero). I won’t spoil who all shows up, because part of the fun of the story is the reveals of Nate’s friends’ circle. I’m a sucker for “deities and personifications of human concepts walk among us and act like every-day people” types of stories (think the classic issue number eight of Neil Gaiman’s the Sandman, illustrated by Mike Dringenberg, among others), and this one fits the description very well. It also fits very well as a paranormal romance, and I love it when authors blend and blur genres.

 

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past. Click on the Sunday Shorts tab at the bottom of this post to find earlier entries in the series!

READING ROUND-UP: January 2024

The first monthly summary of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching in 2024!

 

BOOKS

I read 10 books in January: 5 in print, 5 in e-book format, and 0 in audio format. They were:

1.       What Moves the Dead (Sworn Sword #1) by T. Kingfisher. (E-BOOK)

2.       Phantom on the Scan by Cullen Bunn, Mark Torres, David Sharpe. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

3.       What Feasts at Night (Sworn Sword #2) by T. Kingfisher (PRINT, ARC (publishes February 2024))

4.       Highlands Book One: The Portrait of Amelia by Philipe Aymond. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

5.       Highlands Book Two: The Survivors of Blackwater by Philipe Aymond. (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

6.       We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker. (E-BOOK)

7.       Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. (E-BOOK)

8.       Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire. (AUDIOBOOK, REREAD)

9.       The Birds & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier. (E-BOOK)

10.   Hellstrom: Evil Origins by Gary Freidrich, Herb Trimpe, Don Perlin, Bill Mantlo, and others (PRINT, GRAPHIC NOVEL)

 

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 366 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) this leap year. Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it.

 

1.       “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones, in Lightspeed Magazine #164, edited by John Joseph Adams

2.       “Shadow Films” by Ben Peek.

3.       “Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel” by Aimee Ogden

4.       “We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World” by David Anaxagoras

5.       “A Saint Between the Teeth” by Sloane Leong

6.       “In the Tree's Hollow” by Lowry Poletti

7.       “Farewell to Faust” by Adam-Troy Castro

8.       “To Be a Happy Man” by Thomas Ha

9.       “The Silver Sea” by Seanan McGuire, on the Author’s Patreon

10.   “Ten Thousand Crawling Children” by R.A. Busby, Nightmare Magazine #136, edited by Wendy N. Wagner

11.   “The Forgetter” by Andrew Snover

12.   “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier, from The Birds & Other Stories

13.   “Monte Verita” by Daphne du Maurier

14.   “The Apple Tree” by Daphne du Maurier

15.   “The Little Photographer” by Daphne du Maurier

16.   “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” by Daphne du Maurier

17.   “The Old Man” by Daphne du Maurier

18.   “The Carnival” by Richard Chizmar, stand-alone chapbook published by Cemetery Dance

19.   “End Game” by Martin Edwards, stand-alone chapbook published by The Mysterious Bookshop

20.   “Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden, from Clarkesworld #208, edited by Neil Clarke

21.   “Down the Waterfall” by Cecile Cristofari

22.   “Willow Wood” by Linda Neihoff, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #398, edited by Scott H. Andrews

23.   “Home Bread” by R.E. Dukalsky

24.   “Miriam” by Truman Capote, Fantastic #2 (1952)

25.   “The Star Dummy” by Anthony Boucher

26.   “Most of ‘81” by ‘Nathan Burgoine, from the Author’s Website

 

So that’s 26 short stories in January. A bit less than “1 per day.” (January 31st was, of course, the 31st day of 2024.)

 

MOVIES

1.       Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), directed by James Gunn (STREAMING, Disney+)

2.       Gamera the Giant Monster (1965), directed by Noriaki Yuasa (DVD)

3.       The Birds (1963), directed by Alfred Hitchcock (DVD)

4.       Gamera vs. Barugon (1966), directed by Shigeo Tanaka and Noriaki Yuasa (DVD)

 

TELEVISION

·       Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1, episodes 4 – 8 (5 episodes) (SEASON REVIEW HERE)

·       What If…? Season 2, episodes 2 – 9 (8 episodes)

·       Slow Horses Season 1, episodes 1 – 6 (6 episodes)

·       Slow Horses Season 2, episode 1 (1 episode)

·       A Hero’s Journey: The Making of Percy Jackson and the Olympians (1 episode)

That’s 21 episodes of television, again not quite the “1 per day” I was shooting for.

 

LIVE THEATER

1.       Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, NYC)

 

 

Summary of Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 0 of 14 read.

366 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  26 read; YTD: 26 of 366 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 10 read; YTD: 10 of 120 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 4 read; YTD: 4 of 52 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 0 of 12 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 1  read/watched (“The Birds”); YTD: 1 read/watched.

Movie Challenge: This month: 4 watched; YTD: 4 of 52 watched.

TV Shows Challenge: This month: 21 episodes watched; YTD: 21 of 366 watched

Live Theater Challenge: This month: 1 show attended; YTD: 1 of 12 attended.

Sunday Shorts: Two by Beth Cato

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

 

Recently on Facebook, I commented that Beth Cato is one of those authors who expertly breaks this reader’s heart on a regular basis, and yet I constantly go back for me. This was precipitated by reading two of Cato’s stories almost back-to-back, one a recent publication and one a reprint. Both stories are about struggling with the impending loss of a loved one, making hard decisions about whether it’s better to try to delay the inevitable or give in to it, and about what good may come, in time, from such a loss.

“Perilous Blooms” (Daily Science Fiction, May 26, 2020) takes place in a world where super-abilities are just common enough to be taken advantage of by a government that only wishes to remain in power. People who develop these extra abilities are corralled up, shipped off to war off-planet. The narrator of the story, a grandmother now, lost her own mother in such a way. We realize very quickly that she has reason to fear losing her very young grand-daughter the same way. Mother and grand-daughter are both struggling with the impending death of the woman who connects them. Grand-daughter thinks she can heal her mother, keep her from dying. Part of grandmother wishes this could be true, but most of her hopes her grand-daughter is just imagining the ability as a way of coping with the fact that her mother is dying. I won’t spoil the outcome, as I think the spooling out of what is true and what is imagined is part of what makes the story so heartbreaking. Cato keeps the POV very tight, gives us no more world-building than is absolutely necessary to understand the narrator’s quandary and the threat to the grand-daughter in a world where even pretending to have a super-ability is enough to get you snatched up by the authorities.

“The Sweetness of Bitter” first appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show’s September 2013 issue and will be reprinted in an upcoming anthology I had the pleasure of proofreading. The setting is post-apocalyptic: what the apocalypse was is vague, but there’s little in the way of electricity, communities are barren, and what people the main character encounters are distrustful of strangers. The main character, Margo, and her daughter, Tara, are making their way towards a facility Margo hopes will stop her daughter from dying a second death. Second, because we learn very quickly that this daughter is a “sim,” an android recreation of the daughter she’s already lost once to leukemia. In the days before the collapse of society, repairing sims was fairly easy. But now, Margo’s only hope is a headquarters of the company that made the sims in the first place. The signs of Tara’s impending system failure become more apparent as the story progresses and the two encounter unexpected roadblocks. Those roadblocks made the story even more poignant to me, made me feel Margo’s anguish at yet another delay in healing her daughter. Backstory (where is Tara’s father? what else has Margo tried before getting to this point) are sketched in as the story progresses as well.

Back in December 2004 through February 2005, I was primary caregiver for my mother, who was slowly finally succumbing to the cancer she’d been fighting for the previous four years. In restrospect, the end was more apparent in December and even early January than I wanted to see – in fact, it was probably more apparent months earlier than any of us, even her doctors, wanted to admit. I see that struggle of mine to accept the inevitable, to make peace with it and start deciding what positives could come from her passing (for instance, we caught my own colon cancer just seven months later thanks in part to me “listening to my body” in a way my parents hadn’t), reflected in the main characters of these two stories. Neither of them wants their daughter to die. Neither of them wants the world to be the way it is. But both also find strength, to do what needs to be done (for me, that need was to acquiesce to my mother’s wishes to die at home surrounded by loved ones instead of in a hospital). There is hope even in their despondency.

And that is why I say that Beth Cato, especially in her short fiction, has the ability to rip a reader’s heart out and yet keep us coming back for more. In the past few years, largely due to her Blood of Earth trilogy, she has become one of my favorite writers.

Top Ten(ish): Stephen King Books

Top Ten(ish) is a new series on the blog, in which I list of ten or so of my favorite things that have something in common: books by the same author or editor or publisher; music by the same band/performer, etc. Feel free to suggest topics (although if I don’t have a deep enough catalogue of experience with the category, I may choose not to post about it). The (ish) allows me to run slightly higher or lower, because exactly 10 is often hard for me to decide. Note: they’re MY favorites, for a variety of reasons not always having to do with quality alone. I’m not saying they are The Best (in fact, I never make that determination, about anything). Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV). Please, don’t yuck my yum and tell me how I’m completely wrong about anything on this list.

 

Top Ten King books (2).jpg

 

Today’s inaugural Top Ten(ish) post: Stephen King Books, in no particular order other than #1:

1.       ‘Salem’s Lot: I sincerely doubt anything will ever knock this novel from the top spot. I’ve read it about as many times as I’ve read Dracula. I love the sweep of the narrative, the sense that the infestation is so much bigger than the rag-tag band that is fighting it. I love the main characters. And every time I read the scene where Danny Glick shows up at Mark Petrie’s second-floor bedroom window I find myself back in 13-year-old Anthony’s panicked mind – when I first read the scene, it was a windy night and something scratched at my window; I looked and saw red eyes for a second. It turned out to be a raccoon on a tree branch, but I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a book across a room so quickly nor screamed quite so loud.

2.       Cycle of the Werewolf: I’m a bit of a sucker for books that are set up to match a calendar of some kind, whether it’s a chapter per day, per week, per month or per year. This one works so well on that level and as a novella, which is my favorite length to read. And of course, in the edition I have, the Bernie Wrightson art just makes the whole thing even better. (Admission: pretty sure I saw the movie Silver Bullet before I read the book on which it’s based. I like both, but when push comes to shove in this case, I think the book is far superior.)

3.       The Dark Half: I’m also a sucker for books where the main character is a writer, especially if that writer gets involved in supernatural or criminal shenanigans (See: ‘Salem’s Lot previously, and also the next entry on the list). Thad Beaumont may be one of my favorite characters of all time, and definitely one of my favorite King characters. I love the pacing and the reveals on this one, and the glimpses into how Thad wrote versus how George Stark wrote. Interestingly, when the book was released it was touted as the first part of King’s “final Castle Rock trilogy,” followed by the story “The Sun Dog” (which I read and liked) and the novel Needful Things, which is among the King books I haven’t read yet.

4.       Misery: Oh, Annie Wilkes, perhaps one of King’s greatest creations. As a play lover, I’ve always been fascinated by how a writer keeps the audience’s interest up when there are only two characters in the entire story, and I think this novel is something of a masterwork in that regard. Yes, there are the chapters with the new Misery novel Paul Sheldon is writing under duress, but otherwise for the most part it’s just Annie and Paul in a house. And every page is riveting. (Even moreso the movie, which may be one of the few times I like the movie slightly more than the book.)

5.       The Dead Zone: My memory’s getting rusty, but I’m pretty sure this was the second King novel I ever read (after ‘Salem’s Lot and before Cujo) and it has always stuck with me: Johnny’s sense of loss and disconnectedness after his five-year coma turning into a sense of mission as he realizes what he can do; the look into the seedier side of politics (very impressionable on a 13- or 14-year old small-town boy); the apocalyptic nature of the whole thing. I am way overdue for a re-read of this one.

6.       Night Shift: I am a short story fanatic (someday maybe I’ll write a post about why). I may not have read every Stephen King novel, but I have read every short story and novella collection and this was the first (and may have been the second King book I read; I know I read it around the same time as The Dead Zone and Cujo but can no longer remember the exact order). I know people love King’s dictionary-size works, but I think he’s a master of the short form. In this particular volume, favorites include “Jerusalem’s Lot,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” “Quitters, Inc.,” “Children of the Corn,” and “One for The Road.”

7.       Different Seasons: I might have to credit this volume for instilling my love of novellas (alongside Robert Silverberg’s To Open the Sky). Three out of the four included in this volume blew me away, showing me how a writer could step outside of their identified-with genre and still be fantastic. There’s barely a hint of horror at all in “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” and no supernatural element to the horror of either “The Body” or “Apt Pupil” (which contrast two very different childhoods to great effect). And all three captivate me from start to finish. The only novella herein that I rarely re-read is “The Breathing Method.” When I first read it, it felt too much like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story in terms of set-up (I was young, opinionated, and unaware of the tradition of “gentlemen’s club stories.” Sue me.); I really should try to read it with fresh eyes.

8.       Nightmares and Dreamscapes: So yeah, there are a few themes among this list, as you can tell. More great short stories (perhaps I should do a separate post about Top Ten(ish) Stephen King short stories?). Favorites in this particular collection include “The Night Flier,” “Popsy,” “Home Delivery,” “Crouch End,” “The House on Maple Street,” “The Doctor’s Case,” and “Umney’s Last Case.”

9.       Cujo: Either the third or fourth King book I ever read (again, that pesky rusty memory). Another time I saw the movie before the book. In fact I almost didn’t read the book because the movie holds a not-pleasant memory for me: a friend and I went to see it and for various reasons got there late and ended up sitting in the second row. I developed a headache throughout the movie, and when we got to the scene where Cujo circles the car, the constant eye-view motion got to me, and I ran out of the theater to puke up my popcorn (the first of two times that’s ever happened to me). And of course got teased mercilessly. Pretty sure I never went to a movie with that friend again. The book was phenomenal, partly because another thing I love is books where the characters (and sometimes the reader) are unsure as to whether events have a basis in the supernatural or have a mundane explanation.

10.   Lisey’s Story: I had taken a long break from Stephen King novels, for no apparent reason, but December of 2006 brought me back to it, with almost back-to-back reads of The Colorado Kid (the first Hard Case Crime imprint release I read, leading to my love of that line and thus covered in a future post) and Lisey’s Story. I was in a rough place at the time: unexpectedly between jobs, still not quite over the death of my mother almost two years earlier, with heavy depression, questioning my abilities as a teacher and as a writer … and Lisey Landon’s loss and memories resonated with me. And look at that – another book in which a writer and his secrets take center-stage (or close to it), although this time we see that all through the lens of the writer’s wife/widow.

11.   Skeleton Crew: Have I mentioned how much I love short stories, and how much I love Stephen King’s short stories in particular? I’m not sure that’s been made clear enough in the preceding 10 entries. (That’s a joke, son. Poking a little fun at myself. All the best writers and bloggers do it.) In this volume, the stand-outs for me personally are “The Mist,” “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” “The Raft,” “Word Processor of the Gods,” “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” and “The Reach.”

12.   The Stand Complete and Uncut: Look, I don’t hate King’s doorstop-size novels. If I did, there’s no way the uncut version of The Stand would be on this list at all. I just in general struggle with 1,000+ page books: they’re a big investment, and I find they often take a long time to really “get going.” But The Stand is an exception to that trend: it starts with a bang, and then the swell of characters and locations carries you along until the characters come together and shit really starts to happen. Images sit in my mind’s eye years after reading it: Trashcan Man’s irradiated skin; the mystery of Mother Abigail, the skeeviness of Harold Lauder, the connection between Franny and Stu, the sacrifice of Nick Andros, and of course the big final confrontation.

Okay, Constant Readers: your turn! Hit the comments and tell me what your favorite King books are – put please do so without denigrating what other people love.