Welcome back it’s time for more great short fiction! This week I’ve got another 5 stories I enjoyed, and think are great and worthy of your time! No single theme happening this week though we do have two stories of revenge, and there is definitely a lot of significant death and tragedy to be had here. It’s not all Doom and Gloom, but there is at least some of that to be sure. I promise though that there are also a lot of moments of human kindness and beauty and helping each other survive the things life can throw at us here too.

One thing I’ve don this week that I’ve never done before is feature two stories from the same magazine. It wasn’t on purpose at first, I was just going through my notes and realized I’d picked out two stories from Strange Horizons. I normally deliberately avoid doing this as I like to spread the recommendations around, but if there was ever a time to highlight two great stories from Strange Horizons now is the time as they are currently in the midst of their annual fund drive. Strange Horizons is a wonderful magazine that provides not only great international short speculative fiction, but poetry, reviews, and critical essays as well. They’re always pushing the envelope and are near-unique in the field. Well worth your support if you’re able.

But now, let’s get to the stories!

“Objects of Value” by AnaMaria Curtis from Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2022 Issue

Here we have a complex, lovely story of perseverance, love, and kindness, all in the face of terrible destruction and loss. Keth lives in a city, Spire’s Ledge, that floats in the air and is kept their by natural spires that grow the herbs that power the world’s magic, and that city is doomed. The destruction facing Spire’s Ledge is basically a slow moving natural disaster and people have time to try and escape, though class and luck have much to do with the chances of survival. The wealthy and lucky can get one of the few available seats on an airship before the city crumbles. The rest must make do with parachutes of various quality and reliability.

Keth is someone whose talents allows her to transfer the memories associated with an object, such as a treasured clock passed down by a loving grandfather, into another object, such as a small whittled dog figurine. With the need to flee and leave so much behind facing an entire city, business is booming. Keth, attached as she is to the memories of the city as a whole finds leaving herself a very difficult proposition and her lingering lets her help some, but also witness the tragedies that come when facing utter destruction with no adequate means of survival.

Despite the grim subject matter, that only feels even grimmer when it feels like a mirror held up to our own future of ever increasing climate disasters, I found a lot of peace and beauty in this story. Keth is not exploitative of her desperate customers, and is doing everything in her power to let people save as much as they can, even finding herself crossing lines in the name of saving a life, and we are reminded not only that love can still exist at the worst of times, but that though people can and will die in disasters a people can also persevere and live on and preserve something and sometimes something has to be enough.

“Heavy Possessions” by Seong Kim from Strange Horizons May 2nd 2022 Issue

I always like to be clear about the fact that my recommendations are subjective and based on my own tastes and biases. For that reason, I do like to be clear about those biases when they come up (long time roundup readers probably know my love of time travel, for instance) and one of those biases is for stories that remind me of Korea. It was my home for 13 years and will always be a part of me so stories that evoke it’s food and mountain graves and stories will have a special attraction for me. That said, you certainly don’t need any special connection to Korea to enjoy this beautiful story, a much lighter story than the last, though it fits firmly into a bittersweet mode at times.

Here we have a tale of two members of two different experience of the Korean diaspora. First we have “you”, the protagonist being spoken to, who is a young Korean-American woman who barely speaks Korean and pays the rent by acting as a Korean shaman online, a “digital medium” (i.e. a scam artist). Second is the narrator, the “I” of the story, a ghost of an older Korean woman who moved with her husband to the United states long before K-pop took over the world and who, much to the surprise of both characters comes to possess the “fake” medium.

What I most loved of this story is the healing each character is able to offer the other, healing perhaps neither knew they needed, as the spirit acts as a surrogate grandmother helping the living young woman connect with the culture, food and language of her family that was mostly lost to her and the medium, apparently real after all, provides peace and comfort for the older woman to ease her passing on to proper rest. A very nice story.

“Six Steps to Become a Saint” by Avi Burton from Apparition Lit Issue 18

Here we have a second-world fantasy tackling colonialism and diaspora issues that is also clearly firmly rooted in Jewish experiences and culture (though not only Jewish experiences and culture and, again, is second-world fantasy). It, like many stories this week, has a lot of tragedy, darkness, and death, but it also has triumph and wonder. One thing I most loved about this story, other than the great imagery and the way the setting comes alive, is the relationship between the main character and his father.

Here we have a father raising his young son in a land not their homeland, and one that seemingly only barely tolerates their different religion and culture, and he clearly wants his son to know and understand where they came from and embrace it, but when the son chooses another path, the path of assimilation (assimilation so complete he strives to become a priest of this nations religion), his father does not abandon him or turn his back on him or curse him for the choice. Indeed, he even gives his son advice: if you’re going to do this, do it fully and completely or you won’t succeed. The son feels he grows apart from his dad, that his father becomes like a stranger to him, but we never get the impression that his father has anything but love and understanding for his son.

Eventually things go wrong, and our MC does embrace the roots, the magic, the beliefs and automaton creation traditions (this world’s golems I assume) of his ancestors, and reject the country that would never accept his father, but it is never the relationship with his father that goes wrong, not from his father’s side of the equation and I can’t help but think that though his father would probably be proud of the choices his son eventually makes, he would have been perhaps happier if he had found the peace, security and happiness his son thought his initial path would give him instead.

“In Hades, He Lifted Up His Eyes” by James Bennett from The Dark Issue 85

Now this story is quite a bit different than a lot of what I’ve been recommending, being a kind of historical horror piece, and it definitely requires some caveats with the recommendation. I do like to read horror and dark, macabre stories, but I also feel a need to be extra clear about the content of such when I recommend them. This story includes rape, assault and graphic murder and that certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. If it is though, here is a dark story of evil men doing evil things as told by a former ally of theirs who lies in wait for to execute a frankly epic bit of vengeance and revenge.

The narrator of this story, eighteen year old Abraham Farley, is laying buried in a coffin and armed with pistols awaiting his ex-boss to come dig him up so he can kill him. This wild plan makes a little more sense when you know it is 1832 and we are dealing with a gang of resurrectionists (the people who would “acquire” cadavers for anatomists and surgeons to study and practice upon) who aren’t above some murder when an adequate supply of corpses in good condition aren’t available. Abraham is not a particularly good person, he was, by his own admission, “ok with all the murdering”, but when his boss and henchmen kill someone Abraham cares for he puts his plan to end them in motion.

In a lot of ways this story is a darker, and gayer, take on “The Body Snatcher” which was first a Robert Louis Stevenson short story and then a classic Boris Karloff movie. I’ve not read the story but I love the movie so it should come as no surprise I enjoyed this story too, though given the summaries of the story’s plot I’ve seen I should say it’s even more similar to the original material than the movie. That said, you do not have to have any particular interest in resurrectionists, the real life Burke and Hare murderous duo who inspire so many of these stories (and the characters in them!), the Stevenson story or the Karloff movie to enjoy this tale all on it’s on. James Bennett’s prose is gripping and the story wonderfully dark and unsavory in the best ways.

“Consigned to Moonlight” by Shaoni C. White from Fireside Fiction April 2022

This story is just so good. A modern style epistolary format with bits of story coming from a will, a personal journal, a newspaper article, an interview transcript, a professional log, and a witness statement the pieces come together to give us a fun story of revenge and a rebellious strike against an oppressive warmongering government. It’s not all happy and nice, seeing as how the revenge is posthumous, but it is still satisfying. I personally am a fan of these style of stories (No surprise as I’ve even had one published myself after all). There is something really enjoyable about a short story coming together in bits and pieces almost, but not quite, puzzle-like where even the asides and document headings reveal bits of the full picture being painted for us.

Along with the cleverly crafted story we also get a really interesting world here. With runes and concentrated magical moonlight being the source of great and terrible power. White has done just a masterful job of creating this fascinating, intriguing fantasy world that feels overflowing in possibility for stories all while staying perfectly focused on this story. It’s excellently done and as a beautiful bonus the story includes a gorgeous illustration by Aurelijus Langvinis that makes the Verdigris City come even more alive.

And that’s it for this week. As always, if you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that here. I hope to be back in a week with another roundup. If you find something you enjoy reading in my recommendations I hope you’ll shout that story out!