Fantasy Magazine Online, December 2007

This month’s Fantasy Magazine yields up horror, romance, a re-imagined fairy tale, a prose poem, and a bedtime story. It’s an uneven crop but an interesting one nonetheless. Overall, where December’s offerings are weakest is coherency. Two stories feel like sections of novels (a phenomenon I’ve encountered from this publication’s offerings before), and the plotline of another is difficult to follow. There’s some beautiful writing here, however, and a few powerful, poignant moments.

I am completely baffled by Leslie Claire Walker’s “Offerings.” I gather that Emma is a decorator for ghosts, employed by someone named Johnson. Her son (now deceased) was a serial killer, and she’s visiting one of his former victims, Michael Delacroix, who has killed two people himself since he entered the afterlife. She never does any decorating, just a bit of snarking about Delacroix’s disgusting apartment. Then she visits her son’s grave. Walker devotes intricate care to establishing a tone and describing environments but less to providing exposition. Who is Johnson? What does a decorator for the dead really do? Does Emma have to shed her grief for her son before she can do her job? Why is Delacroix killing people, and are those folks Emma sent? I will say that even if Walker has left me confused, she certainly hasn’t bored me (although I was a little grossed out by visceral descriptions of bodily harm that were doubtless necessary), and I’d be interested in answers to these questions, so she’s definitely doing something right, which is more than you can say for many stories.

I’m not much of one for romance, but, despite its fey tone, Marly Youmans’s “The Comb” is pleasing and smoothly written, and I find its inconclusiveness maddening; she succeeds in making me care about her heroine, who doesn’t seem to have a name. Our protagonist has survived a divorce, a nervous breakdown, and a suicide attempt, and meets a strange, fey man with a magical comb while wandering in the countryside. He has an enemy and a history that is never quite explained, and at the end of the story, our heroine is waiting for him to return. I’m not a fan of the gender politics in this story, but it is oddly enchanting, like the bond between the protagonist and her lover, and just as full of unanswered questions as their union.

I suspect Nicole Kornher-Stace likes Angela Carter’s work, because “The Promise” feels like an homage: a fairy tale with a female main character, a tale rife with gore and sexuality, transformations, an ambivalent union, a puzzling plot. This Little Red Riding Hood eats bloody apples and has sexually charged encounters with a wolf. But the elements don’t fit together here the way they would in a Carter story; they feel pretentious and incoherent, done over, shocking to be shocking. Kornher-Stace handles tone skillfully, even if I don’t care for the way she uses it in this story. I think different use of language and some uncluttering of symbolism might make this tale feel more coherent and original, and from what I can see, this writer’s capable of it.

Amber Van Dyk’s “As Soon As Summer” is narrated by someone grieving for a loved one dying in the hospital. It feels more like a prose poem than a story; it is grammatically stringy, repetitive, and padded with seasonal metaphors intended to carry emotional weight. There’s also a bit of culturally insensitive content when the narrator describes her loved one in a clearly metaphorical way as “my Chinese acrobat.” This is a heartfelt piece, but some analytical muscle needs to be applied to it for it to succeed as a story. There is no rhetorical or narrative movement and no argument, although Van Dyk does manage to set a tone.

The strongest story on offer this month is Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Time to Say Goodnight,” which is reminiscent of some of the pieces in Joan Aiken’s collection, Tale of a One-Way Street. I would not hesitate to recommend this story to parents I know as an age-appropriate handling of divorce and death, but it also carries considerable poignancy and power for an adult audience. It feels simple but not dumbed down, authentically childlike but not twee. Yoachim successfully mixes reality and fantasy so that you can’t even see the seams between them; magical toys and talking animals share a world with microwaves, divorce, and pulp-in orange juice. This piece is smoothly written, free of both purple prose and syntatical snarlups. There’s an appropriate minimum of environmental and personal description, and the details that do come through successfully illuminate a world in magical miniature, well-formed and carefully crafted. “Time To Say Goodnight” succeeds, swimmingly.