Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, November 2007, No. 21

What’s in a name? What, exactly, should a reader expect when they pick up a magazine called Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet? Pretensions to literary stylings would seem to be a certainty, but does the obscure title also hint at a deliberately obscure approach to story and language? There are those writers whose primary purpose is to communicate with their readers, to tell a story, make a point, or engage in a conversation, and there are others who seem primarily concerned with demonstrating the range of their command of the English language and the scope of their intelligence.

Communicators make the most engaging writers, though that’s not to say that “good” writing is the sole province of one or the other approach, but great writing is inclusive; it takes the particular experiences of a person or group of people and makes them accessible across gender, class, time, and space. Therefore, regardless of genre boundaries or literary pretensions, those writers who seek to open channels of communication with their audience rather than exclude or marginalise parts of their potential readership have always seemed more admirable than those who write to exclude.

Which leads, with some trepidation, to the contents of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Thankfully, for the most part, the stories contained within these 62 square cut pages are surprisingly free of the pretension that the magazine’s title might suggest.

The first, and longest, offering in this issue is “The Night and Day War” by Alice Sola Kim, and it is also one of the issue’s most problematic stories. There’s some exceptional writing here in a story that’s a neat mixture of Age of Terror paranoia and teenage angst. “The Night and Day War” sees a troubled narrator transferred from her suburban life to a special school where the classes are divided between the privileged kids (taught during the day) and the gifted and oddball kids in the narrator’s class (taught at night). The story is threaded through with a sense of foreboding—war is coming, missiles will soon be flying. Events come to a head when a fight breaks out between the day and night kids that coincides with a cataclysmic event.

“The Night and Day War” asks plenty of interesting questions about the world we live in, but it doesn’t offer anything in the way of answers. The narrator appears to learn little, despite the momentous events around her, and while the author might (fairly) argue that in a confusing, dangerous, and indiscriminately cruel world, her conclusion, leaving her protagonist hovering between two worlds like some quantum cat, is the only proper way to envisage the future, it hardly delivers a satisfying experience for the reader. These reservations aside, however, the imagery and the strength of the writing means that “The Night and Day War” persisted in the memory long after many of the other stories in this collection faded.

About the only thing “The Night and Day War” has in common with “The Curmudgeon” by Adam Ares is that the characters are convinced there is war coming and mankind is doomed. Out of this, though, Ares manages to construct a witty vignette in the life of a character who might be the shallowest human ever to walk the Earth, even in a near future where “Ode On A Grecian Urn” has been rewritten in praise of Wal-mart and where heartbreak is recompensed by on-the-spot fines. The story’s narrator is charming and funny and at the same time utterly despicable, and just when you think the little shit might have learned his lesson and deserves some sympathy, Ares pulls the rug out from under your feet again. As a whole, “The Curmudgeon” neatly balances a dark and dystopian worldview with sharp and witty observations, a trick that deserves praise and a high recommendation.

Dark fantasy and horror writers frequently use the death of children as the foundation of their work. The reason is perfectly understandable—the idea of losing a child is a parent’s greatest terror and one that can be appreciated across boundaries of age and culture. But, while the theme may be almost universal, following in the footsteps of so many other writers can make approaching the subject with any degree of originality very difficult. “The Lake” by Matthew Cheney, a tale of parental obsession and ghostly visions following an accident that robs a town of many of its children, doesn’t deliver any startlingly new insights, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t provide moments of poignancy or arresting images. “The Lake” is likeable, moving even, but it has flaws. The relationships (between the narrator and her husband, Gabe, and between the parents and their children) are rather one-dimensional. Even in the most loving families, the relationships between a mother and her child are rarely so simplistic as presented here. Gabe’s decision to leave his wife seems too coolly taken.

Cheney’s courage (not to say enormous chutzpah) in choosing to end his story with a direct reference to the greatest short story ever written in the English language (The Dead by James Joyce) is admirable but unwise; “The Lake” might be good, but just isn’t in that league.

“On a Dark and Featureless Plain” by Stephanie Brady Tharpe starts promisingly—with the arrival of a stranger in an American diner—and the opening section is well handled and does a strong job of creating atmosphere and a sense of foreboding. The story falls apart, however, when it descends into a protracted magical fistfight between the protagonist and his mysterious evil stalker. It turns out that our hero is bearing some curse or gift that places him at odds with this stranger who he must defeat—there are some dark woods and a lot of crows and rather too much hokum for my taste.

In “Two Variations,” Jeannette Westwood writes from the point of view of a snake god playing backgammon with a young girl. The story splits into two paths—depending on the roll of the dice—win or lose. “Two Variations” is very short, as it has to be—the conceit would not sustain greater length—but it is startlingly written and packs an astonishing amount of energy and emotion into a very small package.

Kirstin Allio’s “Clay” is the second most substantial story in this issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, at least in terms of page count. The story itself, however, is pretty thin. It follows George and Arla, teenagers escaping to the city from their small town upbringing, through the apparently inevitable collapse of their always fragile relationship, to what appears to be a reconciliation in rural France. George is a sculptor, and following their breakup, he becomes obsessed with modelling Arla. The problem for “Clay” lies in the denouement—which relies on an unheralded and dramatic shift in George’s character. One can see that the ending makes sense for the author; unfortunately, she has not done enough to convince the reader that it makes sense from the point of view of the character. And so, rather than casting light on what has gone before, the final passage muddies the waters.

Even after several readings, “The Postern Gate” by Brian Conn remains unfathomable, and the more closely it is examined, the less of it there seems to be revealed. The story features an uncomfortably handled point of view and an overblown writing style. The story opens with a first person narrator describing some unnamed men moving across rough country to a castle which they expect to enter through the postern gate. Their objective is described as “poor for a castle,” with no moat or ditch, but it is apparently large enough to enclose corridors and stairwells that stretch “half a mile” (and later the narrator remembers when the moat was full of goldfish). Inside the castle, a maid is carrying a baby something through dark corridors to an appointment at the postern gate.

This is where the real problems start. The narrator is able to tell us what this maid does, sees, and feels, even though he cannot possibly be present with her or know what she is thinking. As the story progresses, the narrator seems capable of looking across miles and into the past and the future without hindrance. The end of the story is a whirl of characters and places and times thrown together in a jumble of viewpoints that make no sense, given the story’s single narrator. A generous reading would be that Conn is playing games with our expectations of time and space and reality, but as “The Postern Gate” unfolds, it becomes harder to shake the feeling that he is incapable of controlling an incontinent point of view.

As the story progresses, the writing becomes steadily more complex but less revealing—a candle lights a room with a “fulgent haze” (can a haze be fulgent?), time “flows more like a scent than a sentence” (do scents flow?), then the story shifts to a room full of men who expand “like cats” before passing back to the maid who is suddenly, inexplicably pursued by a barefooted man. From there, it descends into a stream of consciousness that is poorly linked to what has gone before, and the writing slips into self-indulgence, mistaking complexity for craft and opacity for profundity.

More satisfying by far is “The Coder” by Benjamin Parzybok, which is a simple enough story about a mystical programmer who produces perfect code for Nebbets Inc. and their apparently petty software. The Coder is a hermit-like figure who lives on Nebbets Inc.’s roof and who deals only with Brian Gorman, the story’s narrator. Brian modestly exploits his unique position for his own benefit—though less than others might—and his job largely involves delivering food, collecting screeds of handwritten code, and hiding from everyone, except the company’s most senior managers, the fact that the entire organisation exists on the whim of a madman on the roof. The end of “The Coder” will hardly come as a surprise, but it is nicely handled, and it maintains a neat air of mystery and irony.

Corie Ralston’s “Maps to God” is the most interesting and successful story in this issue. It is told from the point of view of a young girl who hears snatches of music and voices she believes are being beamed to her from “a Gnostic sect hidden deep in the Sahara. Or possibly Nevada.” The girl is working on constructing a machine, a map to God, in her basement. Her father is indulgent, helping the girl with her project. Her mother is desperate and wants her daughter to be placed on medication.

There are a number of admirable things about Ralston’s story. The choice to make the young girl the narrator was by far the most difficult way to tell this story, but Ralston pulls it off with great aplomb. The story has obvious parallels with Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, as the protagonist briefly emerges into a sort of clarity before slipping back into her “natural” state, but Ralston’s short story doesn’t suffer by comparison. The narrator’s manic obsessions and her glitch-ridden view of the world are, of course, an illness, but the moment of “clarity” that comes with her brief “cure” reveals a mundane world. Stripped of her intensity and without the rainbow of possibilities that her illness endows upon the otherwise bland world around her, reality doesn’t seem to offer the narrator half as much as madness. The final paragraphs of “Maps to God” are bittersweet; this is escape and madness, but it is also a perverse kind of freedom that locks a girl away inside uncontrolled obsessions.

The final story in this issue is Carol Emshwiller’s “Sanctuary,” and it is very short, very cruel, and very funny. Aliens seeking sanctuary on Earth make two terrible mistakes—first, they trust humans and second, they turn out to taste great fried!

Issue #21 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is rounded out by two poems, a comic strip, a fake agony aunt column, and an interesting piece on “new wave” fiction in Japan.

This is an accomplished magazine. There’s no shortage of ambition amongst the writing on show, and even those stories criticised here have obvious qualities and are the work of demonstrably capable writers. The standard throughout is high and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is neither as fey nor as hard to approach as its esoteric name might suggest. This issue contained a number of genuinely memorable stories and some excellent writing. It is a read that is certainly worth your while.