Not One Of Us #38

Any small press publication that reaches thirty-eight issues is to be commended. A ‘zine that, like Not One of Us, edited by John Benson, can do so while publishing a bunch of strong fantasy stories that either play with or defy genre conventions, deserves a much wider audience.

Take Ian Roger’s “Relaxed Best,” the darkest story on offer, combining as it does the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction with elements of paganism and witchcraft to create a horror story shaded with a sense of menace and creeped-out paranoia. Private investigator Ryerson is hired by Veronica Marchand—known as the Blue Fairy for her skill in playing the stock market—to investigate husband Jonathan, whom she suspects of straying from the marital bed. The alias signals Veronica’s true nature, and explains her success in predicting stock prices. It also suggests that there’s more to this marriage than Ryerson anticipated, with the possibility of some kind of demonic pact being hinted at as the story strays down the kind of horror/crime hinterland explored in fiction as diverse as William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel and Jay Russell’s Marty Burns stories. Like Hjortsberg’s Harry Angel, Ryerson is soon way out of his depth and discovers too late the meaning of the term “relaxed best” as he pays the price for Marchand’s broken contract.

“Sweet Spot, or The Antigone of the Wykigill Mining Station” by Jeremy Wexler uses myth, as its title suggests, to structure a simple but affective piece of science fiction which focuses on an act of extraordinary defiance. The protagonist, Annie, has lost her father to an unexplained accident caused, it is implied, by neglect on the part of his employer, the Wykigill Mining Station. Out of a sense of duty, Annie wishes to bury, or at least dispose of, his body in a fitting manner. Only problem is his dessicated corpse in suspended in orbit between sixty and ninety meters above the surface of the tiny planet Wykigill, and the company boss refuses to bring him back. Floating in this “sweet spot” alongside various pieces of flotsam and jetsam, the body is both a source of embarrassment and a constant reminder of a relationship full of wasted opportunities. Despite an order forbidding her from trying to rescue the body or to blast it beyond the planet’s orbit, Annie is compelled to do this one thing for her father, no matter what the cost. Told in a deadpan, tragic-comic manner that subverts the heroic but alienating nature of myth, Wexler emphasises Annie’s ordinariness, her confusion, and succeeds in giving us an all-too human Antigone.

The weakest story is Sonya Taffe’s “Bones and Bitters,” which strives for effect but in doing so leaves the reader stranded. Its thin narrative collapses beneath the weight of turgid description, alluding, along the way, to vampirism, Faustian pacts, Tarot, and serial killing without ever really making clear what the protagonist, Skander Marinin, has done and whether he deserves the fate meted out to him. Marinin’s character is barely sketched, but, confused as I was in trying to keep track of the disparate elements of myth and fantasy, I didn’t really care. It’s all very well being able to conjure up a dark, brooding atmosphere, but when it leads to unnecessarily convoluted prose that strangles the life out of the narrative, as in the following sentence:

“Deodare had brought out whatever device passed for a pocket watch, turnip silver and late sun over its enamel-and-crystal face, that he was studying as singularly as though he had not even heard Skander, but he glanced up as Samovila stepped out of her chair, crossed the room in the time Skander had to swallow dryly.”

then the reader is perfectly entitled to wander off to some other page and let the writer continue her maunderings undisturbed.

“The Fox and the Foreigner” by Loren Rhoads is a contemporary fantasy set in Tokyo. Alondra, the foreigner of the title, has come to the city to seek redress from Tadashi, a dealer in occult Orientalia who has cheated her deceased guardian. Returning from an initial meeting with the crooked dealer, she encounters an old woman who, after giving her tea and listening to Alondra’s story, offers to give her a beautiful kimono to wear to a party Tadashi has arranged. We soon realise that the old woman is not what she seems, but a fox-spirit who has herself suffered at the hands of Tadashi. Alondra too possesses magical skills, though these are only gradually revealed. This means we look at her in human terms, and only in retrospect do we reconsider this westerner’s way with Japanese language and customs. This aspect of the narrative is skilfully handled, conveying with conviction, both Alondra’s fascination with and respect for local customs and tradition, and the strangeness—to a western reader at least—of the city and its people. What’s less convincing is that Alondra and Kitsune—the fox-spirit—should meet so fortuitously before the former’s final encounter with Tadashi. Perhaps Rhoads felt constrained by formal elements of Japanese myth, but this coincidence, coupled with the fact that Tadashi is a poorly sketched villain, meant that I never really believed that Alondra was in any real danger, despite an allusion to a childhood rape. Despite these weaknesses, the story has charm and shows in Alondra an ability to create a convincing and sympathetic outsider.

There is something incantatory about the prose style of Patricia Russo’s “Pigeon, Water, Blue”—easily the best story here—that suggests a kinship with an older, oral tradition. Her rhythmic, sinuous sentences, with their repeated phrases and sound patterns, propel the narrative along with an almost hypnotic ease. The story itself is simple; in an implicitly described post-apocalyptic landscape, three loosely allied tribes eke out a basic hunter/gatherer existence, the men of each band getting along with those of the other tribes with varying degrees of suspicion, envy, and hostility. The women from each tribe, however, associate more easily with each other, often foraging together and trading their finds. A girl, crippled with a hump on her back, discovers that she possesses the rare talent of softening and reshaping stone. While the mother wishes to see the girl educated in ways to help her develop her gift, her father thinks she is cursed by her disability and therefore unworthy. This same father has also become “A Man Who Killed People,” and though the author offers no explicit rationale for his crimes, the narrative suggests that his membership of the most powerful of the three tribes grants him a kind of immunity from retribution. The larger community seems to suffer a kind of inertia, even when the man kills again, but the author suggests that the coming together of the womenfolk, their willingness to communicate with each other, can generate a pragmatism capable of overcoming the hidden bonds of tradition and superstition. The whole thing could so easily have become mired in worthiness and solemnity, but Russo counters this by investing the narrative with an earthy sensibility that makes her characters more human than the archetypes of fable.

There’s a striking cover image which illustrates a scene from Rhoads’s story, and a number of poems, including one by Taaffe, but in truth, it’s the strength of the fiction that makes this one ‘zine that lovers of dark fantasy should check out.