Not One of Us #39

Not One of Us is an appropriate name for a zine that features the kind of fantasy stories that resist categorisation and seem to exist in an uneasy twilight between genre and literary fiction. Though editor John Benson notes in his editorial in issue #39 that animals—real and imagined—crop up in all the stories, the predominant theme of this issue seems to me to be transformation. The protagonists of the six stories presented here all appear to be in a state of transition from one form of existence to another: from living to dead, from man to beast, from human child to creature of the moon, and from human to dragon. Some of these transformations remain incomplete, while in others, the desired state isn’t necessarily what was expected. Not all the stories succeed, but those that do create a palpable frisson of unease.

Take “Ghostlight” by Amanda Downum, for example. This is a beautifully written fantasy that oozes with the sultry atmosphere of the bayou. Memory is a dead girl fostered by Samaritana, a witch. She is troubled by premonitions and echoes of her own living past, and of her mother, for whose death she holds herself responsible. One of these premonitions heralds the arrival of John Grey, a mysterious man in search of a monster. Though the witch agrees to help Grey in his quest, Memory senses that his encounter with the monster—a deftly sketched dragon dripping with the primeval stench and muck of the swamp—will lead to her own dissolution. The narrative is deceptively simple, but it is enriched through Downum’s descriptive skill, particularly in creating simple but striking images and through her ability to conjure up an intense mood of yearning and potential threat.

Michael Kelly’s “Like a Gift from the Ocean” is more vignette than story but no less effective for that. On a beach, memories of a lost child—dead or abducted, we are not told—are prompted by the appearance of a cherub-like creature at the water’s edge. Searching for something to fill the void of his own longing, a man is moved to help the creature, but a cry from beneath the deep echoes his own, long ago pain. For such a short piece, the tale packs a strong emotional punch that derives as much from what is unsaid as from what is revealed.

In “Phase,” Martha J. Allard weaves a memorable fantasy out of a legend that equates the moon with a beautiful woman. In this human form, she had been loved by another mythical creature, Cabriel, made out of flame and bark, and had borne him a child. In the narrative present, the woman has died and has entered another phase of existence, with the moon representing her corpse. Cabriel is trying to connect with his daughter, Ella, for the second time, having found her three years previously and driven her almost insane after revealing his true form. Allard manages to portray Cabriel’s loneliness and tentative love for his daughter with tenderness and honesty, even investing in him sympathy for a fellow outsider, a young, drunken derelict who had planned to rape Ella. Written in third person, the story switches focus easily from Cabriel to Ella and shows us her growing awareness of the truth about both Cabriel and her own true nature, as, for example, when she wakes to find a bloodstained ghost at the foot of her bed and thinks it a natural occurrence in an abandoned hotel. She even seems to empathize when the morning sunlight eats the ghost away. Odd though they are, such incidents are accepted and prepare Ella for her own transformation. The story, too, works to transform the mythical into a magical, contemporary urban fantasy.

In “Laohu,” Erik Amundsen attempts a second person narrative point of view, which is always a difficult trick to pull off convincingly. Such an approach demands élan, which is, unfortunately, the very quality that Amundsen’s prose lacks. Here, it’s annoying and intrusive, getting in the way of the rather flimsy “story”: ex-pat American teacher in a remote Chinese province suffers culture shock and has difficulty relating to his students; seeking solace in alcohol, he has weird visions of a tiger in a bar. It’s possible, I guess, that Amundsen was attempting a surreal representation of alienation, and he might have achieved this but for the clumsiness of the narrative perspective. The effect is more absurd than surreal, and this is compounded by the adoption of a derivative but misplaced cynical, world-weary tone. At times, it comes across as a rather labored attempt at stream-of-consciousness, but it reveals neither insight nor truth.

Patricia Russo’s “The Dogs are Alone Upstairs” is much briefer and far more effective. Nothing much happens in the story, rather Russo alludes to things that might have happened, to possibilities that exist only in a crumbling mind. The unnamed protagonist lingers in an apartment crowded with the ghosts of his victims, isolated from normal life except for Judy, who may or may not have participated in his crimes. An act of kindness from a woman in another apartment prompts him to respond with a gift. His alienation lends the act a ritualized significance, as well as the potential to reconnect with life through other familiar gestures like conversation, a friendly smile, a shared coffee. Do these things come to pass? Russo’s spare, unfussy prose hints at barely tangible but troubling memories, leaving the reader to use her own imagination to fill up the dark spaces in between.

And finally there is Gemma Files’s “Drone,” an extraordinary tale of transformation that manages to do something new and exciting with one of fantasy’s most overused conventions—the dragon. The narrative consciousness is conveyed through two perspectives, first and second person voices. But where Erik Amundsen struggled to make the latter work for his story, Files succeeds effortlessly, deploying the first to reveal glimpses of the narrator’s true motives in relation to the (male) character who appears to be the main protagonist. The latter’s thoughts and feelings are mediated through the second person, presented as a wholly unreliable narrative voice as Files repeatedly wrong-foots the reader, forcing us to question the assumptions we make about the maternal bond. The son, who breeds exotic snakes for a living—something of a problem for his girlfriend—is, like so many other characters in these stories, trying to make a connection with a long-lost parent. He is aware of his strangeness, his difference, from other humans, and the quest that he thinks he has initiated is to find the mother he hopes will explain his true nature. Mother though, has an agenda of her own, one that touches on ancient myth and dragons’ love for gold. This is not simply a marvellous story but a sharp critique of conventional, male representations of the relationship between dragon as mindless beast, woman as helpless victim awaiting rescue, and man as warrior and dragonslayer. Like Lucius Shepard’s The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter, “Drone” invests the dragon with subversive potential and transforms our notions of how the mythic beast might in the future be represented in fantasy.