On Spec, #72, Spring 2008

The spring 2008 issue (#72/volume 20, Number 1) of the Canadian magazine On Spec delivers six stories, two poems, and an interesting mix of nonfiction, including an editorial on some favorite On Spec stories of past issues by Managing Editor Diane Walton and Fiction Co-Editor Susan MacGregor. In the case of the current issue, its first story is one of the strongest. “Aesop’s Last Fable” by Tony Pi uses Aesop’s death as a launching point for a tale that pits the Greek storyteller against the legendary Sphinx.

Having been heaved off a cliff by the Delphians, Aesop comes to awareness in a kind of limbo. The Sphinx greets him, breaking the news that before Aesop can begin his afterlife, he must solve the riddle of how the Sphinx herself was killed. As a helpful historical refresher, the Sphinx flies Aesop through time to witness scenes of the men of Thebes attempting to solve her famous riddle: “What has one voice, yet becomes four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?” The events unfold from this new vantage point and conclude with the Sphinx’s death. Based on this viewing, Aesop must deduce the answer to the Sphinx’s new riddle.

While I generally lack enthusiasm for reworked Greek mythology, this story won me over by being well-told and delivering exactly what it promises. (I was similarly won over by Elizabeth Bear’s story “Your Collar.”) My only complaint is the occasional unevenness of its tone. The language sometimes slips and sounds too modern, when I think Pi’s intent was to give a patina of another age to the dialogue and narration. Still, a compact and enjoyable read.

“Carter Hall Sweeps a Path” by Marissa K. Lingen is a strange little story about a young man, Carter Hall, who finds himself challenged to a curling match by an immortal witch. Will he win or lose? Simmering in the background is the problem that he’s the best man in a wedding between two of his good friends, Tom and Janet, and Janet doesn’t like Carter’s girlfriend. Sensing this disapproval, Carter’s girlfriend resents Janet. (Carter’s girlfriend doesn’t seem to like Carter all that much either.) Sprinkled throughout this piece, characters make foreboding references to the way supernatural beings interfere with humanity’s world and how easily these beings may be offended.

As someone whose experience with wintry northern cultures extends no further than a handful of A Prairie Home Companion episodes, I started off at a disadvantage. Even if this story were purely realistic, I would have needed more help in understanding some essential cultural cues (curling, sweeping, “Ole” jokes) to keep from feeling slightly adrift. To compound my confusion, Lingen’s story drops the reader into a place where witches and other supernatural beings exist in an uneasy, and threatening, relationship to the mundane world. This problem is regularly confronted by speculative fiction, and authors resolve the issue by layering in contextual clues to gradually “teach” the reader about the imagined world. Lingen, however, doesn’t offer much in the way of help. In order to fully appreciate this story, readers are expected to possess a passing familiarity with a bit of Slavic folklore (more specifically, the character of Baba Yaga, a nasty witch who lives in a cabin that walks on chicken legs).

What I admire nonetheless is Lingen’s intent to frame the supernatural match-up in character-driven conflict. Done well enough, I may not have needed to understand the folk references. Unfortunately, the conflict between Carter and his girlfriend (and Janet and the girlfriend) receives superficial treatment, almost tossed by the wayside as the plot rushes to conclusion. To be fair, readers in the know may find that this story works.

Gods interfere with humanity in “Jakkar’s Servant” by Marion Bernard, but they demand assistance. One of the assistants, a young man named Kirdan, stands at the center of this tale. Kirdan has been chosen to be a servant to Jakkar, the god of death and justice. (Kirdan also pulls double-duty as servant to Sirrika, the goddess of protection rooted in love.) The position requires that he become a vampire, because those mortals who wish to make a request to Jakkar or Sirrika must pay in blood. That the servant vampires also crave this blood makes for an unusual symbiotic relationship. The first request Kirdan receives comes from a man who wishes his own son dead. Why he wants this, whether or not Jakkar grants the request, and how Kirdan is an instrument in the execution of the god’s will occupies the remainder of the story.

While Kirdan certainly experiences new emotions as a result of imbibing his first blood sacrifice, he remains unchanged as a character. That static quality left me wondering if this piece was an early chapter in a novel rather than a short story. In either case, “Jakkar’s Servant” could be a promising novel opening, containing an interesting premise, a potentially engaging protagonist, and several lines of conflict.

Tyler Keevil’s “The Masque of the Red Clown” ends on a different note than the Edgar Allan Poe story that inspired it, but it does share a general premise: a wealthy enclave lives in luxury while ignoring the suffering of other (poorer) people. Both pieces warn, moreover, that no one can isolate themselves permanently from the world.

The wealthy enclave in Keevil’s story is a group of investors in Cuba, sealing the deal on a new hotel in Havana. The narrator is a cynical and slick executive who holds responsibility for wining and dining and meeting and greeting these investors. As part of the pampered capitalists’ celebration, they tour the impoverished Cuban capital. Deteriorated buildings make up the cityscape. The narrator alone notices the way they have been “ravaged by time.” He alone hears the bus driver acknowledge Cuba’s poverty. The investors are indifferent. The narrator also notices a strange clown—red face paint, white nose—outfitted with a one-man-band apparatus. Throughout the trip, the clown appears to him.

Surrounded by poverty that stands in contrast to the investors’ wealth, and aggravated by the incongruous clown sightings, the narrator feels alienated from the tour group and finally disgusted. Moved by his own sense of injustice, he arranges a finale to the celebrations that none of the characters will forget.

Keevil evokes the setting of this story with convincing details. Better still, the narrator’s epiphany about what absentee ownership is doing to Cuba occurs in a psychologically and metaphorically apt scene. What I wish the story also offered was more insight into the narrator’s feelings and how they lead to his final actions. He’s disillusioned and cynical even before he sees the clown or tours Havana. Why? Still, the absence of that characterization is not fatal to the story, which is the strongest of this issue.

Something (and someone) creepy lurks in “The Sea, at Bari” by Claude Lalumière. When we meet main character Mario, he is traveling to the Italian town of Bari, where as a child he experienced something traumatic. As far as he can remember, a monster attacked him. After the attack, Mario experienced strange effects: He was emptied of emotion and empathy. Then, as an adult, his treatment of other people (particularly women) became sociopathic. Now, he confronts this trauma by returning to Bari.

Lalumière examines facets of Mario’s troubled relationships with women and documents his attempt to come to terms with the monster’s attack by intercutting scenes from different points in Mario’s life. I found this tactic less than effective because the flashbacks undermined the tension of the scenes taking place in the present. The story may have benefited from beginning at an earlier point in the first place and working forward in a more linear fashion. Still, the story drew my curiosity. I continued to turn the pages, wanting to know what happened to Mario as a child and what would happen when he went back to the sea. And as a disturbing contemplation of child abuse (whether Lalumière intends it or not) “The Sea, at Bari” lingers in the mind. That’s a good mark of success for fiction.

Steve Stanton’s “Trickster” concerns itself with two men, one a union member named Derek Thundersky, the other a colonel named Woodsworth Dunfield. The two share little in common except that they both work for a corporate giant which plans to launch a generational spaceship to colonize the stars. The story’s divided attention leads to two conflicts: One, the union member has agreed to secretly tag the ship with graffiti on behalf of the union as a symbol of corporate rebellion (and he wants to avoid being caught). Two, the colonel wants to win back the female crewmember with which he was initially partnered—a partner that doesn’t want the match. The stakes are high for Derek, but more interesting is the nuanced portrait of a reserved and somewhat insecure British colonel trying to handle rejection by a woman that he’s (inappropriately) fallen in love with. I found the notion of tagging a spaceship a bit too silly, but the two story lines eventually dovetail and do so effectively. Because of that, “Trickster” lands on its feet.