Unwelcome Bodies by Jennifer Pelland

Jennifer Pelland’s first collection, Unwelcome Bodies, is a compendium of dark tales that are truly speculative. Each one embraces a cosmic “what if”—many of the same questions we ask ourselves today—but in Pelland’s stories, we can see the outcome.

The first tale, “For the Plague Thereof Was Exceedingly Great,” starts with a terrible future where HIV has mutated into HIV-5 and HIV-6, exceedingly virulent and terrifying versions of the virus, which have left the human race crippled and divided with cities falling apart from all the lives lost. While the facts behind the disease are present and solid, and the social outcome is heartbreakingly clear, the real story here is of the isolation that constant fear of the disease brings and the desperation, growing in the characters, to feel like humans again.

“Big Sister/Little Sister” takes childhood feelings of parental favoritism and makes it both real and terrifyingly literal. Big Sister was ever the suffering martyr for her disabled younger sister, not by choice, but forced to it by their mother with a wicked brutality. Mother even sacrificed Big Sister, implanting weak Little Sister into Big Sister’s stomach against her will. Nothing mattered to Mother but Little Sister, but now that Mother’s dead, Big Sister is free to pay every bit of that pain back. A vicious tale of fault-flinging and abuse, this one shows that Pelland has horror in her veins and the imagination to make terrifying breaches of boundaries a reality.

“Immortal Sin” takes the reader into the mind of a sociopath. Alex leaves his wife for a waitress who once showed him a kind face in a dark time. His obsession with Cassie turns sour when she tries to explain she’s only friendly because it brings in higher tips, and before long, it turns deadly. Even though Alex is a highly religious man, he doesn’t hesitate to kill Cassie in revenge, then calmly heads to confession to save the purity of his immortal soul. Until the priest won’t absolve him. Then Alex swears not to die, to punish Cassie and God for damning his soul. Pelland’s portrayal of Alex’s psychosis is smooth, flowing, and delightfully ironic.

The main character in “Flood” is a self absorbed, faux tragic, and obnoxiously overdramatic rock star that the reader can’t help but dislike. Despite Callie’s whining and baseless sense of entitlement, the story is almost ethereally beautiful, setting up a world where water is all but gone, with no reason why and no way to make more. While humanity struggles with the loss of not only a source of sustenance and the lifeforms that lived within it, but also the vast beauty of the oceans, rivers, and lakes, Callie parades about, bemoaning something she never saw, something she possibly never really lost. While others fight to keep humanity alive, Callie essentially whines about things. However, this story would not be the same told from someone else’s point of view. While she is largely annoying and useless, Callie’s mentality is also what makes the story beautiful.

“The Call” is a bit of a technique play, written not just in second person, but also almost entirely in questions. The spotlight is on the craft, as Pelland has put together a difficult point of view and a difficult literary convention and still manages to tell a solidly sfnal, and even tragic, story. The mood is one of bitter aloofness, similar to what a few more recognizable characters, particularly alien born comic book heroes such as Martian Manhunter, might feel.

“Captive Girl” is Pelland’s Nebula-nominated short story of epic wrongness that begins with a girl—all her senses stolen save touch—held defenseless and incapable of functioning, all in the name of a special project whose goal is to save the populace of Earth from another deadly alien invasion. As with the other stories in this collection, the setup is merely a backdrop for another story, this one of a forbidden love that is ultimately soul scarring.

“Last Bus” is the most positive piece in the collection, but, of course, it’s not without a touch of bitterness. A surreal tale of a strange bus stop marked with an egg sticker and squeezed into a very unlikely spot with no recognizable road, not even the characters seem to completely remember who they are and where they have been. Built on the complacent nature of humankind, “Last Bus” pushes the reader, like the characters, toward accepting deeper truths with no evidence, just faith and feeling.

“The Last Stand of the Elephant Man” is also one of the less horrific tales in Unwelcome Bodies. The setting is a futuristic, high tech dome where some of the last living humans, survivors of the ongoing Ice Age, live. Life inside the dome is tedious and boring, magnified by the effortlessness of human life. With machines to do everything for them, even pain becomes a pastime. The fabled “Elephant Man,” John Merrick, finds himself transported into this society, his afflicted body stolen against his will out of a twisted desire for anything new, anything not completely controllable, and it his affliction which earns him the right to stay in this new world. The perpetrator of this theft wishes to use John’s grotesqueness to rise up the social ladder, but in a world where everyone is rich and entitled and there’s no need to truly work for anything, people take from and abuse and copulate with others as diversions. And John has to adjust to this society before it completely overrides him.

One of the stories original to this collection, “Songs of Lament” echoes the earlier water issues of “Flood.” Except the water danger here is not a lack of it, but a war on humanity waged by whales. An intriguing twist to the current beliefs regarding whale songs, Pelland speculates what it could mean if, instead of peaceful strains, the whales were singing battle songs against humanity? Brief, but no less intriguing in its speculation or dark in its ultimate outcome, “Songs of Lament” may cause readers to ask themselves why they didn’t think of it first.

Of the selections in this collection, “Firebird” is set the closest to present-day. It’s a very human tale of an advanced Green movement and of today’s teen celebrities as they become adults. Kay stars here, but it isn’t really her story. Years ago, as a spoiled fifteen-year-old pop star, she tried to speak out against climate change in a dramatic, pop star way. She set herself on fire. After the pain of her self-inflicted injuries and the subsequent surgeries, not to mention the emotional anguish of having seven other girls follow her example, but without surviving their self-immolations, Kay just wants to be left alone. She doesn’t want to be the savior that everyone else sees her as, and she tries to teach the virtues of living a moderate life over committing acts of radical activism—do what you can. But no one wants to hear that message, especially not the woman lucky enough to be rooming in college with Kay who just wants to relight the star’s fires of passion, no matter what it takes.

“Brushstrokes,” the last story here, is also one of the longest. Humanity is stolen from Earth and taken to a strange world where “higher” beings brutally enforce a harsh caste system to keep their own society served and running smoothly. Reminiscent of the Matrix movies, there are many systems of control, all capitalizing on human fear, designed to make all castes feel helpless against the great machine which rules them. And also like in the Matrix trilogy, human nature is shown as treacherous and unbreakable, especially when forced into a sociological corner. Layered and complex, different readers will take different things from it.

Unwelcome Bodies is an excellent read, featuring stories within stories and wildly creative futures with solidly preserved human souls.

Publisher: Apex Publications (Feb. 2008)
Price: $30.00 (hardcover), $14.95 (trade paperback)
Pages: 252
ISBN: 097886767X (hardcover), 0978867688 (trade paperback)