[Reading Room] On Cosmology by Roísín O’Donnell

I’m often wary of modern Irish and British stories because they tend to be grim. It’s not a style I enjoy and it’s not one I have much time for. So I tend to shy away from modern British and Irish stories altogether.

But it’s always good to read outside your comfort zone, so occasionally I give a new story in a genre I don’t love, a shot.

On Cosmology, by Roísín O’Donnell won the  Hennesy/Irish Times prize for August 2015. In the story, a lecturer in astrophysics wonders about the ‘gooey, alien-like creature’ which may be growing inside her.

So yes, it does deal with sex and issues of pregnancy — and in less-than-ideal-circumstance. In Ireland, no less. Certainly sounds like the recipe for a grim, modern moan, doesn’t it?

This story, however escapes being grim.

I had to think hard about what O’Donnell had done right that kept me from hating her story. And I think it came down to this: I liked the main character. She was not thrilled about her situation but she was curious. That curiosity, which totally fitted with her profession as a scientist, trumped everything else. It felt real, as if she was a real character. It gave her an optimism that transcended her circumstance.

I like the narrator and the picture of her world that she paints. We, as writers, would be wise to give our characters a strong character trait that carries them through any situation they face. It can waver, it can bend, but in the end, they’ll be realistic characters if they are ultimately consistent.

So yes, I recommend it.This is a good one!

Read the story online here.

The Tuesday Reading Room is a regular feature at StoryADay.org. If you’d like to contribute a review of a short story, read the guidelines here.

Reading Room – The Weight Of A Blessing by Aliette de Bodard

This story needs to be carefully read, but it rewards that careful reading with a rich world (and the smug feeling that we’re really smart for figuring it out).

I read this story because another writer I admire raved about Aliette de Bodard’s writing. I wasn’t too sure at first, but this story of cultural taboos in a futuristic, post-war world, stuck with more more than I expected. Therefore I rate it ‘worth reading’.

de Bodard definitely created a fully-realized world. As such, it was confusing and I left the story not really sure what happened or that I understood the events. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A little frustrating if you’re not in the right mood.

Her handling of time was fascinating though. The story follows a mother on a final visit to her daughter, who is in jail. The story handles The Recent Past, During And In-Between Her Three Visits With Her Daughter; and The Far Past, During The War. All of them combine to illustrate the theme of the story while unpacking the details of what the heck’s going on (kind of).

She leaves a lot up to the reader to puzzle out. In a way it’s great, because the narrator doesn’t over-explain, the same way we don’t explain how smart-phones work to our friends. We have a reasonable expectation that our friends already understand what smartphones are. The narrator in this story talks us as if we live in the world, but the author gives us enough clues to put it together.

The story needs to be carefully read, but it rewards that careful reading with a rich world (and the smug feeling that we’re really smart for figuring it out).

The author’s mother-tongue is French and I felt the language was a little antiquated/formal at times, but not often. (Any my French should be so good! Her English is better than most English speakers’).

I’m not sure I enjoyed this. A bit bleak. But good world building, economical…not 100% successful, imo, but certainly not boring or predictable. And with a definite lesson for writer: less is more; leave some gaps for your readers to puzzle out.

Read the story here.

The Reading Room is a regular feature at StoryADay.org. If you would like to submit a short story review, read the guidelines here.

[Reading Room] The Goat Variations by Jeff VanderMeer

What can we learn from this story as writers? Well, certainly not to try to write a story just like this…

The Goat Variations, by Jeff Vandermeer, plays with reality and alternate realities, in the best traditions of ‘what if’ speculative fiction.

It starts with a scene that most people who were sentient in Sept 2011 (or shortly thereafter) will recognize, but then things get weird.

Slowly you start to realize that things are not as they should be and your brain starts running quickly to catch up. Then things get REALLY weird…

This was not an easy read. It was mind-bending in a deliciously difficult way.

What can we learn from this story as writers? Well, certainly not to try to write a story like this. Perhaps it’s more that we should be willing to be idiosyncratic, like VanderMeer. Or perhaps it’s that a good idea is worth working, and reworking until we’re telling it in the way that it needs to be told.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t worry about taking a topic as fraught with baggage as 9/11 and telling our own story in our own way, about difficult topics.

Most of all, we can’t be afraid of other people disapproving of the things we write — or the way we write them.

(Small nit-pick: the website that I’m linking to here inaccurately casts the main character as “George Herbert Walker Bush” when in fact it is George W. Bush.)

But the story? The story is great!

Read the story here

The Tuesday Reading Room is a regular feature at StoryADay.org. If you’d like to submit a review for the Reading Room, see the guidelines here.

[Reading Room] Nightmare At 20,000 Feet by Richard Matheson

I thought I knew what I was getting into, with this story.

After all, I’ve seen the Twilight Zone episode (William Shatner!!) a hundred times and they re-used the story for the Twilight Zone movie (John Lithgow!!).

Surely there was nothing Matheson could do to scare me (or even retain my interest) in a story I knew so well.

Ha!

The writing is FABULOUS and I thoroughly recommend you read something by Richard Matheson today.

Within the first two paragraphs he conjures up the sense of being on a plane in the 1960s, when this story was written. He describes an everyday action (like smoking a cigarette), but it tells you so much: Who, what, where, the place, the time, the state of mind of the character and the tone of the story to come:

“…the sign above the archway which led to the forward compartment lit up — FASTEN SEAT BELT—with, below as its attendant caution — NO SMOKING. Drawing in a deep lungful, Wilson exhaled it in bursts, then pressed the cigarette into the armrest tray with irritable stabbing motions.”

(Of course, everyone in my critique group would have crossed out that word ‘irritable’ as unnecessary, but that just goes to show that sometimes you can ignore people’s pet peeves without killing a story!)

Moving on,

“Outside, one of the engines coughed monstrously, spewing out a cloud of fume which fragmented into the night air. The fuselage began to shudder…”

Isn’t that a great opening for a story that you know is going to be a creepy story? He’s not being melodramatic at all (planes DO shudder as they start up), but the vocabulary is just perfect.

This is a much longer story than I expected, after having watched the two filmed versions. It’s a psychological nightmare, as promised in the title, by a master short story writer.

Highly recommended.

[Reading Room] In Cretaceous Seas by Jim Shepard

This story starts off magnificently,

“Dip your foot in the water and here’s what you’re playing with: Xiphactinus, all angry underbite and knitting-needle teeth, with heads oddly humped and eyes enraged with accusation, and ribboned bodies so muscular they fracture coral heads when surging through to bust in on insufficiently alert pods of juvenile Clidastes. The Clidastes spin around to face an oncoming maw that’s in a perpetual state of homicidal resentment.”

Shepard takes us on a tour of the ‘monsters’ of the deep in the Cretaceous era and then, suddenly, the story swings into the modern day human world.

It’s disorienting and not at all what I was expecting. I was a little disappointed, to be honest. The writing in the first few paragraphs evoked a world unknown to me, with power and vivid images. It seemed to promise one thing and then veer away.

But as I read on, I was swept along on the language as we examined the life of one tortured middle-aged, suburban man. I didn’t much like him — I don’t think I was supposed to — but I did end up having some sympathy for him.

And the language…wow.

I had to go back and read the story again to figure out what the heck happened when we switched from the Cretaceous to modern suburbia, but that was OK because I wanted to.

I read the story without the introduction found online, which made it even more disorientating, but see what you think:

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[Reading Room] The Care And Feeding of Houseplants by Art Taylor

This story won multiple awards in 2013 for Best Short Story and I can see why.

The Care And Feeding of Houseplants is crime fiction, though it’s not clear for a very long time where and when the crime is going to come in…but I didn’t care because the writing was so engaging.

As is often the case in mysteries, the passion at the heart of the story is all about infidelity. As in Thea’s First Husband the husband is complicit in his wife’s decision to stray. Unlike that story, however, this tale is visceral and full of raw imagery. Information is doled out during the story, rather in great gobs of ‘telling’.

In this story we really get inside three out of the four characters’ heads, even when not narrated from their viewpoint: the way the lover views his conquest’s “beige linen business suit…folded carefully across a chair by his bedroom window’ tells us as much about her character as about his self-congratulatory tendencies; the wife comments on her husband’s character during their courtship, saying “He’d brought her an orchid for their first date. He’d typed up tips for taking care of it”, which speaks volumes about both the husband who did these things and herself, who noticed.

I really enjoyed this story. It was more than a mystery, more than a crime: it was a story that pulled me along from the start to the deliciously dark ‘reveal’ near the end. I was, if you’ll pardon the pun, rooting for and against the characters exactly as the author intended, and I loved every minute of it.