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Mallory Ortberg, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror: Angela Carter would be a good starting point for these retellings, most of them grabbing fragments from more than one traditional fairy tale. But where Carter was interested in sex and blood, Ortberg is more interested in the horror of knowledge. Specifically, the horror of knowing that something is very wrong and that if you say so, those who are close to you (and who, in their own way, may very well love you) will deny that anything is wrong and perhaps hurt you to prove their point. Not all the stories are specifically about that, but most are about how people conflate “love” and “power over.” They were indeed very creepy.
Stephen King, The Outsider: King continues his forays outside Maine, with characters he’s introduced in recent books (especially Holly) playing supporting roles. In a small Oklahoma town, a boy is kidnapped, savagely abused and murdered. Given the eyewitnesses, fingerprints, and DNA, it’s an open and shut case: the beloved baseball coach did it. Except that he was hours away, in front of cameras and close friends, at the same time. Starting from that point, the story follows what happens to the coach, his family, the cop who arrested him, and others sucked in, eventually confronting the possibility of supernatural activity. It’s a good romp, though basically just a variant of King’s standard “random evil exists and we must face it” story.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg et al., The Sime-Gen Minipack: I’m glad the Sime-Gen books have found a publisher, and that they’re now all available at least in e-book form. That said, this short collection of older stories shows that a lot of Sime-Gen stuff that I loved when I was younger hasn’t aged well, especially the last story in which the innocent young Gen raised to hate and fear Simes learns that she should submit, sexually and otherwise, to the powerful, protective Channel in order to save everyone.
Tansy Roberts, Musketeer Space: The Three Musketeers, retold in space with lots of variety (two out of three Musketeers are women, one with lots of boyfriends and the other with lots of girlfriends, and d’Artagnan is also female, plus there’s some genetic engineering). It didn’t click for me. In part I had trouble with the idea of a culture in which marital infidelity could bring down a political regime but sexuality was otherwise not heavily regulated. But in part I just wasn’t in the right mood for a youngster-comes-of-age-by-getting-in-fights story, I guess.
Jake Bible, Z-Burbia: I must’ve bought this as some kind of experiment. It’s a relatively straight-up zombie story where our protagonist is basically a fixer for a post-apocalyptic community where his wife is a teacher. They’re still operating as a homeowners’ association, which is kind of funny as a concept, but when a crime lord wants to move in, our hero and others have to fight back. If you like straight-up zombie apocalypse stories, this one is ok, though warning for the pubescent cannibal girl who is basically River Tam, but less well socialized, though tamed by the love of a good family.
Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: A small crew on a ragtag ship ekes out a living helping to install the gates that allow instantaneous travel between interstellar points. There are a couple of secrets, and some aliens/AI, and some sex, and some interaction between these things. It was pitched as a quasi-Firefly, and I see that, though no human’s problems on the ship are as serious as Mal’s or River’s demons. If you like long-haul ship stories, this might work for you, but it didn’t grab me.
Connie Willis, I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land: Anti-book (that is, physical object) blogger encounters a library that archives the last copy of every book it can. Something something memory human striving something—Willis hasn’t been working for me for a while, and this didn’t change the pattern.
John Scalzi, Head On: Chris is back, and as gender-undisclosed as ever, investigating the suspicious death of a fellow Haden as part of a new sport that involves beheading threeps (the humanoid vehicles by which Hadens interact with the physical world) and might be poised to become the next WWE. It’s a brisk mystery with lots of cop threats, mostly from Chris’s partner, and a cute cat cameo.
Stephen King, The Outsider: King continues his forays outside Maine, with characters he’s introduced in recent books (especially Holly) playing supporting roles. In a small Oklahoma town, a boy is kidnapped, savagely abused and murdered. Given the eyewitnesses, fingerprints, and DNA, it’s an open and shut case: the beloved baseball coach did it. Except that he was hours away, in front of cameras and close friends, at the same time. Starting from that point, the story follows what happens to the coach, his family, the cop who arrested him, and others sucked in, eventually confronting the possibility of supernatural activity. It’s a good romp, though basically just a variant of King’s standard “random evil exists and we must face it” story.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg et al., The Sime-Gen Minipack: I’m glad the Sime-Gen books have found a publisher, and that they’re now all available at least in e-book form. That said, this short collection of older stories shows that a lot of Sime-Gen stuff that I loved when I was younger hasn’t aged well, especially the last story in which the innocent young Gen raised to hate and fear Simes learns that she should submit, sexually and otherwise, to the powerful, protective Channel in order to save everyone.
Tansy Roberts, Musketeer Space: The Three Musketeers, retold in space with lots of variety (two out of three Musketeers are women, one with lots of boyfriends and the other with lots of girlfriends, and d’Artagnan is also female, plus there’s some genetic engineering). It didn’t click for me. In part I had trouble with the idea of a culture in which marital infidelity could bring down a political regime but sexuality was otherwise not heavily regulated. But in part I just wasn’t in the right mood for a youngster-comes-of-age-by-getting-in-fights story, I guess.
Jake Bible, Z-Burbia: I must’ve bought this as some kind of experiment. It’s a relatively straight-up zombie story where our protagonist is basically a fixer for a post-apocalyptic community where his wife is a teacher. They’re still operating as a homeowners’ association, which is kind of funny as a concept, but when a crime lord wants to move in, our hero and others have to fight back. If you like straight-up zombie apocalypse stories, this one is ok, though warning for the pubescent cannibal girl who is basically River Tam, but less well socialized, though tamed by the love of a good family.
Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: A small crew on a ragtag ship ekes out a living helping to install the gates that allow instantaneous travel between interstellar points. There are a couple of secrets, and some aliens/AI, and some sex, and some interaction between these things. It was pitched as a quasi-Firefly, and I see that, though no human’s problems on the ship are as serious as Mal’s or River’s demons. If you like long-haul ship stories, this might work for you, but it didn’t grab me.
Connie Willis, I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land: Anti-book (that is, physical object) blogger encounters a library that archives the last copy of every book it can. Something something memory human striving something—Willis hasn’t been working for me for a while, and this didn’t change the pattern.
John Scalzi, Head On: Chris is back, and as gender-undisclosed as ever, investigating the suspicious death of a fellow Haden as part of a new sport that involves beheading threeps (the humanoid vehicles by which Hadens interact with the physical world) and might be poised to become the next WWE. It’s a brisk mystery with lots of cop threats, mostly from Chris’s partner, and a cute cat cameo.