Minus, His Heart is one of those odd stories that just doesn’t quite seem to make sense upon the first reading.  It has a hallucinatory quality that carries the reader along without ever quite grounding itself.  At its heart, the story is a quest story.  A boy must help a man from the town where he lives recover an item that the boy has stolen.  There is a mix of old-fashioned language interspresed into the story that gives a sense of timelessness to its tone and a sense of urgency about the quest.  There are only a few characters in the story, but the world in which the story is set is very interesting, indeed.  Each person has a deck in the middle of their chest which has a mix tape.  This mix tape is what the boy has stolen from Minus, and what they attempt to recover.  There is a stop at a playground, which is where children come from (quite literally, as it turns out), and a climactic scene in a zoo full of human oddities.  This is the kind of story that sticks with the reader, not necessarily because of a perfect sense of understanding or relating to it, but because, days later, you’ll still be mulling it over and trying to figure out just exactly what happened.

    
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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

Mario’s Three Lives is a short short story. Maybe a bit over a thousand words, almost flash fiction. I have to admit I generally don’t like stories that short. The author only has time to get his point across but that is about it. Maybe it is good practice for a writer to strip down a story that far but as a reader I need some of the things that gets stripped. I rarely read any that I think are memorable.

In Mario’s Three Lives the famous plumber from a great many computer games asks himself some fundamental questions about his existence while hurrying through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Peach. He feels the invisible hand of the gamer (which he things of as God Who Continues) on him and dreads the return to “The Place Where One Waits Between Continues”.

It is certainly a view on the computer game character that will not be on most gamers’ minds when they’re dodging mushroom headed foes. It’s an interesting concept, I have to say that, but not enough to make me overcome my initial reservations. Maybe it would if I had actually played Super Marion.

    
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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

I am not familiar with the work of Deborah Coates. Fortunately the editors have provided us with a little bit of information on the author. It states among other things Ms. Coates lives in Iowa with two dogs and no cats. I’d say this story could not have been off to a worse start, everybody knows cats are superior creatures. I will try not to let it influence my opinion on the story though

This is what winter’s like in South Dakota on the plains—you wake up and it’s full dark still, maybe five o’clock in the morning and you know without ever throwing the covers off, without ever getting up, that it’s at least twenty below zero outside.

Chainsaw on Hand opens with a perfectly sensible reason why not many people choose to live in South Dakota. The main character however, does choose to live there. We follow her on one of those harsh winter days, that from the start look like they are going to be miserable. She’s going out to see her ex-husband. A man who is considered insane by most of the the small community she lives in. The man beliefs he sees angels, or perhaps they are fairies, and has announced this fact to the rest of the world. The sign outside his door that says “Chainsaw on Hand” is the latest sign of his state of mind.

I guess you could say she has never quite put the divorce and her ex-husbands insanity behind her, somehow feeling responsible for him, or perhaps denying that, despite what her rational minds tells her, she wants to believe him. This story is not really my thing but I have to admit the way the tangle of her feelings about the whole situation unknots at the end of the story is very well done.

As you can see from the quote about the story is written in the second person. An unusual perspective, I don’t remember reading many pieces of fiction in the second person. It works very well in this story, although I doubt this style would work for a longer piece. Good characterization and the use of an unusual perspective make this story stand out in the four stories in Best American Fantasy 2008 I have reviewed so far. Good writing outweighs the absence of cats I suppose.

    
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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

    
Kage Baker’s contribution to Best American Fantasy 2008 takes the form as an homage to the classic fairy tale in a story that, in a mildly humorous and slightly didactic tone, recounts the adventures of a willful and inquisitive young woman while simultaneously playing around with some of the most well-worn tropes of fantasy fiction.

The heroine Svnae is the daughter of the Master of the Mountain (a professional dark lord) and the Saint of the World (a living goddess who can heal the sick and raise the dead). She desires power from an early age and after being told by her father that power comes from knowledge, her life takes on the form of a restless search for all the secrets of the world. She desires mastery over the material world and in the process of achieving her goal she rejects her mother’s feminine wisdom of nurture and healing. Svnae has many adventures, driven by her unending thirst for knowledge, mastery and power – yet only when she marries and starts a family does she begin to understand her mother’s perspective on life.

Baker’s story is structured over a series of oppositions that continually are reinforced by a symbolism that is grounded in an age-old tradition of binary thinking and patriarchal value-systems. Throughout the narrative we thus encounter the traditional distinction between light and dark, feminine and masculine, passive and active, nurture and adventure, and so on. Within this conceptual framework, and supported by fairy tale style of narration, “The Ruby Incomparable” comes across as a didactic allegory of a young woman’s realization of her own essential femininity, which is equated with motherhood. The reader is constantly being told that Svnae is searching to find what she really wants – and that is apparently to understand her mother and have her mother understand her.

I have to admit that I didn’t particularly care for this story, which I found to be rather bland and quite heavy-handed in its symbolism. It is certainly well-crafted, in a technical sense, and I did enjoy the humorous and slightly ironic tone, but there’s not really any meat on the bones of the story and it’s take on gender is unsophisticated and hopelessly outmoded. The didacticism is too heavy-handed and unappealing – and this type of unsubtle story-telling is frankly not my cup of tea. There is of course a slight possibility that the ironic tone is intended as a critique of this kind of binary and essentialist thinking, but that seems highly unlikely.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

This review was due a couple of weeks ago but the end of year article and the holidays kept pushing it back. I only mention this because in waiting so long to write the damn thing Brian Evenson, in the end of year article, expressed in a single line about Jeff Vandermeer’s The Situation what I had been thinking about Ford’s The Drowned Life, and much much better and more succinctly I might add.

“It recognizes that such realities are best expressed by acknowledging them for the absurdities that they really are.” — Brian Evenson

Because what I liked best about The Drowned Life , what resonated the most, was the modernity of it. As a grown man with children in the 21st century it spoke to my reality in a way that a medieval fantasy never could. This is fantasy at its most powerful because it isn’t escapist but embracive. It doesn’t shy away from problems or cast them in a historical light to provide perspective; it absorbs them, examines them from all sides and sees them as they are. It stands there and loudly proclaims that shit is fucked up and so whacked out and twisted that it’s not “normal” any longer. But more importantly it speaks to our leveling out. We’ve become so used to the turned about way of things that we’ve found our sea legs and it doesn’t bother us anymore. Our baseline has adjusted and that may speak more to us then to the situation.

One of the things that I found myself reminded of with Fords writing here is Charles Willeford and his essay New Forms of Ugly in which he writes of the immobilized hero and his views on fiction and modern life. For example look at this quote from Willeford “the veneer of our modern American civilization is as thin as the gold on a rented wedding ring.” It would be easy to write this comment off as hard-boiled cynicism except for the truths that it contains, especially as exemplified by the current economic woes.

Once the thin veneer is rubbed off in The Drowned Life the craziness that existed in the abstract comes to life and is literalized. It’s the protagonist being chased by literal demons.

I think the connection to Willeford is an interesting one for what it suggests. If there are echoes of some of Willeford’s writing in some of Fords writing then maybe it taps into a larger question; a larger question of possibility, something broader. Is Ford’s writing, specifically The Drowned Life, cast from an older, almost Depression-era model with dare I say, proletarian heroes. I think that there may be a case to be made here that The Drowned Life (along with Vandermeer’s The Situation) is a 21st century proletarian story of the fantastic.

If the two best fiction tools that we posses to describe the insanity of the new century is the language of crime fiction and the language of the fantastic then Jeffrey Ford in many ways represents the perfect nexus point of these two languages. It’s from this synthesis that the power of the story is derived. I think that Ford is in a unique position to write some of the more powerful fiction of our times because of how well versed he is in both modes.

All of this speaks to Fords ability to talk frankly and directly to us as one of us.

The Drowned Life is a dead on classic and you should go read it now.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

In the Middle of the Woods is about a family of three: a put upon mother, a tinkering father who makes mechanical creatures out of household items and their son. We stand over the shoulder of the son, not understanding what his father does or why, as we share in the winter of their discontent. They live in an isolated house in the middle of a barren, burnt out woods, maybe the woods are representative of their collective interior landscape; a physical manifestation of a family in name only. Or not. But what can’t be disputed is that it is an icy hell with tormented people acting out daily rituals.

The best part of the story for me was the Hitchcockian steampunk/clockwork Birds moment that invokes a dread and helplessness in the boy. His frustration levels — towards his father, towards the birds, towards his mother — were palpable and nicely conveyed. But despite these pressures — both internal and external — we get a sense that he is afraid to leave the woods, much as any child would be afraid to step too far out of their familiar backdrop despite their protestations of independence.

Ultimately though much of this is just speculation because this is an ambiguous story. Whether the characters and the setting are meant to be something more or not I found it hard to tell at times. This feels, to me, like a piece of a larger whole and I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned up later in a longer work.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

The Revisionist by Miranda Mellis is an extract of a novella length work of the same name that appeared in 2007 with Calamari Press. It took me a while to figure out what to say about this story. It appealed to me a lot. It is not a story you move on from quickly after reading it. In my experience these are usually the best.

The main character is in the business of revising scientific data to reflect the desired conclusion. The story is written entirely in a first person perspective so it is not quite clear whether the main character is a man or a woman. He or she is working on weather data to prove increased greenhouse gas emissions are actually beneficial. While making the observations a nuclear device goes off in the distance. No need to panic; it is just more work for the revisionist. This time to show radiation was harmless.

This story is set in quite a scary world. Scientific data being manipulated to suit the desired conclusion is of course not new. Usually, these manipulations are a lot more subtle than what is described here (in the west at least). As a result people become scared, slightly paranoid,  and they act on their own observations, and chaos ensues. A warning to any scientist and politician really.

On the one had the theme of this story really interests me, on the other it is quite clear that there is more to this story than being shown in this except. I think The Revisionist as a novella may indeed be a more satisfying read than this short story. Still, in about six pages Mellis creates a very unsettling atmosphere in this near-apocalyptic tale. Maybe not quite as satisfying as it could have been, but it creates a taste for more.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

The Seven Deadly Hotels by Bruce Holland Rogers is a different story altogether. Reading it I couldn’t escape the suspicion the author must have had one hell of a bad trip to Europe once. The title an obvious play on the seven deadly sins this story has seven repetitions. In each of them an unwary traveller finds himself in a strange hotel in various places across Europe, where they are being driven (or tricked?) into doing things they normally would not consider.

I must admit the story felt a bit forced until the title and the and the stories connected in my mind. I have not had a very religious upbringing so it took me a while. Guess I should have paid closer attention to the lessons that covered Dante.

The boy watched as I ate lavender colored cakes, pistachio-powdered biscuits, and little horns of flavored cream so scrumptious that I could not resist going around the lobby, from basket to basket, eating every last one of them.

In a number of somewhat surreal scenes Rogers depicts each of the seven sins. Above his interpretation of gluttony. Apparently it is not all that hard to bring the bad in people, as each of our travellers finds out. The darker sides of human nature is is fascinating material for a writer and here too it makes for a good story.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

How the World Became Quiet is a history of how humans managed to wipe themselves out, or at least the story of how humans finally apocalypsed themselves to death. Interestingly enough, according to the author, it took eight apocalypses to finally do the job. It’s told from a very unique perspective, even though it certainly follows the age-old adage that history is written by the winners.

The story has a wry, twisted sense of humor about it, although it really seems to make perfect sense within the fabric of the author’s reality. It has the classic tone of a myth and really feels like a story that has been handed down through several generations and will continue to be told to subsequent generations.

The real twist of the story is finding out who is actually telling it. It’s not entirely a shock but it is the kind of thing that makes a reader really understand why this story would be included in a “Best of” anthology. How the World Went Quiet is the kind of story that I would revisit multiple times because it’s the kind of story that really sticks in a person’s head.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

To my shame I must admit I have read work of precisely one author in this anthology, and even that exposure is limited to one story only. So rather than going though the whole lot and see what appealed to me most I decided to trust the VanderMeers’ good taste and pick the top two stories. To my surprise they had one striking feature in common. The use of repetition. That is where the similarity ends though, they are very different stories.

Bufo Rex, a story by Erik Amundsen is, as the title suggests a story about a toad. A rather important one too. He introduces himself as follows.

I am called Bufo, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toad stool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits.

Bufo tells us about a number of increasingly unpleasant encounters with humans each beginning with the same introduction. All manner of superstition surrounding toads are discussed in this story. Starting with the fable that it is looking for a bride and ending with it’s alleged link to the devil and witchcraft. At some point a toad must say enough is enough.

I suppose you could say this story is about superstition. Starting at a humorous note, the bit between the introduction and the first repetition reminded me of the story Frogs and Scientists by Frank Herbert. It turns darker toward the end though. A very unusual perspective indeed.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

The Naming of the Islands chronicles the journey of a ship of convicts who have been sent out to sea in lieu of serving prison time. The story is written in the form of a ship’s log. The crew aboard the ship have found themselves in a strange chain of islands, which they name according to what they find on each one. Despite keeping these records, they discover that the islands seem to be rearranging themselves so that the ship never gets to the same island twice.

The circumstances on each island vary from a hideous island-coating swarm of rats to an island that contained a beating heart at its center. The men are starving and running low on water. Their tempers are fraying and the hellish circumstances seem to be exacerbating the situations. However, each time it seems that the tensions must come to a head, another island appears, so they put aside their disagreements in order to explore them

The story carries a feeling of both hopeless despair and impending doom. The men in the story have done horrible things (there aren’t really specifics, but there are a couple of very brief explanations given) and they, in turn, are witnessing unimaginable horrors. It’s definitely a fantasy that’s both very dark and very claustrophobic. It also feels like it ends just before some extraordinary breaking point is going to be reached.

While the story was good, it seems like it could be much more. In fact, it feels, most of all, as if it’s the germ of an idea for a novel. Personally, if it ever became a novel, it’s most certainly the kind of novel that I’d want to read, just as long as I could keep the lights on after I was finished and I didn’t have sea voyages of any kind planned.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

Peter S. Beagle is a name that is widely recognized by fans of fantasy fiction.  He has a tendency to write pieces that are powerful and carry great impact but still carry a tone that can best be characterized as gentle.  His short fiction collections can be difficult to find, so the opportunity to read one of his short stories in a widely available anthology should be cause to rejoice.  The Last and Only is a bit difficult to categorize.

George Moscowitz becomes, over time, French.  At first, the change is gradual, but as it becomes more apparent, the transformation begins to completely. radically alter his life. He discovers that his switch in nationality leaves him open to an entirely new sort of prejudice and he has to learn to cope. An actual move to France, prompted by his unique circumstances, presents entirely new challenges, both for himself and his wife.

Ultimately, this story carries the tone of a fairy tale or fable, and it certainly seems to carry a subtle moral about not only the choices we make in life but our own decisions about whether or not those choices will truly make a person happy once they’re enacted. The story is quiet and understated, but it’s also elegant in the way that it progresses and in its ultimate message. It’s the kind of short story that a person can reread many times and take away something different each time, depending on your own perspective and your life experiences. It requires some post-reading thought, but it doesn’t lose any of its entertainment value because of that.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

What if a dead columnist could keep writing his column?  Neat concept.  I enjoyed Story With Advice II: Back from the Dead by Rick Moody.

The column from the other side took the form of a “dear Abby”–with questions from the living worried about what they might find when they died.  What could they take with them?  Who would they see?  Whatever shall I wear? Some of the questions are funny, some are just plain weird and a couple were over the top.  But all in all, I enjoyed this story about the afterlife that touched lightly on the meaning of life and quite possibly the meaning of death.

Easily worth a read.

I’ve read some Kelly Link that I like and some that just makes me wonder what she’s talking about. My favorite is probably The Faery Handbag. Her work is generally surreal with world creation top-notch and this piece is no exception. Important details are tucked here and there like little pieces of a puzzle that you have to find and put together. The world she presents in Light, is one you think you know, with just a thing or two out of place. As the story grows, the surreal details are more common, but it’s a gradual build and fits the story.

Unfortunately, this story is one that I don’t really understand or perhaps I just can’t connect with it. It’s about a woman with two-shadows, a misfit or perhaps an outcast. She works a 9 to 5 mundane job, drinks a lot, tries to find solace where she can. She’s had a bad relationship or two, but Kelly Link knows humanity; the woman in the story falls into old traps, never quite able to break away. I think it’s a story about us, but cloaked in what-if; the reason for our loneliness is defined easily by something such as being born with two-shadows. Two shadows is not truly meaningful or harmful, but the character lets it hold her back and sometimes it keeps her from ever really finding comfort. Or perhaps it is just that she picks up her idea of comfort in one-night stands from men in a bar.

Link doesn’t leave us without hope. What if a door opened, one you knew was there, one you hadn’t seen before? What if you knew it wouldn’t really be different so you packed your booze and a few things you wanted, but you were able to leave behind your biggest problem of the moment and maybe–just maybe explore something different? What if, indeed.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

Her husband comes home, stamps the snow from his shoes, kisses her, and asks how her day was.

“Our time together is short,” she says.

The married couple remains nameless, but the wife has been diagnosed as “Stage three” and her transformation into a deer acts as a metaphor for her struggle with cancer.  Memoir of a Deer Woman may have its roots in Native American mythology, but Rickert has created a story both modern and timeless, both unique and universal.

Rickert’s use of tense, the present and simple future, creates interesting transitions between what is happening now and what will happen.  It gives the story an odd, moody feeling.  Little portents offered up throughout add to this moodiness and lend to it a feeling of melancholy.

Who knows how long they have?  Maybe this is the last time.

But this isn’t a depressing tale.  Rickert doesn’t dwell on the inevitable.  The changes the wife undergoes are handled with grace and sensitivity.  The deer woman’s transformation goes beyond the physical.

It is also a story about a husband who is losing the woman he loves.  His willful denials, his inability to comprehend what she is going through.

He is crying and shaking his head and all of a sudden she realizes that he will never understand.  Should she say so in her memoir?

His part in this story is handled with equal grace and sensitivity, so that you, the reader, understand,

her husband is not being mean, just human.

Memoir of a Deer Woman is not a story of despair, but more of acceptance.  It is not so much a story about dying as it is a poignant reminder to live without regret.  And no matter how many times you read Memoir of a Deer Woman (and you will read it more than once), it still retains a sense of the mysterious and inexplicable.

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_{This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.}

Our first focus will be on Best American Fantasy 2008 which should be hitting shelves soon via Prime Books and is edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

Table of Contents

1. “Bufo Rex” by Eric Amundsen (Weird Tales)
2. “The Ruby Incomparable” by Kage Baker (Wizards)
3. “The Last and Only” by Peter S. Beagle (Eclipse 1)
4. “Mario’s Three Lives” by Matt Bell (Barrelhouse)
5. “Interval” by Aimee Bender (Conjunctions)
6. “Minus, His Heart” by Jedediah Berry (Chicago Review)
7. “Abroad” by Judy Budnitz (Tin House)
8. “Chainsaw on Hand” by Deborah Coates (Asimov’s)
9. “The Drowned Life” by Jeffrey Ford (Eclipse 1)
10. “The Naming of the Islands” by David Hollander (McSweeney’s)
11. “Light” by Kelly Link (Tin House)
12. “The Revisionist” by Miranda Mellis (Harper’s)
13. “In the Middle of the Woods” by Christian Moody (Cincinnati Review)
14. “Story with Advice II: Back from the Dead” by Rick Moody (Mississippi Review)
15. “Ave Maria” by Micaela Morissette (Conjunctions)
16. “Logorrhea” by Michele Richmond (Logorrhea)
17. “Memoir of a Deer Woman” by M. Rickert (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
18. “The Seven Deadly Hotels” by Bruce Holland Rogers (shortshortshort.com)
19. “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” by Rachel Swirsky (Electric Velocipede)

So what you will see periodically for the next couple of weeks are reviews of stories from Best American Fantasy 2008 popping up in their own individual posts all, however, leading to the same discussion thread at our forums. You will be able to navigate through all of them via our tags.

To kick it off a bit I asked Matthew Cheney (the series editor) what he thought when he hears the words ‘American Fantasy’.

My first thought on hearing the words “American fantasy” is not a single thought, but many — for instance, I immediately wonder what “American” means and what “fantasy” means and what they are doing together. Whose America? Whose fantasy? With our series, at least, we’ve made these questions central to the project by allowing the guest editors great freedom in defining the terms. The books are each a provisional answer by the guest editors to not only the vexing question of what constitutes “the best”, but also to the question of what “American” and “fantasy” might mean. – Matthew Cheney

So there you go and I hope you enjoy!

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