"Angels and Saints" is one of the first stories to be offered, as a free download, from an upcoming sequel ebook/bound paper anthology to the Undertaker Books anthology Stories to Take to Your Grave, Volume One. It's by Bobbi A. Chukran, a veteran writer of nonfiction and some fiction and plays (including a novel in 2006, and the continuing "Nameless, Texas" series of short stories) who is now turning some of her efforts to "weird western" fiction and related fantastica. The Mailer Review's 15th anniversary issue similarly arrived yesterday in the mail, as a surprise, after managing editor Michael Shuman's kind offer of the previous issue, a while back, to members of the FictionMags email discussion list. So, friendly netquaintances are the source of this week's texts.
"Angels and Saints" is a finely-detailed short story, set in Texas in the 1920s, involving a minister out riding his horse in open country to help, among other things, formulate the next sermon he'd deliver, who gets caught up in a storm and finds shelter at an isolated house, occupied solely by a caretaker while the other residents are away, who has his own sort of religious expression, carving icons such as the one pictured above, which is one Bobbi owns and which inspired this story. The arc of the story is a familiar one, but it demonstrates Bobbi's love of the setting and deft employment of small details.
Bobbi Chukran is a professional writer expanding her palette; while Emmy Li, in the 2021 volume (and latest so far) of The Mailer Review, largely devoted to the work of Normal Mailer, gives us two examples of the very young writer showing promise. "Chessboard" is also a ghost story, involving a young woman's last game with her late grandfather's spirit, who had engaged her in the game from early childhood, and it had been a goal for her to finally win a game with him. "The Mirror" is a less cozy sort of ghostly horror, which gives away its author's youth in the slightly rushed set-up, in which a doppelganger manages to gain access to the life of the protagonist (albeit surfiction by elders can also take a similarly "OK, why not?" tack). She wrote well for a 9th grader, and presumably is now a high-school graduate likely on her way to college (her desire was to become a professional educator, the contributors' notes indicate...there was no headnote on her two short stories, that lead off the fiction and poetry in this issue of the Review, to suggest her mid-teens status at time of composition, and the work is certainly of the better sort for a writer of her years).
For more of today's Short Story Reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
