John Avide Lindqvist's "You Have to Read This!" has the most familiar feel to it of the three short stories and the novel excerpt; Lindqvist is easily the most famous of these writers in English, due to the success of his novel Let the Right One In in translation--it probably doesn't hurt that the source language, Swedish, is the closest to English. Nor that this story is an open tribute to W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" set in the online age. Deft, and only slightly telegraphed (IM'd?). WLT's use of Adobe stock illos doesn't help here, where the protagonist, who considers herself unattractive and makes no great efforts to dress "well" or otherwise primp, is represented by a photo of a conventionally pretty young woman with subtle, professional makeup, at her computer.
The Japanese Junko Mase, the only woman writer of the featured quartet, has a story with a Kafka-esque quality, and perhaps more than a nod to Margaret Atwood, portraying a kind of limbo claustrophobic settlement in which a young woman describes and copes with her microcosm of a society that might be a cult, or might be a sad outpost of some of the last surviving humans, 0r both. Thus could be read as science fiction, parable, surfiction or psychodrama.
2 comments:
Very nice post, even if it is about horror fiction. Your capsule reviews were good. I read "A History of Canada: Truth-telling through Fiction." And also the poem by Rachel Tzvia Back.
I noted at Patti's blog about the comments, then realized I could have just come over here. I do like the replies following the comments, very helpful, but it doesn't stick in the display at the post.
Thanks, Tracy! As you might've guessed, I haven't gotten to the other contents of the issue yet, as I bought it in hardcopy just the day before (I generally like WLT, but a while back it seemed to forego carrying fiction in favor of all nonfiction/review/survey-essay content, and I was happified not only by the special section of this issue, but also by the inclusion of several fictions in translation).
And, as I've noted elsewhere, I could handle the new format of the comments with less annoyance if they kept the active links to the commenter's blog or other linked source in the commenter's name in the new format. (Also, the way the new format bops up and down while one is typing is more than a little annoying. But, then, that last might be a bug with the Chromebook I'm using.)
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