"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.
Short Story Wednesday:
Patricia Abbott: "How to Talk to Your Mother" by Lorrie Moore, first published in her collection Self Help (1985). The story can be read here.
Jerry House: "Gynecologia" by Gilbert Cannan, first published in his collection Windmills: A Book of Fables (1915). The story can be read here.
George Kelley: Margolyam by Matthew Hughes (reviewed as a collection of linked stories, though Hughes considers it a novel), 2024.
Todd Mason: "She-Bear" by Janet Fox, an "Arcana" story, Fantastic Stories, January 1974, edited by Ted White. Can be read here.
Plus:
John Boston: Amazing Stories, September 1969, edited by Ted White
Will Errickson: "Talent" by Theodore Sturgeon, Beyond: Fantasy Fiction, September 1953, edited by H. L. Gold; "Naturally" by Fredric Brown, Beyond, September 1954, edited by Gold
Rich Horton: Peace by Gene Wolfe (and the stories "retold" in it); Olivia (a novella) by "Olivia" (Dorothy Strachey Bussy)
Jerry House: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Tracy K: Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi; Nearly Nero by Loren D. Estleman
Steve Lewis: Weird Tales, January 1949, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith; Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1967, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.
James Reasoner: Texas Rangers, July 1949, edited by ?G. B. Farnum
Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic Stories,August 1969, edited by Ted White
and:
Evan Lewis: some 1934 Spicy Detective covers
K. A. Laity: "Murder, Surrealism, Women’s Rage, and Les Abysses"
William Gibson and Malcolm Edwards: On Neuromancer
The FictionMags Index entry for this issue:
There were, unfortunately, only three stories in the late Janet Fox's series about Arcana, a young witch who becomes also a somewhat reluctant warrior in narratives that deserved a bit more exploration, and a collection, but Fox only published two collections of her short fiction during her lifetime, and the other two stories, one each, were collected from first publication in Fantastic in the '70s, in her 2003 volume A Witch's Dozen and 2004 (and final) collection Not in Kansas. I'd read and very much enjoyed the last, "Demon and Demoiselle" in the October, 1978 Fantastic, which I purchased and read when it and I were new...along with the Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini story, "Another Burnt-Out Case", they were the best things in the issue, and have read the initial story "A Witch in Time" (1973) some years back in Not in Kansas, but somehow never got around to reading the middle story, even though I have a copy of that issue somewhere.
If her work in sword & sorcery fiction resembles anyone's, it most closely (in my experience) matches a slightly more plainspoken version of Fritz Leiber's, and his wasn't the worst model to emulate, in fact essentially the best. Perhaps I've been putting off reading "She-Bear" since we'll have no more of her, nor Fox's other fine work.
In this story, Arcana is seeking a magic-driven sword, in the company of a pony which has been possessed by a hobbled demon under her control, and having found it, meets a displaced northern band of a warrior culture (women and children as well as men), and seeks out (with one of their male warriors) the troll that forced them away from their settlement. Thus, nothing in outline Too surprising in s&s, but written with grace, wit, and an acute sense of women's estate (in our society as well as the northern band's).
I'm glad I've finally read it, and am sorry Fox didn't choose (or wasn't able) to write more of Arcana.
For more of today's short fiction, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Frank Babics: "Passengers" by Robert SIlverberg, from Orbit 4 ed. Damon Knight, Putnam, 1968
Jerry House: "Pigs is Pigs" by Ellis Parker Butler, from American Illustrated Magazine September 1905 and widely reprinted in magazines as well as other sites; issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine edited by Janet Hutchings and Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology edited by Cathleen Jordan
Tracy K: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor
George Kelley: Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini edited by Bill Pronzini; Murder Most Medieval edited by John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg
Todd Mason: World Literature Review, July 2024, International Horror in Translation, edited by Rachel Cordasco and Daniel Simon; Cordasco's website, Speculative Fiction in Translation;
Jeff Meyerson (in comments): "The Room with Something Wrong" by Cornell Woolrich from Detective Fiction Weekly (as "Mystery in Room 913"), 4 June 1938, edited by ?Kendell Foster Johnson; "The Skeleton Rides a Horse" by Toni Kelner (as by Leigh Perry), Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2022, edited by Janet Hutchings
Kevin Tipple: "Girl's Night Out" by J. A. Jance (e-chapbook)
Plus:
Brian Busby: "Murder at Expo '67" (a novella-length excerpt "condensed" from Too Long at the Fair) by Janet Gregory Vernandel, as published in Cosmopolitan, October 1967, edited by Helen Gurley Brown, can be read here.
Mina and Jeff Houghton: Analog Science Fact & Fiction edited by Trevor Quachri
Steve Lewis: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1967, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.
"M Porcius": stories from Weird Tales, October 1939, edited by Farmsworth Wright; stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Ralph Milne Farley, a reprint by Robert E. Howard, and Kenneth Sterling and H. P. Lovecraft; four stories from Weird Tales by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
James Reasoner: Witchery Plus: A Weird Tales Trilogy by Keith Chapman; Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860-1960 by Christine Bold; Texas Rangers, May 1949, edited by ?Samuel Merwin (a guess); North•West Romances, Fall 1945; Lariat Story Magazine, August 1934, edited by J. F. Byne; Super-Detective Stories, May 1935, edited by Fred Armer; Thrilling Adventures, November 1943, edited by J. S. Williams
Christopher Rowe: The Arcana Stories by Janet Fox
Steven Silver: "The Pagan Rabbi".by Cynthia Ozick, The Hudson Review, Autumn 1966, edited by Frederick Morgan; "Basic Agreement" by Avis Pabel, Astounding Science Fiction, September 1968, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Sam Tomaino: Asimov's Science Fiction, July/August 2024, edited by Sheila Williams
