Longtime Gone, by Kurt Dinan

“Longtime Gone” by Kurt Dinan is a painful, painful story of a father’s grief over his daughter’s abduction. It is framed with quotes from Juliet Larson’s A Survival Guide for Parents of Missing Children. Quote by quote the father’s grief grows as he tries to do things that he is supposed to do, but he knows the statistics and when everything is the absence of his daughter.

Their days and nights have no unanswered questions hammering at them as they try to work, as they try to shower, or as they try to sleep—Do the stars look different where Molly is? Or do her lifeless eyes stare at nothing but dirt and decomposing leaves? Is she nearby—less than one mile from this house—or cities, states, or even oceans away? Or is my nine-year-old angel, the child who at six said she wanted to marry me when she grew up, scattered over twenty miles of dark highway?

There are no answers in the silence except for this truth—the day Molly went missing the entire planet became a potential graveyard.

The ending is teased, in a sense, a couple of pages prior, but through it all the ending makes sense through the illogic of it. Dinan’s suggestion that this could be real, that this could be a response feels right at the same time that it feels wrong. If just for a moment, the reader is able to feel a fraction of what a father must feel in such a situation and even that fraction hurts.


-I can't find that Juliet Larson book anywhere online, so I don't know if it is a fictional device from Kurt Dinan or what the story is with that.

Hatchie Bottom, by Barry Hollander

Hatchie Bottom
Barry Hollander
Chiaroscuro: Issue 34


Barry Hollander’s story “Hatchie Bottom” takes until page three before the reader gets the weird. The story opens with three men on a fishing boat in a maze of a marsh finding the body of a white girl hanging from a tree. One of them men takes several pictures, and leave to get the police. When they return there is no body. But there is something wrong with the pictures. Most of them are grey, blurry...but one picture comes through clear.

It’s that moment of discovery, the moment that chills.

It’s not the only moment that chills. The conclusion to the story chills, too, when Caleb returns to the tree with the Sheriff.

Good story. “Hatchie Bottom” isn’t too long, only 3800 words or so, but it is definitely worth the read.

Chiaroscuro: Issue 33

Issue 33 was a good one for Chiaroscuro Magazine. Chizine publishes darker, occasionally twisted stories (Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range, or The Man Who Eats Angels anyone?), but over the last two issues I have been impressed with the overall quality of the fiction. There were four stories in Issue 33.


Waiting Period, by Sunil Sadanand
Ladders, by David Sakmyster
The Vine that Ate the South, by Bill Kte'pi
The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions, by David Nickle


Ladders features an entrepreneur in some strange, dingy, grimy city who retrieves people who have climbed up their ladders to get closer to the fresh air above the city and do not wish to come down. He does the job because it pays well and because it keeps some people from falling to their death. Interesting story concept, well executed and well told. I wished the story was longer to get more into this world of city and ladders and people trying to escape.

The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement... takes the form of a press conference with the Mayor speaking about a boy who was killed in a hit and run accident and about the community's grief. And then Nickle twists the whole thing. Short, but it works for what it is.

The Vine That Ate the South did not really connect with me too much. Apparently there is some time travel, a girl who has had odd experiences with men who seem strangely familiar, and...yeah. Nothing remarkable here.

Waiting Period opens with these two sentences which built up my interest real quick:

"I didn't tell him I was leaving." This is what the dead girl in the yellow dress tells me when I ask her if she's seen my daughter.

There is something about stories where dead people are characters that just works for me. I guess that makes them zombies, but that’s not quite it. A dead man is looking for his dead daughter. It works. I thought that Ladders would be my favorite from this issue, but I think Waiting Period is. It's the walking, talking dead thing. Maybe this is a new sub-genre of fiction that needs to be explored in greater depth.

Short Fiction 'Zines

In light of the Short Fiction discussions I have come across recently, here's a glimpse of what I'm reading.


Actively Read:
Subterranean Online
Strange Horizons
Lone Star Stories
Chiaroscuro
Clarkesworld
Weird Tales (subscription)
Heliotrope


Single Issue Pick Ups:
Steampunk Magazine # 1 (not so good)
Subterranean # 4 (the John Scalzi SFF cliche issue...it’s good, just not as great as the Online edition)
Electric Velocipede # 11
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet # 20
Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies (solid anthology of four stories)



I will definitely pick up more print editions of Subterranean. I really love this small press. I fully expect to order more from the Rabid Transit line of chapbooks. I still need to read EV and LCRW (still need to receive LCRW for that matter), so opinions forthcoming for those zines. I imagine I will purchase a chapbook or two from EV, though. I am very interested in the just published William Shunn chapbook.

I hope / intend on purchasing some One Story, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and perhaps Jim Baen's Universe at some time in the future.

What is readily apparent here is that I only subscribe to one magazine and that’s just because they had a great discount / deal for the subscription. Otherwise I probably would not subscribe to Weird Tales. I would love a similar offer for Asimov's or F&SF. When we're talking $5 (or so) at a time, it is easier to budget in a single issue of a zine. Pulling a subscription fee at any single time is a bit tougher and questionable if the value is there. For markets that only publish a couple of times a year, one at a time is a decent value and gives me a chance to see if this is something that is worth an additional investment. I don't know that I have that option with an Asimov's.

I know there are other free markets out there, but for whatever reason the Actively Read ones are the ones I have focused on before I decide to try to branch out again and find some more.