What I Read in October

I fell a little behind in my reading this month. Mostly this was for good reasons as I hope to reveal either next month or January. Even so, there were a few stories that caught my eye that I’ll talk up below.

For Salvation by Michael B Tager. (Gamine Fiction volume 1) This was my favorite story from the Gold Shader “Game Fiction Volume 1” anthology my story “Distractions appeared in last month. This is a bit of a slow burn but the story gives clear sense of dread and purpose.
Ice by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld) This slice of life story set on a frozen world called New Greenland revolves around the efforts to human civilization to adapt to environments clearly not meant for human civilization. Curious story in that it's about the tension between all sorts of post-human elaboration and the always perilous crust of brother relations. As someone with a brother, this story really registered.
Cats’ Game by Michelle Muenzler. (DSF) A little bit of the Lottery mixed with a character study of a truly formitable Russian Great Grandmother. Very much like how the ending is handled, making it clear what happened without telling.
Some Gods of El Paso by Maria Dahvana Headley (Tor.com) Great first line. This is about living in the middle of things, being an outlaw with feet in two worlds. A story told in a delirious half-drunk manner about two delirious profane and lusty shamans. Its dry as dust fairy tale style really works for this take. Modern myth making at its finest.
Hold Time Violations by John Chu (Tor.com) Interesting story set in Boston about universes glitching and a daughter trying to heal them through the half-remembered instructions of her mother. ANother example of a hard-sci using magical realism elements to tell a truly fantastic and yet tightly speculative story. Good stuff.

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Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

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With the title World War Z

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