Fantasy“The Cursed Universe Inside Your Eye” by Angela Liu
“Dread of the White Dog” by Lowry Poletti
“Bacá” by Alex V. Cruz
“Set Yourself on Fire” by Sam Kyung Yoo
Reviewed by Mina
“The Cursed Universe Inside Your Eye” by Angela Liu watches as a young woman takes on the burden her mother held before her – to become a human curse bearer. It is an uncomfortable, creepy read, but well written: “A human body can’t tell the difference between hot and cold when something is too much of one or the other. Hypothermic bodies die naked, desperate for relief from the imagined heat.” Short and absolutely not sweet.
“Dread of the White Dog” by Lowry Poletti is about a Faustian bargain. Risha the wolf was shot and is dying. A mysterious white dog comes and grants it life. But is it truly life? Risha can only feed on the living and destroys everything it holds dear. And the hunger becomes all-consuming and never-ending. This felt more like a horror story.
In “Bacá” by Alex V. Cruz, the villagers are being forced off their land by faceless men with fake papers. A “bacá” is summoned to chase them away—the monster destroys their crops and kills their livestock. But it is not the bacá that destroys them in the end; it is vengeance from one of their own that they have wronged. Folklore meets fantasy.
“Set Yourself On Fire” by Sam Kyung Yoo is a different take on domestic abuse. The old victim of an abusive relationship talks to the new victim. It becomes like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, with the present intertwined with the past. Echoes, reflections and refractions, giving us a truly haunting tale.
Mina notes that this is the penultimate issue of Fantasy.