Tor.com, December 2023

“Sun River” by Nisi Shawl (reprint, not reviewed)

“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C. L. Polk

“The Sound of Reindeer” by Lyndsie Manusos

Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf

Two original fantasy stories appear in this issue.

The protagonist of “Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C. L. Polk uses magic to protect her neighborhood. A homeless woman asks her for help, but she explains that the unavoidable price would be her first born child. It seems that the woman is willing to make this sacrifice, because a little girl shows up at the protagonist’s doorstep, needing to be adopted.

Complications ensue when an evil magician threatens to replace the neighborhood’s park with office buildings. During her legal and magical struggles to prevent this, the protagonist learns that the homeless woman and her daughter are not what they seem.

There are many interesting details in this work of urban fantasy, from the bees who help the protagonist with her magic to the 1970’s setting. The revelations about the little girl and her mother are intriguing plot twists. On the other hand, the antagonist is a one-dimensional figure of pure evil, and the story goes on for quite a while after the resolution of the plot, resulting in an anticlimax.

In “The Sound of Reindeer” by Lyndsie Manusos, a woman accompanies her girlfriend on a trip to visit family on Christmas. The girlfriend’s relatives have a bizarre tradition, in which the woman is pressured to participate.

To say anything else would be to give away too much about the simple plot of this holiday horror story. One has to wonder why the girlfriend invited the protagonist to meet her family, when she knew it would be a very disturbing encounter.

Victoria Silverwolf has never heard reindeer.