Mysterion, March 2026
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
Let me admit this straight out—I couldn’t make heads nor tails of “Grackles” by K. Ferngall despite reading it twice. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Christian, and I’m missing some subtext readily identifiable by anyone of that faith. Or, quite possibly—as I suspect—it could be that the author is purposely hiding their intentions from the reader in order to seem more profound, as exemplified by this sentence, in the third paragraph of the tale: “The adults, being properly drunk, sit or lean about in their fashions as my cousins and I kneel by her chair and ask her to tell it again.” The question here is whom is referred to by “her.” The reader has no idea because the author is being cute and does not identify the subject of the sentence until three paragraphs later, and then only obliquely. Such coy ambiguity continues for more than seven thousand words, as the author relates the same events from three different perspectives, not to mention combining fictional locations with real ones—is Nameaug City actually New London, Connecticut?—until I had lost all patience with the storytelling technique. Furthermore, the tale’s reliance on Christian arcana is so insufferably hermetic, I cannot recommend the story to a wider audience. Of course, if you shave your head in a tonsure and wear a homespun robe secured at the waist by a rope, the tale might be right up your abbey.