Aurealis #188, March 2026“A New Game” by Matt Freeman
“Anna, in the Abstract SF” by Andrew David
“The Book of Middles” by EC Fuller
Reviewed by Axylus
Two of the three stories in this issue of Aurealis have convinced me that I need to do some reading on Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT). Briefly, when dyadic interactions (i.e., the relationship or interaction between two people, elements, or units) of any kind (mainly interpersonal, but here I extend it to include author and reader) violate our expectations about how that communication should go, our attention is heightened, and our perceptions of the message and its originator are altered, for good or for ill. This explains, for example, why readers react positively to successful plot twists and negatively to unsuccessful ones. But “A New Game” by Matt Freeman and “The Book of Middles” by EC Fuller, the pair which bookended this set of tales, raises another point. “A New Game” opened with a relatively appealing description of uncanny, ritualistic behavior by young schoolchildren. Their actions become increasingly dangerous. Alas, this tale did not sustain its initial degree of engagement, but retreated to a predictable, flawed ending. Meanwhile, the first few paragraphs of “The Book of Middles” felt self-conscious, mildly off-putting. As I read, my mind’s eye could only see an author hunched over a glowing keyboard, anxiously trying to stitch together a hook-y opening, rather than any impression of the characters or setting or events of the story. This created a negative-valence expectation. However, subsequent events and descriptions drew me deeper into the tale.
Returning to EVT, I would recommend “The Book of Middles,” which violated my expectations by improving considerably, but not “A New Game,” which surprised me by getting worse. This could also be explained in terms of Brandon Sanderson’s all-purpose “Promise, Progress, Payoff” view of plot structure. On this view, “A New Game” overpromised but underdelivered (relatively strong promise/surprisingly weak payoff), but “The Book of Middles” underpromised and overdelivered (weak initial promise/relatively strong payoff). This suggests that if you flub the ending, everything you did previously gets tossed in the dustbin; however, if your ending rocks, then it can more than compensate for prior moments of disappointment. Maybe this could be a rule of thumb. Let’s call it the “Hemingway’s 47 endings” rule, after the number of times Papa rewrote the closing lines of A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s 47 could perhaps be restated as, “You really need to spend more time rewriting your ending.”
“The Book of Middles,” follows two researchers conducting experiments on a copy of one edition of the dangerous “Book of Middles.” These are books, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, that carry a parasitic and potentially fatal mycelium spore load. Although some readers are immune, most are generally infected within the first five pages, sometimes with gruesome results. There’s a moment of weird typography in my copy of this story, which I believe is intentional.
“Anna, in the Abstract” by Andrew David is a highly fragmented, experimental jumble of images and references to topics that are intended to be edgy: trauma, sex, vague S&M imagery, skull plugs with magnetic snaps through which tech artists pipe neural stimulation, and so on. A potter named Faye is in love with an artist named Anna. It seems that despite all their intimacy, sexual and otherwise, they never truly connected. This leaves Faye haunted and frustrated. Or at least, I think that’s what happened. The story was deliberately other-than-entirely-clear.