Apex #133, September/October 2022
“On the Sunlit Side of Venus” by Benjamin Parzybok
“The Day When the Last War is Over” by Sergey Gerasimov
“The Skinless Man Counts to Five” by Paul Jessup
“Nothing That Bleeds” by Leah Ning
“Kings and Popes and Saints” by Jon Hansen
“Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal” by Derrick Boden
“Brief Life Story of Lila” by Danny Cherry Jr. (reprint, not reviewed)
“Something New for the Silent” by Zig Zag Claybourne (reprint, not reviewed)
“Stringy” by Carlie St. George
“Triangle Eyes” by Chris Clemens
“Feast or Famine Rulebook” by Anna Madden
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
In addition to the usual new fiction, reprints, articles, interviews, and reviews, this issue contains the three top entries in the magazine’s Holiday Horrors Flash Fiction Contest. Appropriate to the Hallowe’en season, many of the other stories share the same eerie mood as this trio of winners, along with a great deal of sadness and surrealism.
In “On the Sunlit Side of Venus” by Benjamin Parzybok, an unspecified disaster on Earth leaves a woman stranded alone in an airship orbiting Venus after her husband commits suicide. After several months, she is able to communicate with a woman on Mars, similarly marooned.
This is a melancholy, hopeless tale whose resolution is inevitable. The author writes in a clear, readable style and the characters are memorable (including the airship’s artificial intelligence) but a mood of despair fills the narrative, making it difficult to enjoy.
In “The Day When the Last War is Over” by Sergey Gerasimov, the skeletons of animals and people come back to life temporarily after the ultimate war wipes out humanity. The text consists mostly of a resurrected teenage girl’s skeleton communicating over the Internet with a young man in another country.
The author is a Ukrainian living in that war-torn nation, and this surreal vision of the horrors of war can be read as a cri de coeur in response to the ravages of Russia’s invasion of his homeland. As with the previous story, it offers not a trace of hope. Perhaps the most effective aspect of this tragic vision is the contrast between the bizarre situation and the mundane conversation between the two characters.
“The Skinless Man Counts to Five” by Paul Jessup is a very strange story with a plot that is difficult to summarize. In brief, corpses are discovered aboard a generation starship, each one containing a speaker that repeats a number. Many other weird things happen as the ship’s detectives try to solve the mystery.
This mixture of science fiction, horror, and surrealism is certainly unique, even if it is likely to leave many readers scratching their heads in confusion. As with many stories in this issue, there is no possibility of escaping a tragic ending.
In “Nothing That Bleeds” by Leah Ning, the main character (addressed only as “you” in second person narration) relives multiple variations of an attempt to save a friend from self-cutting and/or suicide, sometimes resulting in “your” death as well.
Given the premise, the fact that the two characters are nameless and very similar, and the division of the text into multiple short segments, the plot is difficult to follow. Better appreciated as a mood piece than as a narrative, this brief work shares the same grim tone as many pieces in this issue.
The protagonist of “Kings and Popes and Saints” by Jon Hansen is an elderly woman living alone. She imagines herself surrounded by the personages mentioned in the title, and to be fighting off weed-like creatures in her garden. A meeting with a young man selling magazine subscriptions reveals that she may not be entirely delusional.
This is a yarn in the tradition of Tales From the Crypt, in which a wicked character reaps the horrific consequences of his actions. It’s not the most profound story ever written, but its gleefully macabre mood serves as a respite from the gloom of other fiction in the magazine.
“Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal” by Derrick Boden takes the form of a series of product reviews, such as are posted on Amazon and other shopping sites. These paint a picture of a world fighting off a plague of mutated fungus, with even stranger happenings connected to the infestation. Objects seem to appear and disappear at random, leading to a final revelation.
The story’s mood is one of black comedy. Much of what goes on seems completely random, but the author comes up with an unexpected explanation that ties things together. The work is clever and amusing, but at six thousand words the joke wears off after a while.
“Stringy” by Carlie St. George is the winning entry in the Holiday Horrors Flash Fiction Contest. Written in the currently popular second person, “you” attempt to find out what happened to your vanished brother. The answer may remind readers of Ray Bradbury’s classic shocker “The October Game.”
“Triangle Eyes” by Chris Clemens is a runner-up in the contest. The narrator has to carve faces into pumpkins or face an awful fate. The story reveals its premise quickly, so there is little suspense.
“Feast or Famine Rulebook” by Anna Madden is another runner-up. It consists of the directions for a macabre game that ends in death. Like the other tiny stories in the contest, it creates an appropriate mood for the season.
Victoria Silverwolf was going to point out a grammatical error in one of these stories, but didn’t think it was really worth mentioning.