Apex “The Monster Fucker Club” by A.V. Greene
“Dolly Girl” by Christopher Rowe
“Island Circus” by Amal Singh
“But I Loved You” by Sachiko Ragosta
“The Discarded Ones” by Linda Niehoff
“The Magazine of Horror” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
“Gim of P” by Benjamin DeHaan
“You Me and the End” by Mona West
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Apex Magazine #139 contains five original short stories, three pieces of flash fiction and two reprints.
The first new story, “The Monster Fucker Club” by A.V. Greene, is a supernatural tale set in the present day United States. The narrator is one of a group of unusual female students in what initially appears to be an otherwise unremarkable rural/small town school. These self-styled “Weird Girls” cope with the stresses and anxieties of teenage life by each discovering their own idiosyncratic supernatural lover. Very American school pressures such as the banning of books by a reactionary school board, a predatory youth pastor and a school shooting further alienate these youngsters and reinforce their perilous choices.
The reader may initially feel sympathy for their chosen courses, but their relationships with these perilous creatures develop to the great detriment of any more normal interactions and not even physical survival is guaranteed. This is a dark tale with no happy-ever-after ending, but then the genre is horror and this story reaches that benchmark with several wide-eyed screams to spare.
The second piece is “Dolly Girl” by Christopher Rowe. This is also a horror story set in a contemporary US city, but has an altogether more convoluted nature. The central character appears to be a remarkably well-adjusted young woman when it is considered that she and her female predecessors for five generations have all been afflicted with an invisible supernatural monster that is physically affixed to her body and is constantly attempting to control her.
The resilience of our protagonist is tested and proven when she is approached by the self-appointed “Good-Guys” who attempt to enlist her to save the fabric of reality from supernatural attack.
The US City in question is not explicitly named, but our protagonist’s unfazed and world-wise response to the fact that the commission was offered by a rotting zombie and her sword-wielding acolyte may hint that it just must be a borough of New York. Certainly, her automatic distrust of the motives of both sides in the conflict and her eventual resolution of the matter is typical of what many outsiders would expect from a denizen of that city.
“Island Circus” by Amal Singh is a short SF story of ecological disaster set in a much enlarged Indian Ocean/Arabian Gulf only a few more decades into a future that might already have begun. Much of the population of the Indian subcontinent has been forced to live on rafts built by adding floatation engines to what had once been land-based homes. The technical possibility of this degree of flooding and its solution are both highly questionable, but scientific accuracy is not really key in this story unless you are an avid geographer, climatologist or engineer. The most interesting lesson is the very different perspective that a Mumbai-born Asian author can bring to bear on the way that ordinary human beings might deal with this catastrophe.
In contrast to the manner in which many western authors might address this story, the self-absorbed individualist is the rare exception and the need to put the need of the tribe first for the good of all is the quiet but almost complete norm. Yet even here, ultimately selfish rebellion exists and is even portrayed as somewhat admirable.
“But I Loved You” by Sachiko Ragosta explores the limits of acceptable android technology and free enterprise in next century USA.
A flawed relationship between two female lovers has foundered upon the domineering and controlling nature of at least one of them. The response of our narrator is not to meekly accept that reality and move on, but to commission an android copy of her departed lover.
The author simultaneously explores the impact on the narrator of an apparently more perfect but far more subservient replacement partner and the wider moral implications of a technology where robotic AI can copy a human well enough to deceive at least a willing and biased observer.
“The Discarded Ones” by Linda Neihoff is a story that includes, but is not really about, ghosts. It gently explores the loneliest reaches of a bustling present day US city where the sort of caring or needy person who might currently adopt a retired greyhound or abandoned pet can instead house a deserted and fading ghost.
Except for the one supernatural precondition of substituting a ghost for a rescued dog or cat, this could easily have been written in a contemporary genre outside of Tangent’s remit since it is essentially a well-written and uplifting story about a shy and isolated young woman rescuing herself from despair and depression by giving help to equally needy others, both human and, in this case, post-mortal.
“The Magazine of Horror” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an unusual flash horror story. It is presented in the form of the increasingly unnerving correspondence between a semi-magical horror magazine and a talented young author who only gradually begins to realise that even submitting a story to this very special magazine is literally a once in a lifetime opportunity for all involved.
The penultimate flash-length story is “Gim of P” by Benjamin DeHaan. Once again the theme of this short fantasy is ecological, but from an unusual perspective. The Gim are tiny, sentient creatures who live in the interstices of the rafts of plastic that infest the oceans of present-day Earth. But a deadly eco-disaster is coming to the Gim. Human recycling and systematic clean-up threatens their little worlds of refuse, and heedless humanity does not even know what it is about to do to another innocent species as it finally tries to right its previous wrongs.
“You Me and the End” by Mona West is the final flash story in this issue. This is a brief apocalypse story set in the skies above the Rockies. The time-line is our very near future in the few hours after an unspecified but catastrophic and apparently comprehensive disaster. Chance and circumstance has trapped our protagonist in a crowded aircraft holding pattern that is overwhelmingly likely to end in a fiery death.
The narrator is a cynical and not entirely admirable character who spends these final hours of life in reviewing and mentally sorting his relationship with his more successful and apparently more admirable twin. His final conclusion may not be the one that you expected, although there are a few clues in the text that hint that his personality could lead to no other resolution. You may not approve, but you can at least admire his sang-froid in the face of death and wonder if you could make any better an ending in like circumstances.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.