Apex #147, November/December 2024

“And She Had Been So Reasonable” by Rachel Bolton

“Birds of a Feather” by Rachael Severino

“What Happens when a Planet Drops from the Sky” by Danny Cherry Jr.

“Their Wings as Powdery as Bones” by Avra Margariti

“Ceasing to Be” by Garrett Ashley

“Your Return to the Five Ruins of the Bog” by Parker M. O’Neill

“Let Her Collect Stamps” by Juniper White

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

Apex Magazine #147 contains five original short stories, two pieces of flash fiction and two reprints in addition to its non-fiction content. Only the original pieces of fiction are reviewed.

The first new story is “And She Had Been So Reasonable” by Rachel Bolton.

This quiet piece of horror is set in a small town or innocuous suburb at a time or place where female independence and empowerment is not yet the norm. Each reader is explicitly invited by the author to select the exact period and location of this story according to their own experiences. However, Ms Bolton is merely toying with you. The physics and biology of this place is unlike anywhere in our mundane world.

The protagonist is a woman whose life as a dutiful wife and near chattel to an overbearing male chauvinist has become too hard to bear. She seeks divorce and he agrees to grant that request upon the condition that she return his wedding necklace. However, that proves to be not as simple as it would appear and her solution is gruesome, grisly and not at all what this reviewer expected. Perhaps you will consider that this act empowers her. This reader believes that she still dances to his rules and his agenda.

The second piece is “Birds of a Feather” by Rachael Severino. This story is set in a pseudo-medieval world where a feeble or entirely absent central government is powerless to enforce law and order in the face of autonomous and despotic local Lords. One realm is controlled by a deeply dysfunctional ruling family that make the inhabitants of Castle Gormenghast appear to be a group of fun-loving teenage partygoers by comparison. The first person narrator is the youngest son of the family, most definitely the feeble runt of the litter. He may not be intrinsically evil, but can be easily led to it by more dominant members of the family. The Lord and his older sons are self-absorbed and selfish, the matriarch of the family is a heartless and vicious witch, but it is our narrator’s eldest sister who scores a pure 100/100 on the distilled evil scoreboard.

This story records a day when potential applicants for the eldest daughter’s blood-stained hand arrive to offer their services without realising that not every unsuccessful suitor leaves exactly as he arrives. This Mother and Daughter combination have unreasonably high standards and an uncompromising attitude to failure to achieve them.

“What Happens When a Planet Drops from the Sky” by Danny Cherry Jr. is a short love story interrupted by an unusual Apocalypse. The location is New Orleans on a near future Earth and the New Orleans of a mirror image Earth in a different dimension of the multiverse. For reasons entirely inexplicable, Earth X and Earth Y are merging and becoming gradually more solid and real to each other. The two would-be lovers are scientists from the two separate iterations of the Earth who begin by exploring the upcoming merger but fall into a doomed love that can only ever be physically satisfied by the catastrophic destruction of both worlds.

The fourth story is “Their Wings as Powdery as Bones” by Avra Margariti. This speculative piece of fiction is set in the present or near future in an unspecified small town that could as easily be either rural USA or the author’s home country of Greece. The town has been suddenly and completely isolated from the rest of the world by a dome of apparently quiescent alien bodies in an impenetrable barrier. The aliens, who appear to some observers to vaguely resemble angels, seem to have the ability to call mentally to certain pre-adult youngsters. These selected individuals become convinced that they are being granted a great honour and develop the ability to levitate towards the alien dome, and even to carry into the air those who attempt to prevent their ascent.

The distrust of the aliens by those unaffected by their blandishments is such that the adults adopt more and more outlandish and cruel ways to secure their children against these calls. The relationship between those called and their parents rapidly disintegrates as otherwise reasonable people perform entirely unreasonable acts for the best of motives, with each party convinced that the other is entirely wrong.

“Ceasing to Be” by Garrett Ashley is set in a near future USA where AI androids are exclusively available from a large and successful corporation to the upper part of a society that is even more sharply divided into haves and have nots than the USA of today.

The first person narrator is a bright but unruly and antisocial teenager whose schooling has been neglected in favour of assisting his step-father in his petty criminal business. The AI androids have a peculiar semi-random fault that leads some of them to develop the equivalent of a human suicide compulsion and our narrator’s step-father makes a precarious living in finding their remains and extracting the high-tech brain chips for illegal sale to those who cannot afford the steep prices of the original corporation.

His interest in school is briefly reignited when three AI androids are allocated to the school as part of an experimental exchange programme. The School Principal reluctantly allows him to participate in the hope that the good example of a quiet obedient android might rub off on him, but any minor improvement in his conduct is dwarfed by the unexpected ability of his android partner to learn mischievous and antisocial behaviour from him. It is only when his android friend is finally gone that he realises that he has learned to better connect with others and to be more human from this very inhuman source.

“Your Return to the Five Ruins of the Bog” by Parker M. O’Neill is an SF story set in a star-spanning future where two human explorers examine the remains of an older and altogether more mysterious and powerful race. It is mostly written backwards in time with each segment moving from finale to the very start. Only the brief epilogue is in linear, sequential order. The aliens are entirely peripheral to the story which revolves around the love, loss and perilous rediscovery of one partner by the other.

“Let Her Collect Stamps” by Juniper White is the final flash story in this issue. This is a short but clever little piece of speculative fiction set in the present day. It is based on the premise that selection and editing of your future life is possible to those who know the secret. The first person narrator instructs her daughter how to modify the future that her daughter will live in the same way as her own mother and grandmother learned from their maternal parents.

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.