Apex Magazine #151, October 2025
“Liecraft” by Anita Moskat, translated by Austin Wagner
“Ghosts of Summer” by Catherine Tavares
“Code Green” by Rebecca Johnson
“We Used to Wake to Song” by Leah Ning
“The Horrible Conceit of Death and Night” by J.A. Prentice
“The Fate You Choose” by Nadia Radovich
“FAQ on My Vagina Dentata” by Juniper White
“Cassandra and the Changeling” by R.J. Sterling
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Apex Magazine #151 contains five original short stories and three pieces of flash fiction that have been reviewed.
The first new story is: “Liecraft” by Anita Moskat, translated by Austin Wagner. The physics of the world in which this story takes place is unlike our mundane world. Decay is not merely a passive process but an active, inanimate force that can be only too easily accelerated or, with great difficulty, slowed, by spoken words. Words of truth feed and accelerate the decay and only lies can slow it. The greatest tragedy of this world is that lesser lies have only a marginal impact and it requires the cruellest and most hurtful lies to temporarily reverse the decay and repair its ravages.
The narrator is a woman who has been brought up and trained to create and deliver such potent lies to her volunteer husband for the greater good of all in the embattled city, even although she knows that even her most inventive and unkind lies are not enough to do more than delay the inevitable. So she seeks to create a lie so great that it might protect her city and all its people for generations, no matter the harm that it might do to her long-suffering spouse. When such a grand and potent lie is finally within her grasp she must decide if the needs of the many always outweigh the suffering of the one. Then in a final twist, she discovers that beyond the level of lie that she has painstakingly prepared to hold the decay at bay for decades, there is yet another level of even more creative super-lie. One that had required an entire lifetime of preparation by an unexpected inventor.
This is a fascinating piece of fantasy fiction in which the author has succeeded in the difficult task of maintaining a consistency in the physics of a totally alien realm whilst simultaneously creating a protagonist with dilemmas and choices that are relevant to our own world.
The second piece is “Ghosts of Summer” by Catherine Tavares. This story is set in the midst of an urban city heatwave in present-day America. The First Person narrator is a self-confessed ‘middling grade’ witch whose partner invents a new use for necromancy. Ghosts famously create cold spots, so what could be better in an unremitting heatwave than apparitions used as makeshift air-conditioning? Alas, nothing in this world is free and there is a price to be paid that converts amusement to pathos.
“Code Green” by Rebecca Johnson is a story of big-business medical conspiracy and maleficence in a near future USA. In this future, the field of gene splicing technology has advanced enough to create viable human/plant hybrids and, like many hybrids, they offer advantages drawn from both species. However, human hubris and big-business greed combine to push medical and even merely cosmetic use of this technology well beyond safe boundaries. Inevitably, nature has its revenge in the shape of an aggressive and highly-infective viral hybrid that rapidly spreads across the entire population of people who had never used any spliced plant gene material.
The narrator is a nurse in one of the many isolation hospitals created to help to control this new plague. From the plethora of details, both large and small, it is clear that the author is very familiar with the hospital environment. The word-pictures of nurse to patient interactions feel particularly authentic and grittily realistic.
The conspiracy to conceal the real truth behind this disaster shows big-business in a most unflattering light, but the extensive list of medical disasters, from thalidomide to theralizumab suggests that this jaundiced view is probably not entirely unsupported by historical fact!
The fourth story is “We Used to Wake to Song” by Leah Ning. This speculative piece of fiction is set in a not too distant future where the impact of human activity on the planet Earth has passed its tipping point, with mass extinctions of species on land and in sea and air. The contra-scientific but fascinating response to this is that humans undergo a change, driven by some process thousands of times faster than evolution, in order to repair the ravages that they have caused to the planet. Vast numbers of humans become sessile sea-filtering entities or tree-substitutes whilst still retaining the ability to think and reason.
The narrator has long ago chosen to become such a sea creature. A look back at her seemingly irreversible decision is triggered by her daughter’s attempt to join her in the same mission. That introspection about the complex and frequently uncomfortable relationship which she had with her daughter whilst still a motile human being is the true core of this strange eco-story.
“The Horrible Conceit of Death and Night” by JA Prentice is set in a fantasy world with many late-medieval Italianate features, but with an unusual narrator.
The first person narrator is a spirit-guide for the dead. It is embodied in the shape of a cat and shares some of the personality traits of Terry Pratchett’s anthropomorphic personification of Death, much as he appears in Discworld novels, but with less of his independent agency.
The spirit-guide’s current client becomes a problem customer when it discovers that she is not actually dead. She is the young bride-to-be of the local Prince but loves another, a sailor still away at sea. Therefore, in a plot of Shakespearian complexity, she has faked her death using magic.
The ancient spirit guide has seen many variations of this story and points out patiently that few variants end well for the participants. However, one surprise remains, the lady’s true love is not the sailor but the ocean and the freedom that the open sea stands for. The reader must discover for themselves if that variation to the ‘Doomed Lovers’ theme is enough to change the story’s ending and what any new ending might be.
“The Fate You Choose” by Nadia Radovich is a flash fiction story set within an apparently multiple choice game in which the reader plays the great huntress, Atalanta. The reader will discover that there is no genuine choice involved since the reader is constrained to follow the events exactly as reported in Homer’s Iliad in his story of Atalanta and the Calydonian Boar.
The huntress inevitably slays the boar and precipitates a murderous feud between two sides of one of the noblest families of Greece. She is transformed into a lion as either punishment or reward by the Greek pantheon of gods. The female author draws a different and more triumphant conclusion from this story than the male-orientated twenty-nine century old Greek view that ‘she got what was coming to her for messing about in male affairs.’
“FAQ on My Vagina Dentata” by Juniper White is another flash fiction story. This is written in the dry, almost lecturing style of a typical ‘frequently asked questions’ webpage, but the subject of the FAQ is distinctly atypical.
The myth of toothed sexual organs is found in many primitive societies, especially those which harbour fears or doubts about the impact of female sexuality on that society’s measures of maleness. Perhaps the attitude of supposedly more educated Westerners might differ if they should encounter a real example of this phenomena, or perhaps not? Read the original story to see one author’s answer to that question.
“Cassandra and the Changeling” by R.J. Sterling is the final flash story. This is a short little piece of speculative fantasy set in present day small town/rural USA. Two children born on the poor side of the tracks escape their modern day Huckleberry Finn-like lives via a deserted magical carrousel whose existence is mysteriously known to many similar children. The carrousel is selective in its choice of the recipients of its magical favours, and no one so favoured remains unchanged by its eldritch power.
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.