Aurealis #125, October 2019“Drink with the Dead” by Craig Blane
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The first story in Aurealis #125 is “Drink with the Dead” by Craig Blane. This tale is set in a post-apocalyptic land a few decades into the future. Some unspecified disaster has devastated the world. Supernatural forces may have been involved since there are hints that magical powers now function in this world and we meet a member of the living dead.
A ghoul is cursed to wander the wasteland to pay for a previous life of crime and evil. In each town he must force an individual into a potentially fatal contest of “drink or draw” and the heart of this story is that challenge and its resolution.
There are hints that the protagonist of the story may have his own bad past and it is possible that this meeting may be rough justice, but whatever elemental force resurrected this murderer has taken no regard for any innocent bystander and the ghoul is dangerously willing to gun down the blameless along with the guilty.
The basic story concept could easily have been converted into an interesting morality tale but, as it is written, there is no moral compass to it and it becomes a simple “zombie apocalypse” challenge solved by the application of violence in standard B-movie style.
The second offering this month is “The Witch Who Wove Dreams” by Mike Adamson. This is an elegantly written alternative history story set in mediaeval Haarlem (the original city in Holland rather than the New York suburb!). It is the time of the witchcraft paranoia that swept across Europe for several centuries. The fascinating twist to this tale is that, in this alternate universe, witches are real and have genuine paranormal powers.
The witch Marinja is a Dreamweaver who uses her gift to grant the most wretched and unhappy dwellers in the city the means to survive the drudgery of their mediaeval lives. She is loved by the poor and helpless but the lords of the city know that the word of God is that you shall not suffer a witch to live. They set a trap for her, baited with a crippled youngster, Jonas. Their cynical calculation is that Jonas needs her help so much that she will not be able to refuse to help him. When she does, they will be able to take her in the act of witchcraft and burn her for her crimes.
The character of the witch Marinja is finely and sympathetically drawn so that the reader cannot help but grip a chair and grit teeth as her doom approaches. But Marinja is not one of the helpless old women of our own mediaeval past—this is a different world with different rules and a very different ending.
The last story, “Data” by Laurence Barratt-Manning, is set in an anonymous city, not far into the future. The female point-of-view character has a boring and demoralising job as a data entry clerk in a small and not particularly successful business. For reasons never fully explored this hapless female is the recipient of accurate and specific information about forthcoming happenings. Readers may have dreamed of what great things they could achieve if they had access to such foreknowledge of future events, but in this story, it does not work out that way. By the time that the data predicts the disintegration of her marriage, our protagonist is thoroughly dispirited by the experience and when the data gives warning of an imminent global extinction event that may wipe out all mankind, the protagonist’s response is merely to crunch up the printout and throw it away.
The author does an excellent job of painting a word-picture of this unhappy female trapped in a job whose very existence saps the soul, if that is what you want to read. If you read SF in order to be uplifted then you should move on quickly.
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.