Apex“Unsettled Nature” by Jordan Kurella
“Piglet Delivers” by Maria Haskins
“Ascension” by P. L. McMillan
“The Island of Sea Turtles and Blood” by Angela Liu
“The Cellar Below the Cellar” by Ivy Grimes (excerpt, not reviewed)
“Shrinkage!” by Ashlee Lhamon
“One Last Light to Guide Me Home” by Avery Parks
“Heritage, or This Body of Folklore” by Ayida Shonibar
“Un Lamento de Flores” by A. P. Thayer (reprint, not reviewed)
“Citizen Komarova Finds Love” by Kat Sedia (reprint, not reviewed)
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
The characters in “Unsettled Nature” by Jordan Kurella live on a gigantic jackalope. The bodies of people smashed to death show up. The narrator is blamed for the killings by a hot-tempered person and begins an investigation with little help from a former lover.
The bizarre setting is the only factor that distinguishes this story from a mundane murder mystery. (The solution, admittedly, involves the fantasy premise.) The narrator speaks in dialect that seems like something out of a typical Western. This gets a bit tiresome after a while.
“Piglet Delivers” by Maria Haskins takes the characters from A. A. Milne’s tales of Winnie-the-Pooh and places them in a grim tale of drunkenness, drug abuse, and attempted murder. As the title implies, Piglet is now a truck driver, working for the sinister corporate executive Kanga and her hulking, brutal son Roo. Roo keeps him dazed on alcohol and drugs so he won’t remember the nature of his deliveries. When he finds Pooh missing and his home a shambles, he struggles to recover his memory and save his friend from an awful fate.
In recent years, there has been a trend to offer dark visions of Milne’s characters, now that they have entered the public domain. In addition to the slasher film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, we have the anthology The Horror at Pooh Corner. Readers’ appetites may be sated by such gruesome variants on the old stories at this point.
“Ascension” by P. L. McMillan takes place on a planet where a gigantic tower soars into the sky. The protagonist lost an arm in an industrial accident. The prosthetic arm that replaced it is not good enough to allow participation in competitive climbing. Success in climbing the tower will earn a large monetary reward, pay for a more advanced prosthetic arm, and possibly win back the protagonist’s lover.
This synopsis makes the story sound like pure science fiction. However, once the climber encounters the dangers on the tower, it reads more like fantasy horror. The way that the protagonist deals with one of the gruesome hazards strains credibility. The story contains multiple flashbacks that are not always in a logical order.
In “The Island of Sea Turtle and Blood” by Angela Liu a woman disappears for a few days while on vacation with her friends on a remote Japanese island. After she returns, she leads the narrator to the place where she encountered the supernatural.
From the beginning of the story, including the title, it is clear that something horrific is going to happen. There are strong hints later in the text as to the exact nature of the menace. Multiple flashbacks relate the relationship between the narrator and her friend, both of whom have suffered tragedies. These experiences may be intended to reflect the meeting with the fantasy being, but overall this is a typical horror story.
The magazine’s section of original fiction ends with a trio of thousand-word stories.
In “Shrinkage!” by Ashlee Lhamon divers enter an alien world’s ocean in order to obtain lights, which may be living, that can be used to cure illnesses. The lights fascinate the divers, leading to a grisly climax. The worldbuilding is much more interesting than the story’s simple plot, and this work might have been more effective as a full-length story.
The narrator of “One Last Light to Guide Me Home” by Avery Parks is in a spaceship that is about to crash into the sun. In order to recapture a childhood memory, she adjusts the interior of the vessel. This is a sentimental tale, which provides some relief in an issue full of horror stories and other dark fiction.
“Heritage, or This Body of Folklore” by Ayida Shonibar features characters who are literally made up of threads consisting of their ancestors’ stories. The plot deals with a rivalry between two scholars and how one reacts to the conflict. I have explained the plot poorly, because the surreal premise makes it difficult to understand. Even so, the character’s actions seem inexplicable.
Victoria Silverwolf reviewed The Horror at Pooh Corner for Tangent Online a while ago.
https://tangentonline.com/print-other/the-horror-at-pooh-corner-edited-by-joe-monson/