Grimdark “The Last Fire-Bearer of Angtíl” by Alex Fox
“A Beautiful Accident” by Peter Orullian (reprint, not reviewed)
“Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” by Stephen Graham Jones (reprint, not reviewed)
“Kissing Carrion” by Gemma Files (reprint, not reviewed)
“Shadow Prisons of the Mind” by Caroline M. Yoachim (reprint, not reviewed)
“Underbelly” by SenLinYu
“Futurephage” by Laurel Hightower
“The Rule of the Isotope” by Ken Liu
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
Grimdark gives us a long and varied issue this time around, with four new stories mixed in with four reprints from other magazines and a number of author interviews. The issue opens with “The Last Fire-Bearer of Angtíl” by Alex Fox, a story about a mad king. This is not a spoiler; the first person narrator tells us in the first paragraph that he is known as “mad,” “bad,” and “sad.” And therein lies the tragedy: his madness, he is certain, results from the weight of his responsibility. And perhaps in an attempt to absolve himself of his actions, he believes that all men, himself included, are puppets at the mercy of invisible strings.
The setting is a proto-typical medieval kingdom and the prose is efficient. The plot itself is in danger of becoming redundant: did the author really need seven sons (admittedly a sometimes magical number) when five or six would have sufficed. But in hindsight all is forgiven as the reader is left with the haunting final question: did he do what he did for his own aggrandizement, or was it really to his save his sons from the same madness that has overtaken him?
“Underbelly” by SenLinYu is easily the darkest of the stories here. The unnamed main character is surviving as a street urchin in a world at war when she chooses the wrong pocket to pick. Her would-be target captures her and takes her to an underground lab where he does unspeakable things to her body in the name of “weapons research.” The result is a body so mutilated that it is clearly meant to be metaphorical rather than physically plausible in any way. While there she frees another prisoner, a young boy who cannot die: he lives for years without food or water, and any part of his body can regenerate if damaged. And together they do manage to survive.
The story starts in the past tense, describing her former life as a thief, before switching cleverly to the present tense for the much longer section about her ongoing suffering in the sewers. And the body-horror elements, along with her insatiable hunger, further heighten the feeling that the story is not meant as anything other than allegory. But exactly for what is difficult to say; the war and even her captor play only a small part in the story, and perhaps the only message is “survival at all costs” despite the atrocities committed against her.
The third of the new stories, “Futurephage” by Laurel Hightower, is the odd one out. While Grimdark’s submission guidelines do allow science fiction, all the other stories in this issue and in most other issues are far removed from SF ideas. But in this story, there is a world-wide catastrophe somehow related to climate change, and it is so severe that everyone knows that the current generation will be humanity’s last. Nevertheless there are sufficient resources to build a spaceship that is going to take hundreds of fetuses, harvested at twelve weeks gestation and frozen, to a suitable planet along with a crew of seven. There, the crew will thaw the future colonizers and incubate them in artificial uteruses, allowing mankind to survive.
So an optimistic story, you might think, despite the hints of corruption in the government as well as sexism and racism in the crew selection. But this is a grim dark story and the author needs to subvert any possibility of a happy or even a faintly hopeful outcome. And the story does manage to do that, but only by assuming an attitude of such extreme misandry towards all men that it borders on the laughable.
The final original story is “The Rule of the Isotope” by Ken Liu and despite the scientific-sounding title, this is a zombie story. If you are like me, you might be getting tired of the classic shuffling, brain-eating type of zombie that has been used in hundreds of movies and stories for at least fifty years. And the first half of this story is simply boring, with a more experienced zombie giving a newbie the all too familiar details about what it takes to survive as a member of the newly deceased. This is all done in the second person, adding to the general tedium. But to his credit, the author does insert a clever twist at the end, although many would argue that it completely disregards the basics of the genre by giving zombies something they have never had before: feelings.