“Love Goes Begging” by Bennet H. Marks
“Love Goes Begging” by Bennet H. Marks reverts to the speculative/romance/erotica buffet that Strange Horizons seems to favor, this time with mixed success. It is the tale of one man’s encounter with a washed-up Cupid. He is given a powerful love potion, and faces a moral dilemma: does he dare to use it to incite the passions of his flighty lover? What of his patient but boring life-mate? Exactly what are the logistics of slipping someone a love potion in a crowded restaurant, hoping that they look at you first and not the waiter?
Marks takes one of the tropes of fantastic fiction, the all-powerful love potion, and far from it being a deus ex machina, Cupid’s potion is an excellent plot device and the seed for all sorts of delicious internal quandaries. “Love Goes Begging” is the kind of piece that will irritate some at first, but it is definitely worth sticking with. While Marks’s gay characters act more camp than a row of tents, he can be forgiven for this stereotype-ladden writing when the sheer narrative tension comes into play. Definitely a page-turner/mouse-clicker.
The back story is an absolute treat, and the characters leap into this story with life and breath of their own. Cupid the beggar is presented evocatively, and there is a great line about his teeth that really works as descriptive prose: “His wings had shrunk to quantum fluctuations, and his teeth were yellow and cracked, like Scrabble tiles in some ancient runic language—Lemurian, or Old Norse.”
Perhaps one thing Marks can be faulted on (apart from his cringe-worthy queens) is the way he slotted the speculative element into what is otherwise a clever romantic drama. The encounter between the protagonist and Cupid is forced and somewhat clunky, and it is not love but the suspension of disbelief that goes begging at this point. It is more noticeable for the fact that the rest of the piece is pristine and delightful that this section stands out. Simply grit your teeth and you will get through it!
Finally, it seems odd that Strange Horizons made this a two-parter: all of the story is about 6000 words (a little long for an e-zine, granted) but they seem to have chopped the first part off at an arbitrary point about 2000 words into the piece. This point of separation just didn’t make sense, and SH would have been better served by leaving “Love Goes Begging” as a whole. At the very least, this split could be more equal; reading a 4000 word Part 2 isn’t much different from digesting 6000 words in one hit.