Reactor, March 2025
“Landline” by Kelly Robson
“The Shape of Stones” by Hildur Knútsdóttir
“After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens” by Rachel Swirsky
Reviewed by László Szegedi
“Landline” by Kelly Robson
True to the category with which this story is tagged, it is a horror tslr, and a frightening one as it turns a normal, everyday situation into a terrifying one. A mother calls home before her plane takes off and finds her small son being alone at the other end of the line, with all kinds of scary things lurking around him in the darkness. The characters are described vividly, the readers can flutter on their adventures.
Alas, the silent snow cover of the winter landscape is in a strong contrast with the tension of the kid’s disappearance. Although I didn’t feel the end of the story developed well enough, the overall special vibe of the situation remained within me for a long time.
“The Shape of Stones” by Hildur Knútsdóttir
I looked them up during reading the story: the Icelandic legends and myths the author mentions are real ones. The sympathetic, relatable main character is conducting research on thousand years old stones to find some clues or evidence of long forgotten rituals. He tells about his findings in the form of a journal. Even though he can be considered an academic researcher, some phrases he used were quite informal, not fitting to the rest of the text, breaking me out of the reading experience.
We can relate to the loneliness of this character anyway, but the research loses its interesting factor after a few days, the researcher’s speculations and findings don’t feel too exciting. And just when something groundbreaking would happen, the story ends abruptly, leaving the reader hanging.
“After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens” by Rachel Swirsky
“Gr’chak didn’t like it when Mary laid traps for the cockroaches.” What a great opening line, right? The bug-eyed aliens live along with humanity on Earth after a war, and we get some interesting glimpses of their everyday life together: the tension, the differences, the social effects coming from this special situation. These glimpses are in the form of short anecdotes, hardly intertwining in the story. While the world described is moderately interesting, the plot is not developing anywhere, gets stuck on the level of these anecdotes without getting deeper into the fates of any of the characters. The concept of enemy and the futility of fighting is discussed in a great way, independent of these particular species, so it could be exchanged to any other enemy—maybe this was the point of the author.
László is very happy for the britpop band Oasis being back together.