All these stories take place outside my pre-existing universes – so no Fighting Pumpkins, no October Daye, no Velveteen. They are quick glimpses of another room, with a door that will close in short order.
It’s the last day of 2019, and there are so many fantastic books I haven’t gotten around to yet. I had big plans to seek out some highly-rated new novels from authors I’ve never read before in order to round out my Favorite Books list for the year.
And then I saw that Seanan McGuire released a new short-story collection and I’m sorry folks but I couldn’t resist I’m not made of stone.
Laughter at the Academy contains 22 tales hand-picked by the author from across ten years of her career. Most of what I’ve read of McGuire has been from her Wayward Children series, so I knew to expect a lot of whimsy and shockingly clever, intricate plots mixed with some very dark undertones that she pulls out of the themes from children’s stories that you thought you already knew backward and forward. I found all that and more here, although I have to say that I was completely unprepared for just how hard-hitting some of these works can be.
A lot of the stories have some incredibly gloomy themes (world ending, children going missing, destroyed friendships and death), but not all of them actually made me feel gloomy. Let’s start with the ones I found toughest to get through. Both “The Lambs” and “Please Accept My Most Profound Apologies for What Is About to Happen (But You Started It)” made me heartsick, and for similar reasons. We keep trying to find ways to deal with bullying, but we never seem to touch that part of a bully’s mind that is somehow okay with what they’re doing. Punishment hasn’t worked, and forgiveness feels like throwing a cup of water on a bonfire. Is it any surprise if a scientist decides that world-ending retribution is the only solution?
Adults continued to say “but he had his whole life ahead of him” like it somehow absolved their boys of their crimes against their girls.
Bullying also comes up in “Driving Jenny Home”, but the story is still surprisingly beautiful. Everyone knows the campfire story of the ghostly hitchhiker, but the ghost here is just the pebble thrown into the water, with the ripples spreading out into a tale of lost love and high school misery.
Mad Science is a recurring theme in this collection. “The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells” features another scientist who has just had enough (in this case it’s of a population that ignores science). “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” is told from the point of view of a very different kind of scientist working on behalf of her very different family. And “Laughter at the Academy” is a lighthearted look at the question of why do so many good scientists go bad?
He was a poster child for science as a force for good…at least until the tentacles started bursting from the windows.
It’s getting harder and harder to deny that the world is changing, generally not for the better, and the only question now is whether humanity is going to just let things keep getting worse, or change ourselves in order to adapt. “Threnody for Little Girl, With Tuna, at the End of the World” takes place in a world that’s losing more and more species, to the point where finding one surviving tuna is something to celebrate. It’s a close look at what we’re throwing away, how that might affect life as we know it, and how we give so much meaning to things that remind us of a better time. But mostly it’s a heartrending story about a girl’s lifelong friendship with a fish.
“Each to Each” goes in a different direction, where the Navy’s need for military personnel in the last frontier – under the sea – leads to Navy women being transformed into, well, basically mermaids. McGuire adds a lot of poetry to the themes of transformation and violence, and takes a look at the things you might do to become a better warrior, with the risk that eventually you’ll change so much you end up walking away from the war altogether.
But moments like this, when it is us and the open sea, remind us every day that we are more than what we were, and less than what we are to become, voiceless daughters of Poseidon, singing in the space behind our souls.
A couple of the stories deal with toys, specifically dolls. “There Is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold” is a convoluted tale of the inheritors of Pandora (There’s an assault in this one that will make some people – like me – uncomfortable and enraged, but I love any story that goes into detail about a very specific craft, like dollmaking.) “We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War” has a population that’s trying to pick up the pieces in a conflict that stole the world’s children. It’s amazing how many elements of childhood are so inherently creepy, and how technological advances and good intentions are almost guaranteed to make things worse.
The war is over. The war will never end.
McGuire’s Wayward Children series has a precursor here, “Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage”. I’ve always wondered why would children who have traveled to a magical world choose to give up their adventures. In this case it’s because many times they aren’t given the choice. Love the hints of other stories that the author drops into this one. “…the year she’d saved the Meadows of Mourning from the machinations of the Timeless Child.”
“Lost” looks at the adventuring children trope from the viewpoint of the people left behind when the children disappear and never come back. And to move to a much lighter tone about disappearances, the story “Uncle Sam” is a little slice of Americana, asking the question “Why do women go to the bathroom in groups?” (Answer: The Founding Fathers were a bunch of superstitious patriarchal bastards, and Uncle Sam is an actual “person”.)
I’m not even sure what category to put “Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare” in. It’s selected passages of an autobiography of a very matter-of-fact, utterly charming heroine who’s been assigned to domesticate and/or wipe out all mammalian life on the planet. There’s a very deliberate swipe at colonialism here, with a nice steampunk flair.
Now we get to the ones that are based on an existing story, with a little something extra. “In Skeleton Leaves” takes a children’s book story we’re all familiar with and adds an epic level to the underlying mythology: what if Pan and Wendy aren’t names, they’re titles? (If you’re concerned that the bulk of these stories features a lot of The Evil That Men Do, this one pulls away from that by showing how men can be nurturing, and women can be ruthless. Or just indifferent and cruel.) And “Homecoming” updates North mythology to show the autumn-themed reward (one version of it, anyway) for those who died in battle. Any battle.
I knew I was going to love the murder mystery “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust” when McGuire described it as “urban fantasy film noir Oz”. But what really sold me was the fact that I read the Oz books. All of them. (I was a hardcore completest in middle school. Don’t ask how many Nancy Drew books I made it through.) This meant I caught the nuances right away, like what sunny days (magically sunny days, caused by a particularly vindictive fairy princess) would do to Dot’s relationship with her girlfriend.
Only one type of person is allowed to wear white in the Land of Oz; it’s the color of witches, and I, Dorothy Gale, Princess of Oz, exile from Kansas, am the Wicked Witch of the West.
If McGuire wants to write a whole series about the hard-drinking, no-fucks-left-to-give Dorothy and her community of crossover refugees, I would read the hell out of that. And I’d also like to see more of the main character from the planetary settlement story “Frontier ABC’s: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher”, a gun-totin’ schoolmarm who just happens to be one of the most terrifying forces in the galaxy.
By far my favorite stories in the books were the one where McGuire experiments with the storytelling format. “Bring About the Halloween Eternal” is in the form of a Kickstarter campaign, one that promises to fill the earth with unending darkness with the risk of every backer (except the top tier, naturally) being thrown onto the sacrificial fire in order to allow the dread Lord to walk the Earth. It will also keep Christmas decorations from creeping further into July. Okay, I’m not saying no…
I love the sort of thing that McGuire does with “Office Memos”; it’s a series of back-and-forth work emails that gradually get snippier and snippier as different personalities clash with fantastical beings who’s very nature creates a hostile work environment.
Did you know the Gremlin language has seventy-three ways of saying “lab accident”…
“From A to Z in the Book of Changes” is a collection of mini short-stories based on fan-submitted words starting with each letter of the alphabet. I’ll include the entire one for “G” here so you can get an idea of the length of these. And the tone.
G is for…Grail
It was sought for centuries. Empires rose and fell in its shadow. Heroes fought and died for its dream.
It can currently be found in a small secondhand store, priced at seventy-six cents. It will be thrown away with the rest of the trash if it doesn’t sell by the end of the month.
Perhaps, considering the shape of history, that would be for the best.
With my love of found-footage movies like The Blair Witch Project, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that I think one of the most effectively scary stories is “#connolly house #weshouldntbehere”. The entire story is told in the form of tweets by a team of haunted-house explorers, and it’s an excellent example of a story that wouldn’t work in another format. Pay close attention with this one; what’s happening in the house is weird, and the things that are happening within the tweets themselves are part of it.
And that’s it for 2019! Thank you for following my reviews; tune in next week (hopefully) for my list of Favorite Books of the year.