The weird and whimsical world of novelettes

At my very first Readercon, I bought the at-the-time recently published Bone Swans: Stories by C.S.E. Cooney, a very charming and extraverted woman I met at a hotel room party. I liked Cooney very much and I also like reading short stories very much when I actually do it, and yet I am really, really bad at getting around to reading all the short story collections I buy at Readercon. So for this year’s Readercon I put it in the Bag of Shame, as a reminder to not buy any more damn short story collections until I read the ones I have.

I didn’t get much reading done this Readercon but I did opt for Bone Swans when I did dig into the Bag of Shame, and it took me approximately the whole convention to get through these five short-ish stories (novelettes, maybe?). And, about as I expected, I am kicking myself for not reading it a lot sooner, like as soon as I bought it.

All the stories in this collection are sort of mythic and fairy-tale-y, but there the resemblance to each other ends. They’re all quite different in tone and language. Two of them are recognizable as fairy tale retellings–The Bone Swans of Amandale being a Pied Piper story, and How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One being a romantic retelling of Rumpelstiltskin–and if the other three are based on existing stories I did not recognize them. My favorite was probably The Big Bah-Ha, which is about a bunch of children navigating a world that’s killed off all the grown-ups and then an amusement-park-themed afterlife that’s been corrupted. If this story reminds me of anything already existing it’s probably Spirited Away, although that comparison possibly does a bit of a disservice to how gory and grungy the world of The Big Bah-Ha is.

Overall, this collection is… well, it’s exactly the type of thing I come to Readercon to discover! What took me so fucking long!

Ben Jonson, homicide detective

From the “This has been sitting on my shelf for entirely too long” files, I picked up Greer Gilman’s Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, a chapbook from Small Beer Press that, according to the inscription on the title page, I bought at Readercon 2014. Whoops.

This is a weird little murder mystery for very serious Elizabethan theater nerds. I am not a very serious Elizabeth theater nerd, but I know enough about the period to be interested in it, and can at least sort-of follow most Shakespeare-adjacent historical fiction.

This one I can definitely only sort-of follow. Gilman writes the whole piece in allusion-laden Elizabeth English, and the effect is marvelously immersive. I spotted not one but two uses of my new favorite word “hirpling,” if that gives you a sense how little Gilman is bothered about Being Accessible To A Wider Audience. But the work of prying open this closely sealed pistachio of a tale is rewarding, because, if I have read it rightly, the story being told here is a Gothic magnificence, in which a corrupt serial killer aristocrat makes young theater boys participate in bizarre rituals of bad theater and then kills them, and famous playwright and poet Ben Jonson has to travel to Venice to meet up with a shady character in a church and acquire poison, which he then brings back to England so that he can team up with one of the theater boys and exact revenge upon the villainous Lord for his twin crimes of serial killing and writing very bad plays. It’s really quite a lot of fun, and there’s times when you can really hear and see and smell the crowded nastiness of early modern cities in a really vibrant, textured way. I could probably stand to read it a second time and look up more words, but it is more likely that I will try to see if any of Gilman’s other work is a little easier to read.