![]() She understands the complex family relationships that exists and explores them fearlessly. Helen Marshall's writing evokes feeling of love, beauty, guilt, yearning, regret, and sadness. The Gallery of the Eliminated is about a boy whose father brings him to a mysterious, magical place in the wake of a family tragedy. They live in a rugged, logging community, and things change when a mysterious girl arrives. More family tension exists in In The Moonlight, the Skin of You, which follows a girl who stays with her father after her mother abandons them. Supply Limited, Act Now is a melancholic story of growing up, and follows a group of young boys as they get their hands on a real shrink ray. ![]() This one is also run through with the creepy Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale. Readers take a trip to a creepy South African house in Ship House, another story in which family and inherited guilt take the forefront. In Crossroads and Gateways Marshall makes use of African myth to tell a fable of love. The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass is another sad story about a boy struggling to cope with his parent's divorce. The Santa Claus Parade has forever changed the way I will view street corner and department store Santas. The main character is a young teenager, and is struggling as she wants her own omen and feels left behind as hers refuses to manifest. A town is plagued by "omens," Everyone has their own individual one, which ends in their death. The title story is one of the best weird fiction stories of 2014. A man tries to come to terms with the troubled relationship he has with his father and his own son. The story plays out like a nightmare, an anxiety dream the girl is having, as the story goes further and further into the surreal.įamily is at the forefront again in All My Love, a Fishhook. A young girl narrates a story in which her mother is pregnant with twins and the girl is terrified of the twins and of their imminent birth. Lessons in The Raising of Household Objects is another story where family is front and center. Secondhand Magic opens with what seems to be a classic, mid-century, suburban neighborhood, but things take a darker turn when a kid magician gets on the bad side of a spiteful woman who knows how to use real magic. Inherited guilt also comes into play and the story explores the idea of children paying for the sins of their parents. The game was a sort of sacred rite of passage, and more of a ritual than a game. In The Hanging Game a woman revisits her childhood and a dangerous game her and others would play. Her writing comes across as honest, and fearless, qualities which elevate her writing into the topmost tier of weird fiction being written today. ![]() The stories explore many themes, among them family, dysfunction, inherited guilt, growing up, and regrets. Her fiction hits hard emotionally, bringing to mind the debut collections from Nathan Ballingrud and Livia Llewellyn. Marshall is a masterful storyteller, penning stories that manage to be creepy and beautiful at the same time. Published by the ever wonderful ChiZine Publications, Gifts for the One Who Comes After contains seventeen stories without a mediocre one in the bunch. Marshall's story, In The Year of Omens was one of the highlights of the anthology for me, and therefore had me quite excited to check out her forthcoming collection. Helen Marshall is an author I have heard of the last few years, but I had yet to read anything by her until this summer, when I sat down with Ellen Datlow's Fearful Symmetries. Both stories show a fear of technology and what it can do to people, and the "static zombies" of Outside Interference are rather symbolic of today's smartphone culture. Things seem bad enough when a blizzard begins and they fear being snowed in, but when the elevator door opens and unleashes what was once their minibus driver it is apparent that the blizzard is the least of their worries. A few slacker types are left behind in a company's move in order to transfer their paper records onto the computer. It takes place in a recently abandoned office building in an abandoned business park, which makes for an excellently creepy venue. Outside Interference stands out for not following a lone person, but focusing on an entire group. The pace is fast, and readers are just as flustered as the protagonist as he is quickly whisked away on his trip, arriving only to be taken straight to the job site where he finds something he isn't expecting. In the first story a man is sought out and hired by a new company, and within days is sent on a business trip to a remote area in Mongolia. Technology, and more specifically the dehumanization due to technology, comes into play in An Hourglass of the Soul and Outside Interference, which are my two favorite stories in the book.
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