Tag Archives: domestic abuse

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UNsettling Homelife

A review of They Have to Take You In edited by Ursula Pflug (Hidden Brook Press, 2014).

By Derek Newman-Stille

Home is a complicated concept, but one that we often pretend is easy. We project “home” as a place of belonging, of comfort, of ownership, and an extended form of selfhood, and we connect ideas to home like family, security, safety…. But these concepts are always open to challenge, to question, particularly by those whose home lives don’t match the assumed standard. Ursula Pflug’s edited collection They Have to Take You In blends the speculative and realist literature that borders on auto-ethnographic in cases to explore this multiplicity of “homes” and to challenge the safe, secure image of “home” that society prefers to construct to the exclusion of other options. 

As much as They Have to Take You In is about home, it is more about exile: the experience of being Othered, of not being able to find that place of comfort and security that is promised through the notion of “home”. The authors in this collection remind readers of the unsettling power of home, its ability to make people feel excluded because it focuses so strongly on the promise of belonging, and that sense of belonging only works for people in positions of privilege. The characters in these stories are Othered from a sense of home through poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, dementia, the need to escape from abusive homes, as well as a sense of wanderlust. The authors explore the possibility that sometimes you have to leave the place where you have settled in order to find home… and sometimes you can’t ever find home, can’t discover a place of belonging. The multiplicity of these narratives provides a space for exploring  home as a place of security… and simultaneously suggests that, for some, ESCAPE from home is a place of safety.

Connected to home is the notion of family, an idea that has been shaped by historical circumstances (industrial systems, labour, political and religious ideologies), but that has pretended to be natural and enduring. They Have to Take You In complicates family as a natural category. In addition to showing assumptions about traditional family structures, these stories complicate these structures, invite speculation and open them up to question the ways in which “family” as a category can be exclusionary, delimiting possibilities for other interactions. 

Many of the endings in these stories are open, uncertain things because the reality of home life is that nothing ever really ends and everything is always open to change and reassessment. Homes are places that are always complicated and always haunted by the potential failing of the home as a place of belonging, security, and safety. Deep down, we, as readers, know that while we feel safe in our homes, there are those who are homeless, those whose homelife is marked by domestic violence and who need to escape, those whose housing is precarious because of poverty, and so all houses are haunted places… haunted by the myths of belonging, security, and safety that are not as ubiquitous as they pretend to be. 

To discover more about They Have to Take You In, visit Hidden Brook Press at http://www.HiddenBrookPress.com . 

To discover more about the work of Ursula Pflug, visit her website at http://ursulapflug.ca 

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Edgy Relationships

A review of Suzanne Church’s Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (Edge, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo of Suzanne Church's "Elements" courtesy of http://edgewebsite.com/

Cover photo of Suzanne Church’s “Elements” courtesy of http://edgewebsite.com/

In her short story collection Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction Suzanne Church treks across stars, across time, beyond the human experience, into the magical, the mystical, the dark, infusing pages with otherworldly imagination that invite us to be fellow travellers into the unknown. She crosses genre boundaries, infusing each with new life brought trough experiences submerging in the others. Her work touches the barriers between horror, science fiction, and fantasy, playing with reader expectations and expanding the scope of the reader’s imagination.

Elements IS fundamentally elemental, not just because some of her characters play with weather (the elements) and with the elements of fire and water, or even because some of her androids are named after elements from the Periodic Table, but because there is something both incredibly large and incredibly intimate about her work because whether it be about aliens, androids, sentient coffee cups, future warriors, or magic users, her work fundamentally explores RELATIONSHIPS, those strange, impossible, and yet oh so familiar things – and relationships are things that we share, whether they be romantic, familial, friendly, or interspecies. Suzanne builds bridges across species, planets, dimensions, and states of being in order to capture that moment when Others touch, when a sharing of experience occurs, and a fuzziness develops between the Self and the Other.

Not all of the relationships in Elements is positive, because relationships hurt, relationships can damage us. This is, by far, not a romantic collection, but is rather about the interactions between people, the ways in which we understand and relate to each other… and not all of the ways we relate to each other is positive. Her stories deal with issues like domestic violence, sexual abuse, war, imbalances of power, abandonment, and situations where the only safe relationship can be created after an escape from home… but they also forge improbable connections, friendships between unlikely allies, allegiances between seeming enemies, a push beyond fear to allow for connections between people who fundamentally see each other as opposites.

Relationships are part of how we understand the world, how we interpret it, creating understanding and interpretation through dialogue, through the experience of sharing ideas with each other, but they are also painful, sharpened by feelings of abandonment, differences in viewpoints, codependency, contexts of pain, confusion, misinterpretations, and an Us against Them mentality. Suzanne Church explores all of these, pushing the extents of human relationships to the edge, and perhaps even peaking beyond the human, displacing our centrality in our view of the world.

To explore reviews of some of the individual stories in this collection, visit:

https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/evangelical-science/

https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/predator-and-prey-relationships/

https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/body-of-war/

and for a discussion of this collection with Suzanne Church, visit our interview at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/speculating-canada-on-trent-radio-episode-14-an-interview-with-suzanne-church/

To find out more about Elements and other Edge books, visit their website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/ .

To discover more about Suzanne Church, visit her website at http://suzannechurch.com/wordpress/ .

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 14: An Interview with Suzanne Church

In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, Waterloo author Suzanne Church swings by the studio as part of her book tour for her new collection Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (Edge, 2014). Suzanne Church’s work stretches across genre boundaries between Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. She has published in several of the Tesseracts anthologies, in collections like When the Hero Comes Home 2, Urban Green Man, and Dance Macabre. She has also published in speculative magazines like Clarksworld, OnSpec, and Doorways Magazine. Suzanne is an Aurora Award winning author and her short story “Living Bargains” is currently up for this year’s Aurora Award.

Suzanne Church and I talk about fiction’s role in bringing attention to domestic violence, pushing genre boundaries, the stretches of human relationships, ideas of displacement and home, and the power of short fiction as a medium. Prepare to hear about aliens, fuzzy green monsters, sentient coffee cups, androids, ghosts… and so many other otherworldly beings that tell us more about what it is to be human. Take a listen and I hope you enjoy our chat.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

 

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

 

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Transformative Art

A Review of OnSpec #91 Vol 24, No 4 (Winter 2013)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo courtesy of OnSpec (Art by Kenn Brown)

Cover photo courtesy of OnSpec (Art by Kenn Brown)

One of the key narrative threads running through Volume 24, number 4 of OnSpec is the transformative power of art and writing. This thread is most potent in Kevin Cockle’s Palimpsest, a short story about a man who learns how to transform the world and people around him through calligraphy, over-writing people’s personalities, histories, and selfhood with simple movements of pen and ink. The world becomes a transformative space, subject to authorial whims and transformative thoughts.

Gaie Sebold’s Sharali focuses on an artist who is resisting social pressures to devote his artistic energies toward capitalist means. In a society that is over-writing the natural world with the destructive industrialist enterprise, Charentin concentrates on painting natural scenes and scenes of natural beauty, capturing the numinous quality of the natural environment rather than scenes of industrial expansion and wealth. Through his artistic ability to overlay the natural, Charentin is capable of releasing himself and the prostitute Sharali from their lives of servitude and artificiality.

William B. Robinson’s poem Delta Theta Alpha Beta concentrates on the numinous quality of letters, the ability of letters to transcend the limits of simple meaning – the power of sigils to speak to more than their representative value but summon an eldritch quality that arises from beyond the mundane.

In Steven Popkes’ 10 Things I Know About Jesus, the transformation that occurs is on a mythical level, shifting the tales told from the past to illustrate how rumour leads to legend, leads to myth, and the mythical says very little about the original subject and speaks more to the ideologies of those creating the myth. Jesus in this story is far different from the character outlined in Christian belief. He plays poker with Satan and Lazarus, doesn’t attend a church, has little interest in performing miracles, and views the events leading up to his crucifixion as his last foray into the realm of politics. He resists the mythical structure that has been built around him.

David Gordon Buresh’s The Devil’s Eyes looks at the transformative power of consumption and hunger, the way that the act of eating can fundamentally shift something in the structure of human beings, pushing them into something Other, something mythical.

Leslie Claire Walker’s Ghost Ride explores the world of a driver for the dead, bringing the deceased to their new destinations (whether it be Heaven or Hell). Mack, the driver, seeks to change destiny, trying to find his wife (who committed suicide) a means of finding her way into Heaven, transforming the stigma and spiritual blight that was branded onto her soul by her act of suicide. The transformative quality of this story is huge, facilitated by the vehicle of travel (the car ride to the realms of the dead) and the transformative quality of death itself, moving between one state of being and another. The life (and afterlife) narrative of the passengers is in flux, determining what their next steps will be.

Kim Neville’s One Shoe Highway is a powerful transformative travel narrative. Like Ghost Ride, it is focused on the roadway as a place of transition and change. Women in this story disappear periodically from the road, leaving behind a symbol of their travel as well as of their previous lives – their shoes. These women have the option of giving up their previous lives (often marred by abuse) and separating themselves from the world that victimises them.  Bringing attention to the social issue of so many battered women disappearing, Kim Neville has her characters instantly be forgotten after they disappear (mirroring the social response to women who are victims of assault and abduction, which is often to forget about them and erase their memory). Instead of being abduction victims, however, the women in One Shoe Highway are given the option of changing their narrative future and instead of tolerating a future of spousal and societal abuse, they are allowed to move out of the world into a space primarily for battered women.

As a medium that brings the SF community short stories, SF artwork, interviews, and editorials in one volume, it was incredible to see OnSpec’s focus on the power of narrative and stories to shift and change and to alter the world around them. SF stories have the potential to bring social attention to issues in our world – they can shift our consciousness, help us see things that we ignore, and open our minds to new possibilities. Art and narrative really are transformative – they can change the world.

On a personal note, as a disability scholar, I was extremely excited to see the interview conducted with Kevin Cockle and his discussion of the influence of his own medical disability on his authorial work.

To find out more about OnSpec, you can visit their website at http://www.onspec.ca/ .

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Interview with David Nickle

An interview with David Nickle by Derek Newman-Stille

I was pleased that David Nickle was willing to do an interview here on Speculating Canada and particularly that he shows such a strong interest in the ability of Speculative Fiction to open social questions, challenge taken-for-granted notions, and encourage readers to think for themselves. 

Author photo courtesy of David Nickle

Author photo courtesy of David Nickle

Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell readers a little bit about yourself?

David Nickle: Well let’s see. I’m the son of a landscape painter and a highschool teacher, have grown up in central Ontario and near Toronto, and I make my living as a political reporter in Toronto.  It’s fair to say that some of this influences my fiction, although I would only get myself into trouble trying to explain precisely how.

Spec Can: How much do you feel your Canadian identity influences your writing?

David Nickle: It doesn’t, a great deal. I’m not a big reader of Canadian literature, at least as its defined under the CanLit Protocol. I certainly pay attention to my environment—a lot of my fiction, particularly my contemporary horror fiction, hinges on a sense of place—but really, the canon that I’ve followed has been the usual mix of British and let’s say North American influences in the general sweep of fantastic fiction. So the H.P. Lovecraft-Richard Matheson-Robert Bloch-Stephen King lineage is something that shows up in my work. I also have paid heed to mainstream writers like John Irving and George Orwell and Timothy Findlay.

Really, my Canadian identity has for many years as a writer, contributed rightly or wrongly to my sense of being an outlier.  Coming of age as a writer, I was constantly faced with the notion that as a Canadian speculative fiction writer, my fiction either ought to deal with humanity cast against a hostile environment—Susanna Moody in Space as it were—or preach non-violent, anti-individualist solutions to problems that an American writer might just shoot full of holes with a space blaster. Canadian specfic writers of a certain age either embraced or bore the weight of that particular critical conceit.

In general, though, I don’t think that I’ve been particularly preoccupied with those themes. I like to think that my writing, like my identity, is fundamentally my own.

Spec Can: What do you see as distinct about Canadian Speculative Fiction?

David Nickle: That’s a big question, in that I think that Canadian speculative fiction has come over the decades to occupy a vast range of subject matter and theme.  To that end, I think that it might be too big a question.

What really makes Canadian speculative fiction distinct, I think, is that its writers are all covered by universal health care such that they can practise their craft and their art without fear of an unexpected blood clot or cancer diagnosis bankrupting their families.  And so there are a lot of us at work here, many of us able to do that work full time, because of that.

Spec Can: What are some of the questions that you hope your work will evoke in the minds of readers?

David Nickle: I’d like readers to question themselves, I guess, and the reality that they believe they inhabit. One of my cherished memories from childhood came at around five years old, when I recall considering the fact of my existence. I had, as all little kids do, experienced myself as being at the center of the universe: without me, there was nothing. But I remember slowly working it through, using all the existentialist tools that my Montessori education had provided me: that in fact, I was finite. I had been conceived in 1963, and born in early ’64. Prior to that, although the world had chugged along, I had had nothing to do with it. When I died, as I understood that people did, it would chug along further, once again, without me.  As I considered this, I didn’t cry, or become angry, or turn to religion. I just became very quiet, and thoughtful, with the realization that there was more to things than I would ever, fully, be able to know. And if there was a real centre of the universe, it sure as shit wasn’t me.

That’s what I want to evoke in my work—the quiet and terrifying wonder of the unknowable void.

If I can evoke that in a five-year-old, all the better.

Spec Can: Your work deals with a lot of diverse bodies. Can you tell us a bit about your interest in the body and in diversity?

David Nickle: Hmm. There are a number of ways to parse that question.  In terms of ethnic/gender diversity, I like to think that my work is as diverse as the best of them, but it’s not a conscious choice. I’ve grown up and lived for the most part in and around Toronto—and the city contains a pantheon to diversity. You can’t take two steps in this town without encountering people from all parts of the world and from across the gender/sexuality map. Toward that end, you’ve got a choice: either engage, or hunker down in your own ethnic/sexual/gender enclave. I’ve never been for the latter.

Cover photo of Eutopia courtesy of http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/

Cover photo of Eutopia courtesy of http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/

So far as the body goes, now: I’m going to parse the question such that we’re talking about some of the body horror that I’ve dealt with in some of my fiction (my first solo novel Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism comes to mind as particularly squicky in that regard). I like body horror as a writer (less so as a reader) because it is a pretty literal and direct route to getting under a reader’s skin.  From the time we hit puberty, the spectacle of our changing bodies is a constant preoccupation, and I think a universal. So when we talk about change, and that mysterious and unknowable void I was talking about earlier, depicting a gestating parasite or an eyelid that opens unexpectedly in a lover’s forearm… well, it’s an attention-getter.

Spec Can: What can Speculative Fiction do that “realist” fiction can’t?

David Nickle: There’s a troubling premise embedded in that question for a writer like myself—which is to say, one who tries to write contemporary horror fiction: namely, that speculative fiction and realistic fiction exist in separate silos.

For my purposes, they don’t. I can’t write about the incursion of the strange and supernatural into a world, without that world functioning for the most part according to realistic rules.  So realism is an invaluable tool for me, and I wouldn’t be able to get to the speculative elements in my fiction without it.

That said, I think that the injection of the speculative into the firmament of the real enables us to transcend the moment-to-moment realities of life on Earth.  I like to think of most of my speculative elements as the metaphor in a story made real. But it also allows the reader to feel a moment of scary transcendence that while possible in realistic fiction, is much more difficult to attain.

Spec Can: You collaborated with Karl Schroeder in writing The Claus Effect. What is it like to collaborate with another author? What were some of the benefits and drawbacks?

David Nickle: I’ve collaborated twice with Karl, and once with Edo Van Belkom (on our Stoker-winning short story Rat Food). Each project was a little different. Karl and I wrote two Santa Claus stories together—The Toy Mill, which won us an Aurora Award, and The Claus Effect. Edo and I did one nasty little short story that got a fair bit of attention back in the day and, I like to think, created the genre of epicurean rodent stories that culminated in Ratatouille.

In all three cases, the biggest benefit was that it was just a lot of fun. We riffed off each other,  and tried to find middle ground between our individual styles, and so in an effortless and enjoyable way, stretched as writers. 

The drawback is, I guess, the drawback of any attempt at sharing in a project: the end result isn’t your own, entirely, and you have to recognize the fact that at least half of the good bits, you had nothing to do with.

And really, egos aside, that’s not much of a drawback at all.

Spec Can: In The Claus Effect, you tackle the issue of over-consumption around the holidays. What inspired you to write about the figure of Santa Claus and, in particular, the concept of greed surrounding the holidays?

Cover photo courtesy of the authors

Cover photo courtesy of the authors

David Nickle: That theme—over-consumption around the holidays—wasn’t, weirdly, what got us into the character. It was really the image of Santa Claus, as this great figure of corruption hiding behind a red suit and a funny beard; the notion of malevolence hiding, not very well, in the most benevolent of places. We also both really enjoyed the idea of taking hold of this treacly  and corrupt Victorian notion and, well, turning up the volume.

Spec Can: What mythologies or ideas of the mythic influence your writing?

David Nickle: I’m influenced by a lot of things: the Bible, Greek and Norse and Central American mythology. The Cthulhu Mythos.

Probably the mythology that most influences me, though, is the collection of ideas, conceits and dreams that come together in the 1970s New Age movement. There are some who might scoff at the idea of New Age crystals and Transcendendal meditation and astral projection and aura-reading as a mythology—both people who think it’s hokum, and people who’ve built their lives around it. So be it.  Having grown up with that as  a big part of my household, I find that when I’m looking at supernatural/paranormal explanations and premises, I go there first. At least for now.

Spec Can: What role does the figure of the outsider play in your work? Why do outsider figures work so well in speculative fiction?

David Nickle: I’ll deal with the second part first. I think outsiders are useful in spec fic for entirely technical reasons: they provide a viewpoint that allows readers to enter a strange and complicated world, and learn about it from the ground up. Outsiders can function variously as students, as critics, and as disruptive elements.  They make the story go around.

In my own work? I’m not consciously aware of the outsider as a particular trope in my stories, other than for the aforementioned reasons.

Spec Can: Many of your stories deal with the idea of love turned monstrous or distorted (i.e. The Sloan Men, The Inevitability of Earth). What can horror fiction tell us about ideas of love?

David Nickle: Well first off, I don’t want to be down on love. It is the sweetest thing, and getting it right is akin to getting your life right.

When it’s going right. I think that because of the potential payoff—a life of happiness and fulfillment—we sometimes dive at things that look a lot like love but are really nothing more than traps. That is where horror fiction comes in—because horror fiction is, on its most basic level, all about the trap.

Spec Can: Your short story Janie and the Wind deals with issues of domestic abuse. What can Speculative Fiction do to call attention to issues of domestic abuse?

David Nickle: I think that speculative fiction can do a lot to illuminate domestic abuse issues—although I’m not sure that I really did, in Janie in the Wind. In that story, the truly abusive relationships come about when the Wendigo enters a fellow. And that is a bullshit excuse that has been around for far too long: that the “devil made me do it” or some variation.

I think speculative fiction does what any good fiction does when dealing with hard, real issues like domestic abuse: it establishes a sense of empathy and understanding that journalism or other methods of inquiry cannot.

Spec Can: Your work has a dream-like quality. How do dreams influence your work?

David Nickle: Dreams themselves don’t influence my work very much; I’m not the kind of writer who wakes up from a fitful night and writes down the odd dream I had, as source material for a story. But I think that all fiction, all stories, follow a dream-logic. Because fundamentally, they’re waking dreams, and just as sleeping dreams are a kind of cognitive narrative that we impose on thoughts and memories, so are the waking dreams that are fiction.

Spec Can: Are there any other thoughts or idea that you would be interested in sharing with readers?

Cover photo for The 'Geisters courtesy of http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/

Cover photo for The ‘Geisters courtesy of http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/

David Nickle: Oh, ask a writer with a  book coming out for parting thoughts, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to sit through a plug for the next book.

In this case, my next book is coming out this spring/summer from ChiZine Publications. It’s called The ‘Geisters, and in brief, it looks at some of the socio-sexual implications of active poltergeists in an age of internet kink, while doing its best to scare the nose off readers. It’s also another Fenlan story (Fenlan being my little south-western Ontario answer to Stephen King’s Castlerock and H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham).  Like many of the stories I’ve set there, it’s all about love gone monstrously wrong.

I want to thank David Nickle for this fantastic interview and his incredible insights and keen observations about horror, love, the figure of the outsider, coming of age as a writer in Canada, and Canadian Spec Fic in general. I am excited about reading his new book The ‘Geisters when it comes out this summer. You can explore more about David Nickle by visiting his website at http://davidnickle.blogspot.ca/ .

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Eldritch Summonings from the World of the Unconventional

A Review of Here Be Monsters: Tongues and Teeth Edited by Duane Burry, Vincent Mackay, and Alexander Newcombe (Here be Monsters Speculative Fiction issue seven, September, 2012)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo courtesy of the publisher

Here Be Monsters: Tongues and Teeth is the first of the Here Be Monsters anthologies that I have read, and I am extremely impressed with the quality of work in this volume. It is great to see that an epic battle for which stories should be included in the volume, that, according to the editors involved “fighting with tooth, tentacle and claw… eldritch summonings [and] chaos magic” still proves its effectiveness in producing an incredible volume of speculative fiction – the old methods still produce incredible results.

The magical and monstrous suffuses every page of this volume, summoning the reader’s attention and passions. The stories in this volume question reader pre-conceptions, encouraging them on their own adventure into the darkness of their own subconscious to find the root of their social confinement and dig it up.

The volume itself becomes like a body of text or a textual body, laying out each section with a depiction of the body, illustrating that horrors come not from without, but from within.

Claude Lalumiere’s short story The Ministry of Sacred Affairs evokes the threat of a society that demonises others, a society where fear prevents any form of inquiry or debate and supporting the supernatural is viewed as a terrorist threat. Goblins and golems become figures that question the status-quo and shake up a society that has become complacent in its fear of others.

Numbered by Duane Burry continues the theme of questioning social fears. When communication technology is discovered that allows for interplanetary conversations and connections with aliens from other worlds, instead of viewing it as a method of discovery, it is perceived as a militaristic threat. Humans, unable to travel to the stars, are able to speak to other civilisations, talk to people from distant worlds who have foreign experiences and knowledge to share, but in a universe of fear, all they share are threats of war and questions about possible dangers. It is not the silent vastness of space that cuts off interplanetary voices, but the vast terror of the sentient mind and the secrecy that terror imposes.

Karl Johanson’s The Airlock Scene illustrates a different danger with encountering new worlds: beauraucracy and the need to perform for an audience at the expense of the adventure of exploring a new environment. Johanson portrays the need of scientific minds to mediocritise the fantastic through their pedantic ego battles. Like Burry’s story, Johanson’s is about political issues interfering with the sense of wonder the pervades exploration.

Universal questions are turned domestic in Amy Bright’s Private Transit where the monstrosity of domestic assault is displayed and one can see that abuse is as alienating as any landscape from space, causing the victim to lose all pieces of themselves to feed the monstrous abuser.

Pickle’s Story by Alexander Newcombe reveals the power of myth and legend as well as the bond that can develop between the human and the animal. Newcombe shows the power that gossip and tales can have in creating a reputation, and the power of a thief who wields lies to create his own mythology.

Tarquin Steiner evokes nostalgia in his story Cobbled by modeling it after a text-based computer game.

Camille Alexa casts us back into space in her Children of the Device where, despite being the fifth generation of inhabitants on a colony ship escaping from a doomed Earth, our traditions continue from New Year’s resolutions to war and greed.

Tyler MacFarlane brings the search for identity and the inescapability of ourselves back to the Earth in his Antennae. MacFarlane illustrates that despite the desire for a distraction, the next new thing, we always are brought back to ourselves.

We are reminded that we can’t escape from ourselves again in Carl Roloff’s If Not the Moon, Then the Exquisite Sun where humanity faces the destruction of the Earth by our own sun, and, in an attempt to save something about the human experience, decides to transmute the remaining human beings into crystals – converting individual human thoughts and experience into art that will reflect the burst of the sun into the universe. But Roloff reminds readers that eternity is an experience that is alien to humanity and transcendence is a form of loss itself.

Where Carl Roloff presents the mind as a form of escape and transcendence, Vincent Mackay’s Brain Freeze warns readers of the dangers of technologies of the mind. The mind becomes something that can be used for terrorism and war, converted into supermindbombs that can only be decoded through a process that seems equal parts psychology and computer programming. The Earth’s surface has been made uninhabitable by a field that requires inhabitants to control their own thoughts to the point at which they become insane. Thought becomes a weapon.

Thought is further explored as a vehicle for terror in Sterrennacht by Cat McDonald as art itself becomes a place where kidnap victims and stolen items can be stored. McDonald explores the idea of a world where people can enter into paintings and the terrifying effects of experiencing impressionist art from the inside. Van Gogh has never been so absorbing as McDonald explores the physical, auditory, and other sensory experiences of being totally enmeshed in the world of art. But art has an effect on those who experience it, and the danger of art is that it can consume you.

Ann Ewan explores the loss of humanity in a different way, through literal consumption by an ogre. In Ogre Baby, human beings are infected with ogreness (through ogre mud placed in the body of dead human beings) as a means for the ogres to reproduce. They depend on human beings as an infusion into their own tribe, as a way of expanding their numbers. The familiarity and difference of the human being and the ogre horrifies both species and, in the ogre, excites a deep hunger that may stem from their need to be partially human, to incorporate humanity into their monstrous form.

The body further fascinates Rich Larson in his Strings. The body becomes a marketable commodity, and re-shaped for sexuality. It is divorced of its thoughts so it can become a vessel for sexual pleasure, conveying the notion that as a society we tend to look at bodies in isolation, separate from their fundamental humanity.

Here Be Monsters: Tongues and Teeth is as much a voyage into the self as it is a voyage into the realm of the Other. Like the monster itself, the pages of this volume are dark mirrors reflecting all of the hidden things we like to forget. It is a volume that is fundamentally about the search for a deifining feature of our humanity, the fear of a loss of our humanity, and the dangers that are presented in the human spirit.

To find out more about this volume of Here Be Monsters and other volumes in the series, visit their website at http://herebemonstersanthology.blogspot.ca/