Tor.com

Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.

Tor.com content by

Lee Mandelo

view profile | RSS feed
Fiction and Excerpts [5]
All

Fiction and Excerpts [5]

A Science Fictional Domestic Thriller: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Tue Feb 16, 2021 1:00pm 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

As her scientific career is climbing to fresh heights, Doctor Evelyn Caldwell finds out that her husband, Nathan, has been cheating on her—but not with a colleague. Instead, he’s hijacked her cloning research to create an ideal replacement wife from Evelyn’s own genetic material: Martine. She’s almost identical to Evelyn in appearance, but Nathan has altered her to be more subservient, family-oriented, and attentive to his needs. However, the real problems start when Martine calls Evelyn in a panic after killing Nathan in self-defense… and Evelyn decides to help with the cover-up.

The Echo Wife is a phenomenal, creepy, significant novel—but it’s a hard read, and wrestling with its implications is harder. The twisting, remorseless plot seamlessly combines domestic thriller with cutting-edge science fiction, dragging the reader along as the Caldwells’ secrets are unearthed one at a time. Sarah Gailey’s incisive prose lends to the suffocating atmosphere that pervades the book, maintaining a heightened state of discomfort that is magnified by thematic explorations of spousal abuse, cloning ethics, and straight-up murder.

[Onward; contains significant spoilers.]

A Harbor Full of Bones: The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller

Thu Dec 10, 2020 1:30pm 4 Favorites [+]

Ronan Szepessy, a recently-sober gay photographer, promised himself he’d never come home to Hudson—no matter his father’s ailing health or his guilt over leaving the dying town behind. And he’s done well keeping that oath, until he wakes up on the train from New York City with no clear memories of boarding. When he arrives he realizes the city has changed: overrun with young, white, wealthy kids, antique stores and coffee bars blossoming in place of family businesses. Gentrification has forced locals from their homes and worsened fractures that have lingered under the surface for decades.

Hudson, though, has a long and gore-soaked history that throbs in the blood of its inhabitants: ghosts, nightmares, strange powers. The small gods that are the city do not take kindly to the incursion of outsiders, and neither do the real people losing their livelihoods. After Ronan reconnects with his childhood friends Dom and Attalah, now married, he and Attalah start a scheme to rescue their home—but the situation spirals out of control, and Ronan must come to terms with his own demons if he intends to stop the destruction he’s unwittingly set in motion.

[A review, with spoilers.]

Series: Queering SFF

I Await the Devil’s Coming: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Mon Nov 16, 2020 2:30pm 2 Favorites [+]

Curses are stories are histories, and Plain Bad Heroines is full to the brim with all three. In 1902 the Brookhants School for Girls witnessed the romance of two students, Flo and Clara, with each other and with Mary Maclane’s scandalous memoir—a romance ending with their gruesome demise in a swarm of yellowjackets. After three more untimely deaths the school closed for good, forgotten until the present, when young Merritt Emmons’s queer novel about Brookhants becomes a breakout bestseller. Hollywood comes calling, bringing along lesbian indie it-girl Harper Harper and former child star Audrey Wells to star in the adaptation. But naturally, when these three young women arrive at the old school grounds to begin filming, the situation goes frighteningly awry.

Plain Bad Heroines is Danforth’s first adult novel and second overall, following the much-beloved young adult book The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012). Illustrated by Sara Lautman with an echo of Edward Gorey, the book plays luxurious games with the reader, nesting stories within stories (within stories) as the hauntings unfold. Whether it’s the straightforward gothic of the 1902 plot(s) or the compulsive, prickly-sexy contemporary film production’s messy queer attractions, Danforth nails each beat. Plain Bad Heroines is scary, witty, and darkly taunting—without ever losing the core of heart inside the ghoulish cleverness of the prose.

[Read more]

Distinctly Heterodox: Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross

Mon Nov 9, 2020 2:30pm 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

The emergence of superpowers among the population has dovetailed with austerity measures to create the situation in which Wendy Deere finds herself: a thief-taker paid to hunt a gang of robbers using their unregistered powers to pull off heists. The gang themselves, meanwhile, are a mash-up of queer outcasts trying to raise enough funds for their leader, Imp, to film a new Peter Pan movie… but their cat-and-mouse game is far from the real problem: the reappearance of a concordance to the true Necronomicon. Cultist billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge sets his second in command to acquiring the book, and she just happens to be Imp’s sister—so naturally, who’s she going to hire to help out besides her supervillain thief sibling?

Dead Lies Dreaming is currently billed as the tenth book in the ‘Laundry Files’ series, but per Stross, it’s more accurate to call it the first book in a Laundry-adjacent spinoff: new characters and new concerns, set in the same shambling-toward-apocalypse world we’re familiar with from the spies and managers of the previous nine books. And—thanks in part to the tightly structured fervor of the novel’s plot—that shift in perspective works. Dead Lies Dreaming is at once smothering with grim nastiness and a breath of fresh air in the broader series, which is approaching an ultimate end soon.

[A review, with spoilers.]

Just Bleed for Me: Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and the Documentary Scream, Queen!

Tue Oct 27, 2020 10:00am 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: New Line Cinema

In 1985 New Line Cinema produced A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, taking a risky angle on the slasher that starred a ‘final boy’ possessed by the titular movie-monster. However, the gay subtext of the movie contributed to a negative public reception and the film tanked. More unfortunately, lead actor Mark Patton was gay… but wasn’t out at the time the film was released, so the role that was supposed to launch his career contributed to its end. He disappeared from Hollywood. Then fast forward to last year, when directors Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen along with Patton himself released Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street – a documentary exploring those buried tensions in the film within the context of ‘80s media, the slasher genre, and horror fandom at large.

I kept hearing about the documentary on the queer podcasts I follow, and that whetted my appetite. Obviously I’d missed a part of gay horror history, and that just wouldn’t do. So, for spooky month, I decided to tackle a double-feature of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)—for the education, for the culture!—but had an unexpectedly emotional experience in the process.

[Read more]

Proof of an Iron Will: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda

Tue Oct 20, 2020 3:00pm 1 Favorite [+]

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (translated by Polly Barton) collects a set of linked short stories reimagining Japanese folktales in contemporary settings, shot through with exceptionally witty societal critique. Silent house-callers who watch over the babies of single mothers, lovers who must be scrubbed free of river mud each night, awkward but eerie saleswomen hawking lanterns, and vulpine shapeshifters to name a few feature in these tales… but rather than vengeful ghosts out to punish the living, Matsuda’s apparitions are complicated people in their own right with histories and interests.

Matsuda writes these tales of spirit(ed) women and dispirited men with impeccable comedic timing and a deceptively urbane tone that also carries biting commentary, while Barton’s translation maintains the rhythm of her prose with grace. The book is described as exuberant on the back cover, and the same word kept occurring to me. Wildness is dangerous but exuberant; these monstrous ladies are the same. At turns each might be kind, stubborn, careful, or cruel—but so might the living people they engage with and the world outside with its pressures around gender, respectability, class, and relationships.

[A review.]

The Expectations That Travelers Carried: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun (trans. Lizzie Buehler)

Thu Aug 13, 2020 2:00pm 1 Favorite [+]

The Disaster Tourist is a trim near-future speculative novel from Yun Ko-eun, the first of her novels to be translated and published in English. Ko Yona, our protagonist, has been an employee of the travel company Jungle for around ten years; Jungle creates “ethical” vacation packages to locations of catastrophe. Tsunami, earthquakes, volcanoes, radiation, prisons and asylums, mass killings: the humans involved and the sites of their trauma become the consumables offered in trade for tourists seeking that authentic experience and a bit of moral righteousness to assuage the guilt of rubbernecking.

But when Yona begins to experience sexual harassment from her boss and assumes this means she’s gotten an informal “yellow card”—implying she’s on her way out of the company—she attempts to resign. Instead of her resignation being accepted, she’s offered a ‘working vacation’ to check out one of their failing packages on the island of Mui and review it for cancellation. However, all is not as it seems on Mui, and Yona’s own complicity in the broader systems at work in Jungle’s interventions on local spaces begin to dreadfully evolve.

[A review.]

There Was and There Was Not: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

Wed Jul 8, 2020 1:00pm 3 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Girl, Serpent, Thorn is Melissa Bashardoust’s second novel, a lush stand-alone fantasy inspired by the courts and lore of ancient Persia.  Woven through with conflicts of desire and power, loyalty and self-interest, the novel presents a coming-of-age tale that is subversive, queer, and rife with danger. As the intriguing cover copy starts, “There was and there was not, as all stories begin, a princess cursed to be poisonous to the touch.”

Soraya is the twin sister of the shah of Atashar, but their lives run on opposite courses. She has kept to untouched seclusion in the palace through her entire life for the safety of herself and others, as one glancing brush of her skin is lethal. Her lush rose garden and occasionally her mother, brother, or childhood friend Laleh are her only companions—until Laleh stops visiting. However, when her brother brings a captured demon home with him to Golvahar, Soraya sees a chance to bargain for a cure to her curse… except bargaining with devils for knowledge comes at a high cost, and the consequences of Soraya’s actions far exceed the scope of her imagination.

[A review.]

Series: Queering SFF

Return to the Hollows: American Demon by Kim Harrison

Mon Jun 22, 2020 1:30pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Rachel Morgan might have hoped that fixing the source of magic would earn her a vacation, but instead, she finds herself mired in a swamp of fresh trouble: wandering zombies, a mysterious demon and a teenage elf loitering around her church, a series of violent but inexplicable crimes cropping up throughout Cincinnati and the Hollows. If the question posed by American Demon is “What happens after you’ve saved the world?,” the answer seems to be: start cleaning up the mess the ‘saving’ made, because your work is far from finished.

I had thought, as I figure most readers of Harrison’s Hollows series did, that 2014’s The Witch With No Name was the final novel: the main couple get together, the family unit feels secure, magic is recreated, demons are freed from their elf-arranged servitude and must find their way in the real world. Imagine my surprise, then, when American Demon was announced! Worlds as thoroughly fleshed-out but narrow in scope as Harrison’s are the easiest kind to slip into though, and despite the six-year gap, picking up where we last left off was no challenge.

[A review.]

Queering SFF: The Weird, Wild Fun of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula

Wed Jun 17, 2020 2:00pm 1 comment 5 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: Netflix

Attention fellow queer nerds and weirdos: if you dig boundary-pushing drag, general gender-fuckery, and also alternative culture… well, have I got a recommendation for you. While seeking comfort this June—resting the body from protest marching, or the heart after reading the news, or the soul that longs for Pride festivals cancelled—might I suggest diving into The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, with all three seasons currently available for streaming?

[Let’s get weird.]

Series: Queering SFF

Queering SFF: 12 Authors, Critics, and Activists on What’s Changed in the Last Ten Years

Tue Mar 31, 2020 10:00am 2 comments 6 Favorites [+]

At the start of a new decade, and as this column also reaches its tenth anniversary, I wanted to offer readers a bit of a retrospective with some folks who have been part of the broader field of queer SF/F across that same timeline. And by “a bit of a retrospective,” I mean a big ol’ roundtable discussion with some of the finest individuals our field has to offer—critics, organizers, writers, and occasionally all of those at once.

Whether you’re a convention-goer or a short fiction devotee, a home cook or a Twitter fanatic, a novel reader or a nerdy poet, you’re likely to have run into some (or all!) of our conversational partners today at one point or another. Their interests are diverse, as are their engagements with the field of Queer SF/F at large.

[Onward!]

Series: Queering SFF

Ten Years of Queering SFF: The Scream, Queen! Podcast

Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:00am 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

For the penultimate post of our ten-year retrospective, I thought I’d recommend something fresh… which also happens to (sorta-retrospectively!) cover a genre I don’t often tackle: Scream, Queen!, the horror film podcast. With the finale for season two coming up, this podcast has cemented itself as a hands-down favorite for me, because I too was a weird kid who cut their teeth on horror VHS tapes smuggled out of the Blockbuster or binged at friends’ houses. Scary stories, strange happenings, and things that go bump in the night hold a visceral, endless fascination for me—which, anecdotally, resonates with a ton of other queer folks across the world too…but I don’t often see these movies explored from that angle.

So: Scream, Queen!

[Read on!]

Series: Queering SFF

Ten Years of Queering SFF: Five Series From the Last Decade That Can’t Be Missed

Wed Mar 11, 2020 10:00am 3 comments 5 Favorites [+]

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to write about whole series in this space before—for example, the four-post sets that discuss Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle and Laurie Marks’s Elemental Magic series in depth, or the longer run on “Reading Joanna Russ.” But what usually happens is something more along the lines of… I happen to review a book or two (or if we’re really lucky, each separate book in a series over several years of coverage!) in this space, on a pretty individual basis. Some of those were great and I reflect on them fondly, like Chris Moriarty’s Spin trilogy or Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder novels, but I can’t get to everything.

So, what better opportunity than our special retrospective month of QSFF am I going to have to talk about a handful of queer book series I either haven’t reviewed at all, haven’t considered as a coherent whole, or just want to give a nice solid “remember how cool this was” bump to? I can’t think of a more perfect moment. For several of these, my awesome colleagues wrote reviews at the time of publication, and in those cases I’ve included links too!

[Onward!]

Series: Queering SFF

Ten Years of Queering SFF: The Five Queer Comics I Remember Most

Thu Mar 5, 2020 12:00pm 9 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Since I’m feeling reflective, what with the turn of the decade coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of Queering SFF, I wanted to take a look back. Specifically, I wanted to look back at some comics that stuck with me from my reading over the past long while… things that I didn’t actually review, or talk about at length here so far. So, what five queer comics am I carrying out of this last decade with fond memories?

These comics don’t make up a definitive top five, or a best of the decade, or anything like that. In fact, how I chose the five to write about was this: I sat cross-legged in front of my comic book shelf and thought, “Which ones still give me a jolt to remember—that huh maybe I’ll read that again tonight feeling, after all this time?” And the results are as follows, from the past ten years of my queer life in words & pictures.

[Read on!]

Series: Queering SFF

Latest Posts

Recent Comments

more comments

Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices.