"Calypso's Guest" by Andrew Sean Greer

Published by Amazon Original Stories on August 22, 2023

The narrator of “Calypso’s Guest” betrayed the other humans on his planet by doing a deal with the godlike Others. The deal included the promise of immortality. Having discovered the betrayal, the narrator’s people banished him to the unoccupied colony world of Calypso, where he lives as a prisoner. Robots serve the narrator’s needs but they will not build a ship to help him escape. Even if he had a ship, the robots would not let him leave.

After the narrator was banished, the humans on his planet were killed by the Others. No other colonists joined the narrator on his new world.

One day a spaceship crashes and the narrator is joined by its surviving occupant. The narrator believes his guest was sent to him as part of the bargain he made with the Others. The guest gets along with the narrator, even joining him in his hut on some nights, but the guest is disappointed that there is no way to leave the planet.

The guest has stories to tell — the sort of stories that Odysseus told, complete with one-eyed monsters. The guest is adventurous — like Odysseus — while the narrator is more of a homebody. The guest wants to build a ship to explore their world. He seems to have little interest in having the narrator accompany him on that journey.

Homer wrote that Calypso held Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years. The guest has been on Calypso for seven years when the narrator discovers a newly arrived spaceship. Its occupant is dead but the ship is intact. The story’s moral dilemma involves the narrator’s possession of that secret. Should he share it with his guest? If he does, will the man he loves leave the narrator alone on the prison planet?

I suppose every serious writer needs to write a story that is inspired by the Odyssey. This one is almost moving. It certainly tries to be moving. Perhaps it tries too desperately. The sentiment seems forced, too obvious to be genuine. Still, a short story can be entertaining without being substantial. I’m not sure I would spend money to purchase a short story that will likely appear in an anthology at some point — I like to get more words for my buck — but “Calypso’s Guest” is a better story than most that appear in annual anthologies.

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"Black Vault" by Alma Katsu

Published on Kindle by Amazon Original Stories on August 8, 2023

“Black Vault” is a timely spy story — a longish short story — drawn from recent congressional investigations into UFOs. The timeline alternates between 2006 and the present.

Craig Norton is a career officer in the CIA. In 2006, his career is going nowhere. Norton is arrogant and cocky but he doesn’t have the success or pedigree to back up his attitude. He’s running an unimportant asset in the Russia Division. When the asset is transferred to an assignment in Mongolia, Norton follows him. The relocation places Norton under the supervision of the China Division. The China Division harbors an institutional hatred of the Russia Division. Norton is not made to feel welcome.

Norton arranges to meet his asset at night in the middle of a field. The asset never appears, but Norton sees some strange lights in the distance moving at angles and speeds that defy physics. With some trepidation, he writes a report about what he saw because reporting anything unusual is part of his job. After all, maybe he saw an experimental Chinese aircraft.

Norton is cautioned against submitting the report by a CIA officer who reviews reports and tells agents not to say anything stupid. Norton disregards the advice. Head of Station soon complains that Norton has become a laughingstock and has tainted the rest of the office by writing a report about a UFO. Craig learns that Alvin Lee, chief of the China Division, was particularly critical of his report.

Norton’s career comes to an abrupt dead end. He’s eventually reassigned to the US, where he’s given pointless tasks to fill his time until he reaches retirement age. Norton made the mistake of bringing his wife to Mongolia. She left him as a prelude to divorce. He never really connected with his son. He used the classified nature of his work as an excuse to avoid meaningful conversations.

A few months before he’s able to retire, Norton is assigned to a new task force that was formed in response to a 60 Minutes story exposing the government’s suppression of information about UFO sightings. The task force is composed of other deadenders until Norton mentions to the Deputy Director of Operations that the task force will never accomplish anything without young agents who haven’t lost their curiosity. After suitable agents are assigned, Norton begins to learn why his initial report was buried.

Modern spy fiction tends to develop the theme of bureaucracy and professional infighting as impediments to accomplishment. As Norton digs into the aftermath of his 2006 report, he discovers that people who took his report seriously went to war with bureaucrats who thought UFOs were embarrassing. The notion that UFOs might exist, that their secrets might be investigated by Chinese rather than American scientists, was a potential career killer for anyone who scoffed at Norton in 2006. Now it’s looking like the suppression of inquiry should have been a career killer. The theme of government agents stepping all over each other to cover their mistakes by blaming others is always fun, if only because it always seems plausible.

Craig’s relationship with his son comes across as an afterthought, a way of forcing human interest into the story, but Norton benefits from careful characterization in other ways. He feels abused, overlooked, and underappreciated, to some extent with good cause.

The plot is tight, as a short story plot should be. Alma Katsu was wise to develop her concept in short form. The concept may be insufficiently substantial to carry a novel. The story eventually leads to a resolution that will be familiar to fans of spy fiction, at least after the UFOs are set aside. The mixture of fresh and familiar makes “Black Vault” an enjoyable read for fans of spy fiction and UFO conspiracies.

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Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain

Published by Melville House on May 16, 2023

The stories collected in Sidle Creek are joined by their setting — the fictional Sidle Creek in Appalachia. It is a place where townies keep their business to themselves, where women are routinely abused and men try to avoid deep thought about troubled lives.

The most powerful story is about a stripper who is raped, a dog that is shot, an unmarked grave in the woods, and a man who lacked the courage to stop any of it. Videos eventually surface showing several people of both genders being abused by hunters at a campsite. The story unfolds from multiple perspectives, each contribution building the reader’s understanding of what happened to two girls and how a town where secrets are kept reacted to rumored truths.

In my favorite story, the disappearance of a waitress causes paranoia among the restaurant’s male staff and customers (primarily miners and iron workers) as they wonder whether they are suspected of foul play. Customers are fond of red boots the waitresses wear and are willing to tolerate the restaurant’s gay owner because he hires pretty waitresses. The owner is haunted by the fear that he failed to keep an employee safe. The solution to the disappearance reveals that bad acts can be more sad than nefarious.

In the most poignant story, a man begins to “count random things to pilot his days” after he loses his wife. Living alone on wooded land, he has fallen in love with a doe that occasionally visits his property, an animal he feels an obsessive need to shield from death.

Another strong story revolves around a semi-literate man who breeds pit bulls for fighting. The man has an obsessive desire to be regarded as respectable, a condition he associates with wealth. He decides that having his boys fight each other in bare knuckled brawls is a step up from dog fighting. The story gives new meaning to the concept of unfit parenting.

Several stories highlight the theme of meanness that is ingrained in the characters. A man recalls his childhood, when his angry father dragged a steer behind his pickup truck to punish the steer for wandering away. A priest threatens boys with the paddle when they make “pizzle” the world of the day. A young man on a motorcycle watches a woman with a knife try to steal a baby from a pregnant woman.

Other stories focus on the sadness of desperate lives. An Amish carpenter’s wife tells him that the coffin he built for their son is too small, as if “she thought her love for him might expand his small body.” Sixth grade girls try to puzzle out the mysteries of pregnancy by observing a woman who had four miscarriages in the last seven years, but they instead learn to cope with fear of the unknown. A young woman finishes having sex with a man she can picture making a life with, but then knows she has to hop in her car “and drive far as I can get if I ever want to be anything that ain’t a few steps away from crazy.”

Some stories defy categorization. City council members want to learn the stories of a reclusive woman by condemning her house. A man learns from his Vietnamese wife how to read unfortunate future events from markings on eggs.

Several stories are snapshots of a time and place. Vignettes don’t appeal to me. I like stories to be full meals, or at least a main course, not a meager slice.

I appreciate the cumulative sense of atmosphere that the Winesburg, Ohio approach to storytelling creates. I also appreciate Jolene McIlwain’s ability to portray characters in a sympathetic light despite their limitations and flaws. She doesn’t stereotype or judge. Her prose is precise and fluid but never showy. The collected stories are uneven — the four I’ve highlighted struck me as occupying a higher level than the rest — but taken as a whole, they showcase McIlwain’s undeniable talent.

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The Days Before Us by Sejal Bandani

Published digitally by Amazon on April 27, 2023

This short story is part of the Amazon Original Stories series. Specifically, it is part of the Good Intentions collection, a series of stories about “motherly love” (or, in this case, questionable or misunderstood love).

Autumn is a mess. She feels that her mother abandoned her emotionally after her father left. Autumn has regularly received letters from her mother that she hasn’t opened. She won’t tell her husband why she refuses to open the letters, supposedly because she doesn’t know. Her husband has been patient but is drawing away from her for unexplored reasons that presumably extend beyond her failure to read her mail. He might take a job in a different city. He might not want to bring Autumn with him. As she’s about to confront that reality, Autumn realizes she’s pregnant. Well, of course she does, because that’s what happens in domestic dramas. How can Autumn come to understand her mother without becoming a prospective mother herself?

The story addresses Autumn’s internal drama. Surrounding her introspection are two aquatic adventures. In the first, she finds a young dolphin that has separated from its pod, a metaphor for Autumn’s isolated life. It isn’t a great metaphor because the dolphin wants to be part of a pod while Autumn deliberately distances herself from everyone except her friend Callista. Autumn tells Callista all the dark secrets she keeps from her husband. Why can’t she be just as open with her husband? Who knows?

The second adventure pits Autumn against nature when she encounters a storm while sailing alone. That episode is over before it can add dramatic tension to the story.

Instead, the tension is supposed to arise from Autumn's unresolved domestic issues. Will Autumn reconcile with her mother? Will her husband leave her? Will she tell her husband about her pregnancy? Will he change his mind about their seemingly doomed relationship if he learns about the pregnancy? Will a young dolphin teach Autumn that she doesn’t have to be alone?

Readers who care about the answers to such questions might enjoy this story. I regarded it as a humdrum example of domestic fiction. I’m not a fan of the genre so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but this story reminded me of the reasons I’m not a fan. A confrontation between mother and pregnant daughter (“you were the best part of me”) is excessively sentimental, as is Autumn’s heartfelt discussion with her husband in the final paragraphs. Autumn learns an obvious lesson but just in case the reader doesn’t get it, Sejal Bandani spells it out at the story’s end. The story is too sophisticated to be gag-worthy, but it’s entirely predictable.

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Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Published by Doubleday on March 7, 2023

Aging women are the primary characters in Margaret Atwood’s latest story collection. Sexism and ageism blend in the background of the stories, as they did in Don Lemon’s astonishing remark that women are past their prime by time they enter their 50s. Atwood is proof that Lemon doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The stories are diverse. A couple are probably meant to appeal to intellectuals. Some are funny, although the humor is uneven. The best stories are poignant. All of them showcase Atwood’s love of language, sometimes overtly, as characters discuss the origins and meanings of meanings of words they like or despise.

My favorite story in this collection is “My Evil Mother.” The narrator meets the father who (she suspects) abandoned her. When she was a child, she believed that her mother turned her father into a garden gnome. The narrator’s mother chats with her daughter about spells and potions. The daughter is never quite sure whether her mother is cooking soup or a witch’s brew. The mother tells her daughter that she has been carrying on a battle for the last four hundred years with the daughter’s gym teacher. Back in the day, the gym teacher collected severed penises, keeping them in a cedar box and feeding them bits of grain, as was the custom. Is the narrator’s mother mentally ill or does she just have a bizarre sense of humor? Probably more of the former, but the exasperated (and often embarrassed) narrator eventually realizes that lessons she learned from her mother will serve her in her relationship with her own daughter.

One story is told by a snail whose soul has transmigrated into a customer service representative. The story might be seen as an amusing if uncomfortable take on people who feel they have been born into the wrong bodies. A story told to quarantined humans by an alien has some funny moments. Fans of Chaucer or the Decameron (as well as readers who know how to google) might appreciate the story’s relationship to the character Griselda in folklore. Both stories ask questions about the purpose of being human.

A story set in the world of academia recounts a salty (and slightly drunken) conversation about the history of feminism as a group of women plan a symposium to lay “the foundations for the brave new generation of emerging non-cis-male creatives.” In another story that is probably meant for readers who appreciate education, Hypatia explains how her mother was murdered (skinned by clamshells, to be ghoulishly precise) by a mob of Christian men in Alexandria — while noting that, if it happened today, mob members would have recorded the murder on their phones. Not being an intellectual, I needed to google Hypatia of Alexandria to give the story some context. To be honest, I did the same for Griselda. Atwood is far above my level of intellect but I made an effort to keep up.

In a less successful story, Atwood uses a medium to help her interview George Orwell. He’s not surprised to learn about “cancel culture,” the insurrection, and evil uses of the internet. In another story that didn’t work for me, two aging Hungarians share scandalous memories, some of which might be real, other just fake news.

Atwood has chronicled the marriage of Tig and Nell during her writing career. Those characters star in the first three stories. The first suggests that fears of death are best ignored, lest we mourn events that have not yet happened. Better to preserve an illusion of safety until our fate is revealed. In the second, Nell does a favor for departed friends by telling their story, because they wanted to become words rather than a handful of dust. In the third story, Nell tries to immortalize a dead but beloved cat by making it the subject of Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur.”

The last four stories are about Nell and her memories of Tig after Tig’s death. Nell learns some things (and surmises others) about Tig’s father by reading poems that he wrote during the war. She isn’t sure what she learns, isn’t sure she’s the right audience for the amateurish poems, but she wants to say to the man, I hear you, or at least I’m trying.

One of the post-Tig stories takes the form of a letter in which Nell explains what it means to be a widow: grieving, coping, “tidying up” after a partner’s death, her sense that Tig is still present. The letter is heartfelt and honest, achingly sad and ultimately unsent because she knows that her friends want to hear conventional nothings from widows. Another story is devoted to memories of the lost husband, memories of both his vital and declining days.

The theme of the final story is that death is inconsiderate. It leaves the surviving partner to perform all the chores/repairs that were the duty of the lost partner. Yet she can’t blame Tig. He didn’t intend to grow old.

Growing old is not typically the subject of fiction until writers reach the age when looking back is easier than looking forward. At least when we are older, we don’t fear our own inevitable deaths so much as we fear the deaths of those we love — including, perhaps, a cat. I appreciated Atwood’s willingness to confront the subject in these stories with fearless honesty.

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