Short Story Sunday [14]

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Retold by Alvin Schwartz
Illustrated by Stephen Gammell

This week I'm doing a collection of short stories in one review.  Since each story is so short I'm not going to separate them out.













Section one of this collection is stories to tell to scare your friends.  I found these all to be pretty dumb.  Each one your supposed to start telling, then at the end just scream or shout something, or make a loud noise.   None of the stories has a resolution, just just to catch your listener off guard.

Section two of the collection is ghost stories.  These were actual ghost stories, they were creepy and exactly what should be in a children's book of scary stories.  My favorite of these was The White Wolf and The Guests.  But really, I loved all the stories in this section.

Section three of the collection is about everything that doesn't fit into a different category.  These were silly, but still very enjoyable.  I especially liked A New Horse and Room for One More.  The Dead Man's Brains game was fun too.

Section four is all recent scary stories. These were okay.  The White Satin Evening Gown bothered me, there's no way you can be poisoned to death by trace amounts of embalming fluid on a dress.  It just can't happen.  That story probably caused some poor girls to be traumatized about wearing second hand clothes.  Oh, and fun fact, a lot of fabric is treated with formaldehyde.

The fifth and final section of the collection are "scary" stories which are supposed to make you laugh.  I didn't find any of them overly funny, but The Slithery-Dee did get a chuckle out of me.  

Overall the way Schwartz wrote the stories was very matter of fact, none of them were told to be scary.  And for the first section, you don't need cheap tricks to scare your friends, there are plenty of scary stories with light-hearted endings so you can scare your friends, but not traumatize them.  For the artwork, Gammell's drawing are great! They're by far the scariest part of the book.  The drawings were so creepy they didn't really go with the stories, which all veered towards the side of silly.

I give this collection a 7/10.  It does it's job for little kids without scaring them, but it could have been done better with the same effect.

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween full of spooky happenings and lots of candy!

Short Story Sunday [13]

Harrison Bergeron
from: Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut

My Welcome to the Monkey House review will be split amongst several weeks of Short Story Sundays.  I will review each short story that appeared in the book.

Review

This story is about a future where everyone was made completely equal.  Those people smarter, or more athletic than the stupidest or least athletic people were given handicaps to dumb them down or make it difficult for them to move.  The main character, George, is smart, so he has to wear his handicap earphones which constantly plays loud noises to prevent him from thinking analytically or too intensely.  His wife, Hazel, doesn't have any handicaps.  The story revolves around them watching a government sanctioned television program in which their son, Harrison, makes an appearance.

This just might be my favorite story from the anthology.  I loved how Vonnegut portrayed the idea of total equality.  He made it look as ridiculous as it is, nobody is truly equal to another, one will always have advantages over the other.  Not that one is better than the other, but two people, one will be smarter, but the other might be more athletic, or more artistic, or more attractive.  Vonnegut demonstrates this fantastically, from the conversation between George and Hazel to the musicians playing the music for the ballet and the dancers performing the ballet.  He also demonstrates how ridiculous a government has to be to in order to enforce equality.  This story was written during the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality in the US.  Vonnegut likes going to the extremes of what people were asking for (like what he did with "Welcome to the Monkey House" with the Church's stance on contraception).  It sort of reads as a cautionary tale - be careful what you wish for.

I give this one a 10/10.  It was such a great story, I loved it.  I listened to this as part of the Welcome to the Monkey House audio book.  It was narrated by Maria Tucci.

Short Story Sunday [12]

Where I Live
from: Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut

My Welcome to the Monkey House review will be split amongst several weeks of Short Story Sundays.  I will review each short story that appeared in the book.

Review

This story is about Barnstable Village in Barnstable County, on Cape Cod.

I found this very dull, there didn't seem to be a point to the story, it just kind of haphazardly rambled on about Barnstable.  I did enjoy the bit with the seafood and them not realizing you could eat mussels or tuna.

There really isn't much to say about this story.  Though one thing that bothered me with it was it started with an encyclopedia salesman, then he was never mentioned again as Vonnegut got more into describing the village.  But it ended with the library getting a new set of encyclopedias, but there was no closure as to who they got them from.

I give this one a 5/10.  It was slightly amusing, especially if you know the area, but there was nothing really engaging about it.  I listened to this as part of the Welcome to the Monkey House audio book.  It was narrated by Bill Irwin.

Who Am I This Time
from: Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut

Review

This story is about a man, Harry Nash, who has no personality but is the most amazing actor, and a woman, Helene Shaw, who falls in love with Nash's character.  

I loved this story.  Helene seemed to fall in love with the character Nash was playing and ignored all attempts by the directors of the play to try to get her to understand that the character was not Nash.

I feel like I can't say too much about this story without giving spoilers.  But I will say this - the ending was awesome, I loved it!  Helene's solution for Harry was great!

I give this one a 9/10.  It was a lot of fun.  I listened to this as part of the Welcome to the Monkey House audio book.  It was narrated by Dylan Baker.

Short Story Sunday [11]

Welcome to the Monkey House
from: Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut

My Welcome to the Monkey House review will be split amongst several weeks of Short Story Sundays.  I will review each short story that appeared in the book.

Review

This story is about a world where instead of taking birth control to cut down on population growth a man developed a pill that causes you to loose all feeling from the waist down, therefore making sex feeling-less and only for reproductive purposes.  

This was such a cool story.  I love how the main character, Nancy, was so set in her beliefs, but by the end she began to realize her concept of the world was flawed.  And others that had been in her exact same situation realized the same thing and began fighting to reclaim their rights to their own bodies.

I also found it very interesting how one super conservative hardcore Catholic guy, J. Edgar Nation, got the entire world to take his pills that removed all temptation for sex.  I find it hard to believe that all the other religions, cultures, and more open minded individuals allowed for that to happen.  I would imagine most people wouldn't want to give that up, despite over population, especially when there are other ways.

Vonnegut has a way of writing ridiculous things that are fun to read but end up being really thought provoking and they stick with you for a while.  This one is no exception.  

In doing a little research on this short story, Vonnegut wrote it in response to Pope Paul VI declaring that the Catholic Church was officially against any sort of contraception.  Once I learned that I enjoyed the story a lot more.  On it's own, it's a little weird, but within the context in which it was written it's a great story.

I give this a 9/10.  Not my favorite Vonnegut story, but definitely a good one.  I listened to this as part of the Welcome to the Monkey House audio book.  It was narrated by David Strathairn.

Short Story Sunday [10]

The Ascent of Unreason
by Marie Brennan

Review

This story is about a dancer who gives up dancing to become a work of art until war changes everything.

I found the story to be pretty unremarkable, it was neither good nor bad, it just was.  I didn't really understand the protagonist.  She didn't like to conform to the rules of dancing so instead of quitting she made sure she was kicked out?  I did like the ending though, her final confrontation with the artist.  It was just getting there that took to long, too much exposition, a little more character development for the main character and less describing dancing and the works of art she became would have been better.

I give this story a 5/10, it was solidly in the middle for me the bad equaled the good and the narration was good.

I listened to this story on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Go have a listen.

Short Story Sunday [9]

Made of Cats: A Love Story
by Judith Tarr

Review

This story was so much fun.  It's about an alien race that comes to Earth and as a show of good will they make cats as cute as possible.  So funny.  I love the tone of the story, I love what they did to the cats, and I love love LOVE the resolution.  Can we have that?  Please?

I give this story a 10/10 for the sheer fun of it.

I first hear this story on Escape Pod.  It was narrated by Amanda Ching who did a fantastic job with it.  The full text is also there if you prefer to read rather than listen.

Short Story Sunday [8]

Enjoy the Moment

by Jack McDevitt

Review

This was such a great story.  It's about a physicist who wants her name to go down in history, she gives up on dark matter energy for that dream and instead just wants to have a comet named after her.  It's a lesson on be careful what you wish for, she gets something much more than a comet with her name attached to it.  I loved this story, and I loved the pre apocalypse idea.  It's all about the discovery that the end is coming, but there's nothing about when the end happens.  Such a fantastic idea for a story!

I give this a 9/10, only because I wish it were longer! It didn't completely and utterly wow me, but I did love the story a lot and I kind of want to get the apocalypse triptych...

I first hear this story on Escape Pod, it was narrated by Sara Tolbert who did a fantastic job.  Go have a listen!

Short Story Sunday

Jim Greely, The North Sea Skipper

by R. M. Ballantyne

Review

This is a story about a North Sea fisherman from Yarmouth.  He marries a wonderful woman who he loves dearly.  After a few years he turns to drink, but after his ship sinks and he nearly dies he reassess his life and returns home sober.

The language in this story is a bit difficult if you're not familiar with ships, but skipping over those parts you still get the gist of the story.  The speech of the characters is also a little difficult to understand since it was written in the mid to late 1800s and seemed to be spelled phonetically (noo instead of new).

The story was a little predictable, and it seemed a bit rushed.  This could probably have been told as a novel or novella length story where the characters were really developed so you could feel for Nellie, Jim's wife, and for King, the stand-in ship hand.

I give this a 7/10.  I loved the way it was written as well as the story itself, but Ballantyne could have expanded a bit more with it. 

Short Story Sunday

Inappropriate Behavior
by Pat Murphy

Review

This story had the potential to be great but it really fell short.  I've been listening to my back log of Escape Pod episodes, so I've been picking and choosing which ones to post here, pretty much whichever ones stand out to me.  Usually it's the really good ones that I want to write about.  This one however, bothered me so much, I can't get it out of my head and the more I think about it the more I dislike it.  It's about an autistic girl who remotely operates a cockroach machine on a deserted island when a man is shipwrecked there and she's the only thing that can save his life.  When the story begins the reader has no clue that the cockroach is an autistic girl, that's discovered later in.  And when it is revealed, boy does the author bash it over your head.

I think the thing that bothered me the most about the story was when Annie, the cockroach girl, asked Evan, the shipwrecked man, to tell her a story.  This happens twice, and the stories were Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk.  Now these stories pretty much everyone in Western society knows.  The few that don't know these stories are too young to comprehend them.  That being said, why did Murphy feel the need to retell this within his story?  Here's why - it was an excuse to bash Annie's autism over your head a little bit more.  Let's take a characters actions from a story then examine their every action and decide if it was something Annie would do or if it was a NT action (a term that was constantly used that bothered me just as much as these retellings).  She decided that Cinderella wasn't NT (aka Cinderella was autistic) because being forced to live on a cot in the kitchen was nice, and going to a ball wasn't, and marrying a prince was just about the worst thing ever.  Annie got upset over the ending because it wasn't what Cinderella would've wanted, she wanted to go back to her filthy cot in the soot of the kitchen.

I get that the Murphy was trying to make a point about autism and try to get people to understand it better through a story, but really, this was the absolute worst way to go about doing it.  I know plenty of autistic people, I haven't met one that I didn't like.  Sure they act a little odd, but once you get used to their peculiarities they're great people.  That being said, Annie was 100% unlikable.  I felt awful for Evan, of all the island he could be stuck on he was on one with her.  She cared more about fiddler crabs having rocks then she did about another person's life.  The only character worse than her was her doctor.  A quack through and through.

I think one thing that made me hate this story as much as I did was the narration.  Usually  when i don't like a narrator I put up with it (the beauty of listening to 30 minute short stories on audio) then promptly forget about it, because either the story was so awesome it made up for the bad narration, or because the story was so unmemorable that the bad narration faded into obscurity just as quickly as the story did.  This story was narrated by MJ Cogburn.  Listening to her read felt like listening to a 9 year old trying to read (and I'm being very generous there).  She paused in all the wrong places, she had extreme difficulty pronouncing simple words. She stumbled over easy sentences, it was torturous to listen to.  She made a bad story drag on twice as long as it needed to.  I don't know if she herself has issues reading aloud, or if it was a decision for the character.  If it was a decision it was poorly executed, Evan and Annie had the same bland toneless slow narration, and if it were done because of Annie, it made her sound like autism wasn't her only problem.

This story gets my lowest rating 1/10.  The only enjoyable part of listening to it was Alasdair's intro and outro.  I first listened to this story on Escape Pod.  The full story is posted there as well, I recommend reading it over listening to it, but I really don't recommend you do either.  Instead just go to the next episode, That Other Sea, it's so much better!

Short Story Sunday

Thirty Seconds from Now
by John Chu

Review

This was such a great story.  It's about a boy who can see the future, or rather, every possibility the future holds.  It's a story about him falling in love, getting his heart broken, surviving college, and the story in its entirety is told before it even happens.  The story begins and ends at the same time.  Scott sitting on the floor, juggling with his dorm room door ajar.

I love the possibilities that Scott sees, I love how Tony is so persistent with what he wants.  I love how Scott sees how everything will turn out and yet he decides to let it happen.  I love how you only know part of the story, and will never know how it ends, or how key things happen, because for the entirety of the story Scott is sitting on his dorm room floor.

This story was a lot of fun.  I give it a 10/10.  

I listened to this one on Escape Pod it was narrated by Joel Kenyon, who did an excellent job with it.  I highly recommend listening to it, but if you're not into that the full text is posted in the same place.

Short Story Sunday

Vestigial Girl by Alex Wilson

Review

This story is about a genius toddler who has to fight a monster in her throat.  I loved everything about this story.  The toddler, Charlene, has adult type reasoning but is only 4 years old; she doesn’t have great mobility and can barely crawl, which upsets her greatly - not to mention the ‘monster’ in her throat that she has to battle in order to speak.  Charlene has two dads, and the reason why she has the difficulties she does is because they spliced her dads’ DNA together rather than using an egg donor with only one of their sperm.    

Throughout the story you hear the two dads fighting in the other room, and the fight is so normal, it’s the kind of fight any two parents would have about a difficult situation with their child.  You get to know each of the dads and can see how much of a struggle it is raising Charlene, and yet how much they love her.  The fight, and presumably fights of similar nature before the story begins, makes Charlene even more determined to fight her monster and win.  If she does then her dads would be happier and understand her better. 

I think the thing I loved most about this story is the fact that Charlene has two dads, Daddy Gary and Daddy Oliver, and the author doesn’t dwell on it.  Charlene doesn’t think that it’s anything other than perfectly normal.  There’s no in your face message saying TWO DADS IS JUST AS GOOD AS A MOTHER AND A FATHER.  Charlene has two dads, she loves them both, and that’s that, now onto the story.  That’s my favorite kind of message, subtle, so subtle within the story that it’s only after you finish it that you reflect on what message the author was sending.

I first heard this story on Escape Pod; it was narrated by Nathaniel Lee, who did a fantastic job with it.  I highly recommend listen.  But if you don’t want to listen to it and just want to read the story, it’s posted in the same place.  

Short Story Sunday

The Wrong Foot

By Stephanie Burgis

This story is a retelling of Cinderella, and I’m a sucker for fairytale retellings.  This retelling is about a horrible, lecherous, prince who “finds” his love.  The girl that he claims as his missing love, Sophia, is, in fact, not who he danced with.  The story revolves around Sophia and how tries to get out of marrying the prince.

I love this story.  Sophia is such an awesome protagonist, she’s so smart.  I also love how the prince is the exact opposite of Charming and the girl’s worst nightmare rather than her dream.  The ending was also fantastic, the way Sophia played on the prince’s faults. 

I give this story a 10/10, Sophia was great and it took such a cool take on the story.  This story is so much fun! I highly highly recommend it!

I first listened to this story on PodCastle.  It was read by Renee Chambliss, who did such a fantastic job with it, her character’s voices were great.  

Short Story Sunday

Wart By Jayge Carr

Review

This story is about a cat, Wart, who lives on a spaceship and hunts pests.  He's the runt of the litter and half blind, but he's an excellent hunter, despite "Human-mommy" and "Human-tom"'s loud talking that disturbs his dust-bunnies.

This story is very cute and Wart is so silly, Carr perfectly captured cats, hunting a swishing cat's tail to feigned innocence, batting prey to make sure it's dead before trying to eat it and then burying it exactly where they shouldn't before returning proudly to the humans.

I loved this story and highly recommend it to all cat lovers, and Sci-Fi lovers.  I give this a 10/10.

Short Story Sunday

Paper Menagerie 

by Ken Liu

Summary From GoodReads

A gentle fantasy. Love, paper tigers, mail order bride, culture clash.

Review

This story starts with a young boy of a mixed race family, an American father and a Chinese mother, who didn’t speak English.  The mother made several origami animals for her son, the first of which was a tiger.  When she breathed into them to inflate the animals to their proper size she blew life into them.  The story follows the little boy as he grows into an adult and it focuses on the relationship between him and his mother.

This is one of my favorite stories.  Ken Liu is an amazing author and knows exactly how to pull on your heartstrings.  I love how real the boy is, how he succumbs to peer pressure and tries his hardest to be “normal” before finally coming into himself.  I also love how Liu doesn’t artificially try to make things better for the main character; the people he surrounds himself with are not overly encouraging, there is no token best friend that makes everything okay.  It’s about solely about a boy who is at one with himself until he starts to be aware of how he is viewed by those around him and how he comes to term with his past and who he is.  It’s so realistic, substitute the magical origami animals and Quingming for anything that is culturally specific, and voila this story has played out among countless children growing up in a culture vastly different from their parents.

I first listened to this story on PodCastle, Rajan Khanna does an excellent job narrating.  I highly recommend a listen!