Page 17 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

[AH] “Up in Flames (Working Title)” is probably the story I’m most excited about, closely followed by “The Tale of the Two Brothers, or, The Famous Folklorist Confesses Fratricide!” Probably just because they’re new! And because I had so much fun writing them.

I found “The Last Archive” difficult, both structurally and emotionally. I was writing it when Asheville flooded and people were carrying supplies in by mule; I was writing it when I read Austyn Gaffney’s reporting on memory and death in the wake of the Kingston coal ash spill. (Austyn and I were best friends in third grade; funny how life works). I just think it’s a hard time to write fiction about the end of the world—it looks very near, sometimes.

[BT] Anger in your work rarely feels like something a character has to overcome before she can become whole. It often feels clarifying, even necessary. (KM: Agreed!) Do you see anger as a danger, a survival mechanism, or a kind of knowledge?

[AH] I think that’s partly the nature of a short story—anger is what motivates that big scene, that final turn, and in short fiction we don’t hang around much to consider the aftermath. But yes, I do think of anger as a kind of vital invigoration, the energy that propels us from an unjust state to a more just state.

[KM] It feels somewhat perverse to ask about what comes next for you when we’re here to discuss a book that hasn’t come out yet, but I know publishing has its own timeloops! So, is there anything on your publishing to-do list that you can tell us about?

[AH] Not really! I’m barely started on my next book, which I’m referring to inaccurately as “lesbian Treasure Island.”

[BT] Looking across these stories and your novels, is there an idea, fear, or emotional wound that you keep returning to, even when you think you are writing about something entirely different?

[AH] Unfortunately, I appear to always be writing stories about stories. I always think I’m writing about something else—empire, nationalism, social movements, race, labor, romance—but in the end it turns out it’s just stories! The ones we tell about ourselves, our histories, our nations, our enemies…I suppose it’s just how I make sense of my own life!

[KM] Thank you so much for giving us your time to chat about stories, time travel, and queerness, Alix. I can’t wait for more readers to be devastated by Slantwise Histories so that I can have folks to commiserate with! Before you go, can you tell us about a book or two that you’re reading (and/or have read recently) that you’re really loving? Let’s build everyone’s TBRs even higher!

[AH] Happily! For short fiction, I recently reread some of Amal El-Mohtar’s Seasons of Glass and Iron, which is just sublime. Like a box of expensive chocolates. And I’m sort of always thinking about Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog. Otherwise, I’m re-reading Joanna Bourne’s historical romance series where they’re all spies in the Napoleonic Wars (starting with The Spymaster’s Lady), and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion books.

Alix E. Harrow is the New York Times–bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, Starling House, The Everlasting and various short fiction. A former Kentuckian, Harrow now lives in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.

REVIEW: The Slantwise Histories by Alix E. Harrow

Review by Krystle Matar

It’s rare for me to love every single story in a short story collection, but Slantwise Histories by Alix E Harrow must be made of magic. I can’t find any other way to explain how each story hit so deliciously, and how each of them seemed to be tailored specifically to my interest. Thank you, Alix. May I have another?

Slantwise Histories feels like sitting at the feet of a master storyteller and hear all of their most precious treasures, giving us a glimpse of magic on every page. The trouble I have with short story collections is often the pacing; by the time I sink into a concept and understand the worldbuilding, the experience is tragically over and I am left wanting more even as the collection carries me to the next, and the cycle starts over. Harrow’s stories, however, have avoided this by making every story full to bursting with more than the sum of their individual word counts. It’s truly an act of sorcery. Each story feels much longer than they are (in the best way) and when they come to their inevitable conclusions, I felt they couldn’t possibly be a single word longer or end any other way, even if that ending broke my heart. The worlds we witness in each story in Slantwise Histories have that Harrow style of being familiar-but-with-a-new-angle. Most of the stories have an urban fantasy flavour, or maybe a little bit of alternate historical fantasy, and they all work brilliantly. By relying on a shorthand that comes with invoking cities we know, Harrow is able to build fantastical ideas on the scaffolding of our familiar reality.

I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite, but the ones that live most in my memory demonstrate that style, so I’ve pulled them together in a list:

The Tale of Two Brothers, or, The Famous Folklorist Confesses Fratricide! is the story that feels the most like a Grimm’s fairytale, if the Brothers Grimm were American con men looking to tell stories and publish so they can pay off some debts.

The Knight and the Butcherbird takes place in some near future (or is it the near past?) when Sir John of Cincinnati arrives in a holler that has a demon problem. This story struck me as the most like a Hozier song in how it balances love, demonic imagery, and the perfect ache of grief.

Do Not Look Back, My Lion is one of the few stories that seem to take place in a secondary world, and here Alix takes the skewed gender politics of war that we saw in The Everlasting and doubles down. It’s also the story that is the most horrifically heart breaking—which makes the next story The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly (which is the cutest and lightest of all the stories!) all the more devastating in its adorable-overload. You hurt me good with that pairing, Alix. Who do you think you are?

The Long Way Up is a gender-bent Orpheus and Eurydice with a side order of discussing mental health and how it interacts with love.

Up In Flames (Working Title) gives us a literary version of the Hayes Code that causes ‘obscene’ (aka queer and/or sexual) literature to literally go up in flames, taking place in the 1920s-1930s, which makes it the story most specifically tailored to my interests. It also hangs on the framework of being a story that has been submitted to a magazine, and so there’s a secondary story happening in the form of editor’s notes dispersed through the text. I suspect Harrow cracked open my soul and gave me a story I didn’t even know I needed until she delivered it. It pairs delightfully/devastatingly well with Dustbaby, a story about how the dustbowl could brush up against the fairy world.

The Sycamore and the Sybil is the one that feels most like a Florence + The Machine song—filled with feminine rage and witchcraft, infuriating and dark and yet hopeful against all odds.

It’s impossible to talk about Slantwise Histories without underscoring how Harrow gives us the opportunity to explore the many expressions of gender, sexuality, and the grimdark horror of being a woman and/or a parent in our current reality, when our bodies and our lives are under attack from governments looking to claw back our rights and ban our stories. Slantwise Histories feels like a resistance. It offers us a safe place where Harrow expertly lets us know that she sees us, she stands with us, and she is cheering for us, and I am so grateful to her for this compassionate and stubborn depiction of our dystopian reality.

Never in all my reading history have I ever highlighted so many passages within one book. All of those big, brave, important themes wouldn’t hit so well without Harrow’s incredible skill with prose, emotion, and beauty. Slantwise Histories delivers a specific kind of whimsy that is fantastical, but also dark and angry. So, with that in mind, I’ll leave you with a quote from The Sycamore and the Sybil that seems to embody the theme of many of Harrow’s stories in this collection.

“It wasn’t fair that we were always the ones who had to lose, to change, to become-something-else. To give ourselves up. It wasn’t fair that all we had in our defense were these few, desperate magics that hurt no one but ourselves.”

Thank you so much to the publisher for the ARC of Slantwise Histories. And thank you to Alix E. Harrow for writing it so that I could experience it, be broken by it, and be healed with it.

Father, Son, Holy Rabbit

By Stephen Graham Jones

By the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy looked at the brown flecks in his father’s palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.

Instead of sleeping, they thumped each other in the face to stay awake.