fiction – no shrinking violet

(see what I did there? /finger guns)

Listen at Podcastle 628: Vincent’s Penny, May 26, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.
“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”
“Why would we do that?”
“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”
The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.
The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room.
I know I will never leave this place.

~~famous last words~~

Anyway, in summary:

What’s it about?
Sebastian is a boy plucked from a life of poverty and abuse by Vincent, a mysterious and powerful stranger, and is groomed for the sort of greatness that powerful men seek to pass on to their proteges. (Greatness in this context comes in such exciting flavours as ‘murder with impunity,’ ‘body-snatching,’ and ‘immortality.’) Over the centuries, Sebastian reaps the rewards of being within Vincent’s inner circle, but cannot escape his own conscience. A confrontation as well as a reckoning is inevitable.

What’s so good about it?
You know what “they” say about bad pennies, but what is Chris Barnham saying about them? Possibly that there’s more than one, and whether or not that penny is ‘bad’ or or ‘good’ or bound to turn up again is entirely up to the reader. Sebastian is the lens through which we experience both the horror of a child’s abuse by his father, his serendipitous rescue by a stranger, and his gradual transformation into a man with more in common with his monstrous mentor than he is prepared to admit to himself.

I enjoy any story that makes me struggle to find an appropriate genre label for it. This one spans genres, being equal parts historical fiction and fantasy (hence its appearance on PodCastle), but I’d stretch it further and categorize it as a piece of horror fiction, too. The horror is slow to approach, and subtly written, but it will slam into you like a freight train if you pick the story up for a second time and re-read it from the beginning.

Where can I find it?
You can find the full text of “Vincent’s Penny” over here at PodCastle, and I would strongly recommend reading along with the story as you listen to Matt Dovey’s A+ narration. It’s well worth your time.

Happy listening!

quick picks, recommendations

quick pick: “hello, ello,” by seanan mcguire, _huntsvillain_, by john o’brien

February 10, 2020March 20, 2020 ray brantley

Truthfully I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to write in-depth commentary on all the stuff that has snagged my interest, and I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that my tiny cohort of readers also don’t have the time or bandwidth to devote to one blogger’s commentary. But I want to write about stuff I like! And the stuff I like is pretty cool.

Hence, new category: quick picks.

“Hello, Hello,” by Seanan McGuire

What is it?
A podcast version of the short story “Hello, Hello,” originally published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft.
What’s it about?
Language, communication, parenthood–and birds. A computational linguist is befuddled by the speech, appearance, and uncanny behaviour of an unknown woman’s avatar on the neural network system she uses to communicate with her sister, Tasha.
What’s so good about it?
Beautiful authorial voice and exploration of both animal and human behaviour.
Where can I find it? Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine.

Huntsvillain, by John O’Brien

What is it?
An extremely well-researched and outrageously funny history blog about the state of Alabama.
What’s it about?
In the author’s own words, “short bursts of hilarity from Alabama’s otherwise miserable history.”
What’s so good about it?
In addition to being written by a very good friend, Huntsvillain is an honest and unapologetic look at the history of my home town and home state. It will gift you with more knowledge than you ever realized you wanted about what marriage and divorce looked like during the 1800s, and a scholarly examination of just what lead John B. Haynes to rip apart a local silversmith’s cabin, log by log, with his bare hands.
Where can I find it? Right here–> Huntsvillain

Office friends to hold me accountable. maybe.

the creative process, world building, writing

old stuff: new persepolis excerpt

October 3, 2016February 21, 2020 ray brantley

Since writing the excerpt below, my vision for this world and the characters within it has changed considerably. Even in this iteration of the narrative, the characters and the story itself are different from what I envisioned in November of 2013. But I want to celebrate writing that I am proud of, and part of that celebration involves sharing it with you today.

Not knowing Republican Shee hadn’t been a hindrance in the disputed territories, but inside a government run hospital staffed almost exclusively by Shee physicians it was proving to be a real liability.

Corelli Jones stared uncomprehending at the paperwork in front of him. His skin felt hot and cold under his clothes and the terrified lump in his throat was making it hard to breathe.

The Shee attendant, who had been sitting with him patiently for three and a half minutes of unbroken silence, finally betrayed a hint of discomfort and twitched one of the long quills that had been laying comfortably still across the scaled crest of her scalp. She stilled it and said, gentle as she could, “Water? Would you like?”

It was an English word Corelli recognized. He forced a closed mouth smile and put the pen down to shift the sleeping infant in his arms. “Please,” he said. The attendant got up from her seat and left the exam room, closing the door behind her, and only when he heard the latch did Corelli exhale raggedly and lean against the table. He bore the heel of the hand not supporting Gabriella into his forehead. Alone, he bit his lip and smothered the sob before it could come out.

They knew. They had to know. No human on New Persepolis grew to adulthood without fluency in the dominant Shee dialect unless they were from the disputed territories. Crossing the border into Republic territory without submitting to immigration processing was grounds for execution. Humans with counterfeit identification papers–or none at all–were as likely to be terrorists as refugees, the prevailing thought was. Better to err, with extreme prejudice, on the side of caution. The attendant had probably gone to page security–immigration, if Corelli was very lucky. An agent if he wasn’t.

Gabriella would end up a ward of the state and grow up with no knowledge of him. There was no way to ensure she made it to Diederik without implicating him in their dangerous and illegal border crossing, and the cache of funds they’d stashed outside the city would end up in the Republic’s coffers long before it would ever be of any benefit to Gabriella. This gambit had been a risky one, but Corelli thought he had prepared for everything.

Evidently, assuming that humans would be presented with human language intake papers at the hospital had been one assumption too many. What a careless mistake.

Continue reading →

constructive deconstruction

very friendly monsters: emily devenport’s “postcards from monster island”

September 28, 2016March 20, 2020 ray brantley

“I like this one specific thing an awful lot, I just can’t figure out why.”

eveningfire — A charming photograph of my partner’s brother’s fire pit. (Taken on one of the few mild evenings bestowed upon southern Ontario this August, 2016.)

Case in point: I enjoy a bonfire, but not hot weather. Why? Bonfires are cozy. Sometimes you cook food on them. Hot weather–and humidity–make me feel as though I’m walking through hot soup. Mystery solved.

Figuring out just what it is I like about certain stories or genres, or what I don’t like, takes a little more mental calisthenics. I’ll go through some warm-up moves first.

This Thing I Like: “Postcards from Monster Island,” by Emily Devenport

I first listened to this story when it aired on the Clarkesworld Magazine Podcast back in April of 2015.[1] That’s about a year and a half ago at this point, and out of all the stories that have aired since, this is the only one I revisit at least once every couple of months. “Postcards” keeps me company on my congested morning commute to my day-job, occasionally during my lunch break, and often during the quiet hour or so I have to myself before I go to sleep at night. It’s pairs excellently with my late evening cup-of-tea-and-cuddling-with-my-cat routine, and so I can reasonably extrapolate that it would pair well with people who have similar morning routines, too. (I don’t understand Morning People, but my partner assures me that they are not a myth and do actually exist.)

Read on with caution; there will be spoilers.