Two Short Story Reviews

I have been wrapping up some reviews of books I read over the past few months (you can find my reviews here), but I have also done some appropriately short reviews of short stories that took my fancy. Here's a couple of them.

J.A. Prentice: Fruit of the Memory Tree (Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #383, June 1, 2023)

There is an interesting premise to this story: two children (in an unspecified place and era) steal and eat the fruit of their society’s memory tree, and they find out how literally their Keeper keeps the memories of the dead, over thousands of years. There is a grain of kinship with the story of the Garden of Eden, in that the children’s precipitous theft has transformative consequences, their lives are overturned by eating the fruit of this kind of knowledge. The knowledge is of neither good nor evil, but of everything that once was experienced. The overly archaic language is sometimes a little trying, and the prose sometimes feels a little slack—“sweet it was, like honey”—but overall it is well-done, and the impressionistic description of the protagonists’ experiences once the fruit has been consumed is effectively done.  

Delilah S. Dawson: Blank Space (Uncanny Magazine Issue 51)

This is a fun, compact, sinister story: a sociopathic slant on a very familiar small-town-noir trope. A young woman, Hailey, is apparently alone in the world apart from her uncle. Working in his store, she is hit on by the local bad boy, a tattooed young buck named Dylan that her uncle warns her against. Dylan has an instinct for which “cute little thing” he can charm and exploit, and his veneer of Gothic rakishness quickly flakes away to reveal the essentially unchallenging, but tawdry, even squalid, reality. Alas for Dylan, there is a reason Hailey is alone.