Amanda Pampuro, Wish List and Other Stories. Alien Buddha Press, 2022. Pp. 107. ISBN 979-8-78138-337-5. $10.44.
Reviewed by Jason Kahler
At least one lifetime ago, I took a graduate class covering rhetoric and technology. It was a great class with a great professor and classmates whose company I enjoyed. One evening we were discussing the ability of technology to track us, and I mentioned my frequent customer fob for the gas station I frequented. I hadn’t thought of it before, I said, but a so-inclined Speedway marketing manager would have been able to figure out an awful lot about me based on what I bought at each station I visited. About where I lived. About where I visited. How many kids I had and their approximate ages (because who in their right mind buys four slushies at one time?). What days I attended class. The approximate day the doctor told me to stop drinking slushies. A general idea of what kind of car I drove. It was a scary reminder of all the information I happily turned over just to earn a free slushie after every fifth purchase.
Sharon Powell’s novel The Shadow is idiosyncratic. That it is in the tradition of Frankenstein literature is evident from the name of the central character, Victor Frankenstein. This Frankenstein is a doctor who dissects corpses, but upon finding a young man who has been buried by an avalanche and cryonically preserved, he keeps the young man in the best cold storage possible in early 19th-century central Europe. In overseeing his living but unconscious body, the doctor is surprised by a spiritual visitation: the spirit of the frozen young man appears above the gurney and addresses him, involving the doctor in a plot to rescue a group of children who are “cared for” by one of the most respected men of the village, but who, according to the spirit, has possession of this group of orphans and, in a Dickensian twist, is working them to death. Simon, the spirit, and the doctor team up to locate the orphans to free them, and ultimately bring their tormentor to justice.
Omenana, the now-quarterly bilingual publication (English and French) of African and African diaspora SFF is still going strong with issue 20. The name of the publication is Igbo for both divinity and culture, and speaks to the speculative that permeates African histories, folklore, spirituality, and future-dreaming. As continental African writers show up more in Western SFF, it’s easy to overlook the key role of local African publications, especially as incubators for experimentation and new voices—but it matters immensely. The four-person editorial team of Omenana is Nigerian, with one member living in Canadian diaspora, and although they can only offer token payments for now, you can invest in their 
There is an art to creating a “Best of” list, whether that be a “Best of Shakespeare’s Plays” or “Best Singles by Take That.” You are inevitably going to make a lot of people angry. Art and tastes are subjective, and one man’s trash is another person’s treasure. And nowhere is this more true than with horror fiction. Fears are as individual as fingerprints. The film or book that terrify us and make chills run down our spine might make be utterly dull to another. And we horror fans are desperately protective of our best beloveds. I have seen knock-down drag-out fights between fans who can’t agree whether Matthew Stokoe’s Cows is trash or a masterpiece. So creating a volume in which you want to compile the best of modern horror fiction is a bit of a risky endeavour. Fortunately for all of us, Alessandro Manzetti decided to take on the challenge, and he took it on with grace, courage, and a library I can only dream of possessing.
Sometimes an anthology is just a really good excuse to sit with strong and wide-ranging storytelling. Such was certainly the case with The Reinvented Heart, a collection of 24 stories centered on a wide range of emotional bonds, challenges, and opportunities. Across the board, the writing was deft and immersive, the stories were distinct and memorable, and many worked in striking conversation with their neighbours. The organization of this collection into three overarching “movements”—”Hearts,” “Hands,” and “Minds,” each opening with a small but potent bit of poetry by Jane Yolen, and revealing plenty of resonant story placements—also makes for an excellently curated reading experience, best read in the provided order. My only caveat, before I leap into high praise for the pieces themselves, is that I don’t think all of these stories reflect the anthology’s explicit mission statement. Then again, an anthology is often expected to carve out a singular role for itself in the market, and promotional material often makes sweeping claims to bring readers in.
In Trenchcoats, Towers, and Trolls, the third and last in the “Punked Up Fairy Tales” series, which also includes Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline and Clockwork, Curses, and Coal, Rhonda Parrish brings together twelve cyberpunk tales in a collection that is both engrossing and thought-provoking. Edmonton, Alberta-based anthologist and author Parrish is no newcomer to the anthology game: she has edited a number of other themed collections, including one about swashbuckling cats and an “Elemental Anthologies” series.
The latest Galaxy’s Edge is warmly introduced by editor Lezli Robyn, who is excited to share in this issue the winning story for The Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author. In this inaugural year for the award, the prize went to Z.T. Bright, for “The Measure of a Mother’s Love.”
The new novella from British Fantasy Award-nominee Simon Bestwick, out now from Hersham Horror Books, dances between urban fantasy, horror, and social commentary. The story is decidedly British, with British sensibilities and concerns that flavor the narrative throughout its brisk telling. When a story is light on plot, as it is here, success is measured by the story’s execution. Originality. Commentary. A situation that lingers with you long after you’ve finished reading. Devils of London has the pieces to be successful—timeliness, an interesting point-of-view character, high stakes—but ultimately, the execution of the story as a whole falls short of its promise.
NewMyths’s latest issue offers fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an overarching connection to science-fiction and fantasy; and yet, the work ranges widely across traditional genre set-ups.
Twisted Moon is a yearly magazine of speculative erotic poetry based in Australia that has been published online since 2016. Editors Rook, Edda, Duck-Chong and Maris are all also writers (some of whose work we’ve seen and loved elsewhere), and they bring a lover’s touch to the selection and presentation of poems in each issue. The contents are eclectic, as is perhaps inevitable with collections of poetry, and range from delicious, lyrical verses to the most discordant, experimental or opaque of forms, always tantalizing and excruciating and challenging.
Editor Cécile Cristofari opens Reckoning 5 with a call to action shaped by how pandemic has significantly isolated us from nature; we cannot simply rely on nostalgia to deepen our fight against ongoing natural depreciation from climate change and other human-made devastations. Editor Leah Bobet adds, in her following editorial, that the quest for poetry here was shaped by little intimacies, “flecks of possibility” for reconnection with the world around us, in our most personable and fleeting interactions with the rest of nature.