At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (edition 2012)

Not sure what I thought of this collection as a whole. Some of the stories were gems -- and I say that even of ones that are dark and shudder-inducing, like Spar -- while others made little impression on me. Kij Johnson's writing seems carefully considered and paced, words doled out in just the right amounts, but it doesn't really shine for me in general. A case of "it's not you, it's me"?

The ones that will stick in my head are Spar (gross, but visceral and intriguing, if that's the right word), 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (I like the structure of it, the mystery of it), and The Man Who Bridged The Mist (slower-paced, with an odd climax, but characters I could get interested in and a world I could wonder about). I also wonder about the Orientalism going on here, though. Johnson seems to feel a connection to Japan and its culture, but I wonder about how deep it goes or whether it just caters to the ~oooh kitsune and manga and Japan oh my~ trend -- knowingly or unknowingly, I'm not ascribing motives. I'd rather read these stories from a Japanese woman. ( )

Sometimes an author needs a collection to redeem them with readers, a second chance to change a bad first impression..

My first experiences with Johnson did not warm me to her. I had read two of the stories here before. One, the award winning “Ponies”, left me unmoved. The other, “At the Mouth of the River of Bees”, I had forgotten all together.

But a successful collection can give an author another chance to make their case, another chance to impress, another chance to make a future customer and reader. And Johnson managed to do that with me.

Johnson’s work, at least here, seems to feature two main themes: the relation of the human with the alien – usually presented in the special case of humans’ relations to animals – and people moving under the force of mysterious compulsions. There is also a minor third theme of the indignities suffered by women throughout history.

There are a lot of animals in these stories: monkeys, foxes, cats and cat-like monsters, horses, bees, wolves, ponies of peculiar composition, and dogs.

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” has one of those characters with a mysterious compulsion – to buy a strange primate act she sees at the Utah State Fair for one dollar. For the next four years, she watches the monkeys vanish during their act, go somewhere else in space and time. There is the mystery of how and why this is done – perhaps under the direction of the oldest, dying monkey. And there is the mystery of why her younger lover stays with her.

“Fox Magic” uses a medieval Japanese setting similar to Johnson’s novels Fudoki and The Fox Woman. It’s a long fairy tale about a female fox who develops a love for a young samurai lord and takes steps to magically bring him into her world. Since I’m not a lover of fairy tales, it didn’t do much for me. However, “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles”, in a similar Japanese setting, charmed me with a story of a young kitten forced to roam the world after her home in Edo burns down after an earthquake.

Three year old Sarah has a cat too, sort of, in “The Bitey Cat”, also one of my favorite stories in the collection. She knows Penny the Bitey Cat is really a monster in disguise, and one not terribly nice to her or anybody else. It’s a nice riff on the theme of the protective imaginary friend or spirit that a young child turns to in traumatic times, here the divorce of Sarah’s parents.

I found “At the River of the River of Bees” a lot more charming and moving the second time I read it – and it wasn’t just the parochial interest of having lived around some of its eastern Montana settings. Its narrator has a compulsion to take her sick dog on a spur of the moment drive east where she eventually encounters the wonderful, punning, literalized abstraction of the River of Bees and feels the need to follow it to its source. It’s a rumination on what we owe our pets.

To me, “Wolf Trapping”, another of my favorite works here, was sort of a look at the pathological side of humans’ love for animals. A wolf researcher doing field research in early winter in the Rockies encounters a disturbed young girl who wants to live like a wolf and is disgusted that she still needs a hatchet to substitute for their teeth.

If animals, especially our pets, are to be seen as sort of aliens that we share the earth with, two other stories can be seen as culminations of Johnson’s use of this theme. “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park” is after the Change which made mammals, including the ones we keep for pets, able to speak. And, while pet owners often claim they wish their pets could speak, the reality turns out to be much different. It was another one of my favorite stories. However, if pets are just domesticated aliens, “Spar” is Johnson’s most startling take on alien encounters in the collection. Forced to take refuge in an alien lifeboat after a starship accident, she finds herself locked in continual sexual contact, with an alien. Raped and raping, violated and satisfied, hers is an existence unredeemed and unbroken by anything like communication. I’m not sure the ending works. I suspect Johnson may be going for something like the “white captive” stories that fascinated 17th and 18th century Americans, tales of women kidnapped and forced to live among Indians and how the ordeal forever altered them.

If so, that wouldn’t be a theme alien to this collection. There is an undercurrent of put-upon women, a recasting of women’s dire fate in history into the future. “My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire – Exposition on the Flows in My Spouse’s Character – The Nature of the Bird – the Possible Causes – Her Final Disposition”, with its witty, 18th Century English diction, tells of a man disapproving of his wife’s spending and sexual appetite. And he’s also clueless that his wife is having an affair with the local vicar. Eventually she escapes her marriage.

Escape is on the mind of the heroine of “The Horse Raiders” too. She has to contend with forces of an empire which kill her nomadic clan and kidnap her because of her knowledge of horses – an animal dying out on the rest of the planet. Her tale of resistance and compromise is reminiscent of conquered women through the ages. Being on the losing end of history and still surviving conquest and rape and the destruction of your civilization is womens’ past and some womens’ future in “Dia Chjerman’s Tale”, a story of endurance and not triumph. And “Ponies” seems a parable about the tendency of women to attack women in their moment of happiness.

There are some odds and ends that don’t fit easily in any of the above categories. “Names for Water” has an engineering student taking strange cell phone calls. It’s an ok story helped along by poetic language, here Johnson’s typical present tense prose. “Schrodinger’s Cathouse”, rather like “Spar”, is a story I’m ultimately not sure worked in providing a satisfying ending or thematic conclusion, but the trip was interesting. Playing on the famous metaphor of quantum indeterminacy, its narrator can’t tell whether the object of his sexual desire is male or female even during their intimate moments. Lust, Johnson seems to say, can be narrowly focused on an individual and not a gender. “Chenting, in the Land of the Dead” is an Oriental fable of a Chinese scholar who decides to die early to be certain of a governorship in the afterlife. It has a twist ending but is nothing special. The titular character of “Empress Jingu Fishes” is a fascinating, semi-mythical figure in Japanese history and said to have conquered Korea. Johnson transforms the story into explicit fantasy by making her a shaman of the gods, one who has the power to clearly see the details of her future life. “The Man Who Bridged the Mists” was another story I found pleasant enough but nothing special except in the relationship between a bridge builder and the ferrywoman he is going to render obsolete. Finally, “Story Kit” was perhaps my very favorite story, a modernistic collage eventually linking writing maxims and techniques, the protagonist’s divorce, and the mythic story of Dido and Aeneas. (And Johnson seems to follow one of the given writing rules in her stories: no adverbs.) It’s a look at the alchemy that can transform a writer’s personal life into a satisfying story.

So, while my conviction that the genre awards science fiction and fantasy readers and writers love have anything to do with real significance or lasting quality, I do have a better appreciation of Johnson, and she will be a name I remember and look forward to in the future. She’s an accomplished stylist of the fantasy story. ( )

single-author anthology, with a wierd and an animal thread tying the stories together - hugely enjoyable. Reminded me of short stories from authors like Catherynne M. Valente , Ted Chiang, and Maureen F. McHugh. Some of the stories have really haunted me, weeks and months after reading them. ( )

Johnson’s first collection of short fiction is by turns whimsical, dark, luminous, and deeply affecting. A few of the stories, like Johnson’s two novels (The Fox Woman and Fudoki) take place in a sort of mythic version of Japan. Many others are notable for their contemporary, recognizable settings—settings whose very reality makes the inevitable turn toward the strange, the mythic, or the outright magical more compelling and powerful. Stand-outs in the collection include the excellent title story; the novella-length The Man Who Bridged the Mist; and the delightfully weird 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss. Those familiar with Johnson’s longer works will find the germs of those two novels here also, in the short stories Fox Magic and The Cat who Walked a Thousand Miles. Though the collection has its weaker stories, overall, this is one of the strongest collections of contemporary magical realist fiction I have encountered in some time. ( )

This is simply an astonishingly good collection, one of the best I’ve read in recent years. In overall quality,I think it’s up there with two of my personal all-time favourites – James Tiptree Jr’s Ten Thousand Light-years From Home, and Roger Zelazny’s The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.

Some of the stories I’d seen before: award nominees (and winners) such as 24 Monkeys …, Spar, Ponies, The Man Who Bridged The Mist and so on, and they were just as good as I’d remembered.

And some of the ones new to me were just as magical – The Horse Raiders, Names For Water, Fox Magic, The Bitey Cat, Dia Chjerman’s Tale all grabbed me and pulled me in in different ways.

This is a fine, fine collection from a writer with a marvellous range and voice. Highly recommended. ( )

This is a beautifully written collection. Each story is very different from the last. What each story has in common is something improbable, impossible or incomprehensible. The reader tries to make sense of it, along with the protagonist. There can be nasty despicable characters who kill, and graphic descriptions of these events. There is magic woven into the fabric of some of these worlds, as well. I am glad to have read this collection of short stories. I don't enjoy detailed descriptions of violence, however the way it was written in this collection was manageable. ( )

In At The Mouth of the River of Bees, Small Beer Press collects Kij Johnson’s deservedly acclaimed short fiction, which has been published in various magazines over the past two decades. I’ve been a big fan of Johnson’s writing for a number of years, so it didn’t at all surprise me that these short stories were so remarkably good. But At The Mouth of the River of Bees made me appreciate her range as a writer in a way I hadn’t before: the eighteen stories collected here are, as Ursula K. Le Guin so well puts it, all “differently excellent”.

There are two things I particularly appreciate about Kij Johnson: the way she writes about gender and the way she writes about animals. The latter is perhaps best illustrated in stories such as “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, “The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change”, “Wolf Trappings”, “The Horse Raiders”, and the story that gives this collection its title (but of course, to say they are only about animals would be incredibly reductive). I have written about the first two stories in the past, and I still stand by everything I said then. These stories are heartbreaking without being one bit sentimental; they’re full of tenderness, but also willing to address the power differential inherent to our relationship with domesticated animals. Johnson writes about this power gap, and the emotional and practical complications that derive from it, better than any other writer I’ve ever encountered. I can hardly describe the effect these stories have on me: they make me want to curl into a tiny little ball and cry for hours, except that sounds like a bad thing and I mean it in the best possible way.

When it comes to gender, Johnson is excellent at addressing troubling power dynamics, the difficulties in communication that result from fixed gender roles, and the many different ways in which women are othered – all with incisiveness, subtlety, and sometimes even with humour. I think these themes work even better in her novels, as there’s more room for them to breath and for their full complexities to emerge, but there’s still much about the stories collected here that’s challenging, smart and insightful. Speaking of Johnson’s novels, there are two stories here, “Fox Magic” and “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles”, that are the germ of her novels The Fox Woman and Fudoki respectively. While I still prefer the novels (which I really can’t recommend highly enough), I very much enjoyed reading these shorter versions.

“My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire” was for me one of the most surprising stories in this collection, as the voice is unlike anything I’d see Johnson do before. The full title (“My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in My Spouse’s Character—the Nature of the Bird—the Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition”) should tell you that it’s written in a mock Victorian style: the narrator, a pompous gentleman with a very high opinion of his own intellect but whose failures of insight are glaringly obvious to the reader, tells us about the passing of his wife and of her return to life in the form of a bird. Here are the two opening paragraphs:

My wife seems returned to me as a solitaire: a great ugly mean-spirited bird; feathered and stubby of physique; with a great bulging beak, a surly mien and an omnipresent squawk. To deny so unnatural a fact would be a comfort; but a sensible man faces difficult truths.

Having accepted so extra-ordinary a change, her new form is unsurprising. She was ever a squat, awkward woman; resentful in nature; recalcitrant as to a wife’s right duties of acknowledging her husband’s sovereignty and holding household to his general betterment; and importunate in her demands regarding that amative act that leads to the wife’s other great labor, the bearing of progeny.

As you can tell, there’s casual misogyny in spades in his narration, but the story goes on to subvert it and at the end of the day the joke’s on him. But what impressed me about this story was the fact that it’s not just a darkly funny tale about a sexist Victorian gentleman whose wife manages to escape his control. I really enjoyed the humour, but the story is ultimately more sad than anything else. What I was saying about Regeneration the other day goes for this story too: it exposes the trappings of a damaging gender ideology in such a way that you end up feeling sorry for everyone involved.

The gorgeous and metafictional “Story Kit” is about a writer trying to cope with the ending of a relationship through her writing, and also about Dido and Aeneas and loss and grief and trying to survive. It’s about the limitations of words; their inadequacy; the fact that they barely scratch the surface of the unspeakable – and yet we keep trying to get them to do more, because sometimes they’re all we have. An excerpt:

Not Medea’s frenzy, not Ariadne’s broken thread. Anna under the train’s wheels. Butterfly holding the wakizashi to her breast. None of the betrayed women, that commonest story of all.
Not even Troy itself and all its deaths: the bitter seige, and ten years from home, Penelope’s tears and the Trojan women’s torn breasts and Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the ruined towers, the blood dried to dust on the golden stones; the anguish of Paris; Aeneas’s pain—even these cannot contain her rage, her loss.
Words fail.

And then there’s “Spar”, which is such a difficult story. I’ve reread it a couple of times ever since it was published at Clarkesworld Magazine, and it surprises me that I keep returning to it even though it makes me so uneasy. But then again, it’s supposed to. The story – about a woman and an alien trapped in a small shuttle having sex, after a collapse in space that killed the woman’s partner and perhaps also someone the alien loved – is claustrophobic in the extreme. A piece of fiction is always about many things, some of them entirely brought in by the reader. I don’t believe in one to one allegorical correspondences between stories and the real world, but when I read “Spar” – with its acute sense of entrapment, and above all its protagonist’s utter inability to communicate; her dawning realisation of just how impossible it is that she’ll be heard – I can’t help but be reminded of the experience of being a woman in certain contexts of this world.

Finally, the Hugo nominated novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is every bit as gorgeous as everyone had told me. It is, most of all, a story about change. Kit Meinem of Atyar comes to a small town at the edge of the Empire he serves to build a bridge across the mist. The river of thick mist, in which terrifying creatures known as the Big Ones move, can only be crossed at certain safe times. Rasali Ferry belongs to a family that has been reading the signs of safety for many generations, and yet even then the Ferrys die young. The novella follows Kit and the townspeople for a number of years as the bridge is built. And if you didn’t think that a story about how a great construction project can irrevocably change a small town could be this moving and full of humanity, you clearly haven’t read Kij Johnson yet.

At one point, we are told how Kit feels about his work:

All public work—drainage schemes, roadwork, amphitheatres, public squares, sewers, alleys and mews—was alchemy. It took the invisible patterns that people made as they lived and turned them into real things, stone and brick and wood and space. Kit built things that moved people through the invisible architecture that was his mind, and his notion—and Empire’s notion—of how their lives could be better.

But of course that the clash between his notion (and Empire’s notion) and people’s notions of how their lives should be shaped creates tension. What I loved the most about “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” was that it never went for the facile. It’s not an “Empire entirely bad, traditional way of life entirely good” type story; but rather a story about the endless complications change brings with it, about the loses and the gains, about the challenges of carving a new space for yourself in a world that will inevitably become a different place, and about how all of these things affect individuals and social groups alike.

These are only a few highlights – as I said, the stories in At The Mouth of the River of Bees are diverse, and they each showcase Johnson’s amazing skills as a writer in a different way. Comparisons are often reductive, and I realise than in reality her writing is entirely different from that of the two authors I’m about to name, but I’d venture to say that if you like Kelly Link or Margo Lanagan’s short fiction, there’s a good chance these stories will appeal to you.

Kij Johnson’s writing is sometimes elegant and graceful; sometimes deliberately raw. These stories range from the human to the frightening to the complicated to the self-referential to the moving, and some even manage to be all these things at the same time. At the Mouth of the River of Bees is an excellent reminder of what short fiction at its best can do.

Some of the stories in this collection are available for free online, so if you want to get a taste of Johnson’s writing, just follow the links. ( )

I found this uneven, but the good parts were good enough to almost make me forgive it.

There seems (to me) to be an unfortunately high percentage of stories that use rape in a less complicated way than I would like. It seems to be used as shorthand to show the strength of women, or the awfulness of men (except for one extremely heavy-handed story).

But! the good stories were achingly good, somewhere between ice-cold water and almost too-sweet honey. I cried three times, and I don't usually cry at books. Two for sorrow, and one for joy.

Excellent dreamy, fantastical shorts

Kij Johnson has won a few awards for her short stories and after reading this book I can see why. Mostly they edge towards the fantastical, spanning a long inventive career. These tales aren't trick ones but are heartfelt, the writings lovely and characters shine through. There are short ones, meta ones, heart breaking and creepy ones, there is romance, whimsy and many journeys, they shift in tone from the delightful innocence to something rather more adult and dance through the fantastical genres with delight. Animals centre quite heavily, but so does finding a home, love and death and acceptance. It is a heady book of people in fantastical situations and though of course mixed, there are enough superb tales to make this a great buy.

My favourites? oh so hard.
The novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” where an architect's bridge changes everything hit me hard emotionally, "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" an eminently disturbing tale of love and murder when pets learn to talk and the amusingly, mysterious tale of magic and monkeys in "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”. I still cried at the end of the “river of bees” even though it’s one of my least favourites.

What's even more brilliant, that to entice you, you can read some of these stories online, links collected here: http://smallbeerpress.com/forthcoming/2012/01/04/at-the-mouth-of-the-river-of-be...

Highly recommend to buy, but you must at least try one the above ( )

Kij Johnson’s short fiction has been making waves lately: she’s won the Nebula three years in a row (“Spar” in 2009, “Ponies” in 2010, and “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” a magnificent novella, earlier this year). These stories are included, among a sample from across her career of more than 20 years, have been assembled in her new collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, out soon from Small Beer Press (it was scheduled to come out later this month but has apparently been delayed to September due to a production error).

What can I say about these stories? They’re unquestionably good: jewels of elegant writing and imagination, works of craft in which every word seems to have been carefully chosen. There are recurrent motifs, to be sure; animals show up again and again. We have stories from ancient Japan where foxes strive to become human and cats tell themselves stories; modern-day uplifted dogs on the cusp of creating a storytelling culture; monkeys who appear out of nowhere; horse thieves on another world. Some of her stories feature absurdly fantastical elements that are not explained, but accepted: the river of bees in the title story are as inexplicable as the mist being bridged, but the story is really about loss, and hits you out of nowhere. That’s the other thing about Johnson’s stories: they pack an emotional punch, and she doesn’t always warn you: oh look, a cute talking animal — pow, right in the gut. ( )

A beautiful collection of short stories. I really enjoyed reading these. The titular story At the Mouth of the River of Bees was just beautiful. I haven't quite finished them all yet because I like to savour each one. It seems like I'm doing the stories an injustice if I read through them all in a rush.

Common themes are journeys, love (and its loss), and remembering the past. Definitely worth picking up. ( )

All of these stories are exquisite. And reading them is like reading razors. You don't even feel the cut, then suddenly you're bleeding.

Very highly recommended. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed the collection of short stories in At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees by Kij Johnson. Standouts were Fox Magic and The Man Who Bridged The Mist. Once the editing is tightened up for publication (spelling/grammar/syntax got a little loose in the last third of the collection), I would have no problem recommending it to friends. ( )

A selection of 18 fantasy/ science fiction stories which mainly feature animals to a greater or lesser degree. There were a few I didn't like but in the main the stories were really enjoyable: several of them I think I'll remember for a long time.

My three favourites were:

'At the Mouth of the River of Bees': a woman travelling with her dog in Montana comes across a police road block - the road ahead is closed due to the River of Bees. Not a normal river in flood as she originally thinks but a river made up of living bees.

'The Man who Bridged the Mist': in an unknown land a bridge builder comes to construct a bridge over the river of mist which separates the two halves of the empire. But not ordinary mist, caustic swirling mist which can rise up and destroy riverside villages, and in which live mysterious creatures which no one has ever properly seem.

'The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change': after the change, an event which is never explained, dogs and other domestic animals are able to talk. But humans become less and less comfortable with the changes that this brings to their relationship with their pets and dogs are abandoned to live as strays. ( )

I found this to be an uneven collection of short stories. I finished it about a week ago, and now trying to write this review it seems only a couple remain in my memory. The title story is one, Wolf Trapping is another. A variety of genres and styles are attempted - magic realism, SF, fantasy - with mixed success. There are a lot of stories here - perhaps omitting a few of the weaker stories would have made the remainder more memorable.
I have found one drawback to an e-reader is that it is very frustrating to go back quickly to check a story to refresh my memory.
There are many errors in this book that could have been caught by careful proofreading. Unfortunately, when a book contains so many careless errors I am distracted from the story, and so the writing goes down in my estimation. ( )

The stories range from slightly offbeat reality to fantasy to outer space sci fi, with most in some way featuring animals/aliens - sometimes more directly than others. Settings vary from Japan to the US to outerspace, from present to future to fantasy otherworld. The 18 stories are anywhere from 4 to 70 pages. As with any story collection, there are stories that didn't work as well - though that could be down to personal taste. For example, 'Schroedinger's Cathouse' was a fantastically clever title, but didn't quite live up to the potential. Editing needs more attention, but hopefully that will be fixed for the printed publication.

The collection is at its best when animals recognise or react to something the humans need or want, or when the people find a special relationship with the animals. Sometimes it is the human searching for companionship, comfort or understanding, sometimes the animal - and sometimes they find what they need in each other. There is a deceptive simplicity to many of the stories, which manage to draw the reader in and, in just a few pages, create a sympathy and/or understanding for the characters - both animal and human.

While not entirely in this vein (though there is exploration of the relationship between the people, the mist, and the inhabitants of the mist), the longest of the stories, 'The Man Who Bridged the Mist,' left me wanting to know more, read more, about Empire, Nearside, Farside, and the river of mist.

Overall, I really enjoyed the worlds she created and the various relationships she explores in those worlds. ( )

A long collection of very varied short stories, some of which are considerably longer than others. Again there is no particular theme to these stories, which are not just varied in topic, but also in writing style. This works better for some stories than others.

It is always difficult to review short story collections without either spoiling some of the stories or else being somewhat vague. Most of the stories worked quite well but there were a couple written in styles that I particularly didn't care for, and one that I skipped through entirely after the first page! None of the endings were that unexpected whic is always a shame, but most of the build-ups were engaging.

The title story which occurs some half way through the book is one of the better ones and highlights the authors style well - take a common feature, and extrapolate a bit of weirdness from it, but populate the story with 'normal' people to explore this. The attempts at more historical victorean era stories don't work so well. The dullness of victorean epci style writting overweighs any charm the plots and characters may have had. Some of the other stories were also somewhat long for their content. Short stories are of course very difficult to balance in this regard, but given that it is almost impossible to create any depth of character in a few pages, I found the shorter ones to work better than the longer stories, None of them really reached the novella length which is different again.

Not really a collection that I'd recommend to anyone other the short story weird SF fans. I didn't feel any of the stories were brilliant, and there were some that I didn't much like at all, one that I skipped through completely after the opening pages. Most were interesting enough, but nothing special.

The epub version of this book was not particularly well edited (although far from the worst I've seen), with several instances of the wrong word/letter being used. ( )

Kij Johnson's collection of short stories 'At the mouth of the river of bees' is engaging and thoughtful. The opening story '26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss' particularly displays the whimsical charm Johnson creates by balancing the everyday and the magical and unexplained. My favourite stories were the ones where Johnson played this balance: '26 Monkeys', 'Names for Water' and 'The Man Who Bridged the Mist' among others. The charm and touch of whimsey is balanced by bleaker moments that show a darker side to Johnson's fiction. These stories are both enjoyable and can challenge. Recommended.