Wendy N. Wagner

Buried secrets only spread. Erin's brother Bryan has been missing for five years. It was as if he simply walked into the forests of the Pacific Northwest and vanished. Determined to uncover the truth, Erin heads to the foothills of Mt. Hood where Bryan was last seen alive. He isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this area, and their cases go unsolved. When she discovers the corpse of a local woman in a creek, Erin unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of very powerful forces from show more this world and beyond, hell-bent on keeping their secrets buried.
Erin, who is a travel reporter comes to the small former mining town of Faraday with four friends...Hari, the podcaster Matt, the tech savvy one, Kaylee, who runs a shelter for endangered woman, and Kaylee’s sister Madison who is going to write an article about Faraday’s charm and eco-tourist-friendly attitude. Madison is really there to investigate the towns recent and old, missing persons cases. She may possibly write a book, but it will diffidently be an episode of her podcast, and to finally find closure for the disappearance of her brother, Bryan. Bryan's case has been ruled as a suicide by the local police but no body has ever been found.

Erin and her party immediately encounter locals some nice, like hiking enthusiast Jared, and river tour guide Dahlia, and not so nice, like the Steadman brothers, and landlord Olivia Vanderpoel, deputy sheriff Duvall, and local mushroom expert Ray. There are a lot of characters to keep up with, but this author manages that task very well. Wendy Wagner has a wonderful knack for imbuing characters with depth. It's almost like watching this story come alive on the "silver-screen". There are LOTS of deaths in this story and each has its own emotional impact, even the ones that occurred before the current events of the book.

The entire mood is well done to make the whole story dark and mysterious. There is also something that I don't believe I have ever encountered in a novel... a pervading sense of claustrophobia. Anyone who has ever been lost in the woods or walking through a cave or a dark house will recognize it right away. Along with that atmosphere is an undercurrent of danger that rolls off of every page. Even the mushrooms in the woods have their own distinct "personalities" and a major role in this story. I have never read anything before or ever thought of a genus even exiting that could be labeled as "fungi-based horror"... but this is a real "spoor story"! Parts of it are vivid, but it is the perfect blend of mystery and real "fungal" horror.

Any fan of unexplained horror will more than likely like Girl in the Creek. Now I have to find more of this author's books. show less

A little while back I was thinking that most of the scifi I've read recently is written by men, and a lot of it contains strains of mysogyny, often so subtle that it seems like the author may not have even realized it was there. This was triggered in particular on a review I saw on here of one of the things on my to read shelf saying it could have been a really interesting exploration of gender in an alien society but the author was unable to get past his own cultural stereotypes to truly show more imagine the culture he was trying to describe. And that's true of a lot of books, and even when the author is trying to be feminist it can come in the form of women making exactly the same arguments about how they're just as good at piloting spaceships, etc. as men, and the thought that women still have to make those same arguments in the 24th century is just so exhaustingly depressing. And a lot of the scifi written by women that I've read lately is of the Handmaid's Tale variety, which is also incredibly depressing. So I started looking for other sorts of science fiction written by women, and when this came out the next day I snatched it up.

I don't generally read Lightspeed Magazine so I have no idea if this is a standard example of their usual quality, but this is a really excellent set of short stories. Not an excellent collection of short stories written by women, an excellent collection full stop. As in, better than many standalone anthologies I've read. As with any collection, some are better than others, but there weren't any clunkers and quite a few gems. I think my favorites were probably Dim Sun, which was sort of scifi magical realism, and A Burglary, Addressed by a Young Lady, a sort of Jane Austen-style story in which all polite young ladies are thieves (I want to see a full book expanding on that one), but there are many other good things in here. show less

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers. Jen is her mother's daughter, a sort of psychic vampire who dines on the bad thoughts of others. Jen's date tonight is Harvey, a man who thinks about murdering and raping her during dinner. He tastes delicious, fills her right up. She stores his vile, black essence in a jar in her refrigerator next to her other seasonings. After Harvey, she can't be satisfied with the normal petty thoughts of her dates. She needs something more.

She finds someone else to show more dine with, someone who is like her. Both of them wanting more than their mothers taught them to have. Both of them wanting to take pleasure in what they do. So she leaves behind her mother with all her jars of ex-lovers, and she leaves behind her best friend who used to remind her of everything good and who now seems like nothing at all.

This story was about mothers and daughters, about wanting and needing and desiring so much more than your mother was allowed to have, and about deciding what's really right for you. It was surprising and creepy and I loved it. show less

If the apocalypse comes, beep me.

This special double issue of Lightspeed magazine is easily one of my all-time favorite science fiction collections – and not just because it was written, edited, and illustrated (etc.) entirely by women (109 women, to be precise, not counting the one thousand ladies+ who submitted stories!). The writing isn’t merely solid, but oftentimes downright spectacular – and at just $3.99, it’s practically a steal.

Many of the short stories are worth the show more purchase price by their very lonesomes. Off the top of my head, there’s “Like Daughter,” by Tananarive Due (a woman gives birth to a clone of herself in order to right the many wrongs done to her in childhood); Maria Romasco Moore’s “The Great Loneliness” (a post-apocalyptic world populated by painfully lonely human-animal-plant hybrids); and Alice Sheldon’s “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” (in which two spiders fall in love, the captor becoming the prey, the son the absent father). Eleanor Arnason’s “Knapsack Poems: A Goxhat Travel Journal” introduces a complicated and exciting vision of sexuality and gender in multiple bodied beings (the titular Goxhats).

While these are reprints, there’s quite a bit of original fiction to savor as well. Seanan McGuire’s “Each to Each” is a true gem (a mermaid Navy!) – it’s one I can see myself returning to time and again in the future – as are “The Case of the Passionless Bees” (a scifi reimagining of Sherlock Holmes by Rhonda Eikamp) and K.C. Norton’s “Canth” (a perpetual motion submarine powered by the heart of the Captain’s mother seemingly runs away from its owner/daughter). And Amal El-Mohtar’s “The Lonely Sea in the Sky” is heartbreakingly beautiful. Diamonds from the planet Triton “blink” towards one another – a talent humans rapidly learn to exploit for teleportation, spawning the rise of Meisner Syndrome and the Melee Liberation Front (“Friends of Lucy”).

Though I’m not as much as fan of flash fiction, a number of these stories managed to grab my imagination and pull on ye old heartstrings. “The Hymn of the Ordeal” (“How else do you see the stars, but to join the war?”); “The Sewell Home” (an old folk’s home for “timeslingers”); and “Ro-Sham-Bot” (about a faulty chore bot endowed with a “pesky” personality) are all worth a read or two or three.

Along with the reprints, original short stories, and flash fiction, there’s also an excerpt from Jane Lindskold’s recently published novel, Artemis Awakening (which I skipped seeing as the ARC is in my to-read pile), as well as author spotlights, nonfiction (including artist galleries and a roundtable talk with Ursula K. Le Guin, Pat Cadigan, Ellen Datlow, and Nancy Kress), and a plethora of personal essays, written for the project’s Kickstarter fundraiser. It wasn’t my plan to read the nonfiction – I’m just not into NF as of late – but much to my surprise, I plowed through it all. The personal essays are a little more hit or miss than the short stories, but overall I was engaged, excited, nodding my head in vociferous agreement.

I jumped at this collection the second I saw Maureen McHugh’s name in the blurb. I’m 99.9% sure that I’ve read everything she’s published – usually in multiple formats – but I can always wish for more, right? As it turns out, hers is a reprint of “The Cost to Be Wise” (which went on to become the opening chapters of Mission Child, a book I cannot recommend highly enough), leaving me bummed but not surprised. (I still read it anyway, for the cagillionth time!) I was however both shocked and delighted to find an interview of McHugh (by Jude Griffin) in the Author Spotlight section – and she hopes to start a new novel soon. (Yay!) So it wasn’t a total wash on the McHugh front.

5/5 stars. Most of the stories found here are amazing and stand on their own. There are very few “duds” to be found, and even these fall in the 3- to 4-star range. (It’s relative, yo.) 490 pages of grade-A, woman-made science fiction for just $3.99 – what are you waiting for? You need this magazine!

(No, I don’t work for Lightspeed. I’m just crazy excited about this project, okay! Destroy ALL the genres!)

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/07/09/lightspeed-magazine-june-2014/ show less