Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

Mothers & Other Monsters is domesticity redone through a science-fiction lens. McHugh runs to recurrent themes like a sore tooth: troubled adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, middle-aged women forced to care for someone ravaged by Alzheimer's. Fear, and love, and the ideals that people always fail to live up. She has some talent as a writer, except that she really struggles with endings. Her stories don't end, so much as close with a quick-jab to the solar plexus, a gasp of realization that it always was going to be that way, that everyone is trapped by their history.

As a reader who loves both speculative fiction and literary fiction, it's a special pleasure for me when I find a writer whose work sits squarely on the boundary between those camps. Maureen F. McHugh is emphatically one of those rare writers. Her stories posit some imaginative science-fiction or fantasy ideas, but they are also focused with razor sharpness on the human consequences of those ideas. Her characters are drawn with the grace and delicate precision of a fine artist, and they are always completely real and believable.

Some notes on a few of the stories in this book:

Both of the first two stories -- "Ancestor Money" and "In the Air" -- are quirky and unique takes on the notion of ghosts. Both are warm, gentle stories filled with show more humanity and a sense of love for their characters, and both are a delight.

"Laika Comes Back Safe" is an utterly heartbreaking story of a girl growing up in love with a boy who's a werewolf. Yes, this sounds like it could be the worst treacle, pilfered from the best-seller list of a few years back, but it isn't. It's a hard-edged, totally grown-up story in which the tragic unfairness of being born to a life as a werewolf is paralleled by the equally tragic and hopeless fate of being born to poverty and squalor.

"Presence" chronicles the life and thoughts of a wife shepherding her husband through an experimental treatment for Alzheimer's -- a cure that arguably isn't really a cure at all. One might think that Alzheimer's is a subject that's been done to brain-death, but this story manages to bring it to horrific new life. It does this not so much through its science-fictional elements as through its relentless honesty and precise detail. It's a story that you'll find yourself wanting to escape from, but that honesty and realism will keep you trapped.

"Nekropolis" may be my favorite story in this collection, though it's tough to make a choice. With exquisite grace and delicacy, it draws a future world that's frightening and yet utterly familiar and believable. And in this world are placed characters who have the painfully genuine humanity that's typical of all of the characters in this book. I see that McHugh has expanded this novelette-length story into a full novel, but it's hard for me to imagine that the longer version could equal the jewel-like perfection of this story.

Highly (in case you haven't noticed) recommended. show less

I'm a fan of short stories, and I loved China Mountain Zhang, so I pounced on this anthology, and bumped it straight to the top of my to-read list! The title really intrigued me, too. Some of the pieces felt more like sketches than stories; a sort of open-ended unfinishedness, rather than an open-ended end, if that makes sense, and I found that I needed to punctuate the stories with pauses in my reading, to stop them bleeding one into the other. Oh, but the stories - the ideas and the words and the cold creeping realisations that some of them spin.

Some come very close to home - technological and social developments that might be just a page or two ahead of where we are now - treatments for Alzheimer's and tech to reassure teenagers' show more parents, in stories cutting right to the heart of the big questions - who are we? what is trust? love? self? 'What is self' is one of those questions that I love to read around, so stories like 'Nekropolis' and 'Frankenstein's Daughter' were always going to be a hit with me, and McHugh's concentration on the day to day, the detail, the small moments that together form everything, and the deft craft of her writing were indeed a real treat. 'Laika Comes Back Safe ' may be one of my favourite ever werewolf stories.

(free ebook from http://smallbeerpress.com/creative-commons/) show less

Captivating!

I was first introduced to Maureen McHugh’s work through After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011). I just so happened to spot a review of it online – just where that was escapes me now, sadly (reading recommendations, got any?) – and, in search of new post-apocalyptic fiction (bonus points for zombies!), I snapped it up immediately. After devouring it in all of a week, I quickly tore through her novels: Nekropolis (2002), China Mountain Zhang (1997), Half the Day is Night (1996), and the epic masterpiece Mission Child (1999), which I cannot recommend highly enough. It seems only fitting that I finish off her oeuvre with Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2006), her first of two collections of short stories.

What with its show more cast of werewolves, clones, ghosts, space travelers, and genetically rejuvenated elders, Mothers & Other Monsters is an eclectic mix of fantasy and science fiction. As the title implies, motherhood is a common theme throughout – but the women featured in these stories are anything but monstrous. Herself a stepmother to a preteen boy, McHugh – whose life plans reportedly didn’t include children, at least not until Adam’s father entered the picture – regards the relationships between parents and children and generations past and present with tenderness and empathy.

Here you’ll meet a mother struggling to care for her aging mother while simultaneously guiding her rebellious daughter through her teenage years (“Oversight”); a woman who spends her life savings on an experimental Alzheimer’s treatment, hoping that it will cure her husband without erasing too much of who he is – or was, before the disease stole him from her (“Presence”); a young woman who discovers that her best friend is a werewolf (“Laika Comes Back Safe”); and a ghost who travels from her cozy corner of the afterlife to accept tribute from a distant relation (“Ancestor Money”). Aging, death, and senility are also elements shared by many of the stories – Alzheimer’s and “senility” make two appearances each – as are our all-too human struggles to overcome and defeat them (see, e.g., the thought-provoking “Interview: On Any Given Day”). It makes for a rather heartbreaking, sometimes inspiring collection – one that will dwell in your memory and heart, perhaps even staking a permanent claim there.

While it’s hard to single out any one story for special praise, it’s worth noting that Mothers & Other Monsters contains early version of two of McHugh’s novels: Mission Child (“The Cost to Be Wise”) and Nekropolis (“Nekropolis”). Each story encompasses the opening chapters of its respective book: whereas the plot of “The Cost to Be Wise” is similar to – but also significantly different from – Mission Child, that of “Nekropolis” is very nearly the same in both formats (at least judging from memory – some parts of the narration may be different, but the overall story matches up). “Nekropolis” the short story ends on a note that’s simultaneously more and less hopeful than Nekropolis the novel; “The Cost to Be Wise,” on the other hand, is much more damning in its view of the Offworlders than is Mission Child. It’s an interesting contrast, to say the least.

“The Lincoln Train” is another personal favorite. A piece of speculative fiction that explores how the Civil War might have played out had the assassination attempt on Lincoln failed, it made a previous appearance in New Skies: An Anthology of Today’s Science Fiction (2003). Mothers & Other Monsters also includes a “Reading Group Guide” with an author interview, talking points, and an autobiographical essay written by McHugh, fittingly titled “The Evil Stepmother” (though the latter feels like a bit of a cheat, since some of the sections are repeated verbatim elsewhere in the book – i.e., “Eight-Legged Story”). Readers would do well not to skip these, as they provide valuable insight into McHugh’s stories.

Fans of McHugh will adore Mothers & Other Monsters – and, if you’re not already one, Mothers & Other Monsters will make a fan out of you!

At the time of this writing, Small Beer Press is offering a free download of Mothers & Other Monsters on its website. Go to the book's page and click on the "free download" link!

http://www.easyvegan.info/2012/06/25/mothers-and-other-monsters-by-maureen-mchug... show less

I picked it up because of the title. I brought it home because of the blurbs on the cover from Ursula K. Le Guin & Mary Doria Russell. I was not disappointed. Taut, concise short fiction with a delightfully odd imaginative twist. The stories are strikingly different from one another and all are as tight as a drumhead. There's a bit of alternate history, a bit of scifi, some straight fiction- all of it nicely plotted and interestingly told.

Did I pick it for the title? Yes, or at least that was a bonus. Interesting and mildly unsettling collection. They do read like the stories of someone who wants to write novels, and I'll happily try the novels.

I've wondered if the McHughs characters seem so real because they're often so depressed. This was a free electronic book that I read on a touch. Many of the stories were meditations on motherhood or caretaking, one was a precursor to Nekropolis. It wasn't all her best stuff, but an interesting collection.