A Son of the Rock

Luna Press, 2018, 139 p.

This is a collection of short stories with leanings towards fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m not sure why the ligature st and the one for ct which I cannot reproduce here have been employed on the front and back covers of this, unless it’s to hint at a certain strangeness within. Then there’s the determinedly lower case of the title and author’s name. A statement of some sort.

Orange Dogs is set in a prone-to-flood, global-warmed, environmentally degraded University city where the books have all gone, as has most technology. A man whose wife is on the point of giving birth (again) is haunted by the miscarried child he had to dispose of a year or so earlier. The Orange Dogs of the title are symbols of the end-times; huge swallowtail butterflies. (Their colours are actually yellow-brown with large blue spots.)

Little Red Drops plays with allusions to Little Red Riding Hood in its tale of a woman escaping to the Andalusian wilds to banish the memories of a faithless lover by using the ancient lore of blood for blood.

Told in sections titled 0001 to 0016 Black Isle tells how the engineered species designed by XenoLab, the company our narrator works for, are succumbing to a stranger disease. It evokes the landscape of the Beauly Firth very well.

Stones are a possible portal to other worlds from one where an exaggerated Iron Lady presides over a Great Britain divorced from external alliances and even from trade with the outside world. Narrator Raven belongs to a family who operate the Eye, a camera obscura surveilling the mining town of four vast Pit Heads extracting quartz, coal, ether.

In the less than two page long Love (Ghost) Story the narrator cannot shake off images of her dead lover to whom nothing can compare.

The Ravisher, The Thief sees a young woman called to render her language knowledge in service to her community. She – as do others of the priestly caste – has a mental link to a bird of prey.

Prefixed by Captain Oates’s supposed last words, Frozen Planet reframes Scott’s Antarctic Expedition as a blighted exploration of an alien planet – with added howling creature and either a hallucination or a portal to another world.

Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur tells of how two kinds of vessel appeared in the sky over a central European city on April 5^th 1561, and burned the churches before vanishing again.

Kingfisher has echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper in its tracking of the relationship of a married woman with her husband in a world where birds have disappeared.

A Place for Wild Beasts. A woman is plagued by a deer devouring the plants in her city garden.

Pedant’s corner:- “a flock of geese” (this was ‘in the leaden sky’. It’s a skein of geese, then, [and on the ground it would be a ‘gaggle’,]) “the island formerly known as England” (global warming must have been really profound in order to make England an island,) lightening (lightning, twice spelt as such elsewhere.) “She cleaned the steam off the window” (not steam; condensation. Steam (or water vapour when it’s below 100 ^oC) is an invisible gas – though people do refer to the drops of water it forms when it condenses as ‘steam’,) drunk (drank,) “Black Isle” (x 10 or so; the area as always been known as ‘the Black Isle’, never just ‘Black Isle’,) “Bauly Firth” (x 6; Beauly Firth,) insects-eaters (insect eaters.) “There seems to be two main types” (There seem to be two.) Robins have a drop of God’s blood in its veins” (in their veins,) “what looks like different kinds” (what look like different kinds,) “outside of” (x 3, just ‘outside’; no ‘of’,) “a experimental dose” (an experimental dose,) “if what her stupid uncle thought she needed was a babysitter” (doesn’t require the ‘was’,) “oblivious of” (it’s ‘oblivious to’,) “imping the feathers’ of a hawk’s tale” (no need for an apostrophe at the end of ‘feathers’,) a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, “the prophesy” (prophecy,) “When the tall was made” (when the toll was made,) “save two: to wit : Goodwife Anna….” (save two, to wit: Goodwife Anna.) “What would he have made of it, I wonder.” (That is a question, so requires a question mark at the end.) “It was tuna season and each bar offered their personal take on how to prepare it” (each bar offered its personal take,) “how comforting was to fall into” (comforting it was to,) “was like a taking a draught” (no need for that first ‘a’,) “everyone seem to have difficult pregnancies” (seemed to have,) “they would let themselves been touched” (be touched,) “marinated in soy source” (sauce.) “I looked a Jonas” (at Jonas.) “I fell a moment of void there” (I felt a moment.) “I had never knew what to do with it” (either; ‘I never knew’, or, ‘I had never known’.) “I had taken a plastic bag to use it as a glove” (to use as a glove,) “although there were not fluff” (although they were not,) “but they seem to accumulate” (seemed to,) “when I notice a stain” (noticed,) “that reminded me to the liquid” (of the liquid,) “sat in the sofa” (on the sofa.) “I did not want any doctor too look” (to look,) “the dinning room” (dining room.) “I had tided them up” (tidied,) “they were not native to the local fauna” (???? ‘They were not native fauna’ is less unnatural.) “If she was going to learn something in the next few days, was the systematic way..” (in the next few days, it was.)