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Feraltales
Conversation Pieces #91
by Couri Johnson
Aqueduct Press, $12.00, 114pp
Published: June 2024

Here's another 'Conversation Pieces' volume from Aqueduct Press, the ninety-first in that series by multiple hands. That means that it's nominally feminist science fiction but I'd say that this one is more fantasy in nature, a collection of five substantial stories that explore the notion that "not all women are sweet and docile princesses". In other words, it's anti-Disney and there aren't too many taglines that would sucker me in more than that one does.

Couri Johnson doesn't approach each of these five stories in the same way, but three of them feel like dark fairy tales, not just in their setup but in how they evolve through unusual rules which are then not followed, leading to generally bloody consequences. Each of them feels like it could have been written for children but not here and not now. Like I said, this isn't close to Disney's take on classic fairy tales; it's more like the source stories written on the continent over a century earlier but told with a more modern voice.

The first is called 'The Foxes's Child' and it opens up proceedings in deceptively light fashion. This is polite Victorian fantasy about a king who wants an heir and leaves his wife for a year to give her an opportunity to figure out how to do that. That doesn't sound remotely appropriate for children but it's how Johnson approaches it. Of course, there are plenty of rules and lots of choices and the king is impatient and ignores them all and, well, that doesn't go anywhere near as swimmingly as he might have hoped, what with being king and all. After all, whatever these five stories are going to be about, they're not going to be about old white guys getting their way.

The second arrives a little later after what feels like a blisteringly adult story in comparison, so it's the third in the book, 'Animal Heart' by name. This is probably my favourite story in the book, with its gloriously matter-of-fact opening. An unnamed young lady finds herself sold by an older sister into marriage, only to be stolen on the way by a man without a heart, so she's stuck in a barn with a griffin with her sisters and future brothers-in-law turned to stone and stored as statues around her. And, if you think I just outlined the entire story, I should point out that that's merely the first two paragraphs. There's a long way to go from there.

The third is 'Run, Rabbit, Run', which pits a pair of sisters, Haretongue and Rabbitpaw, against the sea hag who lives in the forest near their father's trailer. That's a perfect example of how Johnson mixes the old and the new: girls with names the most stoned hippies wouldn't land their children with are undeniably old school, as of course are forests and sea hags, but their story starts out in the most banal modern location possible, a trailer home. Haretongue forges a contract with this particular sea hag and that means rules and consequences and inevitabilities. It doesn't remotely go where I thought it would, which is never a bad thing when channelling something so traditional that we think we know it all backwards before we start reading.

I liked all three of these and, as I mentioned, 'Animal Heart' is likely my favourite story of the five, but 'Dancing Girls' just won't leave me be. It's the second story in the book, that blisteringly adult story I mentioned, but that's not because it's pornographic. It's just blatantly modern, set in and around an apartment block in a town rather than a forest in a kingdom. The characters use drugs and swear and sleep around and everything revolves around the Twelve, a group of outstandingly desirable young ladies who live in the same block.

It's a cautionary tale told by a young lady about her brother, Jerome, who goes by Stargazer and falls for one of the Twelve. What follows is delightfully weird and feels like it ought to be rooted in the supernatural but may just be metaphor. It could well be the simplest story of the five on offer but it resonates like it's the most complex and timeless. It felt a little jarring to me, after such an overtly loose opener in 'The Foxes' Child', but I kept thinking about it as I read through the other stories and it's the one that I'm still thinking about the most.

I mentioned that these are substantial stories, hence there only being five of them. Every one of the Conversation Pieces books that I've read and reviewed has been relatively short, novella sort of length whether it's an actual novella, a collection of short stories or a set of poems. However, I don't recall any of those collections filling its page count with as few as five stories. These are all twenty or thirty page stories, giving Johnson a chance to get a lot deeper than eight or ten pages would give her. However, the final story is under twenty and feels shorter.

It's 'A Witch Flew Over the Moon' and it's the shortest and, to my thinking, the weakest of the five, but it's not without its charms, involving, as it does, a witch and a prince on a plane. If a trailer on the edge of a forest is a banal modern setting, then what's a plane in mid-flight? I can't think of a lot of settings less likely to show up in a fairy tale. It's telling, perhaps, that I can remember each of the other four stories pretty well even three weeks after reading this book, but not this one. It serves as an ending and little more.

Beyond liking Johnson's subversive updating of fairy tale logic to a modern world in which women aren't subservient possessions, I found this volume another refreshingly different entry in what I already considered a refreshingly different series. Aqueduct Press keep sending these books over for review and I'm more than happy to keep reviewing them, but I've read enough now to see this series as an admirably diverse whole rather than just a succession of admirably diverse books that nominally count as feminist science fiction. It's still feminist, sure, but it's increasingly not science fiction, the most recent two being mythology and fairy tale. I wonder what's up next. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in Conversation Pieces click here

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