Gifts for the One Who Comes After
By Helen Marshall
Published by ChiZine – 16th September 2014
ISBN 1771483024 – 270 Pages – Paperback
Source: NetGalley
CONTENTS:
– The Hanging Game
– Secondhand Magic
– I’m the Lady of Good Times, She Said
– Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects
– All My Love, a Fishhook
– In the Year of Omens
– The Santa Claus Parade
– The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass
– Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta
– Crossroads and Gateways
– Ship House
– A Brief History of Science Fiction
– Supply Limited, Act Now
– We Ruin the Sky
– In the Moonlight, the Skin of You
– The Gallery of the Eliminated
– The Slipway Grey
The disturbing cover of Marshall’s second collection and its feature on i09.com made me eagerly seek this out and I quickly found that it was exactly the type of short fiction that I most enjoy, well written with a distinct shade of darkness. To call her stories dark and unsettling is accurate, but the supernatural and horrific elements of these stories provide an enshrouding tone for the basic character exploration beneath. By delving into a reality of human emotions rather than a focus on the odd aspects Marshall makes her stories graceful and stirring like the similar use of darkness by writers like Neil Gaiman, Karen Russell, or Shirley Jackson.
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There isn’t a single story in this collection that I didn’t enjoy and I now will have to go back and read her first collection from ChiZine, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which I expect should be equally as sublime and haunting as this. The stories making up Gifts for the One Who Comes After are mostly unified by character explorations around the theme of family: couples, parents, children. The frequent presence of children gives some of the stories an additional chill because of that sense (correct or not) revolving around the ‘innocence’ of childhood.
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The opening story “The Hanging Game” is one of my favorites in the collection, and it perfectly introduces the major theme of
Gifts for the One Who Comes After. In this story, children play a grim and treacherous game that has passed down through the generations in their community, a twisted tradition of ritual. “The Hanging Game”
was originally published at Tor.com, so I’d encourage you to go read it there for a great sense of what the rest of this collection is like.
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Disclaimer: I received a free advanced reading copy of this from ChiZine Publications via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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