Filip Magnus Writes

How can a story about peeling faces off be so damnably sexy? And it’s disturbing from the on-set, this piece, you can just tell: some of Louie’s comments make you unease every time her personality, her appetites, bleed through the third-person limited narrative the story is told in. There’s the stench of the supernatural, in some undefined way: what Louie does would be impossible otherwise. But…

There’s something about innocence lost here, I think, as Fowley tells a story about two prepubescent girls as they . Jenny is attracted to her best friend, Cate, who is playing hard to get at the expense of a local boy but eventually kisses him. Some excellent double meaning in the aftermath, when Cate asks Jenny if she’s jealous (meaning about not getting to kiss a boy). When Jenny eventually…

Gods, but this story reads as culty. And to be fair, it is. Real discomfort like sharp nails leaving bloody gashes all over. Seven women sing the sun to wakefulness each dawn; at night, one or two of them warm the bed of the man who took them to the edge of the world, off the mainland, so that they might do their hellish duty. His presence chokes the lives of these women, and makes me so angry on…

This is almost a different take on the wormhole idea that plays some small part in “If We Cannot Go At The Speed of Light“. A Tunnel has been discovered nearby Mars, and humanity must uncover what’s on the other side. But how to do so when to pass through it is to be transformed entirely by the various forces at work within the Tunnel? The answer is one Donna Haraway would no doubt approve of:…

A story with an absolutely killer name, this one, and to be found about two-thirds of the way through Moira Fowley’s Eyes Guts Throat Bones. The framing of it, as the script to a play, and with some small amount of stage directions, makes of this something I would actually enjoy seeing set on stage. A single act play, though short, might be made into something phenomenally fun in the hands of a…

This is one of those short stories with such depth and possessed by ideas dense enough they would be at home in a novel. Written in an epistolary form–a letter from a run-away to a friend left behind at home–“Pilgrims” is a matrioshka doll, within which the reader will find no less than three narrative layers: of narrator Daisy, the letter’s writer; of Olive, one of the founders of Daisy and…

I suspect that perhaps Moira Fowley’s “Rath” is referring, extending, or even retelling an existent Celtic myth but my knowledge of that legendarium is sadly lacking and so I can’t quite connect it to anything. On its own two feet, however, this piece is a remarkable one. It recounts the yearly midsummer pilgrimages of two Irish girls (later, women) onto a rath constructed from lumber, now…

What if we could scan the human brain with such accuracy as to be able to create a snapshot of the individual within? One that we might then be able to interact with, to turn to whenever we need guidance? But that would open a whole can of worms, wouldn’t it? Are the Minds identical to the people who have died? Or are they only simulacra, exact in their knowledge and responses, but without…

In a collection defined by the lyrical quality of its language, it is a joy to encounter a story like this, written so firmly tongue-in-cheek. “The Summoning” begins as follows So say. Just for instance. Somebody. Not Katie. Had like. Summoned an interdimensional demon from some kind of hell-world. And like. Unleashed it on earth. (Definitely not Kathie.) That would be. Like. Not entirely the…

This short story delivers exactly what the title promises: emotions in material form. Stones which, when held, produce in the holder the emotion on the cover. The narrative, told from the perspective of a magazine editor, tracks the sociological effects on South Korean society as these curios appear, grow to take the influence by storm, and are finally made illegal by the government following…

Love and longing dominate Fowley’s “Only Corpses Stay,” a story set in a post-apocalyptic hellscape where children are made into patrol soldiers for no good reason, gutted in the wastes between a handful of outposts in a state of disrepair. June is the model soldier. Well-liked, respected, a successful commander of children, formerly a child soldier herself. Defined by tragedy, like everyone…

This is a narrative about how technology can leave behind even its pioneers, but it’s also about the intractability of the human spirit. Aboard a decrepit space station overdue for disassembly, a corporate employee is tasked with removing an old woman who has been squatting for a very long time. The two strike up a conversation that weaves a fascinating history of humanity’s spacefaring days;…

Oh, look, it’s another absolutely fucked up admixture of body and psychological horror short by Moira Fowley! In this one, an expectant mother is growing inside her a thing of monstrous appetites. An explicit comparison with a kind of spider that carries wasp eggs on its back defines her relationship with the creature within. Yes, it is as gross as it sounds. Don’t believe me? Read on: The wasp…

I’m quite in awe of this piece, the second story in Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light. What at first reads as your run-of-the-mill first contact story of a researcher crash-landed on an alien world, to eventually be taken under the locals’ wing, turns wildly imaginative. “Spectrum” recollects a few of Heejin’s experiences across the ten years she spends around the Loueys–a…

The first story in Moira Fowley’s anthology, “What Would You Give for a Threat Like Me” sends us to the end of the world, another unknowable apocalypse known only by what it does to people. Like all good apocalypses, this one eats people, too, but in such disquieting, transformative ways. This story is told in the second person, from the perspective of one lover observing another. The narrator…

Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go At the Speed of Light opens with “Symbiosis Theory,” a dual narrative which picks up with the artistic, solitary life of Ludmilla Markov. She creates Ludmilla’s World – an interconnected universe of artistic works that takes the collective imagination by storm. Following Ludmilla’s death, something even more peculiar happens: a telescope uncovers a world in the great…

Fey, and Arcadia, and the grammar of things are at the core of Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots. The threads that connect them all are the roots that bind two sisters together. Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne tend to the enchanted willows that feed off The River Liss, whose waters travel freely between mortal lands and Arcadia. The shadow of an uncertain future falls over the older Esther and…