"Peppercorn Rent" by Roberta Rogow (Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre)
Honest, I'll go back to Cheever soon enough
This one is a cute one. It is so cute in fact that the author told me that she didn't like the anthology and I can totally see why. Roberta is a filk singer, a Sherlock Holmes fan fiction writer and a children's author. Also a children's librarian.
I can see why she did not appreciate seeing her story after a story about The Big Bad Wolf killing himself in a vomit filled apartment because Little Red Riding Hood is having an orgy with the three little pigs (and before a story about mutant rats). Seriously the more stories I read in this anthology, the more I wonder why I bought so many stories about hopeless losers living in filth? Granted, at this point I wrote my first novel-length manuscript where the main characters are named Dogshit and Trash and Dogshit leaves Trash asleep in a pile of dirty diapers in the alleyway in the opening chapter (I would have to become much much more famous for it to ever see the light of day. The best I can say about it is that I learned a lot. Also "Let's Live Suddenly Without THinking" is a great title. Yeah I did steal it from e.e.cummings)
And the main reason why this one is in this anthology is because I lost the rights to a story about a guy who could paint people's souls to the point that they lose the most vital part of themselves (causing a suicide before he's killed.) My (ex-)friend wrote it and since he presented femail at the time I figured that I needed another woman written story for balance. So I reached out to Roberta as a friend of a friend (aunt of an ex-girlfriend to be exact) and here we are.
This might be the first time I re-read the story since I published this anthology (this is true for a lot of these stories. By the time I finally put out the book I didn't even want to look at it again. Especially when I had to fix the typos twice (like I went through and fixed all the typos I could find. Then found dozens more. It's still full of typos. Pro-tip, running a spell check and grammar check is NOT copyediting).
I appreciate this story a lot more. I didn't know about the convention of peppercorn rent as a British thing and the main character is obviously a werewolf. The main thrust of the story is the fact that the peppercorn rent is that the daughter of the house needs to spend the night with the lord and since Ms. Lupine (get it?) is renting a very cheap upper room, she wants to make certain that it gets paid.
Meanwhile the new lord wants to sell the land in order to put a burger chain store on it. The rest of the story is a comedy of errors as the lord continually tries to run away from the protagonist and they keep ending up stuck in restaurants and punk clubs. And jail.
Also she's a werewolf.
One part that I might have been less enamored with when I published but I rather enjoy now is the "doesn't quite get the current times" part. I think I learned to appreciate this in the works of other authors and artists. The club is too loud and the band fronted by a singer who calls himself Lime Green Jello is a little broad - not as broad as the punk rock episode of Quincy, but definitely silly enough to forgive the fact that one doubts that the author has ever been in a punk club. Also Lime Green Jello is the CEO of the burger franchises? That's a bit of a stretch. LIke CEOs are usually too busy figuring out ways to screw their workers and not pay taxes to have a side gig fronting a punk band, but ok, we'll go with it here.
Overall, this is a silly story with decent characters and enjoyable plot contrivance.
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