Lanagan, Margo. Black Juice

This is a book of ten short stories; a few fall explicitly into the categories of fantasy or science fiction, but for the most part, these are stories of very different people, and very different cultures, which might exist in another time, or another place. An execution by slow sinking in tar pits; a ceremony of becoming a "Bride" that is purely ceremonial, for which no groom is necessary; a gang that assassinates clowns. To say much more about these stories is to give too much away. What makes them work is that they read like relics from different places. They explain nothing; they drop you in the middle of a situation and force you to figure things out for yourself, bit by bit. Even by the end of the story, even if you've been paying attention, there remain large dark spots in the narrative of things you don't know and won't be able to puzzle out.

This is entirely appropriate. If anything connects these stories together, it is the idea of the alien and incomprehensible, in humans and their desires and decisions, and in whole cultures as well. It's rare to see science fiction and fantasy that feel as truly foreign as these stories do.

While there were a few places where those dark spots felt a little too wide, and I wasn't able to get my arms around the story at all, these stories all work. The essential is there on the page. And they are all so different, one from the other, that it's possible to read them all in a row and not get tired of the author's habits and descriptive tics and repeated themes; they're all beautifully written, but the voices in each are quite separate, distinctive, even mannered at times.

These are what short stories should be; they say only what is absolutely necessary, but you can feel entire worlds breathing in the background.