The Privilege of the Happy Ending
By Kij Johnson
Small Beer Press

 

Fantasy writer Kij Johnson has a long list of awards and award nominations to her name, from Nebula and Hugo Awards — two of the premiere prizes for fantasy and science fiction writing — to World Fantasy Awards.

She and her publisher also have a good sense of humor: Her newest collection of work, “The Privilege of the Happy Ending,” includes the subtitle “Small, Medium & Large Stories.” (Many of the pieces have previously been published separately.)

Published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton, “Privilege” indeed offers work of varying length, from vignettes of just a few pages to a novella-length tale, “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,” which won a World Fantasy Award; NPR voted it one of the best books of 2016.

In these strange and speculative stories, Johnson, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Kansas, plays with form and narrative voices in a way that’s designed to raise questions about how much we really know about one another, the past, or the nature of stories themselves.

For instance, in the book’s opening story, “Tool-Using Mimics,” Johnson posts a strange sepia-colored photograph of a young girl who appears to be part octopus; the author then outlines a number of possibilities of how she came to be that way.

One theory: In 1932, a young women finds a soft, egg-shaped orb, with eyes within it, along an Oregon beach and takes it home, where she puts it in a basin of cold, salty water.

From this a creature eventually emerges that has the woman’s “chestnut hair and her smile” along with tentacles, and the “mother” is exiled from her community because “an illegitimate cephalopod daughter is beyond the pale.”

Or is the picture a fake? Or something genuinely real that we can’t recognize because we’ve never seen anything like it and have no reference points for interpreting it?

“What do you know of your own daughter?” Johnson writes. “Only what you think you know. She does her best playing when you are not there.”

In “Butterflies of Eastern Texas,” a train conductor recounts his dull routine of collecting people’s tickets on each trip and seeing the same vistas beyond the windows.

“You have been on this train for a very long time … Your job stays the same. Make sure everyone has a ticket. Make sure everyone gets off the train at the right station. Rules are rules.”

Then into the conductor’s drab world comes a sudden burst of color: a passenger who disgorges butterflies every time she opens her mouth.

The woman doesn’t have a ticket, so the conductor tells her she’ll need to get off at the next station. But as he’s slowly dazzled by the bright butterflies fluttering in the air, one arrives that’s the exact color of the required ticket … and the conductor finds his world transformed.

A more harrowing narrative can be found in the title story, a fairy tale about an orphaned girl named Ada who lives in a thatched-roof cottage with a widow and her three daughters (named Cruelty, Spite and Malice). Ada’s one friend is Blanche, a talking hen.

Blanche is prescient enough to alert Ada to a clutch of monsters, called wastoures, coming through the forest and devouring everything in sight, and to tell her to climb a tree to find safety.

Ada and Blanche survive the attack, but afterwards they wander through a land devastated by death and destruction and eventually face a final reckoning with the wastoures. It’s a tale with an ambiguous ending that, as one reviewer puts it, “poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage.”

A few years ago, Small Beer Press also published Johnson’s “The River Bank,” a sequel to the famous children’s story “The Wind in the Willows,” in which Johnson updated the 1908 book by adding new female characters and dropping old stereotypes surrounding class and gender.

In her new book, Johnson adds an additional chapter to that story, “The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall,” in which some of the beloved characters of the original story such as the Water Rat, the Toad, and the Mole, joined by newcomers Beryl and the Rabbit, must contend with a ghost at Christmas.

As Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Johnson’s keen eye for the mysteries of human nature shines as her characters experience love, loss, growth, and betrayal, all made delightfully strange. These boundary-pushing, magic-infused tales are sure to wow.”

 

OKPsyche
By Anya Johanna DeNiro
Small Beer Press

 

The unnamed narrator of “OKPsyche,” a dreamlike, speculative novel by Anya Johanna DeNiro, lives in or around Minneapolis in a not-too-distant future in which climate change and economic inequality have brought increasing ugliness and violence to the country.

“The street is mostly empty except for surplus-green tents in the greenway and armed guards in front of the luxury towers. The creative class needs tactical teams to protect them from people who are not them.”

But the heart of this short novel, published by Small Beer Press, is about the narrator’s journey as a trans woman, someone who’s trying to come to terms with the pain of her closeted past even as she struggles to find her way in a fragile, uncertain present.

Part of that present is the fallout from the narrator’s transition: Her ex-wife and 11-year-old son, Aaron, now live in another Midwestern state, and the narrator is desperate to reconnect with Aaron, who seems emotionally distant as well.

During a painful call to him via computer, the narrator says “I’m sorry, Aaron. I wish I was there for you more.”

“‘Yeah, well, you’re not,’ he says, the first thing he’s said that doesn’t feel vague or put-upon.”

Narrated in the second person, “OKPsyche” contrasts the often bleak details of the narrator’s day-to-day life with a deep dive into her interior life, including memories of her time as a male and how she came to realize she felt out of place.

“There were portends of your womanhood, sure. Signs that went beyond your own shame that only became achingly clear in retrospect. Like when you’d see a trans woman in a supermarket or a coffee shop and think, without a hint of self-reflection, That can never be me. Their lives must be so hard.”

With elements of magical realism and scenes that could be in the narrator’s head, such as when a Home Depot employee seems to embody her dead father, “OKPsyche,” as one reviewer puts it, is “like a shard of stained glass in brilliant reds and greens and purples … a chronicle of hope and hurt and freedom, suffused with anxiety and grace.”

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.