I use Audible Originals as a sort of lucky dip to try out authors and stories that aren’t in my normal range of choices. I admire Amazon/Audible for commissioning short fiction from established and emerging writers and producing it to a high standard. Often, the six or seven pieces of short fiction around a common theme are commissioned from different authors and assembled as ‘Collections’ where each story can be read or listened to in a single sitting.
This month, I dipped into two Collections:
- ‘Warmer‘: a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening.
- ‘Into Shadow‘: an enthralling collection of dark fantasy stories about the lure of forbidden knowledge
The two stories were quite different in tone, style and content but they were both engaging and original and had excellent narrators.
‘There’s No Place Like Home’ (2018) – WarmerCollection #4 by Edan Lepucki, narrated by Lauren Enzo. Length 1 hours 16 minutes.
What I liked most about ‘There’s No Place Like Home‘ was the focus on the way thirteen-year-old Vic’s perception of her situation and her relationships changed over the course of the story. The story is set in a near future America where climate change has made large portions of the USA uninhabitable and where Vic’s generation, born after the major changes hit, are, for reasons unknown, perpetually stuck in prepubescence. There are lots of intriguing details about climate change and its effects on daily life but I liked that while these details provided an essential context for the story, they weren’t allowed to dominate it.
The heart of the story lay in Vic’s reassessment of her relationship with her parents. Initially, Vic comes across as a Daddy’s Girl. He has been her teacher and her friend and was the person that she most loved and admired. Until, in the early pages of the story, he kills himself.
Vic needs to understand why he did this. She needs to grieve. She needs to rebuild her relationship with her mother. Most of all, she needs to find a way to earn enough money to get herself and her mother out of the financial hole her father’s death has left them in.
As the story progresses, Vic comes to realise how poorly her father had been coping with the reality of the world that she has grown up in.
He was an educated man who was constantly mourning the loss of the world as it used to be, forecasting the inevitable doom of the human race and disparaging the unprincipled things that people were doing to survive.
It takes Vic a while to see that this worldview was a sign of weakness rather than wisdom. Vic looks at her world as it is, acknowledges the discomforts and the personal challenges but still sees beauty in the world and has a desire to go on living.
By the end of the story, Vic has accepted three things: by committing suicide, the power of her father’s voice in her head has been nullified; her mother is and always has been, the stronger parent and Vic’s future, such as it is, is hers to build.
‘There’s No Place Like Home’ took me a little over an hour to listen to but, in that time, I got to see a plausible near-future and got to meet the women who were finding a way to cope with it. To me, that felt like time well spent.
‘The Six Deaths Of The Saint’ (2022) Into Shadow Collection #3 by Alix E. Harrow, narrated by Saskia Maarleveld. Length 51 minutes
‘The Six Deaths Of The Saint‘ was the second story that I’ve read from the Into Shadow Collection. The first, ‘Undercover’ by Tamsyn Muir, set a high bar for quality, so I went into this story with high expectations.
The story is told in a distinctive style that speaks to fable and fantasy while putting the reader on notice from the first line, that not everything is as it seems here.
The story opens with:
“You were a child the first time the Saint Of War came to you.
You had fallen ill again in the tiresome and inevitable way of the underfed, and the steward had sent you out to the barn so the Lord and Lady might not be disturbed by your fevered morning. You weren’t missed; you were one of a dozen fatherless, half-feral children that squabbled and starved in the shadow of the keep. “
This form of storytelling may not be to everyone’s taste but it worked for me. I wanted to know who the ‘You’ was and who the speaker was and how many more times the Saint Of War came and why. I was impressed by the dispassionate acceptance of poverty and starvation and being one step away from death. I could sense a puzzle and a punchline and I was hooked.
The story didn’t let me down. It was clever and original and managed to be deeply sad while still being hopeful. In less than an hour it got me to consider what I would be willing to give to have my name remembered forever in song and what love looks like and how able I would be to recognise it.
I’ve had Alix E. Harrow’s ‘The Ten Thousand Doors Of January‘ in my TBR pile for a long time now. I bought it because it had a beautiful cover and a great title. Having read this story, I think it’s time to bump the book up to the top of the pile.
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