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Small Beer Press, paperback, 9781931520294 |
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE
Reviewed by Kathleen Ambrogi
After the Apocalypse, a new short story collection by science fiction/fantasy writer Maureen F. McHugh, caught me off-guard. I curled up with the book in bed one night. At first, I found myself chuckling over the opening story, "The Naturalist," about a man imprisoned on a "zombie preserve." It's hard not to smile when you see ordinary people hanging out around zombies. Until it gets ugly. I've had zombie dreams for a few weeks now, and it hasn't been funny. I swore off reading the book at bedtime, but soon broke my own rule. It wasn't necessary. There were no more zombies, and no more scares. Just good, solid speculative fiction. Most of McHugh's stories are spun from the natural fibers of everyday events, but many step so subtly beyond the boundary of ordinary life that it's hard to see any difference between the world she's created and your own. In "Useless Things," a woman who makes dolls lives alone in the New Mexico desert. She is frightened by a break-in, probably one of the hobos to whom she regularly provides a bowl of soup and a day of yard work, and her lonely peace is shaken. It's a good story, but I also got this strange feeling about the dolls—"reborns" that look so real they make people gasp. And what about the large number of transients heading "north to the Great Lakes, the place in the US with the best supply of fresh water?" It's easy to see our present problems—unemployment and global climate change—ten years hence. McHugh's stories can leave you slightly unsettled, and this gives a nice edge to her storytelling. "A Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" tells about a boy who simply walks away from home and starts another life, having apparently forgotten his original one. It reads so much like a newspaper article that I had to check the information on its original publication. But, nope, it wasn't published in a newspaper. This is fiction written as fact, and it's captivating. Told in clear, straightforward language, each narrative is a creative triumph, utterly unlike the one before or the one after. There's one about a computer glitch that looks like artificial intelligence, another about a woman who leaves her new husband on their honeymoon, one about people compelled to go to France (some flying without benefit of airplanes or wings), and my favorite, about two girls trapped in a Chinese employment prison. Turning the pages of this book is an adventure.
But what about the Apocalypse? The last story, which shares the book's title, features a girl and her mother
trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It's a painful tale of love and family, mothers and daughters,
maybe not so much about the horrors of the world beyond the holocaust. There are a few more that are set after
a plague or a dirty bomb, even that one about life after the zombie invasion. But that never seems to be the
point. After all, isn't every good short story about an apocalypse, be it personal or universal? This
understanding raises McHugh's work above any genre into the more general classification of "good stuff." These
are interesting stories about people and the situations they encounter, plain and simple. What more could you want?
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