Elle Engel

Chicago

Journalist at Strange Horizons Magazine

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strangehorizons.com

Articles

The Portals of the Plague Years

Jan 29, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Nicola Lombardi |Guy Goffette |Elle Engel

“That’s right, I’m doing lockdown material.” So spoke Alexei Sayle in the most recent series of his Imaginary Sandwich Bar radio show. “You don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to do it, but this stuff happened to me!” As we enter the fifth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a tendency in popular media to try and bury what has happened.
FOUND: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories edited by Gabino Iglesias and Andrew Cull

Jan 22, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Shannon Fay |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra

FOUND is an anthology that traffics heavily in nostalgia. This is made clear by the cover, a brilliant design by Ann Shetelia, via which the book is made to look like a stained and faded VHS cover. The title doesn’t even appear on the front but on the “label” (aka the book’s spine): FOUND: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories. The book contains eighteen stories which are a mix of those told through “found” media and others told in a traditional first- or third-person voice.
Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

Jan 17, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Eric Hendel |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a book that I both loved reading, and also a story which I think falls short of its full potential. Based in part on a series of shorter works written by the author (all of which have here been compiled into a larger narrative), Kritzer’s novel centers around the experiences of Beck Garrison, a sixteen-year-old girl who, along with her father, lives on a scattered network of artificially created islands and repurposed cruise ships known as a seastead.
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)

Jan 15, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Jessy Randall |Elle Engel |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel

All quotes are from The Journal of Beatrix Potter 1881-1897, Transcribed from her code writings by Leslie Linder (Penguin, 1989). The fungus starred the ground apparently in thousands …I walked there nearly every day,saw the place in every season. My boots sunk into the marshy groundif I stood still for long. If walking, a woman. If not, a mushroom.
IN WHICH JULIA DUCOURNAU'S MUSE POSSESSES ME + YOU + THIS POEM

Jan 15, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel

Oh fuck yeah I wanna be a metal girl / with metal in my skull, veins, spine!! -- big leather stomper crushing my head/pedal // wanna go fast -- hypersonic superspeed: shed shitbox aluminum for steel to rival / god’s design: rudimentary, uninspired stock product // + flash titanium at pretty muscleboys, tongue on teeth -- being so deliciously artificial + freefalling across hot asphalt // fuck biology, biological lovers worship my divine intervention! + I ooze oil gallons from my gorgeous girl...
Half Sick of Shadows

Jan 15, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra |Eric Hendel

The last person in the world lay asleep at the top of the tower. She waited not in a bed of silk and roses for the kiss of a destined lover, but huddled at the foot of a steel door in the hope that she wouldn’t have to be the last person for more than a few hours, that if she stayed right where she was, her family would come to their senses and return to her. Her name was Lena. She was nine years old.
Dreambound by Dan Frey

Jan 15, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Archita Mittra |Jessy Randall |Eric Hendel |Elle Engel

Dreambound by Dan Frey is probably one of my favorite reads of the last twelve months. Told entirely through a series of documents—such as letters, emails, journal entries, interview transcripts, excerpts from best-selling novels, and even police reports—the novel chronicles a father’s frantic search for his missing daughter, a quest that takes him all across Los Angeles, into Fae-populated fantasy realms, and the fandom communities that believe in them.
Frogskin By M. L. Krishnan

Jan 9, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | M. Krishnan |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra

I. Marakatam, or the End of Her BeginningOnce there lived a princess who was a girl, a corpse, a slippery amphibial nymph. She was tucked within several lives, each life pleating and creasing into silken layers of woe. But for our purposes, we will restrain ourselves to one of those lives. Maybe even two. Her name was Marakatam, but it was not the name she was born with. It was a name she was bequeathed, and this was how it happened.
Spring Woods Spring

May 9, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | B. Pladek |Elle Engel |Jessy Randall |Archita Mittra

Harry first noticed the trees in May, when he went out in the purple dusk to hear the woodcocks dance. The sun had set an hour ago. Along the maples’ tangled arms flickered a slight luminescence, like the nave of a candlelit church. By its glow he could see what he usually couldn’t: the male woodcock bulleting upward, wings whistling, to his parabola against the blue clouds. He watched for another hour, until he was confident the light came from the trees themselves.