J. Deery Wray

Jul 12, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Eric Primm |Louis Hall |Elizabeth McClellan |J. Deery Wray

Patterns are a part of life, and the human mind is excellent at seeking them out. In fact, humans are so good at imposing order on seeming chaos that we invent it where sense cannot be found. Why? Because patterns are comforting. Patterns make it seem like there is a purpose to everything, a purpose to our suffering. For some reason, it’s easier to bear a burden if we know there’s a reason for it. But patterns can also become cages of comfort.

Jul 10, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Dan Hartland |Louis Hall |Elizabeth McClellan |J. Deery Wray

What is a monster, and what is it for? In The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed almost holds her monsters in abeyance, crafting the kind of atmosphere and dread that cue us to expect—at any moment!—the arrival of a horror that will rend an unsuspecting innocent in two. But she never quite lets that happen.

Jul 8, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Louis Hall |Elizabeth McClellan |J. Deery Wray |M. L. Clark

The statue of that gorgeous and beloved tyrant, my father, stands in a valley where the weather has only ever been snow. The valley is low, the statue high, and any distinguishing features—trees, houses, civilisations—have been smoothed over like filler in a wall. I cannot say how tall the statue is. Against the white void it has entirely become landscape. You might as well ask how tall the sky. My father has expanded to fill a vacuum: nothing remains to compare him against.

Jul 8, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Elizabeth McClellan |Louis Hall |J. Deery Wray |M. L. Clark

Of course they lied that there was acishet god of fear in wild places, as iffucking,drinking, hunting, feral dancingisn’t universal as forest. Nature fluxes,gobbling bloody maenad genitals,bulldozer operators, overgrown boysdemanding Mars to rule. Desert saguarossing dirges to long life chopped short forPotemkin border walls. The anima mundigathers discarded needles, jams them intobillionaire homunculi: brain, kidney,tender flesh.

Jul 8, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | M. L. Clark |Louis Hall |Elizabeth McClellan |J. Deery Wray

The narrative frame of “science fiction,” which emerged as a commercial genre in the 1920s, has provided writers with a vocabulary for the fantastic and speculative that has supported a wealth of storytelling for the last hundred years—and also made it difficult, at times, to talk about a cosmic sense of wonder in other terms. But the commercial genre did not emerge in a vacuum.