Body horror is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s eating disorder is another person’s wedding feast; this person’s nightmare about life-stealing parasites is that person’s pregnancy.
Charlotte Ashley
Charlotte Ashley is a writer, editor, and independent bookseller from Toronto, Canada. She reads slush at Lakeside Circus, has reviewed short stories for ChiZine.com and The Quill and Quire, and writes short fiction. She keeps a bookish blog at https://www.once–and–future.com/.
Clavis Aurea #32: 2015 Hugo Award edition (Novella)
The deadline for Hugo voting is imminent. The last of the categories I was willing to read cover to cover, the novellas, continues in the same vein as the nominated short stories and novelettes.
Clavis Aurea #31: 2015 Hugo Award edition (Novelette)
The five stories nominated in the Hugos’ “Best Novelette” category represent science fiction’s mainstream better than the short story category.
Clavis Aurea #30: 2015 Hugo Awards edition (Short Fiction)
I will not be coy and pretend I do not know that the contenders for this year’s Hugo Awards are controversial.
Clavis Aurea #29 (Lisa L. Hannett, Zen Cho, Catherynne M. Valente)
In a lot of more literary speculative fiction, the monsters are allegorical. Familiar creatures can be taken as shorthand for particular themes – unicorns for innocence, dragons for power and so on – in order to invoke a complex cultural history with the clever insertion of a symbol.
Clavis Aurea #28 (Sabrina Vourvoulias, Morrigan Phillips, Diane Cook)
We’ve come a long way since the unjust imprisonment of Edmund Dantes. For one thing, we no longer frame political imprisonment as an individual problem – a stroke of awful luck that the prisoner needs to cope with – but as a social problem.
Clavis Aurea #27 (David K. Yeh, Heather Clitheroe, Brooke Wonders)
Review of short stories from around the genre.
Clavis Aurea #26 (Sarah Pinsker, K. A. Gillett, Annie Neugebauer)
In a way, any story with a child under the age of twelve in it is going to be a horror story for parents. Youth might be a great adventure for kids, but it’s a long, harrowing trial for the parents, let me tell you, with plenty of opportunity for tragedy.
Clavis Aurea #25: Brooke Bolander, K.J. Kabza, Curtis C. Chen
While I understand that a “strong female character” is a fraught idea and that we need to look beyond angry, ass-kicking women with tragic pasts when defining strength, I’m not going to lie – I really like angry, ass-kicking women, though I can take or leave the tragic pasts.