The Homeless Moon

The Homeless Moon the chapbook is described by its contributors thusly: "Five Odyssey grads join together like a piecemeal mutant Voltron to bring you a cache of eclectic genre fiction." I couldn't imagine a more perfect or descriptive blurb for the collection. There's no clear and unified theme among these works-- just an assemblage of sample fiction from a group of talented writers. Tangentially, it helps to invoke Voltron in your cover copy: it provokes a grin and nostalgia! (At least in me it does. My generation is potentially showing.)

"Construction-Paper Moon" by Michael J. DeLuca.

I have not yet met a Michael J. DeLuca story I didn't like, which is an impressive feat considering how wildly different each story I've read has been. The first I encountered in Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writings: an intoxicating bit of magical realism of a ruined town fecund with God. The second was in Clockwork Phoenix: a searing piece of purification by angel and bicycle in the crucible of the desert. And this, the third, about a child in our moonless future trying to get into astronaut academy and breaking her father's heart. DeLuca's writing is about moments, about emotion; he casts out this net of words and gathers them -- grief, impatience, love. He lays them at our feet, and they lap at the cuffs of our pants in a soft susurrus of "look, listen, feel." I do. And I will continue to do so, as long as there are DeLuca stories to read.

"Impracticable Dreams" by Jason S. Ridler.

This story had quite an effective horrifying atmosphere: the horror of what one can become in pursuit of success and of the things one must do to get there. Specifically, this is a tale of a stand-up comedian and all the gross indignities he must submit himself to in order to find material that works and to carry it off. There's a sinister magic hat involved and -- I know what you're thinking. Before you say "wait! wrong story!" just check your expectations and prepare to have them subverted.

For all that, I just couldn't get into this story. The author is fond of choppy sentences and awkward imagery along the lines of "He lit a smoke and held it between his giant, yellow chompers." and "Above him, a single bulb shot a cone of lemon light like a UFO tractor beam unable to carry his old fat ass up for a solid probing." Definitely jarring.

"Colonized" by Scott H. Andrews.

"Colonized" is a thought-provoking piece of prose, deserving of the appellation "interstitial." There's a story in the text, but the entire piece is a news broadcast -- the dialogue only -- covering a shooting at a local college and the interviews with witnesses and experts that would naturally result. The conceit, however, is that the western coast of North America where this shooting takes place was primarily colonized by the Chinese rather than Europeans and the shooter belongs to a working class minority group -- the British. The inversion is too straightforward and the story too subjugated to news reporting for it to be meritorious as a narrative in itself, but it certainly has the power to provoke discussion.

"The Recurrence of Orpheus" by Erin Hoffman.

Wow. It did not take me long to figure out the conceit of this story-- yes, it is about a descent into the Underworld, and yes, it mixes a bit of Sumerian with its Greco-Roman which is completely fine, but it's so much more complicated than that. To tell you how would be to ruin the surprise, and this is definitely a tweak that you want to let tickle your mind. It's about stealing the moon and creating worlds and formalizing language to create reality. It's about the fate of gods and those who would be gods. It's something that I never thought would work while I was deep in its dark caverns, but when I emerged-- well, it's haunted me, a ghostly light slipping through my dreams. Well played, Erin Hoffman.

"Welcome to Foreign Lands" by Justin Howe.

This surprisingly enthralling, hot and dirty tale is about Protocosmo: a country at the center of the Earth, where the Earth's molten core is their sun. It's a story about getting lost to find one's way home, which wasn't quite where one thought they left it. It's full of compelling details, about the ecology of the earth's core, the society, the illnesses peculiar to that place (with such names as Conquistador, the Wilting Shivers, or Dewy Ague). A compact, remarkable bit of science fiction, this story has guaranteed that I'll seek out more of Justin Howe's work in the future.


You can actually read all of these stories for free by visiting Homeless Moon's website, or you can send them a $1 to cover the shipping on a physical copy. Either way you do it, I recommend checking The Homeless Moon out.

[Archived at my website here.]