Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories Book

I find favourite authors and favourite books so much more difficult to review than books I didn't like. As it happens, Maureen F. McHugh is one my favourite authors and this is a wonderful book of 12 short stories. I liked every single one of them, but there were some stand outs.

Ancestor Money (2003) - Dead Rachel receives a letter while she's in the afterlife, telling her she's to receive ancestor money. To collect it, she needs to travel to the Chinese afterlife. (Honorable Ancestress of Amelia Shaugnessy: an offering of death money and goods has been made to you at Tin Hau Temple in Yau Ma Tei, in Hong Kong. If you would like to claim it, please contact us either by letter or phone. HK8-555-4444.)

In the Air (1995) - A woman joins a dog club where she meets a man. The ghost of her dead brother stands between their blossoming love. I loved this story so much. The melancholy, the ghost elements, the dialogue - it's perfect.

The Cost to Be Wise (1996) - The one that felt the most sci-fi in capital letters to me. This is more of novella than a short story. Set in a colony on a distant planet and told from a young woman living there; an anthropologist from another world tries to study the colony, when a heavily armed clan arrives. I'm not sure I fully got some parts of this story, to be honest (I sometimes thought I might have skipped some parts while reading) but I enjoyed it. It's rather brutal.

The Lincoln Train (1995) - An alternate history short story that won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, the 1996 Locus Award and was nominated for the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. After the civil war, all Southerners who owned slaves, are removed from the western territories in a neo-Trail of Tears, where many of them are left to die of starvation and disease. The story is told from the pov of a young woman and her dement mother, who are forced on such a train. An alternative Underground Railroad saves her.

Interview: On Any Given Day (2001) - Short story told in a form of an interview. People can make their body young again, but are neither at home with the real youth or their actual peers then. Interesting thought experiment.

Oversite (2004) - People put chips in their children's body to monitor their whereabouts all the time. The story, like the one above, and many others in this book, examines youth and relation to parents.

Wicked (2005) - 400 word short story about everything going up in flames. the most poetic of the stories.

Laika Comes Back Safe (2002) - A young love between werewolf and human and their dog, doomed to fail.

Presence (2002) - This story about dementia and new technology to beat the disease, was both very touching and sad, and asked interesting questions about what it means to still be the same person. One of the best ones in this book.

Eight-Legged Story (2003) - Another brilliant one. A woman contemplates her relationship with her missing stepson and her husband, in 8 short parts.

The Beast (1992) - Another short, rather poetic one, that merges themes of family & monsters.

Nekropolis (1994) - I wish this one were so much longer. This is a love story between a girl who's jessed (sort of enslaved by choice) and a genetically "built" servant boy. I liked the background, the world building with the 2nd koran, and again the questions about what makes a human human, but most of all I just loved both characters.

Frankenstein's Daughter (2003) - From the point of view of a mother and her son, this resolves about the cloning of a girl gone wrong. It felt very realistic, especially the way the mother is judged by the doctors.

Most of these stories are Sci-Fi, but I often thought it felt more like magical realism. I don't know if that's simply because I hardly ever read Sci-Fi and I adore magical realism - or, if it's because all of these stories are so character-focused. The melancholic tone and the direct style is just so perfect. I really tries to read this book as slowly as I could, to savor it.

You can download the book from the publisher for free: