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qalminator's review
3.0
Interesting collection. The tone is somewhere on the border between absurdly surreal and horror, leaning more towards surreal. I liked more than half of the stories, which isn't bad for this kind of collection.
megapolisomancy's review
3.0
GIFTS FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER
Weird fiction stories about families, more in the modern dark surreal fantasy vein than horror, for the most part; very much in the Kelly Link school of quirkiness, to the point that one story (“Secondhand Magic”) almost felt like pastiche. Like Link (and most of the authors in YBWF2), the intrusion of weirdness is used here to trace out fractured interpersonal relationships rather than an anti-anthropocentric worldview/warning to the curious. These stories are uniformly well-written and -constructed, although the prose in the child-narrated stories was on the inconsistent side (when isn’t it?). Epistemology is an ongoing thread here, particularly that of children navigating between their own growing understandings and the guilt/place/legacies they have inherited from their parents. Toward the end I did wish for a bit more thematic variety (and, frankly, for more monsters), but that’s more my issue than Marshall’s. The best of her work, focused on children or not, is infused with a deep-seated sadness about time weighing on us all, marching from the cradle to the grave and tearing apart the relationships we manage to forge on the way.
I greatly appreciated that a lot of her characters were less bourgeois than is the norm - while Marshall is an academic, she resists the urge to make her protagonists the same, which is a breath of fresh air (my impression is that maybe she got that out of her system with her first collection, which I haven’t read).
By far my favorites here were “The Ship-House,” a haunted house story, and “We Ruin the Sky” which, with its Chicago setting, 2nd person voice, and unreliable narrator, seems to have been tailor-made for me. These two can be situated more easily than most of the others here as “horror,” although horror of a more complicated formal structure than most. Of the more fabulist stories, "The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass" and "In the Year of Omens," two different examinations of almost identical thematic territory, were also excellent.
The Hanging Game
The titular game, a longstanding tradition among the children of a logging community, involves an aborted-at-the-last-minute hanging whose victim acts as an oracle for a local bear spirit. Our protagonist pays the blood price for her father’s antagonizing of the bears (“the things our parents leave us”). Weird as coming-of-age/menstruation through the generations.
Secondhand Magic
From the very first line (“A bad thing is going to happen at the end of this story”) we’re in Kelly Link territory, and since a book called “Magic for Beginners” is referenced on the second page, I think we’re supposed to know it. This story is about a kid who wants to be a magician and a pair of witchy sisters, so we get meditations on magic, and language, and, frankly, I’m not sure I followed what Marshall was trying to accomplish with this one.
I’m the Lady of Good Times, She Said
A pair of Arizona hard luck cases, brother-in-laws, are driving out to the desert because the one caught the other cheating on his wife with a ghostly scream queen. Noirish and earthy. "The Lady of ____" is a recurring refrain.
Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects
A young girl worries about the arrival of her soon-to-be-born twin siblings. Convincingly lonesome as she becomes increasingly distrustful of her parents and fixated instead on a Campbell’s soup can as she descends into surreality.
All My Love, A Fishhook
The rocky relationships of three generations of fathers and sons in Greece and, again, the distrust of a new sibling/other family, this time also with the ocean and superstition and a mysterious statue. “This is the great fear of fatherhood. To know that love is a chancy thing.”
In the Year of Omens
A fourteen-year-old girl feels left out and alienated because her peers are all experiencing weird happenings (“omens”) and then dying. The weird as burgeoning adulthood, and sexuality, and the shift in the world after the death of a parent. Adults try to keep knowledge of these omens away from their children, unsuccessfully.
The Santa Claus Parade
One of the few stories here not concerned with family, although the protagonist is a teenager - here instead we’re focused on a boy working at a company that makes Santa Clauses in a vaguely dystopian setting, checking that all the Santa Clauses have both an anus and a beard.
The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass
A father gets his son the titular gift for his 12th birthday, who finds that he can use it to peer into the past. The two of them have moved across the street from their old apartment, where his mom still lives - so he charts out the family's pre-divorce life, trying to figure out what his mom did wrong to drive his father away (because it had to have been his mom's fault, right?). A thematic counterpart to "In the Year of Omens," also using adolescent lust to examine the growing divide between parents and children as the latter age into adulthood; this time also with a subtle critique of misogyny.
Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta
A story of Death personified as a frat boy, playing off horror movie cliches involving sorority girls, seguing into a low-key meditation on aging and relationships.
Crossroads and Gateways
An outlier - a Yoruba/Swahili folktale of the desert Sasha and Zamani and a trickster god (Esu) and shapeshifting and man's love for a cheetah. Not a million miles off from Valente's Orphan Tales, what with the emphasis on the meaning of stories expressed through a fairy/folk tale/mythical framework.
Ship House
A woman visits her aging mother at her (haunted?) childhood home on Table Mountain in South Africa. Twins, we find out, run in the family, as does the theme of halves split in twain, and sacrifice among the women of the family, and the push to leave home struggling with the pull to stay. Like Gene Wolfe's (and, uh, Kelly Link's) best work, hints at much more going on than the actual narrative gives us, and demands to be re-read.
A Brief History of Science Fiction
Three brief vignettes of a woman at 15, 34, and 74, having encounters (of various degrees of satisfaction) with various suitors - the last of whom is an alien.
Supply Limited, Act Now
Circa 1950, a trio of boys in "Shrinky Dink, USA" order a shrink ray and go on a rampage, driven by worry over an enlisted brother and resentment over their small-town surroundings and desperation and confusion over growing up. The former fourth member of their circle, who has left them behind by maturing into womanhood, is frustrated by their antics.
We Ruin the Sky
Told in the 2nd person by an omniscient-ish narrator, in a Chicago high-rise, a quietly despondent meditation on grief and marriage and aging (and numbers) set against the backdrop of a mysterious black hole. Rather Leiberish. A masterful story.
In the Moonlight, the Skin of You
I was predisposed to dislike this one because of the title, and then I read it, and I didn't like it. Overly florid and fragmentary prose about a disappointing daughter and her hunter father (the mother is dead - again, the weird as the shift in the world after the death of a parent) and a folktale that says that if you kill a buck his wife comes to seduce you.
The Gallery of the Eliminated
Another story about a kid anxious about the birth of a new sibling, this one involve zoos and monstrous births and extinction.
The Slipway Grey
The surreal vision of a flying shark as the harbinger of death in South Africa, after a meditation learned in college goes wrong.
Weird fiction stories about families, more in the modern dark surreal fantasy vein than horror, for the most part; very much in the Kelly Link school of quirkiness, to the point that one story (“Secondhand Magic”) almost felt like pastiche. Like Link (and most of the authors in YBWF2), the intrusion of weirdness is used here to trace out fractured interpersonal relationships rather than an anti-anthropocentric worldview/warning to the curious. These stories are uniformly well-written and -constructed, although the prose in the child-narrated stories was on the inconsistent side (when isn’t it?). Epistemology is an ongoing thread here, particularly that of children navigating between their own growing understandings and the guilt/place/legacies they have inherited from their parents. Toward the end I did wish for a bit more thematic variety (and, frankly, for more monsters), but that’s more my issue than Marshall’s. The best of her work, focused on children or not, is infused with a deep-seated sadness about time weighing on us all, marching from the cradle to the grave and tearing apart the relationships we manage to forge on the way.
I greatly appreciated that a lot of her characters were less bourgeois than is the norm - while Marshall is an academic, she resists the urge to make her protagonists the same, which is a breath of fresh air (my impression is that maybe she got that out of her system with her first collection, which I haven’t read).
By far my favorites here were “The Ship-House,” a haunted house story, and “We Ruin the Sky” which, with its Chicago setting, 2nd person voice, and unreliable narrator, seems to have been tailor-made for me. These two can be situated more easily than most of the others here as “horror,” although horror of a more complicated formal structure than most. Of the more fabulist stories, "The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass" and "In the Year of Omens," two different examinations of almost identical thematic territory, were also excellent.
The Hanging Game
The titular game, a longstanding tradition among the children of a logging community, involves an aborted-at-the-last-minute hanging whose victim acts as an oracle for a local bear spirit. Our protagonist pays the blood price for her father’s antagonizing of the bears (“the things our parents leave us”). Weird as coming-of-age/menstruation through the generations.
Secondhand Magic
From the very first line (“A bad thing is going to happen at the end of this story”) we’re in Kelly Link territory, and since a book called “Magic for Beginners” is referenced on the second page, I think we’re supposed to know it. This story is about a kid who wants to be a magician and a pair of witchy sisters, so we get meditations on magic, and language, and, frankly, I’m not sure I followed what Marshall was trying to accomplish with this one.
I’m the Lady of Good Times, She Said
A pair of Arizona hard luck cases, brother-in-laws, are driving out to the desert because the one caught the other cheating on his wife with a ghostly scream queen. Noirish and earthy. "The Lady of ____" is a recurring refrain.
Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects
A young girl worries about the arrival of her soon-to-be-born twin siblings. Convincingly lonesome as she becomes increasingly distrustful of her parents and fixated instead on a Campbell’s soup can as she descends into surreality.
All My Love, A Fishhook
The rocky relationships of three generations of fathers and sons in Greece and, again, the distrust of a new sibling/other family, this time also with the ocean and superstition and a mysterious statue. “This is the great fear of fatherhood. To know that love is a chancy thing.”
In the Year of Omens
A fourteen-year-old girl feels left out and alienated because her peers are all experiencing weird happenings (“omens”) and then dying. The weird as burgeoning adulthood, and sexuality, and the shift in the world after the death of a parent. Adults try to keep knowledge of these omens away from their children, unsuccessfully.
The Santa Claus Parade
One of the few stories here not concerned with family, although the protagonist is a teenager - here instead we’re focused on a boy working at a company that makes Santa Clauses in a vaguely dystopian setting, checking that all the Santa Clauses have both an anus and a beard.
The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass
A father gets his son the titular gift for his 12th birthday, who finds that he can use it to peer into the past. The two of them have moved across the street from their old apartment, where his mom still lives - so he charts out the family's pre-divorce life, trying to figure out what his mom did wrong to drive his father away (because it had to have been his mom's fault, right?). A thematic counterpart to "In the Year of Omens," also using adolescent lust to examine the growing divide between parents and children as the latter age into adulthood; this time also with a subtle critique of misogyny.
Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta
A story of Death personified as a frat boy, playing off horror movie cliches involving sorority girls, seguing into a low-key meditation on aging and relationships.
Crossroads and Gateways
An outlier - a Yoruba/Swahili folktale of the desert Sasha and Zamani and a trickster god (Esu) and shapeshifting and man's love for a cheetah. Not a million miles off from Valente's Orphan Tales, what with the emphasis on the meaning of stories expressed through a fairy/folk tale/mythical framework.
Ship House
A woman visits her aging mother at her (haunted?) childhood home on Table Mountain in South Africa. Twins, we find out, run in the family, as does the theme of halves split in twain, and sacrifice among the women of the family, and the push to leave home struggling with the pull to stay. Like Gene Wolfe's (and, uh, Kelly Link's) best work, hints at much more going on than the actual narrative gives us, and demands to be re-read.
A Brief History of Science Fiction
Three brief vignettes of a woman at 15, 34, and 74, having encounters (of various degrees of satisfaction) with various suitors - the last of whom is an alien.
Supply Limited, Act Now
Circa 1950, a trio of boys in "Shrinky Dink, USA" order a shrink ray and go on a rampage, driven by worry over an enlisted brother and resentment over their small-town surroundings and desperation and confusion over growing up. The former fourth member of their circle, who has left them behind by maturing into womanhood, is frustrated by their antics.
We Ruin the Sky
Told in the 2nd person by an omniscient-ish narrator, in a Chicago high-rise, a quietly despondent meditation on grief and marriage and aging (and numbers) set against the backdrop of a mysterious black hole. Rather Leiberish. A masterful story.
In the Moonlight, the Skin of You
I was predisposed to dislike this one because of the title, and then I read it, and I didn't like it. Overly florid and fragmentary prose about a disappointing daughter and her hunter father (the mother is dead - again, the weird as the shift in the world after the death of a parent) and a folktale that says that if you kill a buck his wife comes to seduce you.
The Gallery of the Eliminated
Another story about a kid anxious about the birth of a new sibling, this one involve zoos and monstrous births and extinction.
The Slipway Grey
The surreal vision of a flying shark as the harbinger of death in South Africa, after a meditation learned in college goes wrong.
eclectictales's review against another edition
3.0
I won an eCopy of this collection from the publishers via Twitter. This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/10/17/review-gifts-for-the-one-who-come-after/
Gifts for the One Who Comes After is an interesting mix of stories. They can be eerie, disturbing, and haunting, but a central theme that brings all of these stories together is that they feature the subject of family and the interpersonal relationships, whether it be with a lover or a friend or a community. A lot of the stories also feature themes of life, making decisions and sticking to them, anxieties about growing up and new family members coming along, etc.
Intermingled with these stories are elements of magic and the weird featured with the everyday. As a result, it makes the former feel like an everyday occurrence of the world a particular story takes place in, which is very interesting. As expected from a collection featuring “the weird”, there’s also a lot of grimness and death. Some scenarios may disturb readers.
Like any other short story collection, there were some stories that intrigued me more than others. I would recommend this short story collection for readers of short stories, and readers of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the new weird. Oh, and if you’re looking for a haunting read close to Hallowe’en ;)
Rating: 3.5/5
Gifts for the One Who Comes After is an interesting mix of stories. They can be eerie, disturbing, and haunting, but a central theme that brings all of these stories together is that they feature the subject of family and the interpersonal relationships, whether it be with a lover or a friend or a community. A lot of the stories also feature themes of life, making decisions and sticking to them, anxieties about growing up and new family members coming along, etc.
Intermingled with these stories are elements of magic and the weird featured with the everyday. As a result, it makes the former feel like an everyday occurrence of the world a particular story takes place in, which is very interesting. As expected from a collection featuring “the weird”, there’s also a lot of grimness and death. Some scenarios may disturb readers.
Like any other short story collection, there were some stories that intrigued me more than others. I would recommend this short story collection for readers of short stories, and readers of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the new weird. Oh, and if you’re looking for a haunting read close to Hallowe’en ;)
Rating: 3.5/5
lolajoan's review
3.0
I'm totally ambivalent about this book. It's definitely very good quality writing, but I would call most of the stories horror rather than fantasy so it really wasn't what I expected or wanted. There are some horror stories an emotional newly pregnant lady really shouldn't read. :-/ So, on the one hand, I could definitely recommend it if you want well written, deeply disturbing nightmare fuel, but I didn't actually finish the book - my ebook loan from the library expired and I just kind of shrugged and went "eh, I guess that's over now."
whippo's review
4.0
Surreal and bizarre, these short stories plumb the depths of loss, family, and relationships. Favorites include: "The Hanging Game", "The Santa Claus Parade", and "We Ruin the Sky".
lamusadelils's review
5.0
Últimamente he estado leyendo mucho new weird y a veces es hasta que le cuento a alguien de qué se trata lo que leo que me doy cuenta de lo extraño que es el género. Culpo a los VanderMeer por arrastrarme a este rincón literario. Y les agradezco, porque este tipo de libros son una delicia de leer. Había leído uno de los cuentos de esta colección ([b:The Hanging Game|17255538|The Hanging Game|Helen Marshall|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358442867s/17255538.jpg|23848296]) y la coleccción previa de Marshall: [b:Hair Side, Flesh Side|15821238|Hair Side, Flesh Side|Helen Marshall|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350415059s/15821238.jpg|21550291], que también me gustó mucho. Pero he de decir que éste libro es bastante mejor.
Esta colección de cuentos es una joya en el new weird, y lo digo como fan de Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link o los mismos VanderMeer. Todas las historias me gustaron mucho. Son oscuras, extrañas, divertidas y muy emotivas. Hay un excelente equilibrio entre los elementos "diferentes" y los que nos hacen reconocernos a nosotros mismos en los personajes. Hay más profundidad detrás del significado obvio. La selección de temas me gustó mucho y hay una muy buena cohesión entre las historias que permite establecer conexiones y reflexionar sobre ellas.
Barrirecomendación (si les gusta el new weird, o les llama la atención)
Esta colección de cuentos es una joya en el new weird, y lo digo como fan de Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link o los mismos VanderMeer. Todas las historias me gustaron mucho. Son oscuras, extrañas, divertidas y muy emotivas. Hay un excelente equilibrio entre los elementos "diferentes" y los que nos hacen reconocernos a nosotros mismos en los personajes. Hay más profundidad detrás del significado obvio. La selección de temas me gustó mucho y hay una muy buena cohesión entre las historias que permite establecer conexiones y reflexionar sobre ellas.
Barrirecomendación (si les gusta el new weird, o les llama la atención)
macbean221b's review
4.0
I received GIFTS FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER as an ARC through netgalley.com.
3.5 STARS
I really enjoyed this collection. It drew my attention on NetGalley with its strange cover art, and I requested it when I noticed it was a collection--short stories might be my favorite format. I was nervous about its inclusion in the category "New Weird," because sometimes I just don't get it, but I needn't have worried.
GIFTS is a collection of eighteen stories of varying degrees of weirdness, only one or two of which almost lost me. (You really can't read this many stories and expect every single one to feel custom-made for you.) Most of the time the weirdness was ... comfortable. It didn't feel weird at all while reading; a real miniature dog and a real shrink ray purchased from ads on the backs of comic books felt natural, the way Helen Marshall wrote it. That is the kind of weird fiction I like. I think half the point of scifi and fantasy is to be able to lose yourself like that, and Marshall makes it easy.
My favorite stories, I have to admit, were the two that made me cry. But I won't tell you which two. I hope you read them all without expectations and find something for you, even if they're not the ones that felt like they were for me.
3.5 STARS
I really enjoyed this collection. It drew my attention on NetGalley with its strange cover art, and I requested it when I noticed it was a collection--short stories might be my favorite format. I was nervous about its inclusion in the category "New Weird," because sometimes I just don't get it, but I needn't have worried.
GIFTS is a collection of eighteen stories of varying degrees of weirdness, only one or two of which almost lost me. (You really can't read this many stories and expect every single one to feel custom-made for you.) Most of the time the weirdness was ... comfortable. It didn't feel weird at all while reading; a real miniature dog and a real shrink ray purchased from ads on the backs of comic books felt natural, the way Helen Marshall wrote it. That is the kind of weird fiction I like. I think half the point of scifi and fantasy is to be able to lose yourself like that, and Marshall makes it easy.
My favorite stories, I have to admit, were the two that made me cry. But I won't tell you which two. I hope you read them all without expectations and find something for you, even if they're not the ones that felt like they were for me.
justasking27's review
4.0
I find most good short stories intense and weird. These ones are extra intense and weird. But still good.