Worlds of Paul Jessup

The latest issue of IROSF is up, with reviews of my short stories PostFlesh and Secret in the House of Smiles.

Here’s what they say about PostFlesh:

A trope of the previous story segues into this one. Again, we have human explorers discovering what appears to be the ruins of an alien civilization. But it is something else entirely.

Shadrim. It was a grave of space, a planet of bones. It was the endless all and everything. Shadrim. When we discovered it, we found it full of ruins and corpses. Shadrim. When it discovered us, it was thinking. Shadrim. It had sepulchral thoughts. Thoughts that only the dead could or would want to think. Filtering through the entire planet.

Broken down to dispassionate essentials, this planet and Stewart’s Babylon are much alike, building structures on the corpses of organisms that have lived there before. But this version is more of a nightmarish poem, as the planet drives the explorers to dreams of insanity and beyond. Fantastic SF fiction horror, absent science.

And here’s what they had to say about Secret in the House of Smiles

Either everyone in this horror story is in an institution for the criminally insane, or it is an insane world. If it’s an institution, they don’t have very good locks on the doors. Jack used to be in the magic act where he sawed a girl in half. Into more parts than that. But something went wrong.

Queen of the House of Smiles. Cut up, wrapped in plastic. Each piece, each part. Crammed in. But some parts were missing. Some parts were always missing. He hated that. How could he remember her with all the parts missing? Sawed off and stolen. The trick that went south. The too sharp saw, grinning as it cut into her, and her all smiles the whole time, even in that pain, the audience applauding.

And then her asking him—Jackie—please, put me back together again. She whispered it as she smiled, teeth together. He wanted to stop sawing, that Jackie O did—he wanted to. Keep cutting as the crowd applauded.

Jack keeps cutting parts of girls out of magazines and posters, trying to put her back together again, trying to recreate what she used to look like, whole, so he can put her back together again. Alice tries to help, though she would rather watch vampires, to discover if they are living, dead, or in a quantum state in-between.

Ambiguous fantasy, where it isn’t easy to tell the real horrors from the horrors of the insane imagination, but disturbing either way.