The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories

Payseur’s debut collection of 21 genre shorts is far stronger than one might assume based on the opening stories. Fortunately, the shaky start proves nothing more than an organizational flaw. The collection’s strengths lie in its narrative versatility—with narrators ranging from ghosts to mermen to birds—and its integration of queer futurity, with numerous LGBTQ characters, neopronouns, and even (in “Shoots and Ladders”) an instance of a “queerocracy,” in which the LGBTQ community is the political majority. Amid mostly science fiction stories, Payseur’s tales of the fantastic and folkloric are standouts. In the haunting “Alexa,” a merman becomes enamored with a human sailor. A lumberjack falls in love with a crew member while searching for dryads in the Northwoods in the passionate “A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting.” And “The Sloppy Mathematics of Half-Ghosts,” about a “half-ghost” named Jourdain who resides on the ghost ship Nine Lives, is a powerhouse among powerhouses. This is a sure thing for fans of progressive science fiction and fantasy.[em] (July) [/em]