With its heady blend of twenty-two science fiction, fantasy, and sometimes horror pieces—many linked in shared universes and the majority previously published, some as far back as 2015—The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories is a bargain, with the work living up even to its notably trippy cover.
Payseur repeatedly demonstrates that his strength lies in efficiency. The longest pieces here stand at about fifteen pages at most, but, even in a few pages, for the most part he adeptly conveys worlds and lives, engrossing readers with fully-realized protagonists. Unlike his more expansive story “A Giant Problem”—a romp of a take on “Jack and the Beanstalk” which this reviewer discovered in Burly Tales: Fairy Tales for the Hirsute and Hefty Gay Man (2021) and does not appear here—these tales are lean-and-mean SFF, with a soupçon of cosmic horror. Payseur usually mixes exposition and a cast list into the stew of his stories, although this sometimes muddles things; even when he does, however, he compensates with sheer love of the genre, nostalgic focus, and often wonder and optimism. Payseur also bakes in LGBTQI+ characters of all stripes into the narrative, exploring the humanistic, marginalized side of every narrative.
A trim example, and this reviewer’s favourite, is “The Death of Paul Bunyan.” Paul Bunyan’s estate executors call in Johnny Appleseed, who is finding whatever work he can nowadays, to deal with an extraordinary subterranean ecological problem. It opens with a terrific hook:
Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains. (p. 69)
The story asks, “What if folklore heroes were still around and Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were on-off bed buddies?” In skillfully teased-out flashbacks, Payseur shows the legends sharing a joint, being intimate, debating whether to enlist in the war effort in 1944, and ruminating about the past. The story is as much about this Brokeback Mountain-esque rapport as it is about god-like creatures living past their time amidst a sense of lingering wonder.
The touching rapport of these protagonists exemplifies how Payseur populates his tales with front-and-center gay, bisexual, and asexual protagonists, gay parents, and even throuples. The similarly-themed “A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting,” for example, stars two woodsmen in love. In a daring yet consistent move, he also routinely deploys inventive gender-neutral personal pronouns as part of his growing mythos.
“Humans Die, Stars Fade,” a stellar space opera, incorporates many of Payseur’s signature approaches, demonstrating a predilection for first-person narrative that informs most of his stories. A lonely star has lost its longtime companion, which departed through a black hole. In illuminating monologues, the star tries to articulate its experience:
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this all wrong. Alone out here, the story starts to change when I imagine someone else listening to it. The cracks show. The desperation. The loneliness. The hope. (p. 18)
The first-person voice allows the refreshing perspective of a star’s observations of humans and its own personal growth while living in the distant outer reaches of space. It’s a good trick that grants glimpses into the souls of many of Payseur’s heroes.
Throughout centuries, readers see various interstellar explorers investigate the star, their voyages based largely on the Star Trek model of a crew working from the bridge of an exploratory ship the star dubbed Odysseus-5. One crew member, Ensign Malik Rosas, goes by “eir” and “e.” Payseur grows this pronoun template as part of an admirable mythos. Another crew includes a trinary or three-person marriage, whose lives have been influenced by the star.
And so boldly go Payseur’s LGBTQI+ characters, Payseur playing, with obvious delight, not only with space opera, but weird westerns and Lovecraftian horror. An asexual protagonist features in “Feathers and Void,” about eleven humans bonded symbiotically to robotic, interstellar crows, which feed on the treasures and scraps culled from spaceships. “Shoots and Ladders” involves a gun that destroys realities, but not before the bisexual hero glimpses several alternate-universe versions of his life, including three-way relationships with men and women and even a triceratops pet. The linked future dystopias of “Nothing” and “Dance of the Tinboot Fairy” divide the haves and have-nots into squalor-ridden cityscapes. “Tinboot” spotlights a gay dancer who finds their talent is a sort of superpower.
Many of Payseur’s grimy metropolitan settings owe debts to William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, but they are not the only touchstones. In the standout Lovecraftian horror piece, “Alexa,” a Deep One or sea creature relates their affair with the captain of the ship of the same name. The married captain has fallen on hard times providing for his family, fishing in progressively more fish-depleted waters. The anthropomorphism of the sea vessel, in particular, is remarkable:
The first time I showed myself it was because of Alexa. There was just something about the way she sailed, a desperation that I could see and taste. It pulled me up from the depths, because even then there was little enough to hold me. The waters that should have been vast and timeless were showing their age, which was probably why he had taken her out so far from shore. (p. 22)
Alexa seemingly responds, groaning, to the lure of treasure at the bottom of the ocean. Its longing parallels the captain’s for a profitable way of life, but also for a booty call on the distant seas. As such, with a queered love affair at heart, the story sublimely subverts the Lovecraftian Deep Ones mythos as the tryst follows a seemingly inevitable course.
Payseur leaves no world unexplored among the realm of the pulps. In “The Sound of,” for example, everyone is supposed to adapt to the new normal, a relentless, high-pitched tone in a totalitarian state where even the lightest brush with the wrong social media friends (ones whom the state has blacklisted, for instance) can be ruinous. Payseur’s oft-detected use of a wary American-novelist voice soars here.
At times, though, exposition overloads a piece, or the roll-call of character names is too much to absorb, muddling theme or overall effect. This admittedly presents drawbacks for a reviewer who might read stories out of the order of the table of contents.
Take “Undercurrents,” best read after “Rivers Run Free,” just as the stories are sequenced in the book. They are a two-piece set about a ruling class, the Luteans, who subjugate rivers; the rivers themselves are elementals that can take human or liquid form. The Luteans literally bend the anthropomorphized rivers to their will, resulting in an ensuing decades-long cold war filled with anti-river propaganda. “Rivers” is a straight-up weird western: the protagonist and their rogue band deal with double-crosses and the regular, sudden, and brutal violence of their everyday lives. Interludes tell truths about rivers. “Undercurrents,” on the other hand, features interludes that explain lies about rivers as a marvelous counterpoint to the first story. But it is saddled with more backstory, exposition, and multiple characters, many of whom are challenging to distinguish. While well executed and hopeful in tone, then, “Undercurrents” feels less like a standalone story and more like part of something much larger.
“The Troublesome Mechanics of Half-Ghosts” is epic, predicated on the marvellous premise of the pirate ship Nine Lives ferrying ghosts across the galaxy. It features a half-ghost, half-human protagonist who can merge with either humans or ghosts of “halflings.” However, “Half-Ghosts” nearly trips over its own explanation of this dense mythology. Ultimately, the piece still rewards readers with its sweeping scope and successful experiment in numerous hyphenated descriptors including “Hours or days or don’t-we-need-to-eat later” or “an are-we-going-to-make-it-or-burn-to-dust moment”.
Indeed, despite these drawbacks of over-exposition or egregious cast-listing, Payseur often compensates with a winsomely obsessive nostalgic bent. With “Just Toonin’,” the author dances just to one side of copyright infringement: a recognizable coyote relates a possibly unrequited love affair with a desert runner; a certain stuttering pig rolls into town. It’s a place populated by cartoon characters, pushing out Acme products and arming bearded westerners and obsessed hunters so they can occupy the town. The pig wants the losers in the never-ending cartoon struggles to finally win for once instead of being flattened, flown off cliffs, or blown to smithereens and having to heal up and do the merry chase all over again. This makes for a marvellous, clever, and possibly romantic take on a well-worn Looney Tones premise.
In “Little Blue Men,” meanwhile, Caleb inherits his father’s secluded, possibly haunted estate. Dad is a recognizable old curmudgeon who, in his journal, curses the titular creatures living happily in a nearby mushroom village. Caleb might have also inherited a taste for the unsavoury species. The house is crammed with 1980s knickknacks and toys, including those miniature pink M.U.S.C.L.E. guys and toy soldiers. From He-Man to Star Wars figurines, the nostalgia is strangely suffocating. In the end, it’s a little unclear what the connection might be between the father and the property, whether a haunting or possession or something vaguer. The tone is a little mixed and ridiculous, with Caleb’s beau Michel popping his own clothes off during sex scenes, or the steady beat of the father’s charmingly expository journal entries. Nonetheless, “Blue Men” is still worth the trip for sheer cleverness of voice, inventiveness, as well as a fresh perspective on a 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon staple based on a Belgian comic strip.
These sorts of reference are a leitmotif of the collection. Weird-western-toned “Beyond Far Point” concerns a rag-tag crew, including an automaton and gunslinger on the run, Star Wars style. “Medium” is a straight superhero send-up told by multiple voices. The protagonist gives a first-person account of becoming a hero. It charmingly handles imposter syndrome while cleverly dolling up the hero and antagonist’s secret origins. Finally, the title story, “The Burning Day,” evokes Ray Bradbury’s Mars stories and Autumn People references, portraying fire as a purifying force in a future where grotesque monsters are merely part of everyday life.
One of the standout stories offers a dystopia writ small. In “Snow Devils,” a gay seventeen-year-old lives in the absence of his two dads, fearful and isolated after an environmental sea change reverses the order of things. The protagonist’s inability to trust is intertwined with his sexual awakening and attraction to an androgynous newcomer. Does he fear lust, or the potential threat of the stranger? In these moments, and because LGBTQI+ characters feature in most stories, The Burning Day prompts readers to ask why LGBTQI+ characters don’t take center-stage, -screen, or -page in more current SF. Here, Payseur grounds his otherworldly, outlandish pulp fiction in the undeniably human, essentially normalizing such representation. To Payseur’s credit, most of his queer protagonists don’t meet pulpy tragic endings, and are often in healthy relationships, even if a lover’s clothes magically farcically vanish, as in “Little Blue Men.”
Their inclusivity aside, Payseur’s craft and his love of the genre come through in all the stories. Most obviously, the collection boasts many carefully interconnected pieces—an attentive reader’s delight—which this reviewer will not detail here. Payseur can certainly convey the fantastical. The grim and the immutable are also present. But he also betrays a certain idealism tilting toward the optimistic, the exultant, and the awestruck. Often, Payseur ends a story on the perfect pitch: a protagonist finishes one struggle—against a ruling class or an overbearing system or a suffocating life of isolation—and they begin their next great adventure across a barren landscape, a map of the stars, or simply discover heady, newfound freedom. That moment, that reach for hope is, combined with Payseur’s inspirational skill and vision, especially necessary right now, as we embark on this new normal.