The stories in Black Hole Heart refuse to be labeled. They burst from the confines of the page, swirling and switching genre gears, leaving the reader wondering what’s coming next. In these pages, one finds old Russian folk tales, golems, plotting cats, children old beyond their years, generation ships, and more. Teryna balances stories about inner lives and outer space with a deftness that explains why every one of these stories has found a home in a prestigious magazine or anthology: Strange Horizons, Apex, Samovar, Future Science Fiction Digest, Reactor, Asimov’s, Galaxy’s Edge, Podcastle, F&SF, and The Best of World SF 2. Translated by Alex Shvartsman with the kind of care and dedication that allows the stories to blossom and live in our minds long after they’re read, these glimpses of sometimes-dark, sometimes-hilarious worlds solidify Teryna’s place on the global speculative fiction scene. [1]
A fascinating and unique aspect of this collection is its experimentation with language. In “Ultilted” and “The Farctory,” Teryna and Shvartsman play around with spelling in order to create for the reader that unsettled, unbalanced feeling that the story itself will unfold. In the former, a young boy who discovers a music box that can take away the pain of his beloved grandmother’s passing finds people whom he can see are also in pain. Writing an untitled “contract” that is simply a rambling description of his own life, he finds a woman who’s contemplating suicide and gets her to sign it. What follows is a nighttime adventure through the city as the boy has this woman help him find the music box—and in so doing, regain his own sadness about his grandmother (which he realizes he wants back) while taking away the pain his new friend has been struggling with. “The Farctory,” too, relies on creative spelling to underscore the fact that the “color factory” the protagonist is trying to enter—in order to find the people who have disappeared from the city—is not what it seems. Indeed, it is a funhouse-mirror place where dimensions collapse upon themselves and colors explode, shadows walk around without substance, and time ceases to mean what it should. As Shvartsman himself has said on his website about the story, one could “describe it as an M. C. Escher painting in a written form.”
A few of these pieces evoke a sombre darkness, within which protagonists struggle against various horrors. In “Morpheus,” a man who has struggled all his life to keep a dream monster at bay realizes that it has never lessened in its power, as it has killed a classmate and an ex-girlfriend of his while he dreams. Despite sleeping pills and willpower, the monster has tried to control his host—but the host intends to fight back. As Teryna explained in an interview with Samovar (which published the story in 2019), “Morpheus” is “an attempt to poke at the inner world of that unpleasant fellow [“an emissary of evil”] and to understand how he became who he is.” It is also “an attempt to catch a dream by its tail.”
The horror evoked by evil is powerfully described in “No One Ever Leaves Port Henri,” where a Caribbean island is terrorized by its king, who has dispensed with the usual procedures for succession and merely picks a new host body for his soul each time he needs a change. A criminal and renegade named Joe Fellow, who didn’t expect to fall in love and have a son on this island—to which he escaped after breaking out of prison—learns that this same son has also been chosen to be the next King Henri. Despite Joe’s best laid plans, the current Henri, living in the body of a sickly boy, captures his wife and son (who were trying to leave the island) and tells Joe that he intends to inhabit him first and then his child. The strange power to compel people to do his bidding makes Henri especially terrifying, but he doesn’t count on the desperation of his wife/daughter and her plans for ending the nightmare on the island.
The majority of these stories, though dark at times, are genre-bending explorations of how protagonists deal with unusual and unexpected situations. Five people stranded in a massive storm in the Arctic Circle swap folk tales in “Songs of the Snow Whale,” each storyteller bringing to the group their own private sorrows and struggles, in the process forming a group dynamic that one could say is itself a kind of creation. Similarly written like a fairy tale, “Lajos and His Bees” imagines a man who has left his village to live in the mountains and has either discovered intelligent bees or has trained them to take various forms (I couldn’t help but think about Ernst Jünger’s 1957 science fiction novel The Glass Bees). The tragedy that results when he tries to settle down with a wife solidifies his reputation among the villagers as a legend, despite their fear and suspicion of him. This kind of uneasy admiration and fear is also built into “The Tin Pilot,” a story about golem war heroes who are first welcomed back from battle by the humans they saved but then seen as potential violent criminals who must be killed. The narrator goes through a complicated process of self-understanding, realizing that his own memories might be planted and he himself might be one of the golems targeted for elimination.
Teryna’s science fiction stories also explore the conflict between the individual and the group. A teenager living on a generation ship, The Errata, is headed away from a devastated Earth and learns a lesson about the lengths some people will go in order to secure scarce resources for themselves. In “The Jellyfish,” a girl who has sold her body and mind to a social media company tries to escape after finding that she can’t get the numbers of clicks and likes she thought she could, thus trapping her in a kind of subterranean holding cell from which she will likely not escape. Thankfully, though, she has one person who has been looking out for her. “Black Hole Heart,” though not necessarily science fiction, asks us to consider diverging timelines that branch off from one single action. One thinks, after reading this story, about the potential for alternate universes.
One couldn’t end this review without a nod to the deeply humorous “Copy Cat,” in which a highly intelligent feline (“straight off the pages of Pushin or Bulgakov”) finds a way to string together reels of tape to produce recordings of his now-deceased owner saying what he, the cat, wants other humans to hear so that the cat can continue living in the apartment. (The erstwhile owner used to be a radio announcer, so there are a lot of tapes.) Somehow, the cat arranges for his owner’s funeral and maintains the apartment, scaring off anyone who tries to investigate where the old lady has gone. Always resourceful, this cat who “isn’t interested in a life of action and adventure” listens to the record player at night, his owner’s voice floating through the apartment.
A heady mix of genres, ideas, and worlds, Black Hole Heart will make you want to seek out every story Teryna has written and look out for whatever comes next.
Endnotes
[1] “The Chartreuse Sky” was written with Alexander Bachilo. “Madame Félidé Elopes” was translated by Anatoly Belilovsky. [return]