Strange & Fantastic #21
Rearview 2024, plus Mushrooms for Mirabelle Part 2
Well, we made it. 2024 is coming to an end. And what a year it’s been! Speaking for myself, 2024 has been an incredible year.
As most of you know, my first-ever novella, City of Spores, released in February, and it seems to be a hit with readers, which is just nothing short of awesome. And it’s continuing to find new readers as we speak. As of this writing, City of Spores currently has 48 ratings on Goodreads, with 42 text reviews. It’s also been marked as To-Read by 87(!) people! (This is also your friendly reminder that if you HAVE read City of Spores, please consider leaving a review, or at least a rating, on Goodreads or Amazon, or both! It really does help.)
BIG THANKS to everyone who has grabbed a copy of City of Spores and given it a read, and a review. You have no idea how much that means to me! And THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who has nominated City of Spores for various literary awards this year. I’m excited to see what’s next for this weird little “mushroom noir” of mine.
As for what’s next, work continues on the second draft of my dark fantasy novel, Black Coral. I’ve been basically rewriting a big chunk of the book, and progress has been a little slower than I’d like, but I’m chugging along, and feeling much better about the rewritten material—ultimately, I think this will make the novel much, much stronger. I’m hoping to have Draft 2 finished and off to my first readers sometime early 2025. We’re almost there, folks!
2024 Favorites
I’m a big fan of lists, and when it gets to the end of the year, I like to make lists of my favorite reads, listens, and watches of the year. Since I try to share reviews and recs in this newsletter, I figured I’d share those lists with you all. These lists are subjective, of course, and the only criteria is that the album, book, or film was released in 2024.
5 Favorite Albums of 2024:
Songs of a Lost World, The Cure
Dark Matter, Pearl Jam
The Last Will and Testament, Opeth
One More Time…Part 2, Blink-182
Muuntautuja, Oranssi Pazuzu
5 Favorite Books of 2024:
Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer
The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones
Glass Stories, Ivy Grimes
The Devil by Name, Keith Rosson
The Dissonance, Shaun Hamill
5 Favorite Films of 2024:
Dune: Part Two
Longlegs
I Saw the TV Glow
Deadpool & Wolverine
Civil War
Monthly Serial: Mushrooms for Mirabelle
(Part 2)
Mirabelle made a watery stew with the squirrel she’d shot, but there was so little meat to the darn thing it ended up not much more than a mess of murky water flecked with bits of tough, stringy meat. Daddy spat most of his up and refused to finish his bowl; Henry spilt most of his on himself, rocking back and forth like he always did when he wasn’t asleep. Not long after she’d downed her portion of the stew and drunk the water she’d pumped from the well out behind the house, Mirabelle’s stomach was growling again. I could tell it was cramping too, the way she’d bend ever so slightly and place a hand over her stomach.
Still, Mirabelle was strong. She never stopped doing what had to be done.
She got Daddy and Henry all cleaned up and took them both upstairs to the room they shared, the room that had once been our daddy and mama’s bedroom. She got Daddy settled in his cot and put Henry in the corner of the room at the foot of his bed, just beneath the window he liked so much; he wrapped his arms around his knees and went back to rocking. Every now and then, he let out a little moan, but nothing loud. Not like Daddy did all through the nights, when his pain was worst. Mirabelle checked Henry’s ears to make sure he hadn’t been picking at his scars again, then closed the door and we went down the creaking stairs to the main level where she slept.
Like the rest of the house, the main level was dark, and mildewed something bad too. Most of the wood had gone rotten a long time ago, or was working its way there quick. Spiders and silverfish skittered all over the place; when I was alive, I hated creepy-crawlies, so it was a relief to know they couldn’t touch me anymore. Mold grew in the corners of the house, fed by dark and wet; there was some mold even growing in the back of the fireplace, where the rainwater that trickled down the broken chimney grew stagnant.
Seeing as I misted through everything I touched, I couldn’t stand or sit, so I just floated near the foot of the old mattress Mirabelle kept in the middle of the room that included our kitchen. She slumped down onto the mattress and pulled her tattered blanket over herself. Her stomach growled like tumbling rocks.
Want me to fetch you some mice? I asked.
“Uh-uh,” Mirabelle said. “Last time about killed me.”
I’d forgotten how sick the mice had made her. I scratched at my ghostly head. You thinking about that witch?
“Who says she a witch, anyway? What she done that’s so…witchy?”
She disappeared from the Wytchwood as soon as we run off, I said.
Mirabelle huffed. “How you know that?”
She weren’t there when I looked back.
“Listen to yourself, Judson. She a witch cause you lost sight of her while we was running home?”
Something ain’t right about her, Belle.
“But what? You ain’t said what ain’t right about her. Neither do folk in town. You all just say, she bad, and, she a witch. Well, so what? She got enough food to keep us living. What if we over here starving ‘cause of old wives’ tales and rumors?”
Besides telling her about the oily black shimmer I’d seen around Granny, there wasn’t anything I could say that Mirabelle would’ve taken as gospel.
I don’t rightly know, I said. The way I ain’t ever sensed her out in the ‘Wood… That scares me. Scares me bad. Nothing on God’s green Earth that quiet. Nothing but…
I gestured at myself.
Mirabelle said nothing for a while.
“We been all over the Wytchwood, ain’t we?” she asked finally.
Sure, I said.
“And we ain’t never find no healthy critters like them rabbits she found.”
Not ever.
“That full strange.”
Sure is.
“Still,” Mirabelle said. “What if she right? What if she know some place in the ‘Wood where we find good meat like that?”
What if she lying? I asked. What then?
“Don’t know,” Mirabelle said. Her eyes watered. “Alls I know, Judson, I ain’t survive another winter. Not like this. Not Daddy or Henry neither.”
I would’ve given anything to hug her right then.
We could speak to Mr. Grayson again.
Mirabelle laughed, a sound as tired and worn-out as she was. “You forgetting what he said last time.”
I thought for a moment, searching for the memory; since I’d been dead and buried, sometimes my head got all jumbled and things got lost.
Oh.
I winced. The memory came back: the pained look on the gray-haired man’s face, the way he kept looking at the floor when he said: “That house is Company property. Belongs to the Grangers. We’d be well within our rights evicting you, since your daddy and brother don’t work for us no more, and ain’t nobody paying us for that house. But we don’t do that, cause it ain’t Christ-like. We’ve more than shown our share of charity to your family, Ms. Crane. Now, please, don’t come back. For your daddy and brother’s sakes.”
Mirabelle was crying now.
Then hows ‘bout Mrs. Hodgkins? I asked. We only asked her that once…
“I ain’t never asking that wicked woman another thing. Not ever.”
Mirabelle squeezed her eyes shut; I wished I hadn’t suggested it.
“Your daddy or mammy must’ve done something unforgivable for God to hate your family like He does,” Mrs. Hodgkin’s pretty face had said. She’d said it loud enough that the seamstresses working in her store on Main Street could hear it clear. “Good Christian woman like myself is charged with staying far away from the likes of you Cranes, lest I soil my own soul. Bad company corrupteth good manners, saith the Word of the Lord. Please leave and do not come back. Not until the Lord has had His way with you.”
I’m sorry, Belle, I said. Sorry I’m so bad at remembering.
Mirabelle shook her head and opened her mouth, but there was a loud thump on the front porch, just outside the door. She cried out and grasped her blanket to her chest.
I moved to the door and put my head through it. I reckon there’s not much in this world that’s as full-strange an experience as floating through solid objects; your brain screams you’re about to hurt yourself, collide with something solid, but you don’t.
A cloth-covered pot had been left on the porch, but the overgrown street in front of our house was empty except for the sound of insects and nightbirds. I popped my head back inside.
It’s just a pot of something, I told Mirabelle. Piece of paper on it, too.
“Nobody out there?”
Nuh-uh. No one.
Mirabelle got up from the mattress, opened the door and quickly brought the pot inside. She set it down on our kitchen table and took the torn strip of paper pinned to the cloth covering it. She hadn’t had much schooling, but she’d had enough.
What’s it say? I asked.
“Give me a chance, dearie,” Mirabelle read.
She uncovered the pot, and her eyes widened as a smile brightened her tired face.
“Roast rabbit!”
TO BE CONTINUED…
Signing Off
That’s a wrap for 2024! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
As always, thanks so much for reading, and stay strange. I’ll see you in 2025.
—Austin
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe—you’ll get a free eBook of my short story, “Magus,” available EXCLUSIVELY for subscribers!
I’d also love it if you considered checking out my weird fantasy noir novella, City of Spores, or my illustrated sci-fi thriller chapbook, Goodly Creatures.
