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Richo Reviews: I Felt Their Teeth in My Bones by Magen Cubed (Magen Cubed, 2020)

 Here's an interesting - and somewhat daunting - thing: in her preface to this volume, Magen Cubed describes these stories as training for her later work. I can assuredly say that if this was the caliber of my writing in 'training', I would be more than satisfied. I'm being slightly specious here - most of these stories have been previously published in anthologies or magazines, it's not like we're seeing unedited, raw drafts here - but these pieces are not simply a prelude to what came later, they are evidence of a true talent.

What's true, though, is that these pieces are in the main explorations of specific ideas, for better or worse. Some of them do seem fragmentary, evocative scenes that just about have a narrative. This can be unsatisfying, but for every story with a sudden, perfunctory ending, there is a beautifully crafted gem of imagination like 'A Fresh, Clean Soul', a work of emotional weight like 'Ain't No Grave', a fun little piece like 'The Cosmonaut'. The brevity is supported by the dreamlike, fairy-tale nature of these pieces and Cubed's prose. Not all of these concepts need to be, or could be, developed further; their transitory nature is part of what makes them so compelling.

Another part of that is their clear understanding of the human heart. The desire for the unattainable, for the solution to a mystery, for love and companionship, for a new soul; these drives are clearly, achingly expressed in the stories contained in this volume. They push characters into danger, into temptation, into darkness, in ways that are as painful to read as they are intuitively understandable. Sometimes the characters' desires are sickening, their actions harrowing to read, but they are always human. Such explorations, combined with Cubed's poetic style and narrative playfulness, along with her evocation of the darkly fantastical, put me in mind of classic Neil Gaiman or the Nathan Ballingrud of North American Lake Monsters.

These stories may be on occasion undeveloped, but they are never clumsy. They are sometimes beautiful, sometimes enchanting, always unsettling. This is the work of an assured storyteller, and if it really does consist of 'training' pieces, I'm excited to see what she thinks of as her more accomplished writing.

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