Bonne année à tous!
Hopefully the New Year is treating us all well. One of the things I’d like more of this year is talking about short stories. Outside award season (or major controversies), we don’t talk much about short stories, novellas, and novelettes compared to novels, even when they’re as innovative, or as thought-provoking, or as startling. So, starting this year, I’m going to talk about the short stories I think are cool.
And first up is a fantastic one that had me alternately sighing and bursting out laughing: Nick DiChario‘s “Animale dei Morti,” from this month’s issue of The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy.
In his introduction, DiChario explained that he wanted to write an “Italian fairy tale,” and the fairy tale notes are all over the work. But this isn’t the Brothers Grimm by a long shot. It’s ribald and funny and clearly delights in the startling details and the imagined squeamish reactions of its listeners. You can clearly imagine, say, Sonny Corleone telling this story, and bursting out laughing at the over-the-top bits. I’d say he did his homework, but DiChario clearly enjoys reading Italian fairy tales the way I enjoy reading Chinese tales, and it makes it a delight to read.
Marco is about to get married to Marianna, the prettiest girl in the Villaggo delle Ombre, when his older brother Franco gets killed. This is a problem for Marco, since family traddition demands the elder brother stand as best man for the younger. It’d be bad luck if Franco weren’t there. So he goes to the village witch, Brunilda, to bring Franco back from the dead. La strega agrees, on three conditions: that he defend her honor whenever she is slandered, that he take full responsibility for Franco, and that he deliver her a bottle of his best, by hand, every day of his life.
The meat of the story is the next forty eight hours as Franco lives it up as much as an undead man can, Marco tries desperately to keep him in check, and Marianna grows furious with her new in-laws. And, always in the ombres, Brunilda, whose magic weaves through the tale.
Obviously, I love this story. I love the interactions between Franco and Marco and Marianna, I love how sardonic and self-aware (but still serious) Brunilda is. Most of all, I love the life in these lines, the sheer joie de vivre. It really does feel like Sonny Corleone is telling it over a couple glasses of wine, laughing at the funny bits and sometimes (like the requirements to put Franco back) laughing so hard he can barely keep telling it. It was an absolute joy to read just for the telling of it.
But the reason I’m highlighting this story is, ironically, the reason the next paragraph’s un-highlighted and in shadows.
(Spoilers ahead)
With fairy tale retellings or fresh tales, there’s an almost-obligatory twist ending. It’s why I don’t enjoy fractured fairy tales very much, because too many of them either contort the rest of the story around the twist, or the twist is an afterthought that falls flat. This Italian fairy tale has its twist ending – of course Marco loses Maria and his estate on account of his brother, that’s old as Aesop. The twist ending is just as expected: he becomes betrothed to the witch instead.
The neat part is what happens next: Marco isn’t happy. DiChario makes a point of describing his sunken cheeks, the loss of his good looks, his loss of will or verve.
Indeed, the narrative switches almost seamlessly into a discussion of witches, and this witch Brunilda in particular, and it ends as her story as Marco is subsumed into her own will. And maybe it’s always been her story, not Marco’s. A conventional twist ending on this kind of fractured fairy tale would be for Marco to discover that the witch was his fate after all, and that is not how DiChario plays it.
This is what made this whole amusing story keep bouncing around in my brain, days later, when the more serious stories were all muddying together. This twist on a twist and the way it really does make me rethink the entire tale up to that point. I don’t want to say it’s punching above its weight class, but it’s not what you expected of the ribald, funny story in this month’s issue, is it?
(End of spoilers)
Pick up a copy of F&SF this month because Sheree Renée Thomas knows her stuff, because other stories like Maiga Doocy‘s “Salt Calls to Salt” and Innocent Chizaram Ilo‘s “The City and the Thing Beneath It” are moving and well-done…but especially because “Animale dei Morti” calls to you like the call of the unquiet dead who want to sing and drink a little wine again before they go, no matter who they burn down.
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