Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin
My rating: 4/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SEVENTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your annual reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i’ve read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that’s still a work-in-progress. however, because i don’t have a lot of time to waste, and because my brain has felt scraped clean ever since my bout with covid, i’m not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap ’em again.
i am doing my best.
merry merry.
DECEMBER 8
moving away from the tordotcom site for a bit with this prickly little contemporary russian story about the pyramid of the red roar and how it infects those in its midst. awfully timely, as well as funny AND grim.
fun fact: the whole catalyst of the story revolves around a man taking the wrong train:
To put it plainly, Yura confused Fryazino with Fryazevo and went the wrong way. Natasha had explained everything to him: go to Yaroslavsky Station and take the train toward Fryazevo or toward Schelkovo. Her station was Zagoryanskaya and not all trains stopped there. The train toward Fryazevo did, but the train toward Fryazino didn’t. Yura ended up on the train toward Fryazino.
and i only decided to read this story because my dumb brain saw sorokin, mixed it up with Fyodor Sologub, and got all excited. the two authors’ lifespans never overlapped on this earth, but in my brain, they are having drinks now.
“Could you tell me when we’ll be at Zagoryanka?” he asked a thin old man with a cane and a pail in a string bag.
“Never,” the old man replied laconically. “You got on the wrong train.”
“What?”
“Well . . . the train to Fryazino has never, ever stopped in Zagoryanka.”
still, sometimes there are benefits to taking the wrong train/reading the wrong author, and—like the narrator in this story, i have discovered something new because of a silly error. AND WE BOTH LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFT—oh wait, nevermind.
it also comes with a companion piece
2022:
DECEMBER 1: PORGEE’S BOAR – JONATHAN CARROLL
DECEMBER 2: SKELETON SONG – SEANAN MCGUIRE
DECEMBER 3: JUDGE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT – LAVIE TIDHAR
DECEMBER 4: QUANDARY AMINU VS THE BUTTERFLY MAN – RICH LARSON
DECEMBER 5: IN MERCY, RAIN – SEANAN MCGUIRE
DECEMBER 6: CHOKE – SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
DECEMBER 7: THIS PLACE IS BEST SHUNNED – DAVID ERIK NELSON
FROM THE BEFORETIMES:
2016 short story advent calendar
2017 short story advent calendar
2018 short story advent calendar
2019 short story advent calendar
2020 short story advent calendar
2021 short story advent calendar
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