Questions Asked in the Belly of the World by A.T. Greenblatt
My rating: 3/5 cats
In the darkness, the voice in his head is screaming again.
this is a three-for-me, but it’s on the high end of that rating. it’s a pretty traditional set-up (two misfit lovers drawn together by their questions about and shared dissatisfaction with the strictures of their society), set within a truly original world (a mushroom-planet(?) that values artistic creation above all else, where people draw from and give back…inspiration(?) to the surrounding mushroom-force(?), and are each monitored/encouraged/berated by an inner voice independent from their own will and, when that voice dies, the individual is cast out and killed in an all-hands-on-deck ceremony shirley jackson would have slow-clapped.)
it’s one of those scenarios that makes more sense when the author who conceived of it describes it than when someone like me, less-gifted with words, tries to convey its details and ends up sounding like a child recollecting a nightmare.
i liked a lot of the story, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me, except it made the dead milkmen song Little Man In My Head run through my own head for hours.
please feel free to get more out of it than i did!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2021/09/29/questi…
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