Scarecrow by Alyssa Wong
My rating: 3/5 cats
“It’s happening to all of us,” Brett yells, barely audible over the howling crowd. “So you can come and help us sort this shit out, see if we can stop it, or you can keep turning into a fucking bird alone.”
so i guess every tor short is written in second person now. or i just have a homing device trained on the ones that are, because isn’t it statistically improbable to have read something like four in a row written in second person?? it makes me want to rebel: “no, ma’am, i do NOT wake screaming from nightmares of Jonathan Chin, my mouth crammed full of feathers! and i resent you saying that i do! this is libel!!”
this isn’t the most original or surprising story – it’s pretty clear where it’s been and where it’s going, but the writing is a perfect spiky complement to the imagery of corvid beaks and claws, scrabbling across the page and it’s a haunting addition to the canon of recent YA lit centered around bullying and lgbtq issues.
there’s one gory scene and one saucy scene, if you are someone who likes to be warned about those sorts of things. me being me, those are my favorite scenes in the story, and neither of them are gratuitous – they are just the right amount of ewwwwww or ohhhhhhhh.
it’s a medium-three story, with a couple of peaks that rise up into high-three territory. i do really like the abruptness of some of the lines:
You’ve gone blind.
or
You listen until the screams die away. Then you end the call.
and i do kind of swoon at the last two paragraphs:
View Spoiler »in conclusion: birds.
3.5 stars cats
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2015/01/27/scarecrow/
