Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirena Digest #188 came out to-day but I just caught up with #187, the second part of "A Barrenness of Daffodils, A Lerna of Ills". I liked this second part more than the first, and I liked the first. There's a warmer melancholy about it. It follows an innocent protagonists as she navigates life in a post-apocalyptic New York. I especially liked a sequence with a doomed, red-headed time traveller from the '80s, who might almost be Mel from Doctor Who except she's not annoying. Her scene and one in a museum helped convey the idea of lost dreams, an inevitability in Hell.
Caitlin's description of what happens to pregnant women who are victims of the plague reminded me of Sin in Paradise Lost or Errour in The Faerie Queene.
And as she lay upon the durtie ground,
Her huge long taile her den all overspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes upwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred
A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking upon her poisnous dugs, eachone
Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favored:
Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone,
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.
Thinking about the problem in a story set in a future where few, if any, babies can be born, I found the contradiction a bit chilling. Like I was reading about ghosts who have shaped reality to serve their delusion of life.
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