Saturday, January 2, 2016

Adult Children of Alien Beings, by Dennis Danvers


"Adult Children of Alien Beings," by Dennis Danvers, edited by Ellen Datlow, illustrated by Chris Buzelli, and published on Tor.com.

This is the first story I've ever tried to review on its own, and it's proving a bit harder than I anticipated. There's less to work with, less context, less content. I should be doing many more of these - I've begun using a wonderful app called Pocket, which allows me to send short stories (or news articles) from any of my favorite sites to my phone for later reading. Short stories are perfect for fitting into those moments waiting for the bus or waiting in line at the checkout (two things I spend a lot of time doing), and since I've been trying to read more short stories lately, this is absolutely the perfect app for my needs.

But enough about apps! We're here for a short story!

"Adult Children of Alien Beings" was a story with a lot of promise in the premise but a confused tone that had me constantly tripping over conflict between what was happening in the story and the narrator's reaction (or lack thereof). Told in first person, it's a story of an aging man, Stan, who seeks out the story behind his parents, who he describes as not "like your parents," not "like the ones in the Mother's Day cards and Father's Day cards." He proceeds to describe them in more detail; they sound like typical people who happen to be in love and have some idiosyncrasies that might be odd, but their daily lives definitely fall within a standard deviation or so of normal. Their deaths, though, are slightly suspicious; they both fell into an "abyss" in New Mexico when their younger son (Stan) was 18. Also suspicious are their origins, as Stan discovers all of their papers are forged, prior to his older brother Ollie's birth certificate. And when Stan seeks help to find their history, an expert tells him that they were most definitely aliens, and refers him to the titular coping group.

The attempt to convince the reader of the supernatural when evidenced with only the natural reoccurs throughout the story. There is certainly supposed to be some doubt - after all, the claims are outrageous. But I was never convinced, and I was never convinced that Stan himself was convinced, either. In fact, it was hard to tell how the first-person narrator really felt about anything, except occasionally in retrospect. He states things matter-of-factly, seemingly taking them at face value, which he does - unless he doesn't, which happens sometimes, but the reader is never informed of that until he says it out loud. He doesn't react. And between the difficulty ascertaining exactly what the narrator feels about the strange things thrown in front of him and the general predictability of the story (and what is true versus what isn't), it was hard to wrangle a foothold into the story, to care about what happened.

In the end, it wasn't important whether Stan's parents were or were not aliens. What matters instead is that he learned about himself and reached out to others, which felt as trite as it sounds. There were moments, though, of pretty prose, and the story moved at a steady clip, so it wasn't a dull read. I also appreciate an SF story with an amount of ambiguity to it, and this had ambiguity in spades (perhaps too much for some readers). And although Stan's parents weren't all that weird, the moments describing their lives together - his mother's paint-by-number picture where she switched all the numbers, their obsessive love of peppermint - illustrated to me an otherworldly kind of love, a mutually compatible weirdness that I truly enjoyed.

Rating: 2.5/5

The author, Dennis Danvers, is also a VA resident! Way to represent my home state!

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