For five years, Matong has struggled as a farmer in inhospitable conditions on newly colonized Cascade, but things may be about to change, for better or worse. [15 min]
Excerpt:
Matong wiped perspiration from his brow and leaned against his hoe, staring at the horizon. To his west, the dustbowl plains stretched three hundred miles until they met the ocean, and on all other sides the mountain ranges were too far away to see, but sometimes he liked to look anyway and pretend.
It’d been a long time since he’d been to the ocean. Not for five years–five long Cascade years, that was. Not since planetfall, where he’d been one of the ‘lucky’ ones given the assignment to work the barren, arid plains into lush farmland.
He snorted at the thought and the memory, then raked his hoe through the sandy dirt. A useless gesture, and one that didn’t make him feel any better.
Behind him, the door of his makeshift house creaked open.
“Dinner!” Hella shouted. It was her week to cook and she hated cooking almost as much as she hated him. Matong had no idea what tonight’s culinary delight would be.
There’s something comforting about the monsters of category horror. Vampires, werewolves, zombies and ghouls - we’ve seen them all so many times that they’re familiar. We know how they act; we know how they work. (Doubt it? Just say the word “sparkle” to a serious fan of vampire fiction and see how they react. Odds are good you’ll get an enraged “Vampires aren’t LIKE that!”) They’re shorthand to a certain set of storytelling conventions and rules, and once you see the first bared fang you know exactly what the ground rules are. The world, in short, is defined by its monsters, and by the same token, defines them.
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