Uncanny Magazine‘s March/April issue came out (hooray), and I was immediately all in on A. T. Greenblatt’s story “And Yet” (4600 words) which is about a newly minted physicist who comes back to the haunted house from their childhood, hoping to study the parallel universes contained within it.

I cannot describe how pleasing this story was to me, on so many levels. I love that its protagonist uses a cane to get around. I love that it’s about a house that wants things. Two thirds of the way through the story, there’s a shift — I don’t want to call it a twist, because that would be overstating the case — in the reader’s understanding of what motivates the protagonist, which shades back over what we have read thus far. The best kind of — again, is there a word for twist that implies something subtler than twist implies?? — for lack of a better word, twist is the kind where you weren’t expecting it and it is a surprise, but when it’s revealed you’re like, “Oh, of course, I should have realized.” That is what happens in “And Yet.”

Does it turn out well? Yes, extremely! Well, some parts turn out well. Difficult choices must be made, but that is the way of the world.

Was I rooting for the house? Y’all. Let’s get something straight right now. In stories where the house wants something, I am always rooting for the house. (Exception: Helen Oyeyemi’s book White Is for Witching. That house is xenophobic and I do not support its hateful ideology.)

Other stories what I enjoyed this month include “Irregularity,” a creepy little space wars story by Rachel Harrison (7500 words so actually a novelette!); “Unplaces,” by Izzy Wasserstein, in which a woman living in a dystopia annotates her atlas of places that never existed (1750 words); and “Old Habits,” by Nalo Hopkinson, a rather sweet ghost story set in a mall (4400 words). Oh, and an Oregon Trail dystopian fanfic recced by the Not Now I’m Reading podcast, “And Then We Shot the Ox” (3100 words).

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