Challenge 170

Gird Your Loins

At Bewildering Stories it’s Halloween all the time. Bob Blevins’ title “Cruel and Unusual” sets the theme of this issue: violence, cruelty and ironic death stalk the reader at every turn but one. Here’s a little quiz for you. Get just one wrong and you flunk and have to stay after school and clean erasers and blackboards! Match the themes with the titles.

Ahino’am
Cruel and Unusual
The Greers’s Holiday
Hunter’s Story
The Last Book
Sacrament
Sparrow Egg
An Understandable Mistake

assassination
dying unnoticed
gang violence
human sacrifice
an ironic casualty
a murdered heritage
religious persecution
a travesty of justice

The sole exception is Jeffrey J. Lyons’ “Transmitting Through.” In that story, how many items are colored red, and what are they?

Thomas D. Reynolds’ “Sparrow Egg” is part of a cycle of poems about space exploration, and the poems are often miniature slices of stories. Take Thomas’ “space” poems — or all his poems, for that matter — in any order: what themes do they have in common? Can you write a short story or novella incorporating his vision of space exploration as a doomed adventure? Thomas’ bibliography can be found here.

Bob Seller’s “Hunter’s Story” is classified as a serial with continuation pending because it is, strictly speaking, not a story. It’s mostly dramatized exposition and partly the beginning of an action that promises a “larger story.” In terms of the theater it goes up to Act II, scene 2 in a three-act play. How would you recommend that Bob continue and complete “Hunter’s Story”?

Responses welcome!