Alphaland by Cristina Jurado
Publisher: Nevsky Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (126 pages)
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Award-winning short story writer Cristina Jurado’s first collection in English is filled with the idea of the other: different lives that take place at the corners of our eyes, just out of sight. The boundaries between the real and the unreal have never before been so porous, or so fragile. Alien sex-goddesses feed off venal politicians; people have their memories wiped and their personalities changed – for a fee; a vision of the champing jaws of hell accompanies a death in the family. These six stories are six different worlds, and introduce into the English-speaking market a fascinating new author of speculative fiction.

Not everything is as simple as it might appear to be at first glance.

The main character in “Vanth” asked his campaign manager to hire a prostitute for him. When she arrived at his hotel room, he had no idea what was about to happen to him. I found the plot hard to follow due to how often it shifted from one scene to the next and how few details there were about who the characters were. Even their names weren’t mentioned. There was also a scene about a young boy in the woods included very early on that I had trouble connecting to everything that happened after it. While I did come up with a theory about how all of those sections fit together, I would have liked to have a few more clues about what was going on and if my guess was correct.
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After a sudden accident in “Inchworm,” an astronaut woke up to discover that his body was connected to many different tubes and other devices that were keeping him alive. He needed to figure out what had happened to him while also attempting to achieve the goals he’d been sent out into space to pursue. I adored the plot twists in this tale. Not only were there several great ones, the clues for all of them were released so gradually that I was able to spend plenty of time coming up with theories about what had happened to the astronaut and how someone who had been so healthy could suddenly be barely clinging to life.

“Alice” showed what happened to a woman named Alice after she woke up from a medical procedure designed to erase all of her memories of her past. She was determined to find out what she’d decided to forget but had no idea where to begin. I was fascinated by the thought of someone trying to remember a life they’d purposefully chosen to leave behind in such a dramatic fashion, but I did wonder why the clinic would allow a patient to wake up with such an unquenchable desire for this information. It seemed counter-productive, and it was never clear to me why this side effect would be allowed to persist by medical professionals that had the amazing ability to delete specific memories from someone’s mind without harming other ones.

Death was an unavoidable topic in “Second Death of the Father.” The protagonist stood vigil at her father’s deathbed and then had to deal with her conflicting feelings about the turbulent relationship she’d had with him when he was alive. I appreciated all of the details the narrator shared about her father’s absence from her life. Her anger and disappointment at being created by someone who was so uninterested in parenting his own child or getting to know who she was as an adult felt incredibly realistic. It also gave her some pretty understandable reasons for reacting to the later plot developments the way she did.

It took me a little while to get into “The Shepherd” because of how vague the narrator was about what was happening in their lives and what sort of creatures they were hunting. As soon as I figured out these details, though, I couldn’t wait to find out if their hunt would be successful. The world building was handled nicely, especially when it came to gradually revealing more and more information about how this society worked and why the audience wasn’t told certain things about it right away.

The protagonist in “Alphaland” was someone whose dreams were capable of coming back as hallucinations during the day when they were awake. As intrigued as I was by the premise, so little time was spent describing how such an ability could negatively affect someone’s life that I had trouble connecting with the main character. It would have been nice to see more examples of what happened to them when a nightmare they’d experienced one night returned again the next day when they least expected it.

Alphaland was a well-written and thought-provoking collection of short stories that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys modern science fiction.