City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales

by Gigi Little (Editor)

Overview

City of Weird conjures what we fear: death, darkness, ghosts. Hungry sea monsters and alien slime molds. Blood drinkers and game show hosts. Set in Portland, Oregon, these thirty stories blend imagination, literary writing, and pop culture into a cohesive weirdness that honors the city’s personality, its bookstores and bridges and solo volcano, as well as the tradition of sci-fi pulp magazines. Including such authors as Rene Denfeld, Justin Hocking, Leni Zumas, and Kevin Sampsell, editor Gigi Little has curated a collection that is quirky, chilling, often profound—and always perfectly weird.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942436232
Publisher:	Forest Avenue Press
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Graphic designer Gigi Little of Portland, Oregon, is the creative force behind Forest Avenue Press’ visual identity. Outside of the domain of Forest Avenue, she has written and illustrated two children’s picture books and her fiction and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from "Orca Culture" by Leigh Anne Kranz

The Seattle pod moved south. The sonar of hunger echoed between them. The homewaters were empty of the pink-fleshed fish they loved. They swam fast and close to the shoreline. They followed a troller in the fog, moved in with stealth to pull the fish from the hooks. The grandmother killed a great white shark easily, turned it belly-up and held until it drowned. She learned the technique on her first long migration, from a pod in the Farallons, the triangular islands where sea lions lounged golden on the rocks and bled scarlet in the choppy water.

She stood on the sand, a surfer watching the approach of radioactive waves. The nuclear plume was due to hit the West Coast that year, Seattle first, then Portland’s backyard. It had already hit her. She was the human at the end of the story. She was the voice no one wanted to hear. She had been fired from KPDX for talking about it on the air. The mainstream media ignored the first reports that trickled in across the wire. As if what happened to the ocean would not rain down upon the city.

Life proceeded as normal on the Oregon coast. Families arrived like the carnival on weekends, colorful umbrellas and screaming laughter. She didn’t really want to tell them. She wished for them their bonfires, soaring kites and perfect waves.

The pod lingered where the great river poured into the ocean. They hunted across the shifting sandbar, littered with the rusted skeletons of human ships. The pink-fleshed fish were scarce but easy to catch, seeming dazed. Black-skinned seals, driven suicidal by starvation, competed for the fish and were quickly divided among the family. The grandmother nudged her mouthfuls to the young one.

She set the alarm for sunrise; how many she had squandered. She woke to the patter of mist on the windowpane. The ocean was a ghost; she walked along the lace hem that appeared and disappeared on the wet sand. She could make out the smudge of a person up the beach, coming closer, a man; she recognized him. He was a famous writer of the Portland literati who rented a house in the three-street town. His wife and children joined him on weekends. Weekdays, other women. He wasn’t friendly to her, a witness to his deeds. When she moved in, he’d knocked on the door with red wine and two glasses, invited her to sit on her own deck, began to explain her view. She had asked him to leave. His books made her wince, male privilege run amok.

The writer materialized out of the fog, glowered in passing, and was enveloped again.

The run of pink-fleshed fish ended and the pod was drawn southward by passing clouds of meaty, silver fish. They trailed the schools for days along the trembling rift in the ocean floor, regained mass and breached with joy. The young one looked down upon the unfamiliar ground—submarine canyons and mountain chains, steaming undersea volcanoes—mapping to memory the way home. The adults only looked ahead.

The tidal pools were devoid of color; only the armored remained, chitons and barnacles, hermit crabs. It had been one year since she’d left Portland to live on its coast, to treasure the last days of the North Pacific ecosystem. She had chosen the beach town after rounding its dunes and entering a dreamscape: purple and orange sea stars upholstered the rocks, sunken grottoes bloomed with green and pink anemones, transient lagoons held stranded fish and dinner-size crabs. Wherever she looked now, she only saw what was missing.

The grandmother was weak. The silver fish continued on, but the pod could not follow. They took refuge in a cove of haystack rocks. They plucked crabs from the nooks, pulled giant red octopi from crevices. It was not enough. The big male spyhopped the shoreline, raised his head above the surface of the green water to scan the sand for movement, ears tuned for signs of life. He had never tried to hunt like the nicked and scarred pod from Los Angeles, who had taken over their homewaters one season and crawled upon land to grab seals. The L.A. gang had learned the trick from a Baja pod, who’d learned it from some Chileans. The big male scoped the forested coast for miles. The beaches were empty of seals.

Table of Contents

Introduction from the Editor

FROM THE DEEP
The Sturgeon Queen
Rene Denfeld / 9

Octopocalypse: a Love Story
Brigitte Winter / 15

Orca Culture
Leigh Anne Kranz / 27

FROM THE SKIES
Transformation
Dan DeWeese / 34

How I Got this Job
Brian Reid / 43

A Sky So Blue
Stefanie Freele / 49

Alder Underground
Jonah Barrett / 53

How Do You Say
Gentrification in Martian
Jonathan Hill / 74

TO THE DOGS
A Code for Everything
Andrew Stark / 80

Yay
Bradley K. Rosen / 85

Out of Order
Kevin Meyer / 99 

IN THE BOOKS
Aromageddon
Jason Squamata / 120

The Mind-Body Problem
Susan DeFreitas / 126

The Color Off the Shelf
Karen Munro / 141

OF THE DEAD
This Many Lost Things
Nicole Rosevear / 158

Squatty and Weasel Boy
Doug Chase / 165

Stone Cold Monk
Linda Rand / 181

The Heft of Ashes
Kirsten Larson / 183

OF THE UNDEAD
Vampire
Justin Hocking / 196

The Fixer: a Serial - 1 - The Duchess
Sean Davis / 198

The Deflowering
Suzy Vitello / 208

Trainwreck
Leslie What / 222

INTO THE WEIRD
Tunnels
Leni Zumas / 236

Waiting for the Question
Art Edwards / 241

Letters to The Oregonian in the Year 30,000 BC
Mark Russell / 249

In Transit
Kevin Sampsell / 253

NO RETURN
Notes from the Underground City
Stevan Allred / 260

Queen of Tabor
B. Frayn Masters / 275

Twin Carbs on Bad News
Jeff Johnson / 280

Always
Adam Strong / 297

Editor Bio / 302
Contributor Bios / 303

Editorial Reviews

Booklist: "The 30 stories collected here come from an impressive cast of authors. All stories are set in Portland, Oregon (you don’t need to know anything about Portland to enjoy them), and partake, to varying degrees, of the unique brand of weird that defines that city. Some center around specific landmarks (Powell’s bookstore makes several appearances), some reference the history of the town, and some treat the city only as a general setting. These stories range from highly speculative to more mainstream, from upbeat to cynical, silly to serious; stories of love and loss, humor and pathos, from the bizarre to the poetic. There’s even an illustrated comic. Some are wonderfully pulpy, and some are more modern. “Transformation,” by Dan DeWeese, uses an alien invasion as critique of mindless conformity; “Yay,” by Bradley K. Rosen, is a Christmas Krampus story of madness and indigence; “Waiting for the Question,” by Art Edwards, is a gritty urban fantasia featuring Alex Trebek. All of the stories are very good, making this a fun and recommended collection." — John Keogh

"If weird makes you think of funny and moving and disturbing and just plain odd in that wondrous Portland way, well, City of Weird is the book for you."

– Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

"City of Weird is a dark, imaginative and entertaining exploration of the bizarre, set against the backdrop of Bridgetown. From the career troubles of the undead to what's lurking in the basement at Powell's, this book is perfect for readers who want to know what truly keeps Portland weird."

– Ian Doescher, Portland native and author of the William Shakespeare's Star Wars series

"Forget everything you know or think you know about Portland—all that twee Wes Anderson-y Portlandia crap—this is Portland re-imagined as exactly what it is: one more screen on which to project the American Nightmare."

– Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

"With work ranging from myths to folklore, science fiction and a surprising dark comedy of eco-feminist post-Fukushima revenge, Gigi Little has collected together a brilliant showcase of literary talent working in the Pacific Northwest."
– Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl

"City of Weird is everything I love about Portland: its next-gen sensibility, gleeful disregard for expectation, and that undercurrent of darkness which acts as foil to the eccentricity. I popped these stories like the handmade treats they are, and enjoyed every one."

– Averil Dean, author of The Undoing and Alice Close Your Eyes

“Nimbly spanning the gamut from heartfelt to absurd, lyrical to laugh-out-loud funny, City of Weird confirms the suspicion held by many a Portland resident that you don’t have to look far to find the fantastical. It’ll be a long time before I walk on Mount Tabor or wander Powell’s without looking over my shoulder."

– Fonda Lee, author of Zeroboxer

"Like old pulp magazines, City of Weird runs the gamut from simply odd to straight-up horror, from comic to tragic, from short to long and, because it's Portland, there's even one graphic story (Jonathan Hill's 'How Do You Say Gentrification in Martian'). Whether you're already a fan of the weird and horrific in fiction or just enjoy short fiction well-told, City of Weird will have something to satisfy you. Also to horrify you and make you laugh, maybe at the same time. If this is what the bumper stickers mean when they say 'Keep Portland Weird,' count me in."

– Billie Bloebaum, bookseller, Third Street Books

From the Publisher