“The Bride” (2020)

This story by Shaenon K. Garrity is another good one from Black Static magazine, which unfortunately closed down operations in 2023 after 30 years. Garrity’s bio says she is a cartoonist, and maybe some of that accounts for the vivid imagery here, but really this is more compelling on a meta-textual level, at once riffing on the Frankenstein mythos and addressing the reader in chanting, taunting, hypnotic ways. It opens: “As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared.” It’s set in the early 1930s insofar as it has a time setting, which suggests some affinity with the Universal movie franchise. But it is wild and cold and sophisticated more like Mary Shelley herself. It’s not Bride of Frankenstein but it’s in the neighborhood. This Frankenstein’s monster is made from the corpse of a beautiful young woman by a “Doctor” to be his mate. It is in the form of an animated dead girl. She smells bad. She falls apart easily and must be put back together with wax and other adherents. Radium as well as electricity was involved in animating her, so she is also radioactive. Her vision is x-ray and she sees and hears with her entire body. The relationship between the Doctor and the dead girl is, of course, fraught and desperate. Eventually she leaves her rotting body behind entirely and exists as a kind of energy vortex, dimly seen but in the shape of a woman. Meanwhile there is another narrative thread going on in second-person that has us driving and searching for something that appears to be the end of the story? It’s still not finished at the end, leaving us in limbo, even though it certainly seems to finish the story of the bride, but implies it hasn’t to keep us going? Maybe. It’s actually a pretty neat trick, a kind of narrative moebius loop. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a while, contemporary or otherwise. It is splashed with bolts of color. The language is blunt. It may be coy about its Mary Shelley and other Frankenstein sources, but they are there. Garrity even slips in an ”It’s alive!” But I like even more how she pushes beyond that, into a next phase of “the Bride” as a glimmering energy vortex. It wasn’t just life that was created in this experiment, but something more profound. And it’s irresistible! (Note: I see there is a movie called The Bride! set to be released this March. It sounds like it has a similar premise and shares elements with this story, but I don’t see Garrity’s name anywhere associated with it. Credit for direction and screenplay goes solely to Maggie Gyllenhaal, so maybe it’s just one of those “something in the air” coincidences. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to.)

Black Static #77
Story not available online.