Merciless Mermaids: Tales from the Deep

Anthology. Executive editors Kevin J. Anderson and Allyson Longueira.

Editorial team: Scott T. Barnes (publisher and executive editor of NewMyths.com), Lois Bartholomew, Jessica Guernsey, Briannon Holifer, Lila Holley, Robert Johnson, Kelsey Kusnetzky, Victoria Lane, Jennifer Marts, Katherine Meeks, McKenzie Moore, Tracy Paddock, Aubrey Parry, Heidi Payne, and Logan Uber.  ©2023 WordFire Press.

Review by Candyce Byrne

In August 1946, my family boarded an old merchant ship in New York harbor to sail to Stockholm for  my father’s new post at the US embassy. Passenger ships weren’t running yet because the North Sea was still mined. My mother, descendant of ruthless raiders who crossed the seas in open longboats, was terrified not just of being blown to bits but also because my three-year-old sister insisted on riding her tricycle through the ship and out onto the pitching deck, my mother in pursuit, clutching her newborn (me) over her chundering heart. Is that why I’m terrified of wild water and what might loom below? Or is it tales of the horrors my ancestors faced when they “went veeking,” as my Danish Nana put it? Is it personal? Cultural? Or common to us all, genetic, as deep as our dread of the forest, that other familiar metaphor for fear, psyche and soul? With offerings from D.J. Butler, E.H. Gaskins, Mercedes Lackey, Uri Kurlianchik, Rick Wilber and many more, Merciless Mermaids: Tails from the Deep plunges into these questions.

The anthology, executive edited by Kevin J. Anderson and Allyson Longueira, comprises the thesis projects of the graduate students in the Publishing Master of Arts program at Western Colorado University. I don’t have room to tell you about all 30 selections, so here’s a little taste of this fisherman’s feast of short fiction and poetry.

In L.N. Weldon’s “Bones to Lay to Rest,” an unsettling period piece set in a remote coastal inn, the ladies who run the inn realize that handsome young naturalist Dr. McCormack can’t be permitted to reveal what he’s discovered on the beach, and that Something will have to be done.

 “Our Sky,” by Gama Ray Martinez follows the two-man crew of a hyperspace ship as they try to find out what happened to a distant colony whose inhabitants have vanished. The main clue: reports that children were seeing mermaids frolicking in the sea, and then they vanished.

Inuit legend is the inspiration for “The Woman Who Held the Sea in Her Hair,” Em McDermott’s harrowing tale of love betrayed and the power of motherhood.

Karen Deblieck’s poem “O, My Loves” is horrific, beautiful, and skillful. I won’t spoil your path of discovery. Take the plunge.

“Apex Predators,” a flash by Zach Shephard, mixes monsters in another effective piece I can’t describe without spoiling the conundrum at its heart. 

In Jonathan Duckworth’s richly atmospheric “Muddy the Waters,” little Posey is caught in the lethal conflict between her wish-granting Water Auntie, who lives in the bayou, and her stern Methodist mother. What secrets lie between the sisters, and why is Momma weeping in the bathtub?

A bite of ningyo, a fish  man or fish woman, grants long life. It’s a pricey, off-the-menu item in the trendy Japanese restaurant Edomae in Ken Bebelle’s “The Last Ounce of Flesh.”  But the ningyo herself lives even longer. Escaped, healed, and driven by rage over years imprisoned in a fetid tank waiting for someone to purchase a gobbet of her living flesh, she’s out for revenge.

My favorite monster lurks in “The Lure of the Sea” by Michelle Tang. Despite unnecessarily withheld information and missed opportunities to plumb the psychologies of the abyss, the beast, once revealed, is perfect and awful. Set your questions aside and plough on to the payoff.

Mermaids are usually a dark subject, but not all the selections are grim. “Pretty Maids All In A Row” is Mercedes Lackey’s sometimes funny, sometimes grisly account of “Live Mermaids” in a skeezy amusement park defending themselves with their wits and their gifts.

Benjamin Butler Smith’s “Caecelia’s Tears” is a swashbuckling adventure that reads like pulp fiction from the Old Days.  

In “Mer-Made,” Uri Kurlianchik delivers a cross-genre caper about a hard-boiled private eye leading his intrepid crew of honest cops against the vicious mermaid mafia holding his seaside town hostage.

Mermaids can only fly in the rain, B.G. Hilton tells us in “Flight of the Mermaids,” but their skill and daring when heavy weather grounds other pilots more than make up for that limitation. With the Greatest War at a turning point, it’s fortunate that the Baron’s dirigible Hades appears during a downpour. The  mermaids of the 23rd Squadron—Neptune’s Thunderbolts—take to the air to take down the Baron and save the day. Such fun!

Seas, bayous, lakes, rivers, creeks, tanks, bathtubs, even the skies…merciless mermaids could be anywhere.  Let them take you for a dip on the wild side.