Lost Places by Sara Pinsker

Lost Places is Sara Pinsker’s second fiction short story collection. It earned finalist for Slate’s best of the year and Book Riot’s Best Fantasy Books of 2023, among other awards. Of the twelve stories included, eleven have been previously published elsewhere with the majority falling on the fantasy side of the speculative fiction genre. The collection includes Pinsker’s “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,” which scored a rare trifecta winning Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards (as well as a Eugie Award and a World Fantasy nomina­tion in 2022) and her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning 2021 novelette “Two Truths and A Lie.”

Each story in Lost Places provokes the reader to think about challenging issues, among them: What are we willing to sacrifice to be comfortable? What happens when good intentions get perverted? Are lies repressed truths? What are the dangers of increasing digitization and gamification of everyday needs, or of even the best-intentioned surveillance?

The content of the entries is a mix of fable, fairytale, tacky old kids’ TV shows, improvised campfire tales, urban legends, mysterious ancient ballads, fading memories, even compulsive lying. “Each lead story embeds whole shards of other tales; for instance in “Two Truths and A Lie,” we read about the habitual fabrications of the protagonist Stella, the shadowy backstory of the hoarder whose massively cluttered house she agrees to help clean out, and the cryptic tales told by the host of a creepy TV show Stella appeared on as a child.” [Gary K. Wolfe]

Story themes include “her touchstones of music and memory joined by stories about secret subversions and hidden messages in art, lost routes, last chances. Her stories span and transcend genre labels, looking for the truth in strange situations from possible futures to impossible pasts.” [Lost Places]

To celebrate this terrific collection, I’ve written a brief summary of each tale, in the order in which it is presented in the book, along with random thoughts and reactions.

“Two Truths and a Lie” follows a compulsive liar back to her hometown where she reminisces about a creepy local children’s TV show that shaped the lives of its audience. It’s dark and should have been disturbing and I’d have a hard time analyzing it if asked, but I loved it! Pinsker brilliantly weaves an eerie atmosphere into commonplace events. We read about the main character, Stella, home visiting her parents — happens every day, right? But then she begins lying—about everything! We learn that Denny, the brother of her childhood friend Marco, has recently died. She offers to help clean out his house as Denny had become “one of those people whose possessions swallowed them entirely.” Pinsker effectively renders the queasy overabundance of Denny’s home:

The piles held surprises. Papers layered on papers layered on toys and antiques, then, suddenly, mouse turds or a cat’s hairball or the flattened tendril of some once-green plant or something moldering and indefinable. Denny had apparently smoked, too; every few layers, a full ashtray made an appearance. [p.4]

On their first day of attacking Denny’s clutter, they take a break, and Marco asks her about her life. She tells him she lives in Chicago, is divorced, has one son, Cooper, travels a lot, and works in sales for a coffee distributor.

Even as she spoke, she hated that she’d said it. None of it was true. She had always done that, inventing things when she had no reason to lie just because they sounded interesting, or because it gave her a thrill. lf he had asked to see pictures of her nonexistent son Cooper, she’d have nothing to show. Not to mention she had no idea what a coffee distributor did. [p. 6]

“That Our Flag Was Still There” is about a future America where citizens are chosen by lottery to become a human flag for a day, adorned and displayed as a symbol of patriotism, in a potentially perilous ritual that some may not survive. I wasn’t fully immersed in the story until the end, which I loved! It reminded me of the ending in the 1976 film “Network” in which an individual condemns the public’s passive acceptance.

There wasn’t much that underwhelmed about this collection, but I did struggle to see the point of “I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise,” which seemed more like a rundown of famous creatives who lived in New York than a story in its own right. Perhaps this one is more pertinent for New Yorkers and music history nerds. Steve[n] Mollmann writes that it is “a sort of free-association jazz-induced fever dream about a fictional musician peppered with appearances by all sort of real residents of Jazz-Age New York City.”

“The Court Magician” is a dark, well-told fantasy story; like other Pinsker fantasies, it is set in a typical imperial state, where a skilled amateur illusionist learns about power and its dangers. “It’s rather chilling how the story follows the main character, a boy who isn’t cruel but who has a burning desire to know how things work. And, driven by this desire to know how, finds himself pulled into a game that he doesn’t know the rules of, where he agrees because he hopes to learn them well enough to win and doesn’t see until it’s far too late that the rules are something of a cheat, and the how might not be as important as the why.” [Quick Sip Reviews] I found this the saddest of all Pinsker’s stories in this collection because the boy isn’t evil, just very curious and competitive, but the consequences of his actions are devastating for him.

The plot of “Everything is Closed Today” will be familiar to readers of Pinsker’s first novel, A Song for a New Day (2019). In that novel, a large-scale terrorist attack provokes a series of shutdowns across all society, as fear leads to shops, schools, and workplaces shutting their doors with no real indication of when they will open again. “As in A Song for a New Day, Pinsker effectively predicts the tension and emotion of a societal crisis, the scant news processed in shocked, staccato bursts. This sense of lawlessness and indifference, the main character left twisting in the wind as her job shuts down and she loses vital pay, further adds to the verisimilitude of this remarkably prescient story.” [William Shaw]

Mae wondered how many other people were stuck doing what she was doing: checking the news, worrying, counting pennies, counting again. She’d been too young to understand the last time the country was rocked like this, but none of the accounts mentioned the deep sense of powerlessness she was fighting. They didn’t want blood donors. They didn’t want anyone doing anything at all. Stay home, good citizens. Never mind that you won’t have a home if the stores and theaters and libraries and schools don’t open again, that rental offices would still expect rent and banks would still expect mortgage payments. How long could they possibly expect people to put up with this? The news kept reporting threats. Where were the stories about ordinary people struggling: Where was the resistance to this becoming the new normal? She sent out a group chat to friends to see if anybody knew of protests. Nobody responded, and she wasn’t sure if the message had even gone out. [p. 86]

Although it sounds like a real downer, there is a twist to the story that rings of hope, love, and community support.

“Left the Century to Sit Unmoved,” introduces us to a small town swimming hole notorious because occasionally those that dive in disappear without a trace. We never do find out why people keep disappearing, but the question Pinsker is really concerned with is, why do people still jump in? The story examines the psychology of the people who choose to swim there regardless. It’s a little hard to get into that headspace, in fact one member of the science fiction book club I attend stated that it should come with trigger warnings, but I thought it was a beautiful and fascinating reflection on those who take risks and seek adventure at all costs. The narrator, Shay, states:

I don’t imagine that people who are taken die or are reborn. I think they’re transformed, but I don’t know into what. Rainbow trout, black snake, water molecules. Is that different than dying? To become part of this beautiful pond, to receive the waterfall, to be surrounded always by rock and pine and birch and sky? [p. 109]

I found “Escape from Caring Seasons,” one of the most chilling tales because it could so easily be true. In it, an elderly woman tries to free her wife from an AI-controlled retirement community hospital where she is being held against her wishes to return to her home. The story narrative kept me on the edge of my seat and did a fabulous job at hitting the little nuances that made it feel current–a community planner seeing her work twisted, the hunt for missing persons outsourced to private drone-operators paid by the result. Here is a quote that I hope captures the suspense built by the author:

She didn’t have her watch or her cell phone, since either could be used for tracking, so she had no idea how long she’d walked. Zora followed the stream, using the moonlight reflecting off the water as her guide.

She was almost to the spot where she hoped the stream and road met, when something buzzed above the trees, a bat or an owl perhaps. It buzzed by again. Whirred. She whipped her head around, and spotted it over the stream, rotors gleaming. A drone, no bigger than a sparrow. [p.123]

“A Better Way of Saying” features a young man in 1915 who works as a movie shouter, reading the text from silent film title cards and who discovers a magic power that he can only use in very specific circumstances. One critic named this his favorite in the collection stating that: “Like much of Pinsker’s work, it engages with the power of art and storytelling itself: in this case, cinema and journalism and their power to remake the world.” Unfortunately, this was the second entry (the other being “I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise”) that I found difficult to finish. Fortunately, it was followed by an outstanding entry that I have repeatedly reread.

“Remember This For Me,” spotlights a notable artist named Bonnie Sweetlove who has had exhibits at the Whitney but now, diagnosed with dementia, needs to regularly consult her notebook to remember her caregiver or her niece, or even decisions she herself has made days earlier about a forthcoming retrospective. Several book club members shared that it was the most compelling piece they had ever read on caring for someone with dementia and I agree. Here’s a great example of why this story resonated with us.

When she returned to the living room, a middle-aged white woman sat on her couch with a sheaf of paperwork, and a tall Black woman stood in the kitchen mixing something in a bowl. She ducked back into the bathroom and pulled out her notebook. Leafed back through page after page of questions in her own handwriting, looking for something to explain who they were.

WHO IS THE WOMAN IN MY HOUSE?

Her name is Patty. She helps me. She lives here with me.

That was presumably the woman in the kitchen. The other looked familiar.

“Bonnie, would you like some lunch?’ called the woman named Patty. “I heard you go wash up so I started putting something together for you.”

It was considerate, really. Bonnie dropped her notebook back in her pocket and ventured out. [p. 165]

“The Mountains His Crown” is set in some kind of future world or on a space colony, where an emperor is imposing his top-down will on what crops local farmers must grow. My concern with this entry was that it stopped just when it was getting interesting— when an individual act of resistance finally occurs. I wanted to know what would happen if someone pushed back against a massively powerful and oppressive structure.

“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is an interesting experiment with form— a mystery told through a website’s annotations and comments regarding the lyrics of a traditional English folk ballad. Pinsker evokes the social dynamics of internet forums so well here, particularly in how one poster, Dynamum, keeps suggesting outlandish interpretations and then getting overly defensive when called out.

“Science Facts!,” the only story exclusive to Lost Places, describes middle school girls on a camping trip who are unnerved by fireside tales told by a drama teacher recruited at the last minute to be one of their counselors. I liked the beginning and the strange vibe the author built but had a tough time understanding the ending. Who cares when the writing is this good!

We all made it down the mountain. That’s the first thing to tell you, because otherwise you’ll jump to certain conclusions. You’ll think you know our story: that we went feral , turned on each other. The prurient details you add will depend on the type of media you devour, on your desire for human triumph or nature’s retribution, on your own base assumptions about what must have happened if this doesn’t start with telling you eight of us went into the woods, and eight came out. [p. 224]

A futuristic, AI-controlled retirement home, a nation in which you demonstrate loyalty by becoming a human flag, an eerie swimming hole, a town in which the emperor’s machines destroy crops, and a mysterious island where an illusionist encounters powerful magic. These are just some of the lost places you will travel to as you read this incredible collection. Any reader is bound to find something to enjoy because the stories are so diverse: set across the genres of dystopia, fantasy, horror, and realism. Although she focuses on power, Sarah Pinsker examines a diverse set of themes as well, including the influencing force of music, the friction between technology and humanity, the importance of personal identity, and the meaning of community. This is speculative fiction at its very best!

Check Amazon for more on this book I love.