First impressions review: Brimstone and Marmalade, by Aaron Corwin & Masquerade Season, by ‘Pemi Aguda


 

These short stories, again available on the Tor website, feature children with supernatural “pets” that either they or their families fail to value.

 

In Brimstone and Marmalade, a little girl is being a bit of a brat about wanting a pony. Her family say that they will get her a demon instead – a much more practical pet, as it can live in a small cage and only needs grub souls to eat. Mathilde’s new demon is called Ix’thor. He’s a “miniature dark lord”, and he grows on you very quickly:

Mathilde slammed the door behind her and ran up the stairs to her room. She threw her soggy book bag on the floor and flopped facedown on the bed… WHAT TROUBLES YOU, MY MINION?... “We had to make a collage,” Mathilde mumbled. “About animals. And Billy Haggerty . . . he said mine was ugly . . . and he took it . . . and he threw it in the mud! It’s ruined!”  YOUR PLAN . . . WAS NEARLY COMPLETE? “Yes!” Mathilde squeezed her eyes shut. “Now I have to start all over!” …Ix’thor looked down for a moment, then raised his sword over his head. FEED HIM TO THE RAVENOUS TONGUE-BEASTS OF GARAKH’NURR! Mathilde sniffed. “I would, but I don’t know where that is.” Ix’thor reached out his little hand. GIVE ME YOUR SOUL AND I WILL GRANT YOU LIMITLESS POWER. Mathilde smiled a little. “Mom says I can’t have limitless power until I’m older. But you can have a grub soul.” Ix’thor waited patiently by the altar, his eyes glowing brightly. EXCELLENT.

Mathilde starts to warm to him too…until tragedy strikes.

 

By contrast, Pauly, in Masquerade Season, values the creatures who find him immediately. They are masquerades: Dancing figures often covered in shaggy raffia or cloth strips and masks, which represent ancestral spirits, nature spirits, or gods (See a video of some from the author’s country of Nigeria here).  Pauly’s are beautiful:  

The tall masquerade has a body of long raffia threads layered over each other—like someone has stacked fifty-six brooms and topped them all with a brown cowboy hat… The second masquerade is just a little taller than Pauly’s mother. It is draped in rich aso-oke, the bloodiest of reds. Pauly gawks at the twinkling beads sewn into the cloth… Though the head of the third masquerade is a solid dark wood that takes up half its body length…there is an explosion of colorful feathers around it. The feathers are blue and purple and red and yellow and pink and they are long and different, as if all the birds of the world have donated feathers for this purpose… “Why are you following me?” Pauly asks.It is the feathered masquerade that speaks; the voice is a whispery, susurrating sound, as if the feathers themselves are speaking. The masquerade says, “Because we are your masquerades.”

But no one else seems to see how marvelous they are, and when a family member starts wanting to use the masquerades in ways that hurt them Pauly has a hard decision to make.

Overall recommendation: Very cute, and more suitable for younger readers than most of the Tor short stories I've run across.

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