Adam-Troy Castro: Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

Actually, I need to be more specific than that. This man’s virtues as a storyteller are considerable.

First, his sentences are easy to read.

This is one of the highest pieces of praise I can give to any writer. The true test of a writer’s skill with language is to read his paragraphs aloud. If they flow easily from the tongue, they will flow easily in your mind as you read.

More than that, Adam-Troy Castro tells his stories with a seeming minimum of effort. He does not engage in gaudy constructions or labored trowelings of adjectives and metaphors. Instead, he lets the story grow as if it is occurring in front of your eyes. He glides through the narrative, creating magic with the simplest of tools, demonstrating the kind of linguistic muscle memory that only comes from ten thousand hours of sitting at the keyboard, paying meticulous attention to the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, and the way they all fit together—doing the authorial equivalent of “wax on, wax off.”

In other words, Adam-Troy Castro sweats blood to make it look effortless. The result is a clean clear voice. Readable. Evocative. (And the rotten bastard makes it look easy!)

Why is this important? Because if the reader has to stop and decode the sentence he’s not in the story, he’s trapped in the writing. The job of the writer is to evoke the story so vividly that the reader forgets he’s reading and rides the roller coaster as fast as he can, eagerly turning pages (or tapping the side of his ebook reader’s screen) to find out what happens next.

But no matter how skillful any author might be at constructing sentences, he also has to make you believe in the story, and this is where Adam-Troy Castro really shines.

That’s the second point.

You believe in the story because his characters believe in it. They are not standard issue archetypes dropped into their situations as much as they are grown from the worlds they inhabit.

His characters are genuine. They have histories. They have passions, fears, desires, and sorrows. They have feelings, they can hurt. As a writer, he cares about the people in his stories as if they are friends, family, acquaintances, enemies—and because Adam-Troy Castro cares, the reader cares too. Dip into any of these stories and as the characters come to life for you, you will care about them too.

That in itself should establish this man as a writer well worth your attention.

But his skill with language and character are merely the foundations on which he builds.

Adam-Troy Castro has something worthwhile to say in every story. He’s using his stories to illuminate and explore the subtext of our world. He’s commenting on the terrible traps that humanity has stumbled into, the things we do to each other, and the ethical dilemmas that bind us.

Adam-Troy Castro tells stories that disturb.

That’s why he’s worth reading. The status quo is the enemy. The writer’s job is to be subversive, to awaken the reader, to annoy the reader, to make the reader uncomfortable, to stamp the reader with an indelible experience that will change the way he looks at the universe from that moment on. Adam-Troy Castro does that.

Dip into this collection with caution. Do not try to assimilate it all in one read. Notice the spread. Notice the dynamic range. These are thought-grenades. They are time-bombs shoved down your throat. They will lurk in your gut and explode at all the wrong moments.

Pay attention, dear reader. This man is doing what writers are supposed to do.

He’s making a difference.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

This is the story of a mother, and a daughter, and the right to life, and the dignity of all living things, and of some souls granted great destinies at the moment of their conception, and of others damned to remain society’s useful idiots.

CONTENTS

Expect cute plush animals and amniotic fluid and a more or less happy ending for everybody, though the definition of happiness may depend on the truncated emotional capacity of those unable to feel anything else. Some of the characters are rich and famous, others are underage, and one is legally dead, though you may like her the most of all.

APPEARANCE

We first encounter Molly June on her fifteenth deathday, when the monitors in charge of deciding such things declare her safe for passengers. Congratulating her on completing the only important stage of her development, they truck her in a padded skimmer to the arvie showroom where she is claimed, right away, by one of the Living.

The fast sale surprises nobody, not the servos that trained her into her current state of health and attractiveness, not the AI routines managing the showroom, and least of all Molly June, who has spent her infancy and early childhood having the ability to feel surprise, or anything beyond a vague contentment, scrubbed from her emotional palate. Crying, she’d learned while still capable of such things, brought punishment, while unconditional acceptance of anything the engineers saw fit to provide brought light and flower scent and warmth. By this point in her existence she’ll greet anything short of an exploding bomb with no reaction deeper than vague concern. Her sale is a minor development by comparison: a happy development, reinforcing her feelings of dull satisfaction. Don’t feel sorry for her. Her entire life, or more accurately death, is happy ending. All she has to do is spend the rest of it carrying a passenger.

VEHICLE SPECIFICATIONS

You think you need to know what Molly June looks like. You really don’t, as it plays no role in her life. But as the information will assist you in feeling empathy for her, we will oblige anyway.

Molly June is a round-faced, button-nosed gamin, with pink lips and cheeks marked with permanent rose: her blonde hair framing her perfect face in parentheses of bouncy, luxurious curls. Her blue eyes, enlarged by years of genetic manipulation and corrective surgeries, are three times as large as the ones imperfect nature would have set in her face. Lemur-like, they dominate her features like a pair of pacific jewels, all moist and sad and adorable. They reveal none of her essential personality, which is not a great loss, as she’s never been permitted to develop one.

Her body is another matter. It has been trained to perfection, with the kind of punishing daily regimen that can only be endured when the mind itself remains unaware of pain or exhaustion. She has worked with torn ligaments, with shattered joints, with disfiguring wounds. She has severed her spine and crushed her skull and has had both replaced, with the same ease her engineers have used, fourteen times, to replace her skin with a fresh version unmarked by scars or blemishes. What remains of her now is a wan amalgam of her own best-developed parts, most of them entirely natural, except for her womb, which is of course a plush, wired palace, far safer for its future occupant than the envelope of mere flesh would have provided. It can survive injuries capable of reducing Molly June to a smear.

In short, she is precisely what she should be, now that she’s fifteen years past birth, and therefore, by all standards known to modern civilized society, Dead.

HEROINE

Jennifer Axioma-Singh has never been born and is therefore a significant distance away from being Dead.

She is, in every way, entirely typical. She has written operas, climbed mountains, enjoyed daredevil plunges from the upper atmosphere into vessels the size of teacups, finagled controlling stock in seventeen major multinationals, earned the hopeless devotion of any number of lovers, written her name in the sands of time, fought campaigns in a hundred conceptual wars, survived twenty regime changes, and on three occasions had herself turned off so she could spend a year or two mulling the purpose of existence while her bloodstream spiced her insights with all the most fashionable hallucinogens.