The July/August 2025 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.

Featuring all-new short fiction by John Chu, Catherynne M. Valente, Shveta Thakrar, Emma Törzs, Daniel H. Wilson, Jordan Taylor, and A. W. Prihandita; essays by J. R. Dawson, Brandon O’Brien, Charlie Jane Anders, and Amanda Wakaruk and Olav Rokne; poetry by Lora Gray, Shankar Narayan, Avra Margariti, and Prosper C. Ìféányí; interviews with Catherynne M. Valente and Daniel H. Wilson by Caroline M. Yoachim; Nilah Magruder’s The Duet as the cover; and an editorial by Michael Damian Thomas.

My Review:

First, if you’ve never heard Dolly Parton’s classic song, “Jolene”, it’s probably best that you listen to it AFTER you read this take on it. “Jolene” is clearly the basis for this novelette, but I’m honestly not sure whether knowing the original will help or hurt in your interpretations of this re-interpretation.

At the same time, and in the same thought, if you’ve never heard, or heard of the Eldritch Horror version of “Jolene” , you REALLY don’t want to look that up until after you’ve finished the story. Because this story fits WAY BETTER into the Eldritch Horror version than it does the original.

The outline of the story is the same as the song. It’s the same as a lot of songs, actually. “Jolene” strolls into this small town, “steals” the narrator’s husband and comes to claim her “prize”. The scare quotes are because a person can’t be stolen in the way these stories usually mean, and frankly, Charlie is no prize for either of them.

The story is theoretically about a conversation between the narrator, the “wronged” wife, and the brazen, man-stealing hussy Jolene.

It’s in the word “theoretically” that all the paranormal elements AND interesting speculation come into this story – on both sides.

Some of that is in the circumlocution that the narrator uses to refer to Jolene. At first, we’re pretty sure that the word she’s talking around but not actually saying is ‘whore’. Or possibly either ‘bitch’ or ‘cunt’ or all of the above. It’s only as the story progresses, as they talk on the porch, that the reader realizes that the word that’s being talked around is actually ‘vampire’.

And that the reason they’re having this conversation on the porch is that porches are liminal spaces, neither inside or outside, and that the distinction is important to creatures like Jolene. And, as it turns out, to people like the narrator. Maybe. Possibly. Eventually.

Because Jolene can’t get into the house to get Charlie without permission. Permission that the narrator is not about to give. Ever. At the same time, Jolene doesn’t need permission to get inside the narrator’s head. All she needs is time to talk and a whole lot of experience in getting people to question themselves and everything they thought they knew.

Escape Rating B: This is the last novelette in my Hugo reads. And it’s a very sort of equivocal story to end with. It’s not exactly fantasy, it’s not exactly horror, it’s not exactly the song and it’s not exactly like the story the reader thinks it’s going to be at any point in it. It also doesn’t exactly end. Jolene goes, the narrator stays and Charlie wakes up from his ensorcellment but it doesn’t feel like an ending. Or so I thought on first reading

It felt more like a temporary settling on the original status quo, and a pause while the narrator thinks about whether she’s going to remain content with the small life in the small town with the mostly tolerable husband she mostly keeps afloat through life. Then I reread the beginning and realized it wasn’t.

Either way, the real story doesn’t feel like it’s Jolene stealing Charlie or stealing Charlie’s soul or stealing Charlie’s life essence. It’s about the story she tells that night, a very unreliable narrator explaining how she got to be what she is and that it doesn’t work the way that people think it does. And that the narrator is just as likely to turn out like Jolene someday as Jolene was likely to have been her if her life had been different or if she’d been willing to settle for what other people thought she should be.

From one perspective, this is a feminist take on the story in the song. Jolene didn’t choose to become a vampire, she chose not to settle for the life that society believed she was supposed to have. This is absolutely not a ‘wronged woman’ vs. ‘brazen hussy’ story that pits two women against each other over a man who isn’t worth it. Jolene is just surviving and the narrator is just protecting the life she’s built. In the end, they aren’t enemies, they’re merely two sides of the same coin.

I thought the story was left a bit open-ended, that the narrator had decided one thing in the moment but might – and could – change her mind at some point in the future. The author contacted me to tell me to check the opening line again, and she was right to. Because the opening line does give the ending, but only after you read the whole thing through. Something that’s easy to lose track of in the throes of a good story. Which I did.

In the end, I left this one with mixed feelings. It held my interest while reading, and Jolene’s interpretations of the hows and whys of her kind of vampirism were interesting and a bit different, which was itself good because damn but that’s been done to death – pun definitely intended.

However, the story needs a lot of underlying assumptions about the narrator’s life and choices to make it work. (Also, in the original song she’s so pathetic that I can’t even with that.) A little bit more story, novella length perhaps, would have allowed more room for worldbuilding and a bit less of the song lyrics, resulting in a killer earworm. Your reading mileage may vary.

But now that I’ve finished my reading in this category, I’m left on the horns of a bit of a dilemma in my Hugo ballot. Not about this story, which is going to be well down my ballot, but needing to flip a coin between “Kaiju Agonistes” and “Never Eaten Vegetables” for my top pick. I have less than two weeks left to decide!