One of four releases from the intelligent Small Beer Press (run by fantasy/literary fiction writer Kelly Link and her husband), Mothers and Other Monsters, the first short story collection from Maureen F. McHugh, tugs inventively at modern personal and social assumptions. McHughs previous novels have won science fiction awards, but with the exception of one story in the new collection, each of these beautifully rendered tales take place within the familiar confines of western life. Exploring the strange, unsettling, and magical areas inherent in our social interactions, politics, beliefs, and scientific frontiers, McHugh asks, what would happen if?and finds inventive and sobering answers.

The opening stories are bold in their stated otherworldliness: (the first sentence of the book: In the afterlife, Rachel lived alone.), yet so simple and familiar in emotional complexity and experience that the twists and spare-but-vibrant additions of ghosts and werewolves stay shocking and delightfully fresh. Even the dogged sci-fi loathing reader can just relax. McHugh creates sympathetic characters, and does not shy away from building motivating histories that lend credence and gravity to the paths her protagonists choose.

Smoothly inventive, McHugh is at her best in her matter-of-fact, yet metaphysical setting: the first story sends the reader to a calm, unchanging little cottage, inhabited by Rachel, a woman who died young at the turn the century. Her musings are delightful: Rachel did not understand why [her husbands uncle] was in heaven, or why some people were here and some people werent, or where the other people were. She had figured her absence of concern was part of being dead. But, when she is sent notice of a Buddhist offering made by a grandchild in China, she is presented with the notion of working on her soul in the afterlife until obtaining the highest possible level. After weighing the options presented by the competing visions of mortals, Rachel chooses certainty and thus eternal monotony, belying our attachment to our own conditioned ideas of what constitutes happily ever after.

Taking the authentic voice of a teenager in an interview transcript, complete with humor and aching naivet, Interview, On Any Given Dayé“” chronicles the outbreak of a new STD born of rejuvenation therapy for the elderlyor Boomers as the girl refers to them. The narrator describes her boomer boyfriend in the scathingly honest words of a sixteen year old: He was trying to dress like a regular kid. See, most boomers dress in flared jeans and black and stuff and they all have long hair, especially the men, I guess because so many of them were, like, bald before the treatments. This guy had long hair, too, pulled back in a dorky pony tail, but he was wearing a camo jumpsuit. Hed have looked stupid in county orange, like he was trying too hard, but the camo jumpsuit was okay. While reminding the reader of the ever-present side effects that shadow each new scientific advance, McHugh layers her story with a more interesting social experiment. How would a person navigate when offered entre into a wo rld that has been forbidden by nature, cloaked sufficiently if poorly, in an unnatural body?

In another story which explores the pitfalls of step-parenting, McHugh reveals a thesis through which her entire collection can be interpreted, We carry maps we believe are true: our parentsé“’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst. Mothers and Other Monsters, as an intelligent and often playful examination of our social maps, succeeds wonderfully not only in prodding reevaluation of the directions we navigate by, but also the nature of the destination itself.