Mary South's sharp debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, explores the often harsh and always heartbreaking contemporary world through 10 stories of everyday people coping with loss, violence and grief. In "The Age of Love," a male rest home nurse struggles to hold on to his girlfriend after an elderly patient begins wooing her. Meanwhile, in "To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves," a fan community watches the continual build up and break down of the real people behind their favorite characters. Finally, in the collection's title story, a young woman cyber-stalks her rapist's girlfriend. A mix of surrealism, science fiction, realism and magical realism, these stories remain grounded in human experience regardless of their genre-blurring tendencies.
You Will Never Be Forgotten holds firmly together as an exploration of a modern moment defined by cutting-edge science and technology but nevertheless essentially comprised of human emotion. The writing, like the worlds in which South's characters live, is cool, hard-edged and sterile, but full of feeling. Often, South's characters push against the boundaries of social media or attempt to confine themselves within institutions, only to find themselves still in the endless space of longing and despair in which they originated. It is through this juxtaposition of the human and nonhuman that South most effectively throws the intensity and reality of her subjects into relief. Like the narrator of "Frequently Asked Questions about Your Craniotomy," South delivers these poignant, darkly funny tales with a clinical precision that reveals, rather than obscures, her constant reminder that we are all still, despite everything, alive. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor