Their IGNYTE award-nominated short story “The Night Sun” and flash fiction “teatime” were published on Tor.com.

Their story “Summer Skin” in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax’s Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning special issue Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, KaijuRising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. It feels more mythical and tale-like due to this style and furthers what Flowers For The Sea seems to tell us: what you sow, you will reap.įor better and much much worse, this tiny, powerful story will leave the reader gasping, swallowing seawater, hoping (dreading?) for more.Zin E. There is much left up to the reader’s imagination, which plays as a strength. Keeping to that, the details of the world are only enough to characterize Iraxi and the other players in this novella. Iraxi’s dissonance to her body echoes what pregnant women experience as well, but Rocklyn dials this up to enhance the increasing dread with each page turn. Leaning fully into the Gothic heritage that came before Flowers is a dark tale detailing a woman’s resolve to continue, despite losing everything.

Readers should be cautioned that there are some disturbing scenes. Iraxi is in her final days of her pregnancy and it terrifies her. “I abhor my present state, but termination is not an option.” Up to this point, previous pregnant women had miscarried or had stillbirths. She did not choose motherhood, the pregnancy was not planned nor was it hoped for. The hard choices of duty and personal sacrifice eclipse whatever personal freedoms Iraxi would otherwise have amid all of this, which isn’t to say she has many to begin with. Iraxi’s struggle with her desire to get rid of her baby, but knowing her child may be the only one born on the ark at all, is disquieting. Rocklyn captures the bodily, while also the dissociation that comes with pregnancy. We feel every tooth grating, cramp, and soreness. Iraxi, a strong, but wounded character, carries the story through sheer force of will. Spurned by everyone around her, Iraxi turns inward and little does she realize how much may be in store for her.Ī mixture of both dark fantasy and dystopia come together for a blended immersion, and one cannot shake the eeriness.

Her fellow passengers scrap together a meager existence alongside her, after embarking with a calamity nipping at their heels. Iraxi is a pregnant outcast, attempting to survive on board an ark that is beginning to fall apart. Few novels, let alone novellas, elicit the kind of atmosphere and body-ness that Flowers For The Sea by Zin E.

Flowers for the sea by zin e rocklyn