Placed into Abyss

by Rachel Swirsky

From Nebula Award-winning author Rachel Swirsky comes a time traveling adventure Placed into Abyss (Mise en Abyse), a Tor.com Original short story.

Chris would rather be anywhere but here, cleaning out his deceased, hateful grandparents’ house with his relatives. Each room he visits takes him back in time to another traumatic memory. To escape this house and his grandparents and his past, he’ll need to take time travel into his own hands.

Content warning for fictional depictions of child abuse, including verbal, physical, and sexual.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Novella

26 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 14, 2020

About the author

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and is a graduate of Clarion West. Her work has been short-listed for the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Sturgeon Award, and placed second in 2010's Million Writers Award. In addition to numerous publications in magazines and anthologies, Swirsky is the author of three short stories published as e-books, "Eros, Philia, Agape," "The Memory of Wind," and "The Monster's Million Faces." Her fiction and poetry has been collected in THROUGH THE DROWSY DARK (Aqueduct Press, 2010). A second collection, HOW THE WORLD BECAME QUIET: MYTHS OF THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, is forthcoming from Subterranean Press.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chris rubbed his cold arms as he stared down the hallway. His skin felt stretched and thin. He felt like a spaghetti strand being pulled apart. He wanted to step backwards. Maybe sit in the rocking chair next to Jim. Maybe go back into the garage and hunch in a corner.

this is one of the better stories i've read about trauma and abuse, immediacy and aftermath, but i was really hoping for a spooooky short for spooktober and this was barely even genre; flashbacks as 'time travel.' horror, yes, but not fun halloween horror, just 'people are terrible' horror.

on a related note, when are the spoiler alert people gonna battle the trigger warning people? lemme know where that flagpole is, and i'll be there with popcorn, watching the people who don't wanna know and the people who don't wanna not know duke it out and i'll yell at whoever's left standing for ruining reading experiences for the rest of us.

least helpful 'review' i've ever done, but i got deadlines!!



read it for yourself here:

https://www.tor.com/2020/10/14/placed...

come to my blog!

[Badseedgirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too dark and traumatic for me. This will be a trigger story for people. Don't get me wrong it is a well written story, but, just no.

[Alex Sarll]

You know when memes will attribute half the dialogue (or lack thereof) to 'nobody'? This puts a similar trick to far more sinister use as it reifies that queasy sense of time travel which comes with cleaning out a dead relative's house. Except there's worse than just that lurking, in a way whose insidious reveal is somewhat undermined by the content warnings. Not that I don't see the use of them, especially for a piece like this, but it did leave me wondering if there's a better way to deploy them, perhaps whited out for mousing over in the same way as is now commonly done for spoilers, with which after all they so often overlap.

[Fatima · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeing how this has 2.81 stars has me absolutely stumped. Most people who gave it low ratings didn’t give a review, so I can only go by the one-star who admitted it was well written but only gave it a low rating because it made them uncomfortable. I hope that isn’t the case overall, because the 2.81 out of 5 for this - for the text doing its job and executing both writing a successful short story and dealing with a topic that is meant to make you feel uncomfortable - is doing a disservice to anyone who may hesitate to read this over the rating given on Goodreads.

Trauma, depression, suicidal ideation and intent as black holes where people can never comprehend from the outside in, and from the inside out information never gets out.

Grief being nonlinear being expressed in a text that weaves in and out of the present.

Trauma as time-traveling, memory as both self-harm and self-soothing. Generational harm. Family secrets with complicit members. Unaware members. Knowing members.

I want to give it five stars just to help the rating but in truth this was 3.5 for me.

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully told yet harrowing story of one man's recollection of his abuse as a child by his grandfather when he and his family return to pack the remains after the death of the old man. It's painful to read, and made all the more so by Swirsky's use of time travel and black hole metaphors. Additionally, the lack of quotation marks during the family dialogue makes the adult children seem as if they are a family of telepaths. This is a disturbing, strange story with no clear ending.

[OldBird · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting short story, quite literally, as our protagonist Chris revisits an old house and old memories that would probably have been better left buried. How it handles the themes of abusve relationships and unreliable memories is skilfully done, for we never need to see events to know what's happened. The strange hopping between conversations in the timelines threw me for a second, but once I understood what was going on it was hard not to be moved by events.

[Kimikimi]

A hard read about child abuse and trauma

[April Thompson Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it here: https://www.tor.com/2020/10/14/placed...

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting premise but, sadly, it went nowhere.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://www.tor.com/2020/10/14/placed...

[f̟l̟o̟r̟a̟]

incredible writing.

(read tws for this one though!!)

[Per · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://reactormag.com/placed-into-ab...

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://book-bucket.com/2020/10/21/pl...



This is one of the most harrowing short stories I've ever read. It was an uncomfortable read but I couldn't tear myself away and I suspect will stay with me for a while.

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really bounced off of this one. The time travel made things confusing and disjointed, and I really just did not like the depictions of abuse.