Review of Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills

Short story collections are, as I always say at the start of every review of one, a hard sell for me. I love novels. Indeed, I identified a lot with what Samantha Mills says in her afterword about writing long novels in her youth and only recently getting around to learning how to short story. That’s true for me as a writer and a reader. Nevertheless, I liked The Wings Upon Her Back enough that I requested and received this eARC from NetGalley and Tachyon Publications.

This is a collection of thirteen of Mills’s previously published works, the most notable being the eponymous “Rabbit Test,” all of them various shades of speculative fiction. They typically focus closely on a single protagonist, variously first or third person, but always in a milieu quite unlike our own. Mills has dual talents for both setting and characterization; she can drop you into an unfamiliar world and orient you immediately, and at the same time, with a few words, introduce you to a new character like you’ve know them forever.

I won’t review every story individually, but here are some highlights for me.

“Rabbit Test” is the load-bearing story here, and I can see why. At first, I didn’t like it. I thought it was obvious and disjointed. So here’s the cool thing: Mills won me over. That disjointedness became a kind of stream-of-consciousness that connected women, and people with uteruses, throughout history. “Rabbit Test” reverberates across time in all directions in a really fascinating way, a testament to the power of a librarian writing a polemical story; we have always been here and we have always fought. It highlights how the coercive power of the state so cheerfully removing bodily autonomy is at odds with the faux libertarian trappings of conservative moments insisting government has no place in one’s home. Perhaps most poignantly, it makes space for the complicated emotions connected to coerced motherhood—the paradox of loving one’s child while also struggling to grieve for that other life.

Mills dos something very similar with “Strange Waters,” which is my personal favourite of this collection. This story feels really simple at its core—a woman adrift at sea, adrift through time, trying to Quantum Leap her way home. I love its timey-wibey Doctor Who vibes. Say what you will about Moffat-era Who, it always measured out its tragedy with a dose of saccharine reassurance that some sacrifice or loss worked out for the best. It’s a tale that is both big and small at the same time, and that TARDIS-like quality gets me every time.

Of the various other stories, I’ll say this: none of them is a dud. Each one is suffused with Mills’s voice, yet each is also an interesting and different experience. “Kiki Hernández Beats the Devil” showcases this the best, for it’s clear Mills is playing in a genre (weird west) less familiar and a voice (“cocky” is how she describes it in her story notes) used less often. Yet in its theme, setting, and characters, it is very much Mills.

The story notes at the end are a nice touch, and I wish more authors were afforded the opportunity to do this (even the short epigraph-like notes we sometimes get are welcome!).

Overall, this is a stand-out collection, and Mills is an author I seem to appreciate more every time I read something new by her.