The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea
Naomi Kritzer
Naomi Kritzer's The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea is a finalist for the 2025 Best Novelette Hugo Award. It was published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October 2024, and you can read it there, for free. It's about a family: Stuart and Morgan Strand and their daughter Cordelia. Stuart is an academic researcher. Morgan was that once, too, but she kind of crashed out of research after a catastrophic data loss that occurred when she was a postdoc. She has now more or less become Stuart's assistant, as well as a housewife. Stuart is taking a year's sabbatical to work at Harvard. Morgan found a rental house in "Finstowe, a tiny town hugging the Massachusetts coast and overlooking Cape Cod Bay." The titular Four Sisters are a group of four standing stones just off the coast of Finstowe.
Morgan is a seal expert. There are, it transpires, seals at Finstowe. And there are old stories about selkies.
The plot ends up being a revenge fantasy. Like all satisfying revenge fantasies, the punishment for the insult is wildly disproportionate. Who among us has not secretly wished a violent and gory death upon someone who cut us off in traffic?
I enjoyed this, but that was partly because it's always fun to read a story about a place that you know well, and I spent much of my life in the Boston/Cape Cod area. This story will not get my vote for Best Novelette, but it does get my recommendation as a quick, fun read.
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September-October 2024 on Amazon