MINE SEVEN by ELANA GOMEL
“But what if the curse was lifting and another, bigger, curse was following in its footsteps?”
“The sluggishness of time thickened Lena’s blood.”
The gluey Zenoism we all feel now, especially today in real-time as a Soviet monster parallels this work’s conjugation of ‘kelet’ as fed by ‘melt’ of not only our climate change but also by clash of culture and politics, with history, as it says here, woven in.
Longyearbyen. Long year, most northern town, where west meets east between Europe and Russia, I wonder.
“…dotted with crudely done tattoos: blue hearts, and vodka bottles, and crossed shovels, and red stars.”
A massive monster that sucks all from the once thriving Mine Seven, once Your Heaven, and now, Your Hell. Including Russian Lena’s Bill as just one of many souls embodied by the monster – Bill, who never even worked there. Black gold now blackness on the move. The Russian bear is not, after all, already dead, as someone said here, when told to put your gun away, with thoughts of “persecution after Stalin”, and starkly sublime descriptions, here, of snowy wastes and its darkly mental miasma, with even the Northern Lights now flickering in and out as the hugeness of climate could possibly change those, or, as with the sun, vice versa? And what caused Trump? Brexit did! Rasputin, too, in retroactive hindsight, I guess…
“‘Come on, man!’ Oscar spat. ‘Even after Brexit you should know that polar bears are white!’”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/elana-gomel/
mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
Full context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/the-best-horror-of-the-year-13-ellen-datlow/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
“I fancy that daylight all the time would be worse than darkness all the time.” — Robert Aickman
Mine Seven, Mene Mene Tekel UpSeven