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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: An annual beauty contest for third-trimester fetuses is steeped in intrigue, dutifully noted in contestant Wendy's letters to her mother. Will her fiance Kip's ravishing digital effects, kept under wraps, be sufficient to dethrone the reigning two-time champion, a ruthless seductress who seeks by feminine guile to pry Kip's secrets from him and feed them to her own techological mastermind? This tale is a savage take on trends in entertainment, the sexualizing of the very young, and beauty contests for infants and toddlers of the sort that warped the life of JonBenet Ramsey. Guaranteed to disturb.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Gathering the Bones, ed. Dennis Etchison, Jack Dann, and Ramsey Campbell, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2006

7 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [229 KB], eReader (PDB) [35 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [22 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [21 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [81 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [95 KB], hiebook (KML) [105 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [53 KB], iSilo (PDB) [18 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [23 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [51 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [34 KB]
Words: 6266
Reading time: 17-25 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' by Robert Devereaux, the best story in the book, furthers that writer's reputation for going where less timid souls would never venture. A takeoff on the popular pre-school beauty contests that account for the celebrity of the doomed child model Jon-Benet Ramsey, it posits a future where mothers make careers of entering their fetuses into competition. Computer-imaging dresses the unborn in increasingly provocative garb, the children once born are all but ignored, and the prize goes to the embryo whose random motions look most like a pose on the cover of Vogue. As uncomfortable as fiction gets, it's dark as satire gets, it wrings a thousand separate variations on its nasty one-joke premise, and emerges a queasy but unqualified winner."--Adam-Troy Castro, scifi.com

"Take note: that darling deviant Robert Devereaux hits the heights of sick with his satire of beauty pageants (and more) in 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound.' There's not a single bit of gore here, not a drop of blood, just perfect craft and some aspects of our culture taken past all previously established limits. Only a lobotomy will get this one out of your head."--Paula Guran, darkecho.com

"Devereaux's 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' is almost indescribable. It is, in all the right ways, disgusting, appalling, repulsive--quite literally horrifying. It takes two current, persistent, and already disturbing human propensities--the sexual commodification of childhood in the name of some spurious higher abstract like beauty or innocence or truth; and our dumb willingness to be led by rather than to constructively control the capabilities of technology--and pushes them to their hideously logical limits. Basically, advanced digital imaging techniques allow pregnant women to airbrush and animate ultrasound renderings of their unborn children in ever more provocative intrauterine wardrobes and catwalk poses in order for said women and their ultrasonographers and their managers to win national foetal beauty pageants. Now, even the most jadedly cynical of moral relativists ought to find their stomach rebelling at such a scenario. And that's basically the point. 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' could easily have been a sensationalist shocker-for-the-hell-of-it, a Daily Star-style headline grabber with literary pretensions. What Devereaux has produced, however, is a sensitively handled, sharply characterised, and utterly riveting story with a deeply and seriously satirical sensibility threading through every sentence. Everyone in this story is a monster, one way or another. Everyone who reads it will hate it. Everyone who reads it and hates it and bothers to stop and think why they hate it will find that they love it in the same breath. There won't be that many that bother, though (the editors obviously did, to their credit). That's why it's such a good story--it knows that. 'Li'l Miss Ultrasound' ought to win everything. But it won't."--Robert Guy Cook, infinityplus.co.uk

June 30, 2004

Mummy dearest,

It's great to hear from you, though I'm magnitudinously distraught that you can't be here for the contest. Still, I'm not complaining. It's extremely better that you show up for the birth--three weeks after my little munchkin's copped her crown!--and help out afterwards. The contest is a hoot and I want to do you proud, I will do you proud, but that can be done from a distance too, don't you think? What with the national coverage and the mega-sponsorship, you'll get to VCR me and the kid many times over. And of course I'll save all the local clippings for you like you asked.

It made my throat hurt, the baby even kicked, when you mentioned Willie in your last letter. It's tough to lose such a wonderful man. Still, he died calmly. I read that gruesome thing a few years ago, that How We Die book? It gave me the chills, Mom, how some people thrash and moan, how they don't make a pretty picture at all, many of them. Willie was one of the quiet ones though, thank the Lord. Nary a bark nor whimper out of him, he just drifted off like a thief in the night. Which was funny, because he was so, I don't know, noisy isn't the right word, I guess expressive maybe, his entire life.

Oh, before I close, I gotta tell you about Kip. Kip's my ultrasound man. I'm in love, I think. Kind face on him. Nice compact little bod. Cute butt too, the kind of buns you can wrap your hands halfway around, no flabby sags to spoil your view or the feel of the thing. Anyway, Kip's been on the periphery of the contest for a few years and likes tinkering with the machinery. He's confided in me. Says he can--and will!--go beyond the superimposition of costumes that's been all the rage in recent years to some other stuff I haven't seen yet and he won't spell out. He worked some for those Light and Magic folks in California, and he claims he's somehow brought all that stuff into the ultrasound arena. Kip's sworn me to secrecy. He tells me we'll win easy. But I'm my momma's daughter. I don't put any stock in eggs that haven't been hatched, and Kip isn't fanatical about it, so it's okay. Also, Mother, he kissed me. Yep! As sweet and tasty as all get-out. I'll reveal more, next missive. Meantime, you can just keep guessing about what we're up to, since you refuse to grace us with your presence at the contest.

Just teasing, Mummy dear. Me and my fetal muffin will make you so proud, your chest will puff out like a Looney Tunes hen! Your staying put--for legit reasons, like you said--is a-okay with me, though I do wish you were here to hug, and chat up, and share the joy.