This story was a real roller coaster for me.
At first, I feared that it was going to go the same direction as
Rockwerk or
Drowning in Sky, where abuse/sexual abuse is downplayed, and I'm expected not to notice because the characters are both women. Then, when I realized that no, the story was taking Selene's awfulness seriously, I started to warm up to it. I was a little bit bummed when I realized that the shipwrecked sorcerer was, in fact, going to be a bad guy (well, at least ambigusouly bad), because I like stories of heroism, but that was okay because at that point I still thought Dori was going to be a hero.
Then, towards the end, when it became apparent that Dori was, in fact, not even human, but was actually a malicious spirit intent on world domination, I started to drift away from the story again. It's not that I've got a problem with evil spirits, mind you. Some of my best friends are evil spirits. It's just that this left me with nobody to like anymore. Now, I don't need to like the main character of a story, but I usually need to like someone. For this sort of story to succeed, I need to either like someone else (In the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, for example, for most of the series I liked everyone
but the main character) or I need to dislike the main character in an interesting way. Dori turning out to be actually a malicious spirit flattened the character out, so that she became just a problem I hoped someone in this world would solve before it was too late.
On the other hand, the wordplay and world-building of this story were absolutely excellent, and that's something. This is one where the author did an excellent job of creating the sense of a wider world full of magic and wonder, despite the limited scope of short fiction.
What ultimately tipped this story squarely into do-not-want territory, however, is how it tripped on the Evil Dead Lesbian trope. This particularly hateful narrative quirk was popular in the old days, and has fortunately become quite rare. It's last living example is Joss Whedon's epic screw-up when (and how) he killed Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what happened next. The outline of the Evil Dead Lesbian trope is that you have two women (or, more rarely for some reason, two men) who are in a relationship, and then one of them dies, and then the other one becomes evil. The implication is that gay people are all perversely obsessed with each other, so they can't possibly just move on in a normal manner when something bad happens to their lovers. You can read more about this trope over on TV Tropes (though they're calling it
Bury Your Gays now). I know TV Tropes is normally a scum pit of cynicism, but they're actually pretty right about this one.
Now, I'm not actually accusing Rachel K. Jones of outright homophobia. That's why I wrote "tripped" above. Whedon "tripped" in the same way. However, I
do think that it's the author's responsibility to do his/her best to stay aware of these awful, hurtful tropes. I'm also not saying that every gay relationship in fiction has to end well, but this one was just so on the nose. The relationship is dysfunctional. One of them dies. The survivor becomes universally malicious in an entirely unrelated way (as opposed to just being motivated to seek revenge, for example). Uncoupling any of those events - making the relationship not so overtly abusive, having the other partner suffer a fate other than death, making the survivor somewhat less universally and intrinsically malicious - would have helped the story to avoid this particular pit.
So overall, I can't say that I loved this story. It was certainly interesting and very well achieved, but I didn't find it very gripping, and the Evil Dead Lesbian trope really left a bad taste in my brain.