Telling the reader what's happening

Reading some of the short stories published by SF magazines recently, I've been surprised that they were published.  I came across one the other day where a character had several, I think they were sort of puppies or kittens, growing, I think, out of her body.  The writer didn't clearly articulate how this worked.  I think one of them was supposed to have died and the viewpoint character was supposed to be upset by that, but I wasn't sure.

After a few sections, I skim-read through the rest of the story, hoping something would happen.  But it didn't.  It seemed to be a series of scenes about this character's life in which nothing much happened.  The only conflict or problem seemed to be around this dead, whatever it was, but it didn't seem to be driving the character to do something.  If she'd wanted revenge, and that revenge brought down a powerful leader, or maybe the being who died was destined to be the next leader and its death changed the fate of the nation, I could see the point of the story.  But there didn't seem to be any meaningful consequence coming from that death.

This is the sort of SF that frustrates me most.  If you're going to have other beings growing out of someone's body, I expect that to be important for the story.  And I expect you to have a decent stab at working out the biology too.  This particular story seemed to have no narrative drive, no sense of anything that happened in the story being important.

There seems to be a mentality in some SF circles that it's OK to write mysterious, half-understood stories, because we have to make the reader work, don't we?  That's fine, but you have to give me enough clues to let my imagination go to work.  It is, after all, your world not mine, and I can't come to understand it, or your characters, if you don't tell me about them.  And I want to know why I'm reading about them, what problem or challenge they're facing right now.  I'm not particularly interested in what they had for breakfast, unless it's their last, or the people are starving and breakfast is a rare thing.

I've also come across some stories recently where style has triumphed over substance.  Short, sharp, one-word paragraphs have been used in abundance, for no sensible purpose.  Or a writer has started the story with a grabbing action scene, and then wandered off into a tedious flashback for several pages, dragging the story down.  It seems that experimental is still more important for some magazines than good storytelling.

It's time for a return to straightforward storytelling, writing in a way that the reader can live fully in our worlds, understand what is going on in our stories.  I suspect that some writers feel that dressing up a story with a glossy style can hide a weakness of plot or logic.  But it doesn't.  I'll see through that and judge the story as wanting.

So please, when you're inventing new creatures with others growing out of them, tell me what's happening properly.