Eternal Vigilance 2: The Death of Illusions by Gabrielle Faust, reviewed by Jess

The Death of Illusions by Gabrielle Faust

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars


Another beautiful piece of cover art should have teenage goths, emos, and creatures of the night itching to get their hands--or claws-- on Book Two of the Eternal Vigilance series.

One year on from the original "Eternal Vigilance" book (also reviewed by GUD), Tynan Llywelyn, an immortal vampire, is battling the Vicinus in an attempt to save his own race, the Phuree, as well as humanity, from the Tyst empire's attempt to gain immortality. Despite being described by the author on her website as "technohorror", this was more of a typical Fantasy battle novel--high on action and thrills but less involved with character than the first book.

Although I didn't find much in the novel that particularly fitted the Horror genre, it works well as Fantasy, particularly for those who don't mind extremely lengthy back story and buildup. Lots of gadgets and deaths certainly make for up for lack of pace--eventually.

I was disappointed by the lack of character development, even though I was expecting a battle novel. If I don't care enough about the characters I won't be invested in whether they live or die, and the story will have difficulty holding my interest.

"The Death of Illusions" is ambitious, dark and very emo. As a teen I might have liked it more; as an adult, I felt it didn't capture my imagination in the way this author is very much capable of doing. Also, I had some minor niggles, like the over use of 'undulating'; a lot of typos; and far too much italic use in strange places. These niggles detracted from my ability to read the novel fluidly, as I found them off-putting. However, kudos to Faust for getting tentacles into the story. I did laugh at:

"Blinding pain exploded through the my [sic:] torso and I looked down to see a tentacle of blue impaling my body"--page 108

I will still look forward to more from Gabrielle S. Faust in the future--I don't think the Eternal Vigilance novels have seen her reach the best of her potential. One for hardcore vampire fans (and tentacle lovers) only, I think.

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Neon Literary Journal #14, edited by Krishan Coupland, reviewed by Debbie

Neon Literary Journal

Edited by Krishan Coupland

FourVolts Productions, 2007

Booklet, 50 pages

ISSN: 1753-4240

Neon #14 is available in print or to download at http://www.neonmagazine.co.uk.

British literary magazine Neon describes itself as "a journal of brilliant things", and issue #14 belies its small size with an enigmatic and striking picture of a shingle beach on the cover. Throughout this fifty-page literary journal are monochrome images that set off, illustrate, or provide backgrounds to the poetry and prose. This is a serious work of art created by people who take art seriously.

Since the journal is short, the contents tend to be short, too, which means Neon can easily be consumed in a series of quick reads. This makes it ideal for the West's rush-rush-rush societies. But what about those contents? Are they worth the effort?

If you're not going to read GUD (although why wouldn't you?) give Neon a try instead. Or even better--try both.

From the beginning of Rupert Merkin's Second Coming--"Hyde Park is mined"--to the end of Jarod Rosello's This is What the Robots Do--"...robots are sleeping in people's beds"--Neon offers variety, intrigue, and solid writing.

Brits might be disappointed that so much of the content of this British journal is by writers from or connected with the US, but I have to say, from my experiences with NFG (Canadian), GUD (American), and ASIM (Australian), that's pretty much the way the wind blows. The US has a huge English-speaking population, and some days it feels like they all want to write.

To stand out in that crowd, non-US content has to be extra-sparkly. Perhaps like Grant McLeman's poem Fall In:

he was the name,
who gives no reply,
the gap
in the parade ground,
the empty echo
across the square.

Definitely one for the nightstand.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, reviewed by Jess

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Gargoyle is an intriguing and intelligent novel that I couldn't put down, despite occasional annoyance with the overly-flowery language, the momentum being spoiled when interesting sections ended too soon (and believe me, parts are simply stunning, particularly Dante's hell as a dream), or when the prose got lumpy.

The book's nameless narrator is horrifically burned in a car accident, after a hallucination distracts him and causes him to drive off a cliff. The story begins with graphic descriptions of his treatment for burns, including very clinical descriptions which sound as though they've been lifted straight from the pages of a medical journal. We learn that he was a porn star in his pre-accident life, and led a debauched and selfish lifestyle. Not only is he now disfigured and in constant pain, but he also lost his penis in the accident, leaving him with no chance of a return to his old life style.

Giving up all hope, he starts to fantasise about an elaborate suicide plan he'll undertake as soon as he is well enough to leave the hospital. But he soon forgets it when a mysterious woman named Marianne Engel starts visiting. She claims to have known him in previous lives, and tells him a series of tales about how they met, and the ways they died, whilst nursing him.

>She turns out to be a sculptor who specialises in gargoyles, but also a former psychiatric patient, with either suspected schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. I found it unbelievable that after so much apparent treatment and time spent on the wards, her doctors were unable to determine which if either she had, given they are characterised by different symptoms.

The main bulk of the stories Marianne tells concern her life as a nun and her translation of Dante's Inferno, which was supposedly brought to her originally by our now-monstrous hero. These stories, presented in the form of first person chapters, are more interesting than the present-day narrative. This left me wondering why Davidson didn't use these as a full novel, especially as he'd obviously gone to some lengths with his research.

The full-on disclosure of the narrator's background points to a redemption story early on. However, I was fascinated, and found the opening similar in tone to Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters. The style is somewhat different from Palahniuk's, and would have delivered a harder emotional hit had it been a touch less romanticised. I found the obvious conclusion a let down, but because of the circular nature of the plot and the 'morality tale' feel, it couldn't go anywhere else at the end of its magical and inspired journey.

I felt physically repulsed throughout the book, but as a reader who likes it raw I didn't find this objectionable. Despite containing strong elements of Fantasy and Horror, The Gargoyle is probably best placed with Modern Fiction. I'd strongly recommend it as a good example of a mainstream cross-over novel. The intertextual element renewed my interest in Dante's Inferno and inspired me to hunt down a copy. I see it as no bad thing that this book could introduce new readers to such an important poem, although I suspect others may feel that using it as a plot device to such an extent is a rip off.

Although The Gargoyle is blatant and slightly pretentious, Davies still manages to pull off a richly woven, bizarre love story that's not for the squeamish.

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Scrofula by Matt Dennison, reviewed by Jill Librarian

Scrofula by Matt Dennison

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars


Scrofula, a collection of twenty poems by Matt Dennison, is strongest in the poems detailing ordinary life. These include the poems Scrofula, Found in My Garden After the Rain, Premise, and The Spider Weaves.

I admit it, the title sent me to the dictionary—knowing scrofula was some kind of illness—to find

"scrofu·la (skräf′yə lə)—noun-tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands, esp. of the neck, characterized by the enlargement of the glands, suppuration, and scar formation."

This first poem, bearing the title also of the book, has strong, clear images that linger in the mind. As the young man and old man searched through the hill's "hundred summers' growth" for buried head stones, they "marched with pitchforks/ side by side, shoving their fingers into the ground, feeling for what had been slowly bowed/ and buried by the dull weight of time", and further in, "..how entire families would be/ laid out in descending scales of grief, all voices stopped within the same small/ circle of days and how one family, from suckling child to father, had been Taken By Scrofula/ in the winter of 1868, the dark/ earthy sound of which I tried again/ and again in the thick summer air" and going on, includes a quiet tribute to the old man—"tying the posts together in a complicated,/ old-fashioned way whose secret of doing/ I knew would vanish with the old man"—paying tribute to life and to death which calls us "in the ultimate foreign tongue."

In "Found In My Garden After the Rain" a simple find of flint in the garden calls up the beginnings of mankind , flint knapping, and spirals back to today. This poem has nice meter married to some excellent lines. In Premise, the child wants proof of God in his daily life, but the mundane proves too strong. The ending is matter-of-fact but very moving.

Salvation, one of the longer poems, a spirited rejection of traditional church services, is a joy to read. Also "Balboa Egret", with its lovely quatrain:

"Under the house in a low, minor key,
an old cat told a Chinese tale--eyes closed,
>mouth near dirt, she droned on and on
to the delight of her young."

I recommend this small but sturdy compilation to all lovers of poetry.

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Sarasota VII by Lo Galluccio, reviewed by Debbie

Sarasota VII by Lo Galluccio

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Sarasota VII" is so intensely personal that reading it feels like an intrusion, like listening to someone's late-night conversation with their lover, like shoving your face right into the breast of a nursing woman, like clomping in Wellington boots through a delicate tracery of flowers.

It's as if Lo Galluccio has opened her private diary and printed its contents on the page: raw, unedited, begging to be prised open and understood. Death and sex intertwine like lovers, neither making sense of the other, but unable to part.

"She's taken from you. You've been vandalized by a rummaging god. She becomes a compacted star in your cosmos, the rings through which you become, like Saturn, denser than before--heavy with shame and longing--but furious enough in your suspension to fly."

Whatever new definitions the narrative tries to place on the sister's death, whatever consolations are offered--"Girls who become mistresses through whom you become a man, not the boy that death fueled"--the loss is always there, tangible, demanding to be understood, to be redefined, to be hidden then sought in allegory. Every possible means of understanding the death is attempted, rotated, abandoned, re-tried, holding the death at the centre of the narrative, allowing it to force its way into every thought, every action. Here our determination to ignore death is the ultimate taboo; here death will not be ignored.

In the second section, the narrator is dealing with a second death: her father's. Half of this narrative is, it seems, missing, and so it ends tantalisingly with much unsaid. Here, we have perhaps a gentler, more accepting view of death, yet it's still all-pervasive. "Because I'm fatherless I wound up in his shiny black rental car." Grief brings about strange outcomes; grief motivates everything, even though it's the great demotivator. Everything comes back to the black hole death has made in the narrator's life; everything is attributable; everything is coloured by it. Nothing can ever be the same.

This collection will appeal to those prepared to deal with an onslaught of emotions, to those who are prepared to take the time to let it soak into their understanding, to those who've been there. It's outstanding in its rawness, in its willingness to tell it like it is. Not for the faint of heart.

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The Pines by Robert Dunbar, reviewed by Xysea

The Pines by Robert Dunbar

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is a chilling tale set in the rural Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a region as known for its inbred, throwback inhabitants or 'Pineys', as for its swampy, humid and dense woodland. The story centers around a team of ambulance drivers, a couple of small-town sheriffs, and a series of deaths that occur, leaving behind bodies so mangled it looks as though wild animals have been in a frenzy. And yet, there are clues that these are no animals anyone's ever come across before. Thus start the rumors, the stories, of a devil, a Jersey devil, hunting its prey, tearing it limb from limb and doing unspeakably horrible things to the corpses....

The tension builds, and the bodies mount, as Athena, (one of the newer ambulance drivers) becomes deeply embroiled in the investigation. Is her involvement the result of her colleagues' unquestioning attitudes towards the deaths? Or is it because she's the single parent of a son who seems to be autistic, but who has an amazing ability to know the thoughts and intentions of the unknown assailant? Is this really a freak talent or something more sinister?

Using rich language and imagery, Robert Dunbar has written a timeless tale of horror and suspense. All the elements of the traditional horror novel are explored, with just enough twists and turns to engage the reader and lend the story some uniqueness. There are a few stray subplots that could have been edited out, and it seems they possibly were in previous editions. However, this has been promoted on the back cover as the 'uncut version, in paperback for the first time!'

While these subplots don't particularly enhance or detract from the novel, per se, they just don't take the story anywhere new. I have read quite a few horror novels in my time, and when I was younger I'd make the rounds of the more popular authors. In the end, what kept me from continuing with them was their predictability--the nubile thing in the woods gets attacked (usually in an overtly sexual way), there's a mysterious connection between the 'thing' and a human (usually involving telekinesis)--and this novel is, unfortunately, as predictable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad novel, but for someone like me, who has read a lot of horror, it did take a little something out of the reading. I suppose I was hoping for a bit more uniqueness or originality, and I didn't find it here.

Still, this is a pretty good book for any horror fan to curl up with on a dark and snowy night...as long as they're far from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

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Through A Glass, Darkly by Bill Hussey, reviewed by Debbie

Through a Glass, Darkly by Bill Hussey

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars


In Bill Hussey's debut novel, a centuries-old pall of evil hangs over the small village of Crow Haven, personified by a mysterious figure known as the Crowman. When the young Simon Malahyde disappears apparently without cause, and young boys are abducted, then found dead and mutilated, DI Jack Trent is paired with his colleague and ex-girlfriend DS Dawn Howard to investigate.

Trent is already familiar with the supernatural. A childhood near-death experience has left him infested by demons that give him intimate insights into the thoughts and histories of anyone he touches. He also receives visions of the future--visions that insist Dawn's son Jamie will be a victim of the serial killer currently terrorising the area (except Crow Haven itself, which seems inured to strange deaths and malice). Dawn takes more convincing that the threat to Crow Haven is not mundane, and she becomes sidelined as the investigation takes Trent into stranger and stranger parts--including a marvellous hidden library.

The enforced proximity between jilter (Trent) and jiltee (Dawn) makes for a constant thread of tension running through the novel. The more Trent yearns to be close to Dawn, the more he must push her away, for his emotional attachment to her feeds the demons that he has always tried to keep penned within a cage of logic. The demons have already killed his mother; he can and will give everything to prevent that ever happening again.

The narrative is slow to build to the climax, and it feels somewhat weighted down by the density of Hussey's writing. The investigation is followed minutely, and there are digressions into various aspects of the relevant backstory, all of which tends to create a feeling that the story isn't going anywhere soon. Yet Hussey writes well, and imbues the reader with confidence that this is all going to come together at the end. Which it does. The tension becomes more effective as the final confrontation approaches, and the worth of the slow build-up becomes evident when the reader realises they are fully engaged with Trent, and concerned for his welfare.

There are some great aspects to the book--the above-mentioned library, for one, and the way everyone knows there's something not quite right about Simon Malahyde, but nobody really wants to face what it might be. Definitely one for the Horror fan who prefers to get more in their favourite genre than just blood and gore.

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Spellbound by Margit Sandemo, reviewed by Debbie

Spellbound by Margit Sandemo

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars


This very readable novel is the first in a series by best-selling Scandinavian author Margit Sandemo, whose books are being made available for the first time in English. Sandemo is the author of a hundred and seventy novels, a feat that becomes more believable when you note that, at two-hundred-and-fifty-five nicely-spaced pages, "Spellbound" is actually a bit short for a Fantasy novel. A forty-seven-book series is still an impressive achievement whatever way you look at it.

"Spellbound" introduces Silje, an orphaned teenager who has come to the big city of Trondheim seeking refuge after her family is wiped out by disease. Destitute and starving, Silje takes another orphan and a foundling under her wing, before falling in with what she believes to be a group of rebels against the absentee king.

Induced to save one of the 'rebels' from torture and execution, Silje wins the protection of their fascinating and mysterious leader. Returned to the threatening mountains--home to the Ice People of the title-- that she thought she had escaped, she begins a new life with the two children. But peace and tranquility cannot last for long, and soon Silje is driven once again to seek help from the rebels--but are they rebels? And what is their leader's secret, a secret that troubles him so much that he has sworn never to lie with a woman.

This book was a fast and enjoyable read. Silje is a whole person--a woman sensual yet chaste, vulnerable yet competent. She finds depths of strength within herself when rising to the challenges she's forced to face, while at the same time yearning to express her creative side. There are some lovely touches when her lack of domesticity is observed or commented on. She's been promised a different future in which she can express herself, but, meanwhile, the baby has nappy rash.

The sixteenth-century setting convinces at least partly because the author doesn't try too hard--she has nothing to prove. The stark ice and snow, the long wagon journey on which the baby can't be fed because his milk is frozen, and so his "screams would echo in giant caverns".

Where the book perhaps falls down is in setting out what the characters are feeling too clearly, rather than enabling the reader to make deductions based on observation. Telling us what Silje is feeling means her feelings are only shallowly felt; this deprives the book of much of the passion it's striving for. If those feelings could be evoked in the reader with something of the author's own intensity, this book would be unputdownable.

Closing off its story arc nicely, this volume of "The Legend of the Ice People" leaves plenty of threads dangling to induce the reader to try more.

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Sparks and Shadows by Lucy Snyder, reviewed by Debbie

Sparks and Shadows by Lucy Snyder

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Sparks and Shadows" is a collection of poems, short stories, and essays by GUD contributor Lucy Snyder ('Sublety', Issue 2). Snyder has a unique voice and her work is almost instantly recognisable. Dive into this collection and you begin to feel like you're swimming around inside her head. It's not necessarily comfortable in there, but it's certainly interesting.

It's rare to encounter a writer who so loves words and the changes that can be rung and the tricks that can be played. Rare and precious. But because of Snyder's versatility, it's difficult to give an overview of this collection. Every piece is different, and every piece demands attention. So I'm just going to pick out a few to comment on, and you'll have to buy a copy if you want to know the strangeness and wonder of the rest.

In the short story 'A Preference for Silence', we meet Veronica, who has "never lost her tea in zero gee", but for whom the predilection of the title becomes more and more pressing while she and companion Melvin keep watch on a sleepship travelling through space. It's always the little things that wear you down, and even out in the deep black, peace isn't so easily found. Snyder presents the story with confidence, explaining only that which you need to know, and leaving the rest to silence.

The hilarious short story 'Boxlunch' starts with a slightly risky hunt for a condom and ends with a race-against-time through mortar attacks in order to save a recorded ('boxlunched') personality from data decay. This story started off by reminding me of "Appropriate Love" by Greg Egan in which a woman must incubate her dead husband's brain, but it soon went off in an entirely different direction. Egan's story was more disturbing; this is funnier.

"I know you’ll fly to me;
babies can’t resist the shiny, pretty things,"

So speaks the narrator of 'Dark Matter', the "death we cannot see", or, given our endless curiosity, elude. The poems in the ebook version tend to have their last stanza dropped onto a second page, which can give a false impression of where the poem ends. Here, I thought it ended nicely before I even noticed the last stanza--maybe it's one stanza the poem could have done without?

'Through Thy Bounty' presents a chef forced by alien invaders to cook the relatives of the resistance of which she (or he? the narrative doesn't specify) was once a part. The chef's only salvation is a telepathic link with her mother, the organiser of the fight against the Jagaren. Urged by her mother to stay alive, the chef cooks meal after meal, day after day, butchering men, women, and children alike with a dreadful, self-willed calmness. Disgusted by her mother's plan to sacrifice herself trying to rescue her "helpless, useless child", the narrator belatedly discovers there's more to it than that. Although heavy with backstory, this macabre tale is gripping. The reader is forced to balance sympathy for and dislike of the narrator in about equal measure.

In a more light-hearted vein, we have "The Fish and the Bicycle", a poem that explores the incompatibility between the eponymous creations.

"Consider the physics:
how could she pedal
with fragile fanning fins,
sit with slippery tail,
steer with gasping mouth?"

In its subtle way, the poem is a commentary on the saying from which it derives its concept. A fish may be unable safely to ride a bicycle, but, Snyder says, that doesn't mean she doesn't want to. The deadly attraction can't be denied.

With the short essay 'Camp Songs', Snyder takes an idea about indoctrination via Girl Scout songs and runs with it--some might say too far. It's probably best to enjoy the ride, both here and with the essays that follow. Like 'Why I Can't Stay Out of My Husband's Pants'. No, not in THAT way--go wash your brain out! "And, oh, the pockets! Deep, capacious pockets! I could keep all my hopes and dreams in pockets like those." But she can't just go out and buy men's pants. This is Ohio, after all. Fortunately, her husband can solve the problem, if he can only pay attention to it, rather than her, for long enough. This is more of a rant than an essay, but it's touching, all the same. As for 'The Dickification of the American Female', I honestly can't tell you whether it's a rant, a story, two interviews, or an essay. I know for certain it's not a poem. It starts innocently enough by letting you think that "dickification" only refers to famed SF author Philip K. Dick, whom Cassandra (whose story this is) apparently discovered much younger than I did--lucky her! But then it's time for Randi's story, which goes into "Tiny Tango" territory (anyone else know that "undrag" story?) until an almost complete dickification has been achieved. Very strange stuff. Finally, 'Menstruation for Men' is the essay so many women have wanted to write, but only Snyder has. A shame that men will probably wince and skip it.

The discomforting poem 'The Jarred Heart' plays with two meanings of "jarred"--the narrator's heart is literally in a jar, and she (or he? again, we don't know, and we're forced to deal with that not-knowing), and her love for the enchanter who "wooed me and won me // fed me lies sweeter than the opium wine" has been jarred by the discovery of treachery, and poison. But the narrator's not going to put up with this situation for long. Lots of play on words here; it's a delight.

'...Next on Channel 77' gives a literal bent to the idea that our deceased relatives are looking over us in Heaven. Tom's Aunt Fran comes back as a news announcer who's determined no harm will come to him, or to the two sisters he hasn't seen in years. While running hither and thither to do her bidding, Tom rediscovers connections to his family that he (and they) thought were gone forever. There's perhaps one too many emergencies in this story; it started to lose credibility towards the end. Better pacing might have helped, but this is ultimately a feelgood story with not much more to offer.

Dark, funny, and romantic by turns, "Sparks and Shadows" is a must read. Go! Buy! Read!

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Delusionism by Anthony Marais, reviewed by kaolin

Delusionism by Anthony Marais

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars


In "Delusionism", Anthony Marais presents roughly sixty-nine micro-essays, whose two sections (Culture vs. Nature and Art vs. Life) are divided by a hundred aphorisms. This is a forked-tongue-in-cheek exploration and oration, marketed as philosophy/self help--somewhat in the vein of Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", but intending more to drive thought through humor than humor through thought.

The book is filled with thoughts--and thoughts about thoughts--and I was tempted to refer to its points heavily in this review. I was, in retrospect, surprised to not find an essay on Conversation or Discussion, though it's likely there was a fitting aphorism I'm not recalling. Regarding Genius, Marais says:

Has the reader ever noticed that thinking is easy? For most of us it's more difficult not to think than the contrary. It seems that with every turn of the head our brain showers us with thoughts, flashing across our mind's sky like fireworks. Indeed, the rush of ideas is a delightful feeling. Sometimes it seems to palpably flow through our body in a euphoric, almost tickling sensation. Interestingly, it's often ideas we perceive as untruths that tickles us most: absurd, ridiculous thoughts that produce outrageous images. People who, with a haphazard turn of the head, stumble upon these thoughts sometimes find themselves giggling aloud in public, or walking with a silly, conspicuous skip. This is genius: the ability to produce freely and easily new thoughts. And the sensation is pleasurable.

It is genius, this genius, that Marais seems to strive for with this book; and from how often I laughed along, I think he often hit his mark. With a wink and a nudge, he delivers essays on topics ranging from Originality and The Quest For Happiness to Pet Rocks and Books vs. Movies. Some play straight, some verso--and others strive for double duty, contradicting not only convention, but, subtly perhaps, themselves as well.

Of course, some insights are more clever than others--some are obvious, some simply plain, and some a bit muddled. But the overall attempt, I think, makes a very worthwhile platter of intellectual finger food that could well be grown into a banquet given the right crowd. I found myself half wanting to keep notes as I read, to argue back with the author and see where more thoughts led--so perhaps this is a book better read with a friend. But I suspect the author would be pleased even with my reaction to those essays I was not moved by, or felt were less than a hundred percent presented: I thought.

If this sounds interesting, you might also consider our review of The Cure, a novel by Anthony Marais.

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Read by Dawn (Volume 3), edited by Adèle Hartley, reviewed by Debbie

Read by Dawn: Volume 3 by Adèle Hartley

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Read by Dawn" arrived in pristine condition, but will be leaving here in a less-than-perfect state (there was one of those ominous cracks when I bent the spine a little too far back). But if the book's been changed by being read, so have I by reading it.

It's easy to dismiss Horror as the poor relation of the speculative fiction family. Too often it relies on bad things happening for no discernible reason (credibility issues) or on as much blood and gore as can be squeezed into the pages (yawn factor). Reading this anthology of twenty-eight stories indicates there is light at the end of Horror's dark, creepy tunnel. And it's not just the headlight of any old oncoming train.

If the anthology has a theme--and I'm not sure it does--that theme is obsession. Two stories depict men so obsessed with a particular woman that they see and pursue her everywhere, and in a third story another lover finds a unique way of keeping the love-object close--forever. But there's lots of variety here, from a female serial killer to friendship that persists beyond both death and betrayal to a gruesome Halloween.

As with any anthology, there are hits and misses. Scott Stainton Miller's "The Last Ditch" manages a very creepy ending, but achieving it relies not so much on misdirecting the reader as on misleading them. True misdirection enables the reader to look back and go, "Oh, of course!" when they see the clues that were there all along. Miller doesn't enable that; instead, the reader feels cheated, as if a Very Large Elephant in the living room had been overlooked. A shame, as the premise is chilling, and the misdirection in the dialogue nicely done.

"In the Cinema Tree with Orbiting Heads" by Kek-W starts brilliantly. The narrator describes their experience of living in a tree. It's hardly big enough for them even to enter, but they manage. "Although the hollow was narrow and restrictive, there was also something womb-like and sensual about being confined within the tree, as if I was wearing the skin of some vast, alien creature." The tree contains a natural camera obscura through which the narrator observes his surrounding. The mood is nicely created and there's a true strangeness about this tale.

Rebecca Lloyd's "Shuck" introduces us to twin sisters Liz and Erica. Liz lives in the middle of nowhere, haunted by a strange, dog-like creature called Fin. When Erica dismisses the 'dog' as one of Liz's obsessions, Liz replies, "Possession, more like, I'm bound to him." A strangely apathetic struggle for Liz's safety ensues. A gloomy, not-quite-hopeless story.

Two stand-outs in this anthology are "Dawn" by Morag Edward and Jamie Killen's "Blind Spot". In "Dawn", the narrator is pursued by night-time visitations from a 'dark shadow' that creeps nearer and nearer, beginning at her feet and moving towards her head, leaving her mysteriously bruised. Only love can keep the shadow at bay--but love is fleeting, whereas shadows, it seems, are for life. "Blind Spot" evokes the misery of a ghost trapped on a particular section of street, unnoticed by the living. Her one friend has moved on, and it seems there's no hope of a new companion--or is there?

It's hard to imagine anyone with a love of Horror not finding a story (or two or three) in here that will appeal. A solid anthology with much to offer.

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Mourning Meadow by Larion Wills, reviewed by xenith

Mourning Meadow by Larion Wills

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars


Kari is a woman with a secret and a mansion on a large estate. Steve is a man with a secret and a desire to develop mansions on large estates. Oops, that might be his secret.

This may be trying to be a paranormal romance. Ghosts get mentioned from time to time, but they don't add anything to the story.

The storyline: Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, someone tries to kill girl, they run around for a while trying to work out who and why, this is resolved, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.

Steve persuades Caroleigh, Kari's sister, to invite him to Mourning Meadow. They're accompanied by Caroleigh's friends Evelyn and Edward (who's been watching too many bad British TV shows). Yes, there are a lot of names in that.

Here, Steve meets the Kari of the strange behaviour, they fall in love at almost first sight and there goes the opportunity for unresolved sexual tension. Now I haven't read many romances, but in those I have, and those where romance is a subplot, sexual tension adds to the overall tension and conflict, and we know this is what keeps the reader turning the pages. Now having them pair up early on might work sometimes. It might even have worked in this book, had there been some other source of tension or conflict.

All right, someone is apparently trying to kill Kari, but does this produce tension? You'd think so, but no. At one point when I returned to the book after putting it down, I accidentally skipped two pages. After I'd read a few more paragraphs, one of the characters made a reference to a car accident. What accident? I turned back a page and found they'd all been involved in an accident involving non-working brakes and running off the road. Surely people will act differently after they've just been in a car crash? Yet it is like this throughout the whole book--they just continue on like normal whatever happens.

Finally, we get to the explanation of who is trying to kill Kari, and why, and this involves pages of backstory describing the relationships between various people who never appear in the book, most of them being dead, and who, when they have been mentioned, are often referred to by different names, so the whole thing becomes difficult to follow. If all this family history is so important, it needed to be fed in smaller chunks throughout the books.

Then after this, is the resolution of the romance storyline, even though this was apparently resolved in the first few chapters, but that's not a problem. Just throw in a few issues for them at the end.

Did I mention the writing? From the second chapter:

"I thought you said your grandfather is dead," Evelyn said.
"He is," Caroleigh answered.
"Quite," Edward said with a cocked brow.
Puzzled enough to stop her scowl of annoyance Evelyn asked, "Then how did he lock it?"
"He didn't," Caroleigh answered. "Kari did for some obscure reason.

"Mourning Meadow" is easy to read, except for trying to keep all the names straight. It's a good book for if you happen to be working a stall at a living history event, because it's easy to return to the story if you get interrupted repeatedly. You can even skip a page or two, and not notice.

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Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco, reviewed by Debbie

Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Normally I would start a review with a summary of the plot, but having only read "Ocean Sea" once, I don't feel competent to summarise it. Suffice it to say that some characters get together at a hotel by the sea, and there's a chap painting the sea with sea-water, a woman who's going to die unless the sea can cure her, another woman who's trying to choose between her husband and her lover, and a lot of strange children. Plus a professor who's writing love letters to a woman he hasn't met yet. And some other characters.

"Ocean Sea" is written in a lyrical, elliptical prose style that will enchant some readers and infuriate others. There's a lot of rhapsodizing. There's cuts between different stories that are connected but don't immediately appear to have anything to do with each other. There's a lot of work for the reader to do, and it's for the individual reader to decide if that work was worth it in the end.

One aspect that did puzzle me arises from what I thought easily the best-written part of the book--the narrative by Savigny of the events on a drifting raft crammed with survivors of a shipwreck. Although it is perhaps overlong, it's written in an urgent and engaging fashion that brings the horror of his situation to life. However, the raft and the shipwreck so obviously derive from the wreck of the Medusa that it's a puzzle why Baricco names the ship Alliance instead. Perhaps it's an attempt at irony, as anything less like an alliance on that horrendous raft is hard to imagine. But given the characters have the same names as those on the Medusa's raft, the effect on the reader is to have them thinking, "But this is the Medusa! I know it's the Medusa!". It's hard to believe this is the effect Baricco sought.

In contrast to the sombre events of the Medusa shipwreck, and the terrible revenge exacted by one of its survivors, we have the mordantly funny tale of Professor Bartleboom and his mahogany box of love letters. Having finally found the woman to whom he should deliver it, he encounters unexpected and often hilarious reverses, but in the end brings happiness to an entire village, and perhaps to himself.

This book is very much a pot-pourri, although perhaps all its parts do make sense once put together. I'd need to read it a second time to be sure.

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The Lone Star Stories Reader, edited by Eric T. Marin, reviewed by kaolin

The Lone Star Stories Reader by Eric T. Marin

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

// WARNING: gushing follows.

If you've read any issue of the long-established webzine Lone Star Stories, you've seen it's not tied to Texas in any particular way (the introduction to this collection helps explain how that came about). If you've not yet read an issue of LSS, you're missing out.

Having been familiar with LSS for a few years, now, and being an especial fan of the /printed/ word, I was thrilled to hear editor, slush-reader and fastest rejecter in the business Eric Marin was bringing out a collection. "The Lone Star Stories Reader" contains fifteen stories ranging considerably in length, for a grand total of two hundred sixty pages. These are all stories that originally appeared online at LSS between 2004 and 2008, all of which can still be read online at http://literary.erictmarin.com.... But for those of you who prefer your fiction in a tactile form, I heartily recommend this handsomely-presented book.

With most collections, you expect a few clunkers--pieces that don't resonate with you as much as they might with someone else. I felt this anthology had been prepared with me in mind. The stories are inventive; some toy with you, some slap you around, some curl up next to you and purr sweet demands. My only complaint might be that the occasional denouement was more ethereal than I would have liked.

Since they are all exquisitely written, here's some picks to give you a taste for the variety.

"The Frozen One" by Tim Pratt might just blow your mind: a visitor from "someplace else. Sort of a kingdom next door" steps into our reality to tell a parable. "It's like, if you teach a kid to play chess, he doesn't just learn how to play chess, he learns how to think a certain way." They're training us--"there's some bad stuff happening there, way more complicated [...:], but there might be some ... refugees." The parable's an engaging moral tale as well--I loved it, and I have a thing against moral tales.

"The Disembowler" by Ekaterina Sedia is a beautifully inventive piece about a being running around disemboweling cars and appliances. I was skeptical a few paragraphs in, but everything was explained far better than I could have asked for, and the logic was consistent as well as surprising.

"A Night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette is a strange dystopian paranormal detective story set in the bowels of a BDSM nightclub, an otherworld that feels here-and-now except for the magic suffusing it.

"Seasonal Work" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is an exceptionally brief piece of mystic realism (or perhaps there's no genre involved--that's almost up to the reader) set at a gift-wrapping station.

"Angels of a Desert Heaven" by Marguerite Reed sets up the question of the place of gods and culture in a land with cultures both melted together and oddly segregated; it's a poignant tale that spreads itself across several, including those of rock music stardom and fortune telling.

There is so much beauty here, densely packed yet woven like gossamer thread. Buy a copy for yourself and one for a friend who needs a touch more beauty in their lives.

Disclaimer: I've been shooting to get my own works in Eric Marin's table of contents for some time now.

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Going Down South by Bonnie Glover, reviewed by Julia

Going Down South: A Novel by Bonnie Glover

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a reading-group book. You can tell because it's about mothers and daughters, because it has race- and gender-based complications, and because it has Reading Group Questions at the back. Unfortunately, I don't think I found it as edifying as I was supposed to. Going Down South has a solid sense of time and place and culture, even while jumping around between them, but is weaker in plot and characterization, which make that sense of the settings more difficult to appreciate and learn from.

The first two sections of the book constitute the Going Down South itself. They use a car trip from Brooklyn to small-town Alabama as a frame for a series of flashbacks setting up the story, first from the point of view of Olivia Jean, a teenager whose unplanned pregnancy is the cause of the trip (her parents want to hide her away until the baby is born), and then of Daisy, her mother, who hasn't been back to see her mother in Alabama since she was a teenager herself and left home under unpleasant circumstances. The third section is told from the point of view of Birdie, Daisy's mother and Olivia Jean's grandmother, reflecting back on Daisy's childhood and her own as she waits for her family to arrive. This car-trip flashback structure is an interesting idea, but in practice, I found that it seriously screws up the pacing of both the reference-time story and the backstory, and I got frustrated with it very quickly.

The second half of the book is structured rather differently, with a floating point of view but a much straighter narrative thread. There are still plenty of flashbacks -- the three central characters are all working through their issues with themselves and each other, which requires much delving into the past -- but they are spaced in a more conventional fashion. This improves the pacing, and various other aspects of the storytelling improve as well. The characters -- all of whom come off as rather stock toward the beginning -- seem more nuanced and original, and the humor rings truer. (There is also less of the repetition and narratorial summaryishness that further bog down the first sections.) The ending is satisfying, if predictable, and rounds off the plot arc nicely.

As well as the book-group discussion questions, this edition of Going Down South also includes an interview with the author. Mostly nothing unexpected, but I did find one thing about it interesting: When the interviewer asked Glover to describe her characters and how she wrote them, she immediately pegged Olivia Jean as a gutsy and intelligent girl who just needs guidance, and said she didn't have any difficulty writing her or imagining her life, whereas she found her mother Daisy -- passionate, bitter, and pretentious -- much harder to understand and to write (though in the end she empathized with her more). However, from the reading side, I found Olivia Jean something of a cipher, while Daisy's inner life and motivations come through much better (at least in the second half). There may be a lesson in that, more than in what can be found in the text of the book.

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Sound + Noise by Curtis Smith, reviewed by Jess

Sound + Noise by Curtis Smith

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Curtis Smith’s "Sound and Noise" is a fascinating portrayal of two people trapped in lives of stagnant frustration. When she was younger, and felt she had everything ahead of her, Jackie used to sing backing vocals in a big rock band. Now she’s middle-aged, single, and running her own bar, with only a crazy selection of locals to hear her new songs – a far cry from where she saw herself headed all those years ago. Tom is an art teacher at the local university, a married man, but one whose wife lives in a residential home, knowing little to nothing of the world around her. Her tragic accident has left Tom unable to move forward with his life, and forced him to examine his relationship with religion.

Jackie and Tom meet in a supermarket and strike up a friendship – one Jackie thinks will turn into just another affair, until she finds out the truth about his wife. Throughout their relationship, they both begin to work out their problems and look at what the future may hold.

"Sound + Noise" is a will-they-won’t-they romance, with an undercurrent of philosophical introspection on the part of both major characters running throughout. This angle gives it one up on the average romance, and Curtis Smith hits on the doubts and regrets many people have in common, but can’t always share. Because of this, the story is very accessible.

The characters are drawn from backgrounds that aren’t privileged and much of the interest lies in what they choose to do with the natural talents they have. Despite their struggles, their story doesn’t come across as whiney and they don’t suffer from self-pity for too long.

The usual limitations of romance novels are predictable plots and unbelievable characters. The characterisation in "Sound + Noise" is realistic for the most part, with some occasional dreamy, but not sickly-sweet, observations. The plot is predictable and the ending exactly as expected, but this doesn’t diminish the quality of the story, as the anticipated ending is a satisfactory one. Smith's prose is full of quirky, occasionally beautiful, passages that I found absorbing and evocative – a good example is the pair’s first meeting:

"Jackie holds up an avocado between them, and sees another picture—the same one she used to stare at when Sunday school got boring: the unsuspecting Adam and the naked, foolish Eve, her apple replaced by that mysterious and suddenly erotic fruit, the avocado." (p.12)

This strange and awkward moment is turned into a grand event for Jackie, who has been single for far too long.

At times, I felt that Smith was grasping for something just out of reach. Tom and Jackie’s relationship could have been as touching, and even as harrowing, as the relationships portrayed in Ian McEwan’s work, which I find stylistically comparable. But although the characters have depth, Smith doesn’t push them as far as he could to let the reader see what they are really made of. It would be nice also to see more made of the supporting characters, as they are a bit too shallow for my taste.

Overall, though, "Sound + Noise" is thought-provoking and well written.


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Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek, reviewed by Julia

Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

Tomato Girl is a fairly standard coming-of-age story, occasionally daring in some aspects, but, on the whole, rather mediocre. It covers territory that many such stories do -- parental sex and infidelity, insanity, viewpoint-character bad behavior -- but delves into them more deeply and disturbingly than a lot of adult novels about preteen girls would dare or care to, usually without losing its sense of realism.

But it's that 'usually' that makes all the difference; Tomato Girl is a thoroughly almost-good novel. On so many levels, it reaches for and almost achieves something special, but falls just short. The experience of reading this author's first published novel was, in fact, rather like watching someone play a sport they're just good enough at to have gotten onto the team; you can see so many ways they could fail, but they succeed just often enough that you still get the feeling of having your hopes dashed when they flub it. And unfortunately, being able to see the author's process so easily kept me from really getting absorbed in what might otherwise have been quite a captivating novel.

The novel begins with a prologue from the point of view of the narrator, Ellie, as an adult, then jumps in near the end of the main story arc for the first chapter, then begins at the beginning in the second chapter. I assume this time-layering and difficult, stuttery distance is supposed to give us a feeling of what it must be like to be an early-middle-aged woman trying to face the events of a traumatic childhood, but it is not skillfully enough done, and merely serves to make the book difficult to get into. Likewise, I can see why the author chose to tell the reader nearly everything that's going to happen in the story in that first chapter (Ellie's father will fall in love with a teenage tomato-grower, get sick of dealing with Ellie's crazy mother, run away with the tomato girl under unpleasant circumstances, and leave Ellie to deal with the increasingly out-of-control mother (who keeps a baby in a jar) on her own, with emotional support only from an elderly psychic with the wrong color skin) -- it gives us a sense of the narrator and her direct matter-of-factness, and a proper feeling of impending doom -- and, done right, I could see it working very well. But in this case, it merely serves to rob the book of suspense and make any foreshadowing that happens later seem irrelevant. All in all, there are just too many amateurish mistakes for the author to get away with the out-of-the-ordinary structural and dramatic choices that ought to have made this novel special and memorable.

However, there are enough good things about it to make it worth reading if you're into emotional twistiness. The narrative is reasonably evocative, if a bit repetitive, the setting is thorough, and the characters have some depth and grab. Tess, the tomato girl, is interestingly portrayed and recognizable -- even if you don't really want to recognize her -- and the narrator's unusually-but-humanly flawed parents and friend(s) make a good supporting cast. (In fact, I found Ellie to be the weakest character, though I assume she is meant to be the strongest.) Those supporting characters, along with some memorable, emotionally-charged images, are the novel's strongest points.


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The Silk Palace by Colin Harvey, reviewed by kaolin

The Silk Palace by Colin Harvey

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love--The Silk Palace has it all. The two younger daughters of the king of Whiterock are to be married to neighboring kingdoms: one to Prince Casimiripian (Cas) of the Karnaki Empire, and one to an Emir of the Western Alliance. Cas has under his care the linguist Bluestocking, who has been invited to Whiterock to study and translate some ancient scrolls whose meanings have been lost through both intentional and temporal obfusaction.

Bluestocking has a dirty secret that's slipped to us early on, which adds a measure of fear to her day to day existence and gives others a few extra hooks to dig into her as she finds herself more and more wrapped in conflicting threads. We're shown, towards the beginning, what would happen to Bluestocking if she were caught out--public maiming and dismemberment; followed by a slow, lingering death. And by the end, the truth _is_ made known.

Sadly, I found The Silk Palace very hard to get into--it was as if a great expository chunk had been chopped from the beginning and flung back into the flow of things without proper adjustment for what a fresh reader would understand. The characters' familiarities with each other (and lack thereof) were difficult to understand from how they acted until we were given relevant flashbacks/memories.

The writing was competent, for the most part, though I felt it over-told some things, re-told some things too often, and fell into cliche occasionally. For all the wandering about, I never really felt an understanding of the city or the people in it--or the context of it all, including armies laying siege. And while it's traditional for everything to fall on the shoulders of one character, I found there to be too many threads that disappeared as soon as they weren't being looked at--for the scope of the piece, I felt the world was under-represented.

And while the "ancient evil" storyline is given a reasonably complex context, it still felt somewhat generic in execution; the characters tell us a fair bit about themselves, but emote no real depth. Any differentiation from stereotypes was largely due to plot, rather than the plot feeling driven by character.

Still, if "ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love" pull you in, you'll probably appreciate the book.


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Unholy Domain by Dan Ronco, reviewed by Debbie

Unholy Domain by Dan Ronco

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dan Ronco's "Unholy Domain" is the sequel to "Peacemaker", although for some reason publishers Kunati Inc. didn't think this worth putting on the cover. I wasn't aware it was a sequel while reading, but it might have been useful to know, as it explains why so much of the book is taken up with references to obscure events. So I pass this on to anyone who's considering this book--consider reading "Peacemaker" first!

In this post-PeaceMaker world, humanity is divided between those who consider technology to be the tool of the devil, and those who still think it has a useful role to play in our lives. The battle between these two camps is fought with deadly force. Meanwhile, David Brown, son of the man blamed for unleashing the PeaceMaker computer virus on the world, is struggling to clear his dead father's name. But both sides in the conflict have their own reasons for keeping the truth from becoming known.

There are some great moments in the book--like when David has to buy back his own car, with the 'help' of an accomplice of the thief in bargaining down the price. There are some nice twists, and the book does a good job of keeping the reader guessing about who can be trusted and who can't. It's not as fast-paced as perhaps a techno-thriller ought to be, though. It throws the reader into the action immediately, but there's a lot of faddling around before it gets to the final conflict. At least there are some surprises when we get there.

Inevitably, perhaps, the technology takes precedence, knocking characterisation into second place. The narrative tries to differentiate the characters, but they have a bad habit of turning into representations of their side of the argument, rather than into people. More show and less tell overall, but particularly with regard to David, might have drawn the reader in and made for a more exciting read.

Each chapter starts with a quote--some from the past or present, and some from the future--and collectively they illustrate the thinking behind this book. It's a great way to get the reader thinking before plunging them into the next phase of the narrative. It's clear that a lot of thought and care has gone into crafting this novel, and the ruminations on what our technological future will be are the most interesting aspect.

Thought-provoking, even if it doesn't quite live up to the blurbs on the back cover.


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The Suicide Shop by Jean Teulé, reviewed by kaolin

The Suicide Shop by Jean Teule

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Tuvaches, a sort of working class Addams Family, operate The Suicide Shop--a shop where anyone can purchase the equipment and/or training required to off themselves (though children can only purchase sweets that have a 50% chance of killing them).

The story is set some time after North America has been laid to waste by the Big One--but for the most part it could pass as contemporary, with the odd bit of future tech: holographic greeting cards; a solution that turn one's kiss poisonous to others; 3d semi-immersive full-sensory television.

Mishima and Lucrèce Tuvache have three children--two depressed and/or ailing, and the youngest, bright and cherubic. This latter child, Alan, is the force that changes everything.

The chapters are brief, often terse, and the story progresses swiftly--at times a little too swiftly, in that I felt the characters bounced a bit too much in mood and disposition. At the same time, the quick pace kept me turning pages.

I was somewhat disappointed by the direction of the narrative--it's described as a quirky black comedy, but I found it more comedy, verging on slapstick, and less black (until, perhaps, the end). Alan's cheer and undauntable optimism quickly infects the rest of the family (except for Mishima, the father); even suicide commandos are shown to not be able to withstand his barrage of cheerfulness (a favorite quote: "I'll only be demonstrating this to you once!").

Still, it has a definite charm, and if you are perhaps less jaded you might get a real kick out of it throughout. I could easily see it being a cult favorite in the right circles.

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