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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