Fantasy Magazine, April 2008

This is the richest month I’ve seen from Fantasy Magazine so far. All four stories are strong, or at least interesting, and much more smoothly written than some of the pieces that appeared in the past.

What would you do if Tony the Tiger appeared at your door and asked you to marry him? Can you imagine Snap, Crackle, and Pop attending your wedding? Ever share a cup of coffee with Juan Valdez? Unlike the marketing images Isobel crafted when she was employed, Stacy Sinclair’s tasty modern blend of pop art imagery with a slipstream sensibility doesn’t elevate style over substance, that’s for sure. I really wish I were a member of an awards committee. “The 21st Century Isobel Down” deserves some serious recognition; any writer who can use the banality of brand mascots to explore sociopsychological conflicts is a maestro, or a maestro in the making. Okay, maybe I’m a bit biased. I read it at the perfect time in my life, heck, even the perfect time in the day, and I’m its target demographic. Although the horizons of its exploration of roles, conflicts, and cultural imagery are in some ways limited to the life of the sort of unencumbered woman who earns between 50-100K a year because she actually gets high-powered marketing jobs and “takes clients out to strip clubs,” what it illuminates is still valid—the false dichotomy between worker and mother forced by the fact that although women have changed, men haven’t, not much, as evidenced by Isobel’s ex-boyfriend Charlie’s narcissistic plea:

“Pick a side and stick to it. You can’t be the woman who takes clients out to strip clubs, then comes home to bake meatloaf for her boyfriend. Where does that leave me? What’s my role?”

Another heterosexual relationship comes under the knife in “Erased.” Elena Gleason’s memorable and psychologically realistic portrait of a love gone invisible drags in a few places but is overall quite strong. References to the narrator and her paramour’s shared history are well placed, references to her attempts to avoid or reconnect with him affecting. Her futile attempts to rebuild what she has lost as he becomes little more than a ghost thankfully lack the cloying sentimentality one might expect just reading a synopsis.

But I have a sore sweet tooth after reading “The Cinnamon Cavalier,” a beautifully imaginative but somehow empty romp through a fairy-tale land of Giants. Richard Bowes’s Giant Princess—clumsy, spoiled, and full of wonder—is oddly more interesting than the Cinnamon Cavalier she will someday eat, or her father, tutors, cooks, and soldiers, which are little more than stiff cookie people themselves. Ultimately, what saves this story is the setting and luscious description, the “strawberry for his vest which was buttoned with apricots . . . [his] shining vanilla smile” and “turrets and silver towers crenulated and encrusted with gargoyles.”

“A Word Without Ghosts” is even more vivid. As arresting and full of memorable imagery as it is, the dreamlike surrealism with which Paul Jessup permeates its fictional physics left this reviewer reeling. While undeniably sensual, grammatical hiccups and an embarrassment of magical symbols don’t leave room for much coherency. In some ways, it recalls the sort of weird psychodrama Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask dished out. The easiest (and most reductive) way to synopsize this one is that a birdlike sister and a bearlike brother suffer odd metamorphoses in a ruined station full of books while sexual tensions bubble to the surface. Jessup created a much more successful story when he wrote his haunting (and successfully cohesive) “Ghost Technology from the Sun,” which appeared in Postscripts #12. I hope to read more of his work in the future.