Fantasy Magazine Online, February 2008

Three of Fantasy Magazine’s four February, 2008 stories are romances, and all of them involve a certain amount of wandering about in invented histories or surreal environments, some better researched or more convincing than others.

Tomi Two-Hearts and Cinnamon Bear definitely didn’t experience love at first sight in Trent Walters’s “The Fable of Cinnamon and Bitter.” Cinnamon’s severe myopia and Tomi’s exaggerated farsightedness make simultaneous goo-goo glances impossible. (As something of a myopic myself, however, I don’t find that my impairment helps me do the sort of fine tasks in which Cinnamon seems to excel). Their cartoon caveman paradise is menaced by semi-realistic threats lumbering out of the pages of The Far Side, and at one point, a suburban Calypso (perhaps a metaphoric manifestation of a disillusioned Cinnamon) threatens Tomi’s independence. The female characters in this story only seem to serve as foils to Walters’s protagonist, succoring or feeding off him by turns, and his sons don’t even get names—not even a generic Bloog or Burgle (perhaps they function as stand-ins for his youth and virility). It’s hard to winkle out the point of this one (unless it’s “women are trouble”), but that doesn’t make it uninteresting.

Jonathan Wood paints a rather more complex scene in his atmospheric “Début-de-siècle,” set in Weimar, Vienna, or Berlin during the nineteen-teens, and populated by characters one could easily imagine sidling into the Kit Kat Club a dozen years later. Herman, an expressionist artist (and our narrator) has violent Freudian (and symbolist, for that matter) drug induced hallucinations. He, his friends, and their city are haunted by the specter of a murderer whose signature mark is “a cross, broken to resemble a pinwheel.” Although the movement of the plot seems purposeless except to summon the atmosphere of the era and forebode the horrors of Nazism, this vivid and well-written piece is engrossing and intriguing.

Rebecca Epstein’s “When We Were Stardust” is a baffling and melodramatic story, whose excursions into stereotypical, unenlightening, and carefully diversified historical woe merely detract from, rather than strengthen, her ultimate revelation of the narrator’s core concerns. Her friends, and even her faithful husband, are merely cardboard standups for her to project upon in her throes. Perhaps she means to meditate on hard choices and the loss of children, but her scattered and self-interested story structure deprives her coup de grâce of much of its meaning and power. The pain comes through, but it is hard to sympathize with because of the way it is presented. That her story makes any emotional impact at all is an accomplishment of a sort, however.

February’s last piece unfolds in an idyllic and surreal (or perhaps more aptly, semi-real) landscape, just as the first did. Instead of a cave in bear-menaced Ugsville, however, Willow Fagan’s “Cockatrice Girl Meets Statue Boy” takes place in a modern, semi-magical suburb (possibly in the San Fernando Valley), populated by baristas, high school students, and weird sisters reminiscent of A.S. Byatt or J.K. Rowling. The difficult romance of a combative girl and sensitive boy is a tired plot, but Fagan’s well-formed writing and pleasant wit lend it a certain amount of freshness. His handling of feminine defenses, whether violence, frostiness, mazes, or in the case of Beatrice, “an unkempt veil of hair,” is disturbing and endearing by turns. At one point, Cockatrice Girl does nothing to succor the victim of a symbolic rape at a party she is hosting, and at another, the Girl’s frosty sister, Flannery, goes to ridiculous lengths to reassure a balloon-headed beau that she can endure any heat necessary to travel to the moon with him.

I didn’t need Statue Boy’s patience to get through this one, that’s for sure—it was quite a fun piece.