Fantasy Magazine, October 2008

A theme of obsession threads its way through Fantasy Magazine’s October stories: from a woman with an all-consuming passion for palindromes to another hoarding wishes, and from a king “greedy for flesh” to a man drawn far too deeply into a twisting plot.

In the surreal “Yell Alley” by Nicole Kornher-Stace, Anna is engaged in a quest to find a strange but orderly world she once saw in a drawing, a world of palindromes. Eve, her traveling companion, is increasingly dubious about the quest.

At its outset, “Yell Alley” is more an exercise in wordplay than a narrative story. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The first section reads like a prose poem, a paean to the various majestic or squalid or magical places where Anna and Eve have temporarily settled. It isn’t until well into the story that the reader learns the protagonists’ names and begins to get an inkling of who they are and what they are doing. Still, Kornher-Stace’s well-executed repetitions and enjoyable palindromes are pleasing to read, and her lists of improbable details are appealing. The whole tale has a whimsical yet haunting quality, subtle enough to engage the mind without the heaviness that could spoil the fun.

“The Banyan Tree,” Jeannette Westwood’s disturbing tale of avarice, opens with Lata who holds Victory in a beer bottle. In fact, Lata possesses many such wishes—Inner Strength, Love, even Death—captured and imprisoned long ago by a goblin who bottled them and stored them inside a banyan tree. The wishes have changed hands many times since then, always by violence. But neither Lata nor the goblins before her ever used the wishes because “the possibility was enough.” Now Lata’s sister, Malati, has arrived for a visit after many years, and Lata eyes this new threat to her hoard within the banyan tree. But Malati is not the only threat Lata faces.

Lata is certainly not a sympathetic protagonist, cocooned in her obsession with her bottled wishes, but she is intriguing. Reminiscent of Kino in John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Lata is consumed by the treasure she has found and will stop at nothing to possess and keep it. Westwood pulls no punches and allows this character to be who she is, and the story is better for it.

“The Banyan Tree” is tense and full of the emptiness of wealth unused, potential unrealized. But it is not only Lata’s story, nor is its resolution found in her own. The tale goes past its obvious moral to a quite unexpected place, but a place no less dark.

“A Spell for Twelve Brothers” by Erzebet YellowBoy is a take on the Hans Christian Andersen classic, “The Wild Swans,” (or one of the many similar traditional tales, such as the “The Six Swans” collected by the Brothers Grimm). A lecherous king forces a witch to ensure he has a daughter, and decrees that his twelve sons must die. Their mother, the queen, instead sends them away to live in secret in the forest, where their hearts grow bitter toward the sister they have never seen. The witch casts a spell to allay their bitterness, but the girl herself finds her brothers and in innocence interferes with the spell, causing the witch to turn the brothers into ravens and to charge the girl with seven years of silence to break this new enchantment.

This story is well written and engagingly told from the point of view of the witch. However, it does not differentiate itself enough to stand alone as a piece not dependent on the original for reference. Despite the decidedly feminine viewpoint and move away from the traditional type of happy ending, “A Spell for Twelve Brothers” charts a course quite similar to that of “The Wild Swans,” with many of the details only slightly altered.

In “The Plagiarist” by Alex Rose, a man intimately familiar with the world’s great literature is drawn into a book left behind on the subway by a mysterious woman. This seemingly tawdry and badly written paperback is, however, much more than it appears to be.

Rose’s expert use of the second person point of view is effectively disorienting and uniquely suited to the subject matter “The Plagiarist” presents. Proving the author’s mastery of this little-used point of view, the narrative even slips out of second person twice, almost imperceptibly, at just the right moments to demonstrate the book’s effect on the protagonist. This is a tale of subtle creepiness that stays with the reader long after the first reading, and begs for a second or third.

In Deb Taber’s “The Summoning of Spirits Too Far From Home,” a starving people stage a ritual dance to summon The Patchwork Man, who they hope will protect and seed their land. Instead, they are faced with the terrible presence of this old god from their home planet inhabiting the broken body of the dancer, a destroying rather than a sustaining force. And only the dancer’s brave young daughter sees what must be done.

This is a chilling tale, full of black space, parched earth, and burning flesh. The descriptions are uncomfortable and the outlook bleak. It conveys the “otherness” of an origin myth attached to a long-gone culture with alien values and strange sensibilities, yet it is set in the far future, at some time when Earth is a distant memory. “The Summoning of Spirits Too Far From Home” is eminently unsettling, perfect for its Halloween publication date.