Fantasy Magazine, September 2008

Fantasy Magazine’s September, 2008, stories run the gamut from the gritty to the ethereal.

Jim C. Hines introduces us to Jaybird, a hardened, cocksure “Original Gangster” from the mean streets of Chicago. When her baby daughter is kidnapped by a member of a rival gang seeking revenge, Jaybird tries to take care of the problem on her own, disdaining help from an unlikely source, a source she’ll find she has grossly underestimated.

This tense, action-packed tale infuses the grim reality of a young woman’s life with a hopeful spark in the form of ancient—and pleasingly recognizable, once the reader puts it all together—magic. With a spare style befitting the gritty setting, Hines offers an exciting and ultimately satisfying read.

In A.M. Muffaz’s “A Foreigner’s View of the River,” we see modern Ho Chi Minh City through the eyes of Sandy, a recently arrived Westerner. She is disquieted by the squalor and prostitution all around her, but relies on her new friend, Irene, to show her around and acquaint her with life as a foreigner in Vietnam.

This story is rich with detail and evocative descriptions, but amidst Sandy’s everyday experiences in acclimating to her new surroundings and worrying about her age and appearance, the point seems to be lost. Sandy’s observations and interactions seem probable, even mildly interesting in themselves, but they do not seem to add up to anything in particular. I kept waiting for something to illuminate the significance of the long, detailed scene at the dressmaker’s and to tie it to other events in the story. I wanted to better understand Sandy’s seemingly ambivalent feelings toward her husband. Perhaps this piece is too subtle for me, but even after a second reading I couldn’t make these connections. Most puzzling is the one fleeting fantasy element that appears once toward the beginning of the piece and once at the end, both times so briefly that I could not discern its connection with the rest of the story, though I was intrigued and dearly wanted to do so.

Becca De La Rosa transports the reader of “Nora” to the magical world of an unnamed witch who lives “nestled at the foot of a forest, in a house shaped like a growing cornucopia,” but seemingly just at the edge of everyday modern society. The witch administers advice and herbs as needed to people who come to her for help from time to time, and even though she doesn’t take on apprentices, she allows a girl called Bowl to stay.

“Nora” is intriguingly told by a personage who is “not the witch’s familiar…not a spell or a ritual or a holy stone,” but a friend who comes and goes as he pleases, a sort of Green Man figure. His narrative weaves out of waking reality into dreams and back again, beautiful yet elusive. Filled with fantastical images and unexplained oddities, this is a riddle of a tale whose pleasure is not in the solving but in the puzzling.

“In This City” lives an aspiring architect of cloth buildings, desperate for perfect order, and an artist whose mirrored eyes reflect the chaos of the city’s ghosts that her drawings capture. One of these ghosts brings together Neng, the artist, and Dargazhian, the architect, in a violent collision that could save them both, as well as their city.

Brian Dolton uses startlingly beautiful imagery and poetic language to paint a gorgeous, dark, and brittle world. The city is a character in its own right—more than a character, a force. The unhappy and isolated protagonists are dwarfed by it. Dolton’s spare descriptions of Neng and Dargazhian, along with the story’s lack of dialogue and absence of any other living human beings, allow the city’s monolithic oppressiveness to bear down on the reader as it does the characters. Yet, this does not go on so long as to become intolerable, only as long as necessary before the story must turn toward its satisfying conclusion.

[“The Annie Oakley Show” by Ari Goelman is a reprint from print issue #7 of Fantasy Magazine and was reviewed for The Fix by Ziv Wities in November, 2007.]