"Push of the Sky" by Camille Alexa

Push of the Sky
by Camille Alexa
Hadley Rille Books (2009)
302 pages
ISBN 9780981924373

I lucked out recently when I won a copy of Camille Alexa's short story collection from Red Penny Papers. I had previously read a couple of Camille's short stories, as well as read the series, Particular Friends, which is available to be read for free via Red Penny Papers. Camille has a writing style that is at times lyrical, probably thanks to her affinity towards poetry, and at times resplendent in her descriptions of characters and setting. Push of the Sky exemplifies this.

I believe Peter Straub was the first author I heard use the term "fantasist" to describe himself as a storyteller. It's a good label and applies to Camille, in my opinion. Many of the stories told here are housed in fantastical settings, some more than others. "Shades of White and Road" has a fairy tale charm to it with anthropomorphic objects tailing after a gal on a winding road, while a story like "The Clone Wrangler's Bride" takes sci-fi elements offers a fun adventure with robots and spaceships--and a bit of western flavor added.

It's all there inside the book's pages, a kind of cornucopia for any fantasy and sci-fi fan. I genuinely liked the collection, but I can't say I walked away with a stand-out favorite. There's a lot to like, but no one story for me to clutch onto and say I love. It's Camille Alexa's first book, so she's just getting warmed up and I am really looking forward to what she has in store in the near future. This book was published in 2009 after all, and she's already some really good work out in the couple years since (see above where I mention Particular Friends).

With thirty stories and poems in this book, there is bound to be more than one story for readers to find and admire Camille's ability to paint a picture with words. Some stories flow like a lazy, winding river, while a few amp up the level of adrenaline and intrigue. "The Beetle Eater's Dream" has a quiet mystery to it and its fair share of heartbreak, while "The Butterfly Assassins" offers a great little steampunk tale, a sub-genre I'm still warming up to.

If you love that ethereal style of escapist fantasy and science-fiction, you should take a chance on this one. If you're a fan of poetry, which admittedly I am not, there are a couple of real gems in this pages. Again, I'm not a poetry fan, but "I Consider My Cadaver" to be great. Hey, maybe that's the piece I love. Yeah, let's go with that. Me ... poetry lover. Pack your mittens, boys and girls, we're going to Hell.

"Voyeurs of Death" by Shaun Jeffrey

I've had an electronic copy of Shaun Jeffrey's short story collection, Voyeurs of Death, sitting on my hard drive for nearly a year now. It kind of got lost in the shuffle, but it came to my attention again over the holidays when I found out that Dark Regions Press was releasing a limited edition hardcover of the collection. So, I guess that makes my review a timely one. Neat.

Jeffrey, who also has a couple of novels out there including The Kult, and most recently Deadfall, offers up fifteen short stories that run the gamut in some of the favored monsters and legends in horror. Vampires, zombies, and all sorts of things that go bump in the night make appearances in this book. The collection was originally published in 2007, with eleven of the fifteen stories are previously published, appearing elsewhere from as recent as 2006 and as far back as 1993.

Among my favorites is "The Watchers", a story of a young couple out to spruce up their love life by visiting a parking spot in the middle of the night so strangers can watch their lovemaking. The anxiety and wariness on the part of the boyfriend is easy to relate to. Voyeurs of Death proves an apt story to the collection with that story in mind, but the title story in this book, "Voyeurs of Death", is a very different--and very brief--story of a husband's horrifying vision of his wife's murder. "Sin Eater" is one of the more unsettling stories, as a family of four must contend with an imposing visitor they are regrettably familiar with, who has come to hear their confessions. Then there is "Venetian Kiss" and its reminiscence to the kinds of stories you would expect from an episode of The Twilight Zone.

A couple of the stories fell flat with me, like "The Flibbertigibbet" and "Life Cycle", but stories like "The Watchers" and "The Quilters of Thurmond" makes up for them, in my opinion. Like any collection or anthology, you're not going to like them all, but you're bound to find more than a few that you will.

I'm not sure I could reasonably recommend you shell out a heap of cash for that limited edition hardcover, but I'm the kind of guy who is thoroughly content with a well-worn paperback sitting on my bookshelf anyway--that means I'm cheap--and it is, after all, a deluxe signed limited hardcover. If you've read Jeffrey's work and enjoyed it, and you are a book collector, then you should check into it. Otherwise, I suggest sticking with an electronic copy from Amazon.com, or perhaps a trade paperback edition if it's available.