"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.

THE GROVE by John Rector

The Grove is a novel I found while searching out some reading material for the Kindle my lovely wife gave me for Christmas. It was released through Amazon Encore, a publishing venture which provides a second life to previously released titles which may have been overlooked by larger publishers or self-published yet still acquired a following through Amazon’s website. I can see why this book earned a following.

The Grove is a gothic tale of murder, ghosts (not necessarily the kind you might think), and shattering relationships. The protagonist, Dexter, lives alone on his small farm sipping bourbon, beer, and subsisting mostly on regret. His wife recently separated from him to live with her mother, and he stopped taking his pills. His haunted past refuses to leave him alone.

One day, while staggering around his property the day after a blackout and violent argument with his spouse, he finds the body of a teenage girl in a cottonwood grove. He decides he should investigate what happened to the girl. He thinks by doing so he will be regarded as a hero and earn the respect of his community, and more importantly, his wife.

I’m not going to tell anymore because I don’t want to reveal any spoilers. Some reviews I read noted disappointment with the ending of the novel, but I thought it was pitch perfect. I have few complaints.

All the same, there is a plot development somewhere in the third act involving some neighbors that I feel is tacked-on, did not quite feel completely authentic, and could have possibly been left out because it didn’t add anything to the overall story. Also – and this is just about as minor a quibble as you will ever come across – I thought the dialogue needed further editing. For example, characters referred to county roads as “CR’s” as in “CR-11.” I’ve never heard a road spoken of this way before. Living in an area with a lot of county roads, we usually refer to them by using their full name, as in “County Road 11,” or, more often, simply refer to them by their number alone (“I’m driving down 12 and almost home,” etc.) As I said, a minor quibble, but it knocked me out of the narrative at times. This is probably due to my own unique eye for dialogue.

All in all, I highly recommend The Grove. It’s among the best American rural gothic novels I’ve read in some time. It echoes Faulkner and McCarthy in some respects but still manages to be a page-turner. It’s McCarthy light, I guess. The prose is tight and compelling. I seriously read the novel in three or four short sittings and felt mournful every time I had to put it down. The ending left me anxious to check out other books by John Rector. He’s a writer to watch. This is a powerful first novel.

Based on my six-pack rating system, I give The Grove 5 out of 6 shots of Johnnie Walker with a Risperidone chaser.

As I Embraced My Jagged Edges by Lee Thompson

Lee Thompson is a rare thing; a cracking writer and a genuinely nice bloke. He has started on the verge of real success (he has a forthcoming novel from Delirium Books and it’s already being compared to early Greg F Gifune) but his enthusiasm and passion for the genre is refreshing. Outside of short stories, this was the first 'longer' work of Thompson's I've read.

As I Embrace My Jagged Edges (Sideshow Press) tells the story of a shard from King Solomon’s temple guarded by a Jewish family. Boaz, twin brother to Angel, must come of age and stand tall against an onrushing chaos of demons, golems, sea gods and his own sexuality.

Thompson builds a believable mythical backdrop, based on Jewish history, and uses it to weave a mounting tension in the first two sections Morning and Afternoon. In the second half the pace hits breakneck and hurtles towards a startling climax, whipping the reader along for the ride. The final scene on the beach is superbly staged and littered with memorable imagery.

At its heart, lies Boaz, the real success of this story. In Boaz, Thompson has created a believable and flawed protagonist, whose struggles against his family, his own sexuality and the demons massing on the horizon will ring true with many a teenager. The second act - where Boaz meets the boy at the lighthouse - showed me the true potential of Thompson’s writing, a scene that carried a ring of truth and made for poignant reading.

The myth-making on display here is reminiscent of early Clive Barker and the unexpected poignancy put me in mind of British writer Joel Lane. All these ingredients make for a great novelette, packaged in ebook format at a very reasonable $3.

Undoubtedly, Lee Thompson will be a name to watch in 2011.

Golden Visions Magazine - fall

The fall issue of Golden Visions Magazine offers so much that not even the faintest synopsis of each and every story could be done in a relative amount of time. This magazine is big, and by big I do mean the sheer size.

All in all, the magazine consists of 17 stories and poems amidst 83 pages. It's amazing that a small-press magazine can offer so much, and it's definitely worthy of consideration for any freelance-writer or fanatic of fantastical fiction. This magazine covers it all: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, bizarre/surreal, comedy. So many stories and poems are offered that mentioning them all would just induce brain-overload on a scale of Cronenberg's Scanners. So rather than mention every story, I will just focus on two of the magazine's strongest and weakest.

By far the least favorite story for this reader was Heart of a Soldier by Rebecca Besser. The story was a science-fictional piece centered around a youth in space coming face-to-face with a moral dilemma The story was cute, in that it was a story for children/young-adults (adult readers of science-fiction might find its moral theme rather amateurish or childish); yet, the most troubling aspect of this story were the typos! So many typos that I found it hard to focus on anything else. And I quote: "Zyle tried to keep my tone light so he wouldn't worry her." Note the word "my" . . . who's first-person perspective is this? At no point in time (other than dialogue) is first-person ever used; the story is told in third-person. I don't wish to place blame on either the writer or the publishers (as typos are part of the game) but I couldn't help but wonder if a few proof-reads had been overlooked.

My favorite story was Nicholas Ozment's Frank Hunter Vs' The Crawling Brains. This was truly a humorous piece where the main character wakes to find himself as the leading role of a 1950's sci-fi/horror B-movie. With a beautiful co-star, the man is torn between his desire to stretch the family-morals of 1950's while simultaneously surviving an invasion of clay-animated brains which are on the hunt. But seriously, what's the worse that could go wrong for a film from the 50's? And what's the best?

In the end, Golden Visions Magazine has a lot to offer on almost every scale imaginable. I wish I could go more in to detail, but there's just so much this magazine offers that it's just easier to say that this magazine is for those who truly love to read . . . a lot.

Apex Magazine Issue 20

Douglas F. Warrick opens the January issue of Apex with 'The Itaewon Eschatology' a tale of night clowns, magic tricks and the end of the world. A delightfully-weird story.

In Seanan McGuire's 'The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells', a writer (and scientist) unleashes deadly viruses--her daughters--on a world that really should suspect. Well she did her best to warn them about the effectiveness of quarantines in her books. Despite a non-sympathetic protagonist, this is an engaging tale and my favourite this issue.

'Tomorrow and Tommorow' by Mary Robinette Kowal is an off-world tale about a mother desperate to save her son and how others take advantage.

You can read these stories by subscribing now to Apex Magazine ($1 an issue) or waiting until February when they'll be free to read online.

Asylum by Mark Allan Gunnells

Asylum by Mark Allan Gunnells is the debut publication from The Zombie Feed, a new niche publisher specializing in zombie fiction. In this novella, Gunnells utilizes many of the well-known topes of zombie fiction. His zombies are slow, ambling, unintelligent Romero-inspired zombies chasing after a group of survivors who are barricaded inside a confined space. Fans of zombie films are in familiar territory here. However, Gunnells gives this old story a unique twist: This ragtag group of survivors are barricaded inside a gay bar called Asylum.

The main protagonist, a young virgin named Curtis, is on his first trip to a gay bar. While waiting for his friend to finish hooking up with a nameless accountant, the zombies begin attacking. They come out of nowhere. At first, the characters automatically assume the attackers are drunken homophobes, but soon realize these are not regular people. Their attackers are walking and eating their victims despite their own grievous wounds. Inside the bar, a character makes phone calls. Emergency responders have been inundated with calls. This is not an isolated incident. The dead have risen and there is nowhere to run. They barricade the doors of the bar and attempt to stay sane.

Asylum is a fitting title and a fitting name for the bar. Madame Diva, described as a drag queen, owns the bar, and she is a compassionate mother hen who created a place of refuge for the community she loves and cares for, almost as if these men are her children. She is a well-drawn and fascinating character.

In fact, most of the characters -- with a few notable exceptions -- are well-drawn. The story is tight and quick-moving and contains plenty of gory suspense for zombie fans. The gore is actually heartbreaking at times thanks to how well Gunnells draws most of his characters and manages to create sympathy for them. This makes for a compelling read, and I devoured this book in one sitting, even if it sometimes felt a bit too familiar and a trifle predictable. The ending, while not exactly unexpected, was a fitting coda.

So, overall, this is an extremely fun, fast-paced read. Highly recommended for zombie fans, especially those purists who enjoy the classic Romero-inspired zombies. My six-pack rating: 4 out of 6 glasses of Return of the Living Red Zombie Wine.

A Mouth for Picket Fences by Barry Napier

I've known about Barry Napier's work for a few years now, and he's always trying something new: comic books, novels, short stories. Granted, whatever Barry touches usually has a dark edge. 2010 was a big poetry year for Barry, and Needfire Poetry (an imprint of Belfire Press) released his first all-poetry collection, A Mouth for Picket Fences, in late September.

I'm a big fan of imagery, especially poems which surprise and sometimes shock. These kind of treats fill A Mouth for Picket Fences. Consider the following examples:

"The morning spoke in tongues of thunder..." (from "Eggs")

"It was the sort of day where one would / write their eulogy on a napkin stained with mustard." (from "Lives Upon a Napkin")

I also enjoy a strong sound-sense in verse--not necessarily rhyme or careful, repetitive meter, but the way a poem "feels" in your mouth when read aloud. Napier's poems beg to be spoken, tasted, felt...

If you like dark poetry and delight in surprises, look no further.