2 out of 4 stars
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Mary Blower's eclectic anthology of twelve stories, Blood Moon, includes eight fantasies: one of her own, "Behind the Wall", "The Weekend Trip:Snowed ", by Dash McCallen, "The Wings of Leonardo," by Timothy Trimble. "Staffio's Mystery" by Peter Bouchier, "Hello Dear" by Stewart Bint, "Transforming Eve" by Vanessa Wright, "View from the Tower" by Eric Van Mechelen, and "The World of Magifidad" by R.H. Ali. Four of the eight deal with encounters with the future. In "The Wings of Leonardo," for example, the great Renaissance genius by means of a not quite credible contraption assembled of mirrors, magnets, and connected lightning rods contrives a scope into which he peers at a horrifying scene of twentieth century aerial bombardment. In alarm, Leonardo Da Vinci adopts a drastic expedient counter to all his dreams of manned flight to avoid creating the progenitor of flying machines that rain mass death and destruction from the skies. This self-destruct theme in the face of future apocalypse occurs again in "Transforming Eve." Eve, a hideous cloned creation of misguided biological science rebels against her own exploitation and forced birth into an already plague ridden dystopia of the future in the only way possible for a creature like her.
In "Behind the Wall" and "Hello, Dear" themes of time travel are more personally immediate as the characters deal with just the individual significance of other- temporal existence. In the first, a fictional treatment of reception after death into heavenly afterlife, a first person narrator experiences the disorientation of a soul in transition between death and eternity. In the second, another protagonist in the first person experiences both her past and future selves at one moment in a single encounter between the two.
The four remaining fantasies depict supernatural anomalies more spacial than temporal. In "Staffio's Mystery" a nineteenth century composer survives a storm at sea by way of a sailing dinghy that seems to have volition and agency of its own. "The World of Magifidad" is a strangely whimsical-cutesy-tragic account of of a naive young girl's quest in a highly floral, enchanted, fairy attended realm for her impossibly beautiful "real" royal parents. For classic horror there is in "The Weekend: Snowed" the human engulfing wall paper of a house seemingly intent upon the destruction of its inhabitants. Finally there is among the fantasies, "View from the Tower", a well crafted account of the friction between two cultures that remains "realistic" to the very end only to be marred there by a supernatural manifestation emanating from the smoke of a trash fire.
The remaining stories of the collection compare well,I think, with those in the science fiction and fantasy modes. It's a matter of taste, perhaps, but I think that I prefer them. Two of them," Waltz out of the Blues" and "Stefania" are interesting for their style and plot devices. The first uses two narrators, a married couple who on opposing pages offer parallel accounts of the same story. The second, by way of letters between a man and woman who are strangers to a snooping first person heroine reader, change that reader's attitudes toward her own troubled marriage. A third story, "Iglesia De Cristo," is an engaging account of a half Cherokee builder/part time musician who in those twin roles discovers new possibilities in his own life by bridging three cultures.
To this reader these stories were of widely uneven quality. That is the nature of an anthology, perhaps. A reader cannot find all the stories there equally engaging. Those I found less so lacked in my opinion, solid crafting in terms of plausible plotting, rounded character development, and succinct, vivid language. Some of the stories in their attempt,I think, to channel primal archetypal themes were not entirely successful and so lapsed into predictable forms couched in tired cliche's. That said, I still think the general reader who is as much interested in the variety of stuff out there as I am will find something in this collection worth her/his time.
I did particularly enjoy the individual bios of all twelve of these up and coming writers. For me they gave, though brief, some sense of personal connection between reader and writer, and the joint venture upon which both parties embark whenever a story is told, written, listened to, or read. I think this collection deserves more than a 2 rating, but, given the minor weaknesses in crafting, even in the best of these stories, I cannot say it merits a full three. I must rate it,then, as a 2 out of 4.
******
Blood Moon
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