davidkm

Unwelcome Guests is the newest full-length collection of dark speculative poetry from SFPA Grand Master and Rhysling winner David C. Kopaska-Merkel

There’s relatability and strangehood in the offerings, some miniature in haiku, a beautiful symmetry and ominous obscurity in the text, dread in the unspoken.
Where some poets hero the impact of the closing line, Kopaska-Merkel’s poems strike in the power between the lines. The reader can never predict what potency the text might disgorge
Unwelcome Guests is a spectral lover’s touch—tender, yet dooming. It’s a perfect marriage of poetry and prose, warm and chilling, starkly intelligent and reachable.
Ideal for anyone.

--Eugen Bacon, Aurealis

At turns disquieting and quirky, playful and poignant, the poems in Unwelcome Guests, like their titular subjects, will stay with you long after you've put the book down and gone to bed (perhaps leaving the light on). A welcome addition to any genre poetry lover's collection!

--Marsheila Rockwell, Rhysling Award-winning poet and author of the Scribe Award-nominated Shard Axe series

The first half of Unwelcome Guests slithers in and out of side-alleys in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, while the second strides avenues of science fiction. Gotta love “June Lockhart’s Recurring Nightmare”. And when “Medusa Buys a Car”. There’s so many environs of speculative poetry visited here, penned with a convincing voice and deft whispers of experimentation.

--Robert Frazier, author of Phantom Navigation

David Kopaska-Merkel’s poetry is like a twisted vein of black gold, with subtle tweaks of darkling humor. He brings to the fore other images that are like watching a glistening pool of oil, beneath which something moves. Whether disturbing sites near Carcosa, the unsuspecting traps of relationships, or unusual visitations, his poetry will inspire, entertain and make you think.

--Colleen Anderson, Rhysling Award winner

MERELY THE BUCKET LIST POEM (ON PAGE 79) IS WORTH THE ACTION ON MY MIND AND MY FUNNY BONES (MORE THAN ONE)

--Edward Mycue, Author of I Am A Fact Not A Fiction

To order a signed and numbered copy from the publisher:

https://weirdhousepress.com/products/unwelcome-guests-by-david-c-kopaska-merkel?_pos=1&_psq=kop&_ss=e&_v=1.0

You can get one directly from me, too ($18 postpaid). I also have PDFs for $3. PayPal to jopnquog [at] gmail [dot] com.

https://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2025/02/books-for-charity.html

Here is the deal. You send me a receipt, dated today or some day after today, showing that you contributed any amount of money to a non-profit that helps disadvantaged groups. This could be your local food pantry, Planned Parenthood, the Brigid Alliance, or any one of countless others. If you are not sure that I will approve of your donation, email me and ask.

When I receive the copy of the receipt from you I will email you a PDF of my 2019 dark speculative poetry collection The Ambassador Takes One For the Team, and my Elgin-winning 2022 collection, Some Disassembly Required. I have that one available in a variety of ebook formats. I'm sorry that I don't have ebooks of my 2024 dark speculative poetry collection from Weird House, entitled Unwelcome Guests

Yolen, Jane, 2012, The Last Selchie Child, A Midsummer Night's Press (www.spdbooks.org; orders@spdbooks.org), Cover photograph by M. A. Mathews, ISBN-13:978-0-9794208-9-4, perfect bound, 66 pages, $14.95.

Jane Yolen is one of our venerable masters, both of fiction and poetry. She won the Rhysling award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1993, as well as many other awards, some far more prestigious. Yolen was named SFPA Grand Master in 2010. It is always a pleasure to open one of her books for the first time. The Last Selchie Child is a collection of fairy tales retold as poems, 36 of them, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood, just to name four.

I lied already. The first part of the book is a group of poems about stories and storytelling. From “Story”:

You shape a tale
To fit your mind.

And so it goes,
In re-creation,
Mouth-to-ear
Resuscitation,

Several poems deal with the legends of people who can be seals or seals who can be people. There is plenty of room for sorrow and betrayal in a situation like this. From “The Selchie's Children's Plaint”:

She leaves us then, without a word
wading into her future.
It hurts like a knife
skinning us as we watch her go.
We were the ones
who were to dive into another life.

Some of these poems look at fairytale stories from new perspectives. Instead of the omniscient narrator, we see things from the point of view of the woman, the child, the prince. This is indeed a fruitful kind of reversal, pointing out the dark underbelly or ludicrousness of the traditional versions of these stories. But sometimes the shift in perspective shows us more. “Knives” reveals more horror in Cinderella than the by-now familiar idea of what happens after the wedding. Cinderella might not have been the naïve young thing most of us thought.

I spoke to the prince in that secret tongue,
the diplomacy of courting.
he using shoes, I using glass,
and all my sisters saw was a slipper,
too long in the heel,
too short at the toe.
What else could they use but a knife?

Fair young things seem to wait so long for something to happen, in fairy tales. How long is too long? From “Tower”:

I have found
the small barred window,
where I sing each morning
to any passing prince.
Be he large or small, handsome or plain,
I will have him.

After a while, you wait your life away, and anything at all becomes enough. How much becomes plain, although unstated, in a clear-eyed reading of fairy tales? The most interesting thing about this book, for me, is that familiar fairy tales are re-imagined in several different ways in different poems. We don't end up with simply two perspectives, but three, four, and perhaps others that we can imagine for ourselves, now that the way has been shown.

The last section of the book consists of a group of poems about “truth,” which is to say that the stories we have been told are wrong, wrong, wrong. Indeed they are! From “Women's Stories”:

Job's wife had her own story.
Lot's pillar of salt cried tears
indistinguishable from her eyes.
Who invented a glass slipper
never had to dance.

It might be needless to say I think you should buy this book. But just in case, I'll say it. You really should buy this book. You won't be sorry.

Schwader, Ann K., 2007, In the Yaddith Time, Mythos Books, cover and numerous interior illustrations by Steve Lines, introduction by Richard L. Tierney, perfect-bound paperback, 54 pages, ISBN 978-0-9789911-5-9, $10.

Schwader does, seemingly with little effort, what many have tried and failed to accomplish: produce Mythos poems that lie squarely within the genre, are original and entertaining, and make good poetry. Doesn't sound so hard, but I've read plenty of slush that says it's difficult indeed. I have learned to expect something really entertaining from Schwader's Mythos efforts, but this book is a tour de force. Each of the 36 poems stands on its own, yet together they tell a story, just as Lovecraft did with "Fungi from Yuggoth." I can't reproduce the story, but I can give you a taste of its components. It begins quickly.

From "The Finding"

Like slaughter lambs to marvel at that frame
of twisted yellow metal holding rough-
cut stones and latticework of alien make.
This was our first – & mankind's last – mistake.

And things go from bad to worse. From "A Fatal Flaw"

Madness grows
like any other malady: in genes
these most ingenious fools read like a book
of Holy Writ, & from that Scripture took
false comfort in deciding by such means:

Classic description from "Inside the Ghooric Zone" typifies her adherence to the strictures of Cthulhu Mythos form

Black viscous pools within whose fetid deeps
writhed Things our Captain knew – but would not name --
assailed our reeling senses. Sentient flame
eliminated temples, fanes, & keeps

Yet she seems to go beyond the fields many Mythos writers have known. The unwilling wanderers visit many extraterrestrial sites only hinted at by other chroniclers. Schwader describes more fully places of which we have heard before, so we visualize clearly that which was once hidden from us, yet she still imbues them with the mixture of malevolence, madness, and revulsion that Lovecraft first employed. From "Lost Celaeno"

Our instruments revealed no other lives
within this labyrinth, & yet it seemed
that shapes slipped past the corners of our eyes.

She refers to so many of the classic texts the book affords a special delight to those who are familiar with the Mythos. However, I think even if you have never read a word by Lovecraft, Long, Chambers, or Lumley, these poems will still engender a frisson of horror.

The voyage into darkness, death, and madness continues, flawlessly articulated and inexorable. Did I mention that they are all sonnets? The cover and other illustrations, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Denis Tiani, perfectly complement the text. If you like the Mythos or dark fantasy poetry in the broadest sense then you really must have this book.

Rathbone, Wendy, 2013, Unearthly: the collected poetry of Wendy Rathbone, Eye Scry Publications, 170 p., contact wrathbone@juno.com for information. E-book: $2.99 for the kindle from Amazon.com; $2.99 pdf from http://www.fanzinesplus.com/html/unearthly.htm.

Unearthly is an e-book, a reprint of seven out-of-print chapbooks published between 1994 and 2005. Only one poem in this collection is truly new, but unless you have been a dedicated collector of Wendy Rathbone's poetry, you can't have read all of these:

Moon Canoes, published by Dark Regions Press, 1994
(Im)mortal, published by Shadowfire Press, 1996
Scrying The River Styx, published by Anamnesis Press, 1999
Autumn Phantoms, published by Flesh and Blood Press, 2000
Dreams of Decadence Presents, published by DNA Publications 2002
Dancing in the Haunted Woodlands, published by Yellow Bat Review, 2003
Vampyria, published by Eye Scry Publications, 2005

Reading these poems is a sensory experience. They evoke a myriad colors, scents, even pure emotions. Rathbone's work is so rich you have to read a poem again and again to understand what it's about. When you do, you often find the poems are images, or series of images, pictures in words of eerie settings and situations. If these poems were abstract paintings I would hang them in my house. Rathbone's poetry carries the reader through dreamworlds that are intimate, beautiful, ghostly, and sharp-edged. Here there be monsters, though some are the kind to whom one is wont to surrender (whether this is wise is debatable).

From "Vampire Poet"

Fling me the snowflakes
from your eyes
I’ll save them in some
winter land
You’ll never know this is happening
how I watch your naked chest move

Some of Rathbone's monsters are more like old friends, and draw explicitly on tales we've long known.. From "Child’s Letter Found In An Old Toy Box (Written in silver crayon)"

I avoid Neverland’s mirrors, now,
too ancient to look upon, really,
just a ghastly old, old boy.
But don’t be sad, Wendy.

There are themes, common threads running through many of these poems. Seasons and months, especially autumn and winter. Immortality, vampires, creation and destruction. Especially vampires!

I never think of Rathbone as a science fiction writer. Her work is moody; it broods over impossible landscapes like the ghosts of Lovecraft's Elder Things, hovering over their cyclopean Antarctic city. Nevertheless, sfnal themes and settings can be found in her work.

From "Dreaming a Star-Farer to Life"

I watch for his breath
upon the frozen tongue of sky
that arcs my tiny seam of sight.
Within the tundra of galactic
continents, among the sparks
of constellations flickering

These poems take place in unreal worlds: outer space, undefined regions beyond reality, dreams. Sometimes one awakens from the dream. Some of these poems employ tropes from Celtic tales of the fae.

From "The Vampyre Cathedral"

One boy dreamed
of a goblin
who owns time.
He woke aged
and weeping.

There is simply no way to encapsulate Rathbone's oeuvre. And at less than $3 for the whole delightful collection, it's a crime to leave it on the table. So to speak.

Wiloch, Thomas, 2006, Screaming in Code, Naked Snake Press, 6 Rain Tree Lane, Pawleys Island, SC 29585, softcover, perfect bound, 56 pages. Artwork by Thomas Wiloch and Donna Taylor Burgess.

This is a very pretty chapbook: lots of illustrations, nice cover stock with lots of color; too bad it doesn't have an ISBN and the price is not listed in the book. However, there is a website: www.nakedsnakepress.com (the URL is not listed in the book either). Presumably, all is made clear at the website.

This is a book of prose poems that warns the reader against overdoses of its powerful medicine. There is always a risk when one indulges in hyperbole. The best of these stories are like western koans, but some are just not that profound.

Here are some snippets. I don't really want to quote more, because the individual prose poems, which total 34 in number, are generally shorter than half a page. "Tiny white skulls" can be our friends. "You can do anything you want with tiny white skulls." "Tell me I'm wrong": "the human body is composed primarily of empty space." "The locomotive museum" from which the locomotives escaped one day, "some rearing up like great wild horses... and still others as giddy as children."

On the one hand, some of the stuff was just silly, and not on purpose. In "the trunks" the protagonist opens a trunk in order to start packing for a trip, only to find a smaller trunk inside. He opens that trunk and, you can guess the rest. But here's my question. Why did he keep on opening trunks when they got so small he needed a microscope to see them? Why not just pack all of the smaller trunks inside the next larger one, and take the biggest, now empty, on the trip? Sure, there's a mystery to be solved, but you're going to skip a trip to Europe because of it?!

On the other hand, I like the idea of the man who lives in a box. It turns out he lives in a box so large that the entire universe fits inside. If the box is this big does it matter? I think it does.

On the gripping hand, this might be a good book to have on the bedside table for those mornings when you wake up two hours early and can't go back to sleep. You might learn something useful reading a couple of these.

Watts, JS, 2012, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Lapwing Publications, lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com
http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/, ISBN 978-1-909252-02-8, 24 p. This is a print publication, but I reviewed a PDF file. £10.00 plus shipping, or $22 from Amazon.

Songs of Steelyard Sue is a small book of 12 poems about Steelyard Sue, a metal inheritor of our world. Two of the poems were previously published elsewhere. I gotta tell ya, as I was reading this book I kept silently saying to myself, “that couldn't happen,” or “that violates the laws of physics” and so on. I fully intended to not write a review. But somehow I couldn't do that. I couldn't dislike these poems. J. S. Watts didn't write a science fiction book, in which robots are supposed to do only those things robots plausibly could do. Even though it is about a robot. This is, at its most scientific, perhaps a science fantasy book. Of course it is really about a lonely woman, the last person on earth, if a robot who admits that she has no heart and no human soul is a person. Whatever she isn't, she is, at least, a gardener, even in the absence of plant life.

_I bent the wire
in pretty shapes
and made flower faces
from black rubber scraps.
I saw a bird there, once,
perching on a sonic shell._

(From “Steelyard Sue Plants a Garden”)

Sue is alone, the Earth is nearly a lifeless place, but she isn't completely alone. Metaphorically speaking, there are a few knocks on the door:

_It sat there for two days,
stone-like, good as dead,
until, on the third day,
I found the stone moved,
the toad gone,_

(from “Toad”)

And isn't that a hell of a thing? Did Jesus come back in the form of a toad? And Steelyard Sue, a seeker, but not human and not having a soul, didn't recognize him? Or is this allusion really just a cheap joke? I suspect the latter. The thing is, I like Sue. I like her voice. She doesn't know much about our world, but she's trying. She doesn't know how things are supposed to work, but she has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and wants to do right. The writing is lyrical and the story is a real human one, about an amateur self-taught archaeologist marooned all alone on a desert island 26,000 miles in circumference.

_Sometimes I go to church
three or four times a day. There are so many abandoned here,
churches, that is,_

[and]

_I once found a place,
multi-layered, open to the sky,
where rows and rows of cars
waited their turn in silence_

(From “Steelyard Sue Goes to Church”)

Sue doesn't really know what a church was, and she can't tell a church from a parking garage, but she knows they were important to us in a non-tangible way. She tries to experience them the way we did. She is doomed to failure, and she knows that, but she isn't anything by herself. She exists in relationship to our vanished species.

_A woman of many parts, all man-made
and without a human soul,
not even the soft-skin touch of polished chrome.
I make no concession to organic,
the full moon has no pull upon me.
All I am is corners, sharps and rust:_

(From “The Last Lament of Steelyard Sue”)

Sue is a post-human commentator, solitary, strangely knowledgeable about some of our affairs, yet profoundly ignorant of others. She isn't independent of us. She was not made by us, but she was assembled out of what we left behind. The funny thing about Sue, is that she is also a sort of bridge. A bridge between the human world and a robot world about which she knew nothing, because it came to be when she was already gone. Exactly how this happened is not explained either, but it does provide an explanation for the book. The poems are what the robot world knows about Sue. We don't learn much about the robot world, but we do get the sense that there is a real society, developed at some future time with no direct reference to us. Instead, the robots refer back to a legendary past in which Sue was the only inhabitant.

Virtes, S. C., 2008, Improbable Jane: 3 odd odysseys: perfect bound, cover by Scott Virtes, www.samsdotpublishing.com, $8, 70 pages.

This book contains three long poems entitled "Jane Doe discovered," "The improbable notebook of Jason V--," and "Cougar village."

"Jane Doe discovered" is a story of secret hospital prisons, chemical torture, you know the drill. It is very well written and engaging. However, I wondered why. Why was Jane Doe stuck in her predicament? Maybe the explanation was in there, but I didn't see it.

"The improbable notebook..." is about a crazy inventor. Or maybe he's not so crazy. If you make a world-shattering discovery, should you tell people?

The last of this trio of poems is written in the style of a Native American folk tale.

Vinge, Vernor, 1992, a fire upon the deep: Tom Doherty Associates, 613 pages.

I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.

Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.

Bus Stop, John Francis Haynes and The Long Trip, Dainis Bisenieks, 2006, Hilltop Press, ISBN 0 905262 38 7, distributed by www.bbr-online.com/catalogue. $4/£1.75. Not paginated, but 16 pages total. Saddle stitched with a color photocopy cover on front and back. Both covers are by Gunter Wessalowski. This slim volume has the appearance of a typical small-press chapbook, except it is laid out like an Ace double; one poem is right side up beginning in the front of the book, whereas the other poem is upside down and progresses from the back. Or the other way around.

Of course the whimsy in this book is European (British and German) and Pennsylvanian (which is east for me). I like the covers. The reproduction could be better, but it's quite acceptable. Let's look at "The Long Trip" first. Stark geometric objects, organic forms, and bleak emptiness on the cover go well with this poem about an interstellar voyage. The poem only hints at the outcome of the voyage and says nothing about the long trip's purpose. The purpose of the poem, if I may presume to claim that I understand the author's intent, is to show us the dark side of voyaging. If you don't know where you're going, or why, and you don't know where you are when you stop on the way, and you don't know what you are looking at when you make that stop, what does that say about the trip, you, and the universe? For Bisenieks, the universe is just this sort of unwelcoming and unfathomable place. In a few pages, he takes us there.

_The rainstorm ends, and the clouds draw away.
The captain gives orders: continue the trip.
Back into a world of neither night nor day
We follow our shadows into the ship._

Turn the book over. "Bus Stop" has a lush cover full of organic forms: plants, animals, and things that could be one or the other. There is a moon, which might be living, a spaceship, and a plethora of odd alien life forms. Open the book and you step into a dream. It doesn't seem to have a direct relationship to the cover, but by the time you get to the end I think you'll see the connection. The protagonist in the poem (I hesitate to call him that because he doesn't make any progress) is trapped in what he believes to be a malignant dream. Alien landscapes and creatures are a dime a dozen in this dream, if dream it is. It reminds me a little of a dream I once had. The dreamer in this poem tries to escape back to reality, but he cannot. There is no explicit resolution, but the reader is left with some questions. Was it really a dream? Could it be reality? And if it's a dream, why? Drugs, the influence of mind-altering machines, bad luck? We don't know any of these things, but we do get a glimpse into mystery.

_The howling wind screamed around his ears.
Through chattering teeth and half-shut eyes he peered
At walls of ice and two pale, limpid suns.
It really must be time to wake up now_

Certainly these two poems go together like left foot and right. They could be pages torn from books in a library of SFnal dementia. Steve Sneyd, science fiction poetry's historian and publisher of Hilltop Press, knows how to pick them.

Tentchoff, Marcie Lynn, 2007, Sometimes While Dreaming: Cedar Rapids, IA, Sam's Dot Publishing, 83 p.

Sometimes While Dreaming is a chapbook of poetry written by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff. Thirty-seven of the 48 poems in this collection are new. Eight ethereal illustrations by Marge B. Simon accompany them. At her best, Tentchoff is able to put the reader in touch with the souls of some pretty strange people and other beings. There is plenty of her best in this chapbook.

One of my favorites is "Fallen," in which a case of mistaken identity has more than casual significance.

Some other girl found him there,
And drew him down to her,
Gently freeing each limb from the thorns.
It wasn't me.

What I like best about this poem is that I was led to empathize with the protagonist (someone I could be, aside from the gender difference), but put in a situation I could never be in, and, while reading the poem, I felt that I was there.

I also enjoyed "Crow counting," with its mounting sense of impending doom for the naïve narrator.

The road grew long, I asked his name,
but he would only smile at me,
and stroke my cheek with feathers gleaned
from one of our last seven birds.

This poem has roots in the old ballads of betrayal and death that were so popular with folksingers of the 1960s and earlier.

From "Displaced":

Sometimes she remembers
coming from some other place
where song and dance
were food and drink

This poem is a short poignant view into the heart of someone lost who is forgetting that she is lost. Subtle stories, sketched in allusion, hints, and sly clues, these are Tentchoff''s hallmarks. One is sometimes left knowing the feel of what has happened, or why, when the specifics are uncertain.

"Other hungers" is another take on the Persephone myth, supposing, as others have done, that she's content or happy underground.

Do you miss the dim,
bone-filled freedoms
of the underworld

And what if she does? Would anything change? Tentchoff asks a lot of questions here and she hints at the answers, we are not sure perhaps if we interpret those hints correctly.

In other poems we explore the lives of werewolves, Cinderella, dryads, and others. In "Rootbound" (Clever title, by the way) a dryad shows us what her life is really like:

Away from this, the prison of my bark,
My anguish flows and rages through my sap,
And burns the brightest sun to bitter dark,
That they stride free while I rot in this trap.

Tentchoff reminds us that we are all prisoners, and I don't think she says this anywhere in Sometimes while dreaming, but it's implicit. Some prisons we cannot escape, but for many of us the bars are inside our heads.

When Tentchoff is dreaming, strange and wonderful things result. Myths are retold in enchanting and unexpected ways and new myths are created with their own history stretching out from them into the imagined past. Sometimes while dreaming contains many more poems I am tempted to excerpt for you, but come on. Just buy the book. I'm very sure you won't regret it.

Snyder, Lucy A., 2009, Chimeric Machines, introduction by Tom Piccirilli, cover by Ursula Vernon, Creative Guy Publishing, www.creativeguypublishing.com, 85 p, perfect-bound pb, ISBN-10 1-894953-55-X; ISBN-13 978-1-894953-55-9, $10.95.

This small book contains three dozen poems. Most were previously published in various periodicals. . The book is divided into seven parts with titles like "Quiet places" and "Dark dreams." Some groups of poems are highly integrated (one set tells a single story from various perspectives), while others merely share themes.

Tom Piccirilli tries hard in the introduction to sell the book. I think most people who read the introductions to small-press books have already bought them. Still, Tom's clever prose provides excellent quotations for marketing, which is a traditional use of book introductions. Most people don't read introductions, anyway. I'm that way, but this one is entertaining. Don't skip it.

I really like the cover. I don't think it was painted for Chimeric Machines, but it's very appropriate (to the title). The machine in the illustration is made of parts that don't seem like they belong together: a skull, gears, wood (?), and more. It is a chimera: something cobbled together from disparate parts. The poems are not. These poems are not frankensteined out of mismatched bits. They are seamless wholes, moving windows into the mind of humanity. They are sharp and hard, but compassionate in their way. To end abuse one must first recognize it, and Chimeric Machines is halfway there. There is humor here, too, but chiefly there is intensity and piercing insight. These poems are mostly pretty short. Most fit on single pages. It doesn't take many words to make a point if you do it well.

One of my favorites is "Home for the holidays," a chilling poem that turns everything on its head at the end and makes you read it again. I also particularly like" Prometheus." I haven't seen the legend treated just this way before, which is one of the things I like about it. Let's just say that this version would not be printed in a book for children.

My pain's become an impure joy;
I wait for you on this windswept rock,
the granite and iron hard against my flesh.
My blood quickens when I hear your call.

From "Uncanny Valley Girl,"

Your polymer skin is smooth as bisque,
your eyes a ceruleun unseen in Nature.
Swains may recoil from servo whir and whisk,
the deus of your machina's my favorite feature.

Atypical in possessing both rhyme and meter, and also in its light tone, "Uncanny Valley Girl" is one of a few exceptions to this book's rule. A pause for breath, a shift in mood, and proof that Snyder's skill encompasses a greater breadth in form and tone than readers might think after reading the first few poems.

What else? The "Crete, Kentucky" poems combine to yield a harrowing look at a suffering family. "Dumb" is a dip inside academia's seamy side. Multiple layers of meaning, some turning on juxtaposition of title and text, some on line vs line alternative uses of versatile words, are the rule in these poems about cruelty, bad choices, bad luck, and harsh reality. It's not all grim. Humor, yes, and beauty too, in "Ocean," for example, in which a trip to the beach doesn't stop with the water. I enjoyed the diversity of this thin, themed book. I see a lot here. In fact, what I don't see are chimerae!

Although I can't understand why Snyder called this book chimeric that doesn't inhibit my appreciation of it. Aficionados of dark poetry and Snyder fans will be glad they snapped this one up.

Sneyd, Steve, 2008, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman, perfect-bound trade pb, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB, England, ISBN 978-0-905262-42-0, 107 p, ￡6.99/$14.

Historian of SF poetry, chronicler of global SF poetry news, prolific English SF poet whose work is well-known everywhere among genre poetry readers. That is Steve Sneyd, and any new collection from him is eagerly anticipated. Here it is, with an intriguing and disturbing cover by Gunter Wessalowski. If I counted right, there are 96 poems in this book. According to the introduction, these poems were all first published in the 21st century, not many years on, yet the book reads like a best-of high-graded compilation. There is not a dud in the lot.

The introduction, written by the author, appears to claim that the book is published as a guide to surviving the future. Works for me. Although if you use this book as a guide to survival it might just convince you to give up right now. But don't do that! At least read the book first.

The first poem is "If the doors of perception were cleansed." Here's an excerpt.

... just like today only nicer and
futuristic how it ought to be the
best of home only better smoother
cosier somehow if we didn't have
to get back jobs to go to and
Elaine's mum and the kids and anyway

Well, you get the idea. Sneyd doesn't believe in punctuation and has heard rumors of pronouns and prepositions, but does not believe they have been sighted in the wild. Somehow it's all quite understandable (albeit occasionally with a little work).

From "We are also keys to the experiment"

snakes bred russet-red for survival camouflage
in case just in case with monster multifiltered
lungs to breathe
in hindsight the russet we suspect aesthetic
and fangs megafangs manipulated into drills
to search subsurface water out that too late we learn
In this low gravity will also grow

In Sneyd's future nothing ever works like we expect or plan. And when does it ever? Maybe these cautionary tales are spot on accurate. Let me just give you a further taste of the content of this remarkable book. Open it to any page.

From "As is written in the emergency manual,"

Airless Extraterrestrial Enterprises tests our faith
will at very last possible instant as we hallucinate
flake into non-sentience save us reward such loyalty

From "Included out,"

sure beyond doubt more than half at least
the others at these dos are same as me are
not the humans they appear to be at all and
all the towers of the world I am so sure
full night on night of humans hiding from
each other...

What if, all unknowing, you take one of these androids home? Androids who can't be sure of each others' humanity. At least, with clothes on.

From "The sanctity of his mission,"

and
before
sending the virgin to her doom
who otherwise would have anyhow within
a cycle gone into ground

a crop-source-placator she
at least now will not have to
burrow down alone: a hybrid in
her belly, a tasty

extra bonus for the god or gods.

One gets the impression that what is being said is so very important the words tumble over one another in a hopeless attempt to get out before it's too late. I guess if this is a handbook of the "break glass in emergency" kind that might be true. After all, aren't we waist deep in the future already? If this book is instead a metaphor about how hopelessly stranger and more desolate we ourselves will become than most of us can imagine, nevermind what our tools or aliens will be like, then there's no hurry. Cherish your illusions. Don't read this book. Trust me, you don't want to knw what can happen to us, out there, or even right here at home. What you do want to know is, if you buy only one SF poetry book this month, or this season, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman should be it.

I know I'm giving what some will misconstrue as contradictory advice, but I maintain that's the best way to deal with the future. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit I was the first publisher of one or two poems in this collection.

Schweitzer, Darrell, 2008, Ghosts of past and future: selected poetry, The Borgo Press, an imprint of Wildside Press, www.wildsidepress.com, perfect bound. Cover by Thierry Vivies. 125 p, ISBN 978-1-4344-8204-4.

Poems in this book were first published between the years 1992 and 2008. A quick glance through the five pages of acknowledgments indicates that at least two of these poems are first published here. The original appearances of the remainder cover a lot of territory, ranging from Weird Tales to Asimov's, and many lesser-known venues. The book ends with explanatory notes about some of the poems. In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I first published a few of these in Dreams and Nightmares.

I love the way the book is organized into thematic sections. By far the longest is called "Intimations beyond mortality." This is followed by "The matter of Britain," "Post-Homerica," and "Yesterday's tomorrows." All of these sound intriguing, don't they? They do if you are at all familiar with Darrell's work.

These are powerful poems. In each we find the personal immediacy of the best mainstream poetry, but in the context of our boundary-pushing literature. And who doesn't prefer a gripping and thought-provoking poem about death, and what comes after, to a similar poem about cracks in the sidewalk or spring flowers?

"We outnumber the living, you know.
For all you desperately try to outbreed us,
the fruits of your loins inevitably
switch sides in the end."

That is the beginning of "We dead outnumber the living, you know." Nothing we haven't heard before, but the poem takes off from there like a fighter jet from an aircraft carrier. By the time you get to the end, the aircraft carrier is at the bottom of the sea, if you will allow such a ridiculous metaphor.

From "Song of a forgotten god"

"With Moon-pale hair and beard grown dark,
I rage and run with the beasts,
the perilous father of all that I meet,
dancing, dancing against the Sun."

Many of these poems are imbued with the qualities of legend, even those that are not explicitly about the stuff of legend, as this one is.

From "Is their survivor's guilt in heaven?":

"a parent, with just one bad habit,
a little careless at the end,
now screaming in flames forever
while we, the lucky ones,
are supposed to sit back, strum our harps,
and enjoy ourselves?"

Do you suppose the entrance requirements are really as strict as we have been told?

I want to particularly mention the section about Britain, which is really about King Arthur. Schweitzer has been worrying at the question of Arthur like a dog with a very large bone. He has attacked the question of just what is the Arthurian legend all about from several different directions, and for all I know he's not done with it yet. Arthur has inspired a lot of writers and there is plenty to share. Still, there is insight here, worth reading even if you have read tons of what has been written before.

Moving past Arthur, perhaps our most famous legendary hero, Schweitzer is hard on heroes in general. This includes space opera heroes as well as legendary ones. It even includes those who make heroes. From "Near the end of the epic":

"the villainous bards,
who turned this enterprise into an epic,
left that part out, not deigning to mention
the thousands of lives washed away like ashes"

Schweitzer is good at seeing beyond the surfaces of the old stories. He turns them over and shows us the underbellies, moldy and raddled by bugs, that we should have known were there. But we didn't know, because we didn't think about it. Now it will be hard to forget.

You know, I really can't do justice to this book by quoting a few lines from this poem and a few lines from that poem. And it doesn't help to make the review longer. They are all so good I want to give them all to you. But that wouldn't be fair to the poet or the publisher. So, for the moment you have to make do with a few snippets. I suggest you visit Wildside on the web and limber up your PayPal account. You won't regret it.

Why hasn't Schweitzer ever won a Rhysling award? I could answer this question, but most likely all of my answers would be wrong, or at best half-truths. But he must get a winner someday. Quick! Buy this book and read it, so you can say you knew his work way back when.

Clark, G. O., 2011, Shroud of Night, Dark Regions Press, 60 p., www.darkregions.com, perfectbound pb, ISBN 978-1-937128-02-9, $7.95.

G. O. Clark has been a fixture in the fantastic poetry community since before I joined it. His work has been published in many places, including Asimov's Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. This is his 10th book. We have never met, but I have read and enjoyed his work for decades. Shroud of Night, his latest collection, comprises a diverse assemblage of his darkest poetry. Most of these 39 poems are very short, driving their nails in with just a few lines. Few are longer than a page, but they don't need to be. Original images are hard to come by in horror poetry, but Clark delivers, again and again.

From "Cemetery Angel"

She's just trying to
get the kinks out, a little
break time stretching, stiff from
having to hold a solemn pose
all night and day.

Some of these poems can be reminiscent of the old Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil." Others have a sharper edge. Still other poems are serious and silly at the same time.

From "A Few Words About The Angels"

They can adapt to every atmosphere,
be it air, water, or the vacuous lack thereof,
the speed of light a minor inconvenience.

From "Curses and Salutations"

May your gravestone be made of cardboard,
your casket balsa wood, and your obituary
written by a dyslexic drunk.

It's not easy to encompass in a brief review the breadth of style and tone displayed in this book. I hope these three excerpts give you something of the flavor of the whole that they represent.

Who would've thought a poem about screams could send chills up my spine? Did you know that Hell hath a sailboat? Pray you are never conscripted for the crew! You'll meet some peculiar monsters in this book. Zombies, sure, but garden gnomes? What is their horrifying secret? There is humor here, but who said humor and horror don't go together? I think they do, and if you read this book, I believe you'll see I am right. Shroud of Night brings a lot of darkness together in a handy package. You should read it.

Boston, Bruce, 2005, Etiquette with your robot wife and 30 more SF/F/H lists, Talisman, Box 565572, Miami, FL 33256; Talismanpub@BellSouth.net, $4.95, saddle-stitched with cardstock cover. 44 pages. Illustrated by Marge Simon.

This book contains 31 of Bruce's list poems, which have been popping up in various publications for the past few years. One, "Things Not to Do or Say When a Mad Scientist Moves into Your Neighborhood," received the Asimov's reader's choice award in 2003. Lists are fun and I have written a few myself. However, it would be hard to deny that Bruce has covered the territory more thoroughly and well than anybody else in the genre.

Here are some of the titles: "Signs your parents are being replaced by automatons," "Reasons the Druids did not survive," "How a werewolf chooses an agent," "The car of the future," and "Advice on meeting the devil in hell." How to tell if your parents are being replaced by automatons ? Here is one way:

_They keep saying the same things
over and over again._

Some of these lists are just silly. Not that there's anything wrong with being silly, but 10 minutes after you read it you want some more. Or something more. Some of these poems tell the truth, which I would argue is the ultimate aim of all literature. Here is one thing not to say when you meet a famous SF writer:

_I've never read anything by you.
But I hear it's pretty good._

If you have a vivid memory of your adolescence, this might make you cringe. By contrast, anything you should not say when being tortured to death is going to sound kind of silly in the comfort of your own home:

_It will actually get hotter if you hold it near
the top of the flame._

or

_I never use my nipples for anything anyway._

Been there, done that, wished I didn't. Seriously, this is a good book. The poems, like all good poems, don't need explanation, because they already tell their tales in the most concise and clear way possible. I have discovered through experimentation that, like an encyclopedia or dictionary of any kind, "Etiquette..." is most enjoyable when browsed rather than read cover to cover. When at a loss, open it up, read one poem, see if that doesn't help. And the next time your domestic robot acts like this it probably needs a tune-up:

_Insists on wearing a sombrero
when it serves enchiladas._

Most of the drawings by Marge Simon are of couples, and illustrate poems for which that is appropriate. They complement the poems nicely.

I recommend this small book to any fan of Bruce's work. Chances are, you have not seen too many of these poems before, as they (collectively) have been printed in so many different places. Even if you have seen many of them before it is nice to have them all in one place. This might be the sort of book to put out on a very small coffee table when hosting a party. It could get people talking. Then again, watch out for the bean dip.

Patrice, Helen, 2011, A Woman of Mars, PS Publishing, Stanza Press, £14.99UK, $25.00AUD,$25.00US, hardcover, http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/stanza-poetry-6-a-woman-of-mars-signed-hc-by-helen-patrice-416-p.asp

The 34 poems in this book tell the story of, and are from the point of view of, an early homesteader on Mars. The poems were written as a sort of free-verse diary by the viewpoint character.

Our story begins with the protagonist (who never names herself) a teenager on Earth. The first poem, which has no title, refers to "he" as the one who made her realize that her future lay in the stars, rather than here on Earth. “He" is presumably the boy she falls in love with and later marries.This poem introduces without explanation the two main themes of the book: her relationship with her man and, more importantly, her relationship with the planet Mars.

Only from within his eyes,
did I see clear
for the first time,
a future of steel and stars.

At the age of 15 she goes to see a young child-cosmonaut and his spacecraft, and this is when we find out that the protagonist is Australian. Patrice uses the word "spruiker." I rarely come across a term I don't know, but this definitely stumped me. It is listed as "archaic Australian slang" in one online dictionary. The meaning is obvious from context, so I won't explain it here. Read the book (or, look it up like I did). At any rate, their eyes meet, and she knows.

I had one moment of doubt -
surely I was too young at fifteen,
he too old at twenty-six.
As the hologram show glittered,
he slid through the audience,
answering questions, smiling false
to all but me.

The book has a personal tone throughout. I love this. It is easy to read this book and believe that it was all written by a young homesteader trying to make her way in a very demanding place. My chief complaint is that many of the poems are too short. That may sound odd coming from me; I'm sure a lot of what I write seems too short. This might be a case of do what I say, not what I do. There are times when brevity is not really called for. For example, the third poem deals with the protagonist's relationship with her mother. Mother doesn't want her daughter to leave. (Her only daughter? We don't know, because Patrice hasn't told us.) Of course the mother who is staying behind is upset. Our protagonist is homesteading Mars in the same way that European settlers colonized North America in the 17th century. In the same way that my grandparents traveled to New York City from Europe in steerage in the early 20th century. They never went back home to visit. Nevertheless, Mother's reaction is unexpectedly violent. Unexpected to the reader, anyway, and it is not explained. I think the collection would be stronger for little more information here. The only other thing we have by way of explanation of the mother-daughter relationship is brief and remote. We have our protagonist's reaction to a batch of e-mail messages she receives when orbiting Mars at the end of the journey.

I recalled the hard heat of her hands
as she beat me from her house.
We never spoke voice to voice again,
the cold trench of space separating us.

Reconciliation? No opportunity for that. And maybe I am wrong, maybe we don't need to know more. Patrice certainly packs a punch with just a few words, and maybe the explanation I'm wishing for would be too much icing on the cake.

The vast majority of the book is about life on Mars: arrival, getting used to the differences between Mars and Earth, their sometimes dangerous efforts to make Mars feel like Home, and then the task of living there, making a whole life in a very strange place. Eventually, the colonists become Martians, no longer displaced earthlings who are all too frequently looking back to Earth. They create their own society, where meat grows on trees, where it no longer seems peculiar that you can't go outside unprotected, but some things from old Earth are still with them.

Our first murder
was solved quickly.

We are a frontier city,
and nothing is wasted.
Victim and murderer,
both mulched down
for the good of the soil

In the end, a whole life is presented here. It is only the beginning of human life on Mars, but "A Woman of Mars" covers not only the life of the protagonist, but colonial Mars itself. By the end of the book Mars has changed as much as our protagonist has. Emigrating to an established colony, or being born there, is not the same as hacking almost everything you have out of barren red dirt.

I liked this book. I like Patrice's voice; she brings a fresh perspective to a subject that science fiction writers have explored for generations. What it reminds me of most is Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. I think you should buy it.

Vanderhooft, JoSelle, 2007, The Minotaur's Last Letter To His Mother, 60 p., saddle stitched with glossy card-stock cover, 18 poems (5 new), cover painting and a few B&W interiors by Marge Simon, Ash Phoenix Books, $8.95.

"Minotaur" is myth retold and re-examined, myth invented, and folktales transformed into myth. In the title poem, the Minotaur tries to explain both himself and his mother, to her. Vanderhooft dissects this rather unpleasant myth and finds that it's rather more unpleasant than we thought at first. I did feel sorry for this creature who could never have been allowed to live his own life in Minoan Crete. Actually, that would be impossible today, although he would be imprisoned in a different kind of labyrinth. Vanderhooft turns this legend on its head a couple of different ways. She makes us see the story from the monster's side (and is he really the monster anyway?) and we're forced to consider motivations and implications of behavior that we suddenly see as requiring justification as sensible. You can't just plug in the monster and let the story run its course. We have to know why people do things. When the story was a myth we did not necessarily expect the characters to behave like human beings, but now we have to look them in the eye.

The book forces us to re-examine some other myths. Pluto is not a god anymore:

"Let them
draw up their contracts,
realign their charts,
downgrade him from a planet to a stone."

Here, dryads become more than we have known. There is a lot more to making a tree than you might think:

"Her palms, stronger than time, pressed the seed like clay
fresh from the wheel, while she, laughing, sang
the chorus that would guide it through the air
until it flowered"

When a dryad is evicted by the axe, worlds die.

There are myths here about anorexia, the Sphinx, the Kraken, Jesus and Mary, Snow White, and many more. And after all the death of a dryad or of a man bull is not the most harrowing of these.

The book looks very nice, and I really like Marge Simon's cover illustration, but I can hardly believe the publisher neglected to put any contact information on the book. It doesn't do any good to publish a book, IF YOU DON'T TELL ANYONE how to reach you! Okay, maybe the Strangelove reference isn't working, especially because a brief search of the Internet reveals that Ash Phoenix Books is an imprint of Gromagon Press (http://www.gromagonpress.com/), and now you know where to go to buy a copy.

Sneyd, Steve, ed., 2005, Medusa, a poetry anthology, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD5 8PB England, ISBN 0 905262 37 9, £3.99/$9, checks payable to S. Sneyd. Saddle stitched 58 pages + card stock cover.

Steve Sneyd is well-known for his scholarship concerning genre poetry and for his distinctive writing style. This is by no means the first book he has edited, but you rarely see an anthology of poetry with such a specific theme. Perhaps only Steve could get away with that. "Medusa" is remarkably diverse, attesting both to the fascination that the Medusa legend holds for writers and to the ambiguity of the legend itself, which gives free rein for experimentation in quite a few directions.

The book is divided into 6 sections. The first, UK Poets, accounts for a little more than half of the book. The remainder consists of Overseas Poets, Notes, Contributor Data, Medusa in Poetry, and The Medusa Legend. The notes were quite fascinating and I found the brief summary of the legend comprehensive. Every part of this book belongs. Nine of the poems in this book were previously published, but that leaves 33 new in this publication. I particularly like the graphic image of Medusa on the cover, which is by Andy Cocker. Nearly 2 dozen small, stark images are scattered strategically through the book. Disclaimer: one of the poems in this book is by me.

What if Medusa did not understand her power? In "Medusa" by a. f. harrold, we encounter this

_Sometimes I hear movement -- the shifting aside of grass or
the pricking of thorn -- but when I investigate I find there
nothing but stonework and then chill night envelops me._

This book explores many viewpoints and possibilities. From "Medusa's Legacy," by John Light

_"It smiled at me,
the statue smiled."_

From “Auto da fe” by Susie Reynolds:

_At the trial Medusa was examined
Lost in coils they analyse
"Snakes = Lost Eden"
Her golden body, tossed_

Oh my God, buy this book! If you're like me you will not care for every poem in this anthology, but the aggregate is like a composite photograph. Stand close to the picture and you see a myriad of individual small photographs, which may be quite unlike one another. Step back far enough and you see the Medusa, emerging as the product of a subtle reaction among her multifarious parts.

The Lone Star Stories Reader, edited by Eric T. Marin

Marin, Eric T., 2008, The Lone Star Stories Reader: LSS Press (www.lsspress.com), paperback, ISBN 978-0-9817819-0-7, 267 p.

The Lone Star Stories Reader contains 15 stories reprinted from Lone Star Stories (http://literary.erictmarin.com/archives/Issue%2029/index.htm), plus an introduction by Sherwood Smith. Smith introduces us to the editor, the magazine, the book, the stories, and indeed the entire field of genre publishing. And he does it in less than five pages. I have never cared about nutshell story summaries in book introductions. I'm holding the book and I can look at the stories. Not that such summaries don't have their place: many people read them to find out quickly what the stories are about. That's fine. But Smith also talks about how publishing has evolved. We all have our own ideas about this, but I am still fascinated to learn more about the changes wrought in the publishing world by economics, television, and the Internet. Smith's take on this is concise and clear.

"Wolf Night" by Martha Wells is set in an alternate Wild West in which magic and magical creatures are real. Who is killing travelers in a remote valley and who besides the protagonist will survive? Straightforward adventure well told. Kind of reminds me of Robert E. Howard's tale of a zuvembie, "Pigeons from Hell." Pacing and mood are similar, but here we add mutual fear and mistrust.

In "Seasonal work" Nina Kiriki Hoffman presents a strangely changed world in which the mundane conspires with the impossible for a wicked surprise.

Gavin J. Grant is represented by "Janet, meet Bob." In this self-referential story (I have always liked self reference) Janet does meet Bob. But the story is really about the reader meeting a whole bunch of people, or nonpeople, because the story won't let you forget that it's a story. Oh, and there is action, lots of action.

In M. Thomas's "The great conviction of Tia Inez," Americans take advantage of illegal immigrants from Mexico: sounds like a documentary. Did I mention the ghosts? Yeah and don't expect ghosts to behave sensibly like living people do, or even senselessly like living people do. Ghosts are ghosts. They are not us, even though they used to be. This is what I find most successful and interesting about this story: becoming ghosts changes people. And why shouldn't it?

Marguerite Reed 's "Angels of a desert heaven" surprised me. I didn't expect to be deeply moved by a story about a rock guitarist who consulted a Native American spiritual adviser. Even when the story was told from the point of view of the medicine woman. But I was. Reed's storytelling and characterization drew me in. She used many of the elements one would expect: singer addicted to drugs, meeting of two very different worlds, and so on, but she didn't treat them as if they were expected. I enjoyed that, and I enjoyed learning about the Hopi and their beliefs.

"The disemboweler" by Ekaterina Sedia: Eww. Not really. The title's both misleading and accurate, like what Hari Selden said about the location of the Second Foundation. I won't describe this story, because I don't want to give away the surprise. I will say the "what if" of this particular tale is remarkable.

"A night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette is a tale of black magic and old-fashioned noir detective work. I have to say those are two points in its favor with me. Throw in a couple of nods to the Cthulhu Mythos and some nicely developed characters and you can stir up a good story. I probably would like this story even better if it really was a Mythos yarn, but you can't have everything.

"Thread: a triptych" by Catherynne M. Valente is a retelling of the story of the Minotaur. I always felt sorry for the Minotaur, enslaved by the king of Crete.

Tim Pratt 's "The frozen one" is a parable, and it reminds me a lot of those classic short stories from the 60s, you know the ones by Ted Sturgeon and people like that, the stories filling anthologies edited by Groff Conklin, or a single author collections with titles like "X by Y," where "X" is a single digit integer and "Y" is a famous science-fiction author who's probably dead now. The books cost $.35 to $.50 when they were new, and now you can read stuff like that for free online.

Sarah Prineas ' "Dragon hunt" was rendered less enjoyable for me by the heavy-handed denial of the existence of the dragon. A child of six would know this meant there was a dragon. The strength of the story is in the language, especially the descriptions. Prineas' attention to accurate and believable detail brings you right into the story and keeps you there.

Samantha Henderson has given us "Manuscript found written in the paw prints of a stoat." I wasn't sure whether the paw prints would form the letters or words of this manuscript or whether tiny letters would be found inside the paw prints. Of course it was neither of these things. This relatively long story is a mythic journey of self-discovery, full of strange creatures that are also people, some of whom have surprising powers.

"Giant" by Stephanie Burgis turns around the stories of fairytale giants, because it's from the point of view of a giant. The author does that well, but I have a problem. Burgis mentions things in a first person narrative and says that they are being ignored. I understand what she's trying to do. Real people can notice things and ignore them. People reading stories are not easy to fool in this way. If you want the reader to notice something and notice that the protagonist is ignoring it, and believe that, well, this is very difficult. I don't think it's carried off in this very short story.

"When the rain comes" by Josh Rountree mixes Native American magic and a traveling wild west show. I like the character of the protagonist and the magic system he describes. The only wrong note for me is the slightly far-fetched idea that every single member of a freak show would be a kind and loving person. I'm willing to go with it; when it makes for a nice story.

Jay Lake tells of a world containing real angels in"The hangman isn't hanging." Would you really want to live in such a world? Check out this story; it might help you decide.

The last story in the book is "The Oracle opens one eye" by Patricia Russo. If an Oracle really does have the truth, does that make things better in the world? Russo gives us a clear view of one possible answer.

This is a really good book. "Lone Star stories" is known for publishing high-quality material, and this really is the cream of the crop.

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