Back from Conflux, and I seriously need to do a recap post about all the fun, panels, dinners, drinks, and books books books — but that will have to wait for a bit. For now, a quick huzzah: the first review — that I’ve seen, anyway — of Shadows Edge (edited by Simon Strantzas) has appeared on the interwebs, and it’s SO excellent! Over on The Cosmicomicon (and on Amazon) T.E. Grau offers a lengthy and detailed review of the anthology, and it’s peppered with excellent passages like these:
The standout tales (in ToC order) among the uniformly strong field are many, and include Joel Lane’s “Echoland,” Richard Gavin’s “Tinder Row,” “The Falling Dark” by Daniel Mills, Gary McMahon’s “The Old Church,” “Morning Passages” by Lisa Hannett, “Stabilimentum” by Livia Llewellyn, Peter Bell’s “The True Edge of the World,” and “Bor Urus” by John Langan.
Among these, I found “Echoland” (a story about questing after a doorway to that glimpsed land just behind the veil), “Morning Passages” (a truly original natal piece that reads like something out of a more brutal version of the Twilight Zone), “Stabilimentum” (a woman must deal with an infestation of spiders in her new dream apartment that becomes the very least of her startling discoveries about where she now lives), “The True Edge of the World” (for my cash, the highlight of the book, due as much to Bell’s writing style and description of the Scottish setting as the folklorish supernaturalism), and “Bor Urus” (a dissection of a man obsessed by violent storms, and what can happen during them, to the detriment of everything he holds dear) to be the crema fresca of a rather creamy crop, and some of the best contemporary short stories I’ve ever read. Lane, Hannett, Llewellyn, Bell, and Langan are now on my “must ALWAYS read” list, joining several other contributors to Shadows Edge who made the list many moons ago.
How cool!! If you’re keen, you can read the rest here.
If you’re even keener, you can buy the book on the Grey Friar’s Press website, or BookDep, or Amazon, or whatever online purveyor of fine fiction tickles your fancy.
