Tag: reviews

August 6, 2013

Zombie Soldiers

A review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Cemetery Man” in This Strange Way of Dying (Exile Editions, Forthcoming 2013). By Derek Newman-Stille When you are in a battle against an enemy that keeps bringing forth the resurrected dead, the worst thing that can happen is when you find yourself tended to by their doctor. In “Cemetery Man”, Catalina finds herself under the...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 2

August 4, 2013

Blind Vision Quest

A Review of Douglas Smith’s The Wolf at the End of the World (Forthcoming) By Derek Newman-Stille The Wolf at the End of the World is a tale that would resonate with the spirit of any environmentalist – the struggle of diverse species to survive, the conflict with human greed and capitalism, the invasiveness of the human presence on animal...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 2

July 29, 2013

Penning the Subtle Murmur of Death and Splash of Blood

A review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying (Forthcoming 2013, Exile Editions) By Derek Newman-Stille Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying is just one step abstracted from reality, with one foot in The Weird. Populated with monsters, magic, and folklore, her work is fundamentally about the human outsider experience, the deeper engagement with the world that comes...

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July 25, 2013

The In-Between Space

A Review of Lynda Williams’ The Courtesan Prince (Edge, 2005). By Derek Newman-Stille The Reetions and the Gelacks, two branches of the human race that were separated from Earth due to temporary losses of space travel. The Reetions developed from the first group of people to leave Earth and settle in a colony. Connections to Earth were lost, and they...

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July 22, 2013

Coyotes in Urban Turf Wars

A review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Nahaules” (in This Strange Way of Dying, Exile Editions, 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille As in many of her works, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s short story “Nahaules” makes the urban space strange, exploring the intrusion of the folkloric into the cityscape. Nahaules, coyote shapeshifters, old stories, have come into the city, changing the city gradually as scents of...

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June 28, 2013

TRANSformations

A review of Anna Frost’s The Fox’s Mask (Musa Publishing, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille It is refreshing to see a fantasy book that is set in Imperial Japan. So often, fantasy series are based on a Western Medieval archetype, inferring that this is the only forum for sword and sorcery. Anna Frost, although not Japanese herself, explores the imagery and...

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June 24, 2013

Spectral Reality

A review of Sandra Kasturi’s Come Late to the Love of Birds (Tightrope Books, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille In her poetry collection Come Late to the Love of Birds, Sandra Kasturi creates a spectral reality, an assemblage of words that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. She reveals the extraordinary in the natural, taking scenes of everyday life...

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June 14, 2013

Voudoun Visions of Toronto

A Review of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in The Ring (Grand Central Publishing, 1998) By Derek Newman-Stille In Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson blends urban fantasy and near-future science fiction together in a Toronto environment. She creates a Toronto that has been cut off from the rest of Canada, ghettoised and locked off from the rest of the...

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June 7, 2013

The Absurd Undercurrent to Rationality.

A review of Cory Doctorow’s Shannon’s Law (in Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands Ed. Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, Random House, 2011) By Derek Newman-Stille Borderland is a place that exists between the Elfland and mundane reality. It is a strange blend of the fantastic and the urban, a city that is invested and embodied...

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May 27, 2013

Nostalgia for the Stars

A review of Steven Appleby’s The Captain Star Omnibus (Sybertooth, Inc., 2008). By Derek Newman-Stille Society tends to disregard humour as less significant than other forms of social discourse, but humour contains within it a mechanism for piercing status quo barriers and interrogating issues that people may prefer not to look at critically. Humour pushes boundaries, breaks down walls, and...

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