Warren Rochelle's Blog, page 6
November 29, 2022
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
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Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book. Yes, there is a fair amount of scientific language and facts used in constructing this Earth in an apocalyptic crisis. But, don't let that deter you. This an adventure story, and a story of unlikely and unexpected friendship. It is Ryland Grace's story, an unlikely hero, "the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission-and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish" (backcover). An interstellar-traveling microbe, the Astrophage, is doing just that,"eating" the sun, so to speak.
The sun is dimming, which means less heat and less light, and if not stopped, a catastrophe for the planet for which there is no coming back. Grace, a junior high science teacher, and a once-active biologist, winds up on this last ditch expedition, a "hail mary," if there ever was one. He wakes up without memory of who is, yet his knowledge of the sciences intact. He's alone, near Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years from Earth.
And another ship shows up. First Contact, with an alien species who has the same problem as we do. Their sun is in trouble, too. The adventure begins, one of scientific knowledge and experimentation, desperation, inter-species communication with a species far more alien than the strangest of Earth creatures. Grace is an unlikely hero--he didn't want to be on this expedition. How this happens, I will leave for the reader to find out. But he steps up; he does what he has to do.
A page turner, engaging, and funny, even in this desperate situation.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
Project Hail Mary by Andy WeirMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book. Yes, there is a fair amount of scientific language and facts used in constructing this Earth in an apocalyptic crisis. But, don't let that deter you. This an adventure story, and a story of unlikely and unexpected friendship. It is Ryland Grace's story, an unlikely hero, "the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission-and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish" (backcover). An interstellar-traveling microbe, the Astrophage, is doing just that,"eating" the sun, so to speak.
The sun is dimming, which means less heat and less light, and if not stopped, a catastrophe for the planet for which there is no coming back. Grace, a junior high science teacher, and a once-active biologist, winds up on this last ditch expedition, a "hail mary," if there ever was one. He wakes up without memory of who is, yet his knowledge of the sciences intact. He's alone, near Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years from Earth.
And another ship shows up. First Contact, with an alien species who has the same problem as we do. Their sun is in trouble, too. The adventure begins, one of scientific knowledge and experimentation, desperation, inter-species communication with a species far more alien than the strangest of Earth creatures. Grace is an unlikely hero--he didn't want to be on this expedition. How this happens, I will leave for the reader to find out. But he steps up; he does what he has to do.
A page turner, engaging, and funny, even in this desperate situation.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
November 26, 2022
Some thoughts on Brothersong, by T.J. Klune
Brothersong by T.J. KluneMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a journey!
I just finished Brothersong, the last of the Green Creek quartet, the story of werewolves, witches, and monsters,
And love stories, between brothers, parents and children, between mates. It is a story of a family, a pack of werewolves, a gay love story (the gayest pack ever), and
It is about good and evil, and the price we sometimes pay for good to triumph.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
November 23, 2022
The Laran Gambit, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Deborah J. Ross
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The Laran Gambit by Marion Zimmer Bradley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I haven’t journeyed to Darkover and its universe for some time. I have been looking forward to a return trip ever since I placed my order for The Laran Gambit, by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah Ross. I was sure I was in for a grand adventure.
I was right.
The journey begins in a somewhat deceptive calm on Terra, with an also somewhat unlikely hero. Bryn Haslund is a child psychologist who works with traumatized children, traumas inflicted upon them by the brutal policies of the Star Alliance, the successor to the Terran Federation, and its tyrannical First Minister, Arthur Nagy. Bryn is leaving the clinic to go visit her sister, meet her activist “young man,” Leonin Vargas, and to watch her father, Senator Ernst Haslund, deliver an important speech critical of Nagy.
She steps out into the street, and looks up. “A glory of orange and violet bathed clouds was piled high like mountains. She felt as if she was gazing into a faraway country, a land of fjords and rolling plains … A planet circling a ruddy sun … The light shifted …” Bryn stands on the same city street. Another “one of those odd premonitions she’d had since her teen years”?— or, she has been working too hard. Settling for the more prosaic answer, Bryn boards a tram—and the calm of her life as a therapist ends. The gun goes off, the flag drops. Bryn’s life goes into high gear. In the next few hours, she meets Black, a creepy man, on the tram, a really creepy man, and her intuition tells her something is wrong. To get away from him, she jumps off the tram and winds up in the middle of a political protest against Nagy. The protest turns very violent, and she gets dosed with knockout gas. Bryn wakes up in what seems to be a hospital, only to meet Black again, Finally Bryn gets to her sister’s apartment. Her father’s speech is in support of Nagy. Bryn is shocked. This is impossible. Something is really wrong. Bryn and Leonin are soon on the run from the secret police, led by Black.
Bryn finds herself on double quests, one public, the other, other private and personal, yet these quests are interconnected. They will take Bryn from Terra to Alpha, “the Alliance’s center for scientific and medical research,” to Darkover, a “Lost Colony world circling a dim red star, where telepathic powers, [laran], have been developed to an extraordinary degree.” Eventually, as often happens on a quest, she will have to return to where her journey began, for a confrontation, made all the more dangerous with the uncertainty of success and the greatness of the risk involved.
The public quest forces her into the political arena she wanted to avoid. She has to engage in a confrontation between good and evil, in a struggle between freedom and oppression, between the machine and the natural. Bryn has to find and help her father; his very self is in danger of being lost. His mind has clearly been tampered with, by the insertion of a device she later learns is a theta-corticator, a mind probe that alters his thoughts so much he supports Nagy, whom he opposed. Her second quest is deeply personal and private, yet still connected to the public. Coupled with Bryn’s desperate need to help her father, and free him of this device implanted into his brain, her second quest is to know and accept who and what she is. Her premonitions, her danger-sense, are part of the psychic abilities that she didn’t know she had. Can she learn to master them? Or will they master her?
She and Leonin do find her father on Alpha, directed there with the help of Leonin’s brother and a cell of the dissident Free Worlds Movement. They trace the Senator’s broadcast to Alpha and help Bryn and Leonin get off Terra. On Alpha, where Bryn was a graduate student, she enlists the help of a former professor, Felicity Sage, and she seeks information in the university library. Felicity has knowledge of such probes as the one in the Senator’s head. In the library, Bryn learns of Darkover and its natural telepaths, who may know to neutralize the mind-control device. They manage another escape, this time, at a terrible cost. In a firefight, with Black and his secret police, Leonin dies. Bryn and Felicity’s ship is attacked in route. The shuttle down to Darkover crash-lands in ice-bound mountains, which are inhabited by such denizens as “blood-thirsty bandits to giant carnivorous birds.” She mentally calls for help before the shuttle crashed, and someone answered. What does this mean? Who answered? Bryn and her professor are rescued, yes, but more trials await them on Darkover, and so do the answers to her questions.
Readers new to “the marvelous world of Darkover,” will be, at first, like Bryn, a stranger in a strange land. But as Bryn learns how to live on Darkover, so does the reader. She learns how to control and use her laran, and, at the same time, she also learns how to negotiate a complex and ancient culture, with its own factions and politics. She begins to understand Darkover’s troubled history with Terra, a history that complicates her personal relationships with Darkovans. I felt a traveler myself, as I re-learned and remembered this compelling world, from its social order and customs to the food served in its inns.
Bryn, and the others, are appealing and compelling characters. Felicity Sage, the professor, spoke to me on a personal level. As a retired professor myself, I knew who she was. I cheered for Leonin, the firebrand revolutionary, and mourned his death. I also cheered for Desiderio (Desi), the Darkovan telepath, who is first assigned to Bryn by the Regent, only for both of them to find they are drawn to each other. He becomes a friend, a supporter, and the hint of something more—but that’s another story. In many ways, Desi and Leonin are mirrors of each other. Leonin is a wild card, a firebrand; Desi, assigned to help her, is calm, urbane, and gifted with laran.
This doubling and mirroring are inherent in the novel’s structure. The two quests mirror each other, and, as mentioned, inextricably connected. The personal is political as Bryn learns more than once. She treats traumatized children, and she is traumatized herself, by Leonin’s death, the violence done to her, the mental rape of her father, the evil of Black. The theta-corticator’s dark technology is linked to the benign therapeutic devices Bryn has used in her work. Light and dark, good and evil, are recurring, threads weaving the adventure into a whole.
Also inherent in the novel’s structure, in its story, is feminism. Yes, the protagonist is an intelligent and capable woman, but also here is a culture that demands collaboration, cooperation, and community, not power or force. Laran exemplifies these values, which has changed one world—can they change another? Can the Darkovans help Bryn? Will the natural telepathy and mental powers of the Darkovans, their laran, be a match for machines that can change an intelligent, strong man into a servile mouthpiece of a mad dictator? Will Bryn, a stranger on a strange world, master her own psychic abilities, her own laran, and can she learn how to use it in the inevitable confrontation with the agents of the dictator, the evil Black, the dictator himself? Can she do so without violating the deep cultural ethics of Darkovan laran use: it is not, and most not be, a weapon. Can one woman change everything? Will the laran gambit succeed—and save Bryn, her father, and Darkover itself?
Perhaps the ultimate question of this novel, the one that faces Bryn throughout her journeys, is one Ross asks in her introduction, “What will [Bryn] do with the time that is given her?” This time of political upheaval, violence, and the threat of war is not the life she wanted. But no one want such a life. Ross notes a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring that gives me pause whenever I read it:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live in such times. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us” (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1965: 60).
For Bryn, I think, the answer to this question is to take action, both publicly and privately, for herself, and for those she loves. The public and the private are not truly separate, nor can they be. Each influences the other. The actions of one person, as Bryn comes to learn, do make a difference.
Yes, the journey of The Laran Gambit is well worth taking, and this journey is a grand adventure.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
The Laran Gambit by Marion Zimmer BradleyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I haven’t journeyed to Darkover and its universe for some time. I have been looking forward to a return trip ever since I placed my order for The Laran Gambit, by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah Ross. I was sure I was in for a grand adventure.
I was right.
The journey begins in a somewhat deceptive calm on Terra, with an also somewhat unlikely hero. Bryn Haslund is a child psychologist who works with traumatized children, traumas inflicted upon them by the brutal policies of the Star Alliance, the successor to the Terran Federation, and its tyrannical First Minister, Arthur Nagy. Bryn is leaving the clinic to go visit her sister, meet her activist “young man,” Leonin Vargas, and to watch her father, Senator Ernst Haslund, deliver an important speech critical of Nagy.
She steps out into the street, and looks up. “A glory of orange and violet bathed clouds was piled high like mountains. She felt as if she was gazing into a faraway country, a land of fjords and rolling plains … A planet circling a ruddy sun … The light shifted …” Bryn stands on the same city street. Another “one of those odd premonitions she’d had since her teen years”?— or, she has been working too hard. Settling for the more prosaic answer, Bryn boards a tram—and the calm of her life as a therapist ends. The gun goes off, the flag drops. Bryn’s life goes into high gear. In the next few hours, she meets Black, a creepy man, on the tram, a really creepy man, and her intuition tells her something is wrong. To get away from him, she jumps off the tram and winds up in the middle of a political protest against Nagy. The protest turns very violent, and she gets dosed with knockout gas. Bryn wakes up in what seems to be a hospital, only to meet Black again, Finally Bryn gets to her sister’s apartment. Her father’s speech is in support of Nagy. Bryn is shocked. This is impossible. Something is really wrong. Bryn and Leonin are soon on the run from the secret police, led by Black.
Bryn finds herself on double quests, one public, the other, other private and personal, yet these quests are interconnected. They will take Bryn from Terra to Alpha, “the Alliance’s center for scientific and medical research,” to Darkover, a “Lost Colony world circling a dim red star, where telepathic powers, [laran], have been developed to an extraordinary degree.” Eventually, as often happens on a quest, she will have to return to where her journey began, for a confrontation, made all the more dangerous with the uncertainty of success and the greatness of the risk involved.
The public quest forces her into the political arena she wanted to avoid. She has to engage in a confrontation between good and evil, in a struggle between freedom and oppression, between the machine and the natural. Bryn has to find and help her father; his very self is in danger of being lost. His mind has clearly been tampered with, by the insertion of a device she later learns is a theta-corticator, a mind probe that alters his thoughts so much he supports Nagy, whom he opposed. Her second quest is deeply personal and private, yet still connected to the public. Coupled with Bryn’s desperate need to help her father, and free him of this device implanted into his brain, her second quest is to know and accept who and what she is. Her premonitions, her danger-sense, are part of the psychic abilities that she didn’t know she had. Can she learn to master them? Or will they master her?
She and Leonin do find her father on Alpha, directed there with the help of Leonin’s brother and a cell of the dissident Free Worlds Movement. They trace the Senator’s broadcast to Alpha and help Bryn and Leonin get off Terra. On Alpha, where Bryn was a graduate student, she enlists the help of a former professor, Felicity Sage, and she seeks information in the university library. Felicity has knowledge of such probes as the one in the Senator’s head. In the library, Bryn learns of Darkover and its natural telepaths, who may know to neutralize the mind-control device. They manage another escape, this time, at a terrible cost. In a firefight, with Black and his secret police, Leonin dies. Bryn and Felicity’s ship is attacked in route. The shuttle down to Darkover crash-lands in ice-bound mountains, which are inhabited by such denizens as “blood-thirsty bandits to giant carnivorous birds.” She mentally calls for help before the shuttle crashed, and someone answered. What does this mean? Who answered? Bryn and her professor are rescued, yes, but more trials await them on Darkover, and so do the answers to her questions.
Readers new to “the marvelous world of Darkover,” will be, at first, like Bryn, a stranger in a strange land. But as Bryn learns how to live on Darkover, so does the reader. She learns how to control and use her laran, and, at the same time, she also learns how to negotiate a complex and ancient culture, with its own factions and politics. She begins to understand Darkover’s troubled history with Terra, a history that complicates her personal relationships with Darkovans. I felt a traveler myself, as I re-learned and remembered this compelling world, from its social order and customs to the food served in its inns.
Bryn, and the others, are appealing and compelling characters. Felicity Sage, the professor, spoke to me on a personal level. As a retired professor myself, I knew who she was. I cheered for Leonin, the firebrand revolutionary, and mourned his death. I also cheered for Desiderio (Desi), the Darkovan telepath, who is first assigned to Bryn by the Regent, only for both of them to find they are drawn to each other. He becomes a friend, a supporter, and the hint of something more—but that’s another story. In many ways, Desi and Leonin are mirrors of each other. Leonin is a wild card, a firebrand; Desi, assigned to help her, is calm, urbane, and gifted with laran.
This doubling and mirroring are inherent in the novel’s structure. The two quests mirror each other, and, as mentioned, inextricably connected. The personal is political as Bryn learns more than once. She treats traumatized children, and she is traumatized herself, by Leonin’s death, the violence done to her, the mental rape of her father, the evil of Black. The theta-corticator’s dark technology is linked to the benign therapeutic devices Bryn has used in her work. Light and dark, good and evil, are recurring, threads weaving the adventure into a whole.
Also inherent in the novel’s structure, in its story, is feminism. Yes, the protagonist is an intelligent and capable woman, but also here is a culture that demands collaboration, cooperation, and community, not power or force. Laran exemplifies these values, which has changed one world—can they change another? Can the Darkovans help Bryn? Will the natural telepathy and mental powers of the Darkovans, their laran, be a match for machines that can change an intelligent, strong man into a servile mouthpiece of a mad dictator? Will Bryn, a stranger on a strange world, master her own psychic abilities, her own laran, and can she learn how to use it in the inevitable confrontation with the agents of the dictator, the evil Black, the dictator himself? Can she do so without violating the deep cultural ethics of Darkovan laran use: it is not, and most not be, a weapon. Can one woman change everything? Will the laran gambit succeed—and save Bryn, her father, and Darkover itself?
Perhaps the ultimate question of this novel, the one that faces Bryn throughout her journeys, is one Ross asks in her introduction, “What will [Bryn] do with the time that is given her?” This time of political upheaval, violence, and the threat of war is not the life she wanted. But no one want such a life. Ross notes a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring that gives me pause whenever I read it:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live in such times. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us” (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1965: 60).
For Bryn, I think, the answer to this question is to take action, both publicly and privately, for herself, and for those she loves. The public and the private are not truly separate, nor can they be. Each influences the other. The actions of one person, as Bryn comes to learn, do make a difference.
Yes, the journey of The Laran Gambit is well worth taking, and this journey is a grand adventure.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
November 18, 2022
By Imperial Decree, by Angel Martinez
By Imperial Decree by Angel MartinezMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'm sorry to come to the end of Angel Martinez's ESTO Universe series. It has been a delightful ride, to stay the least. By Imperial Decree was a fitting ending in many ways. I found this novel a lot of fun to read. It was funny and touching and ended most satisfactorily.
I loved that this SF love story is also a something of a fairy tale. Shin, a prince of the Altarian Empire, is on the run from suitors who are out of control. He escapes by crawling into a cryo chamber, so any ship-probing sensor will find no signs of life. This Sleeping Beauty is rescued by a hero, Marsh, a stationside mechanic, who is more than willing to help Shin outwit his suitors. Shin is also the hero, wielding a powerful sword, And like all good fairy tales, the ending is good for the heart. As an extra plus, Martinez further explores diversity in the GLBT community as she has done throughout the series (and in all of her work, I would argue). Shin is a trans man; Marsh is disabled.
Highly recommended, both this novel, and the entire ESTO Universe series.
View all my reviews
October 10, 2022
The Advantaged, by Mark Allan Gunnells
The Advantaged by Mark Allan GunnellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a big fan of Mark Allan Gunnells and I’ve been following his career over the years with great pleasure. He is well-known for his horror fiction, including Twilight at the Gates, a fine story collection, and a recent horror novel, 2B, a tale of a haunted apartment and obsessed ghost, and a much longer list of fine stories and novels. He is a master storyteller and he has turned his talents in The Advantaged from horror to more mainstream queer fiction in this “queer drama of love, lies, and loss” (front cover).
The Advantaged is a well-told story that is very carefully plotted and constructed. Silas Granger is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist. He is a student at Greenville Tech, in Greenville, South Carolina, and the son of a single working-class father. He lives in Greer, a nearby small town. Silas is gay and he has been an outsider for most of his life. High school was lonely. He had no real friends. The beautiful Furman campus draws him in, as does a gang of Furman students talking about Ray Bradbury. He “feels good to be thought of as an ‘equal’ to such intelligent and passionate young people” (back cover). They take him in and at last he belongs; he’s not an outsider.
Silas lets these students think he is a Furman student as well, a lie of omission. “He figures he’ll never see them again … What could be the harm?” What could go wrong? A lot is the answer both questions. Gus, who is clearly the “epicenter [of the group], the planet around which the other five orbited like moons” (Gunnells 3) and the rest, take him in. Silas falls in love with Kris, who, somewhat to his surprise, reciprocates his feelings. The lie seems worth it. “Silas doesn’t want to hurry anyone in the group, especially Kris, but he also doesn’t want to lose the first friends he has ever really had in his life” (back cover).
So it begins, lie after lie after lie, all to maintain his mythic status as a Furman student, his place in this group, including manufacturing a Furman schedule, and “losing” his university ID. The list goes on. Inevitably he is caught and his house of cards Furman identity crashes around him. It seems Silas has lost everything, including love, including Kris. The Advantaged is a novel rich in details and in character. Readers will find themselves becoming familiar with both the Furman University campus and Greenville, and a trailer in nearby Greer. They will come to know Silas and to like him, and worry about what will happen when he is caught, and yet, keep wishing he would tell the truth. I found myself identifying with Silas, and no, not because I manufactured a fictional life to be accepted, but because I know what it’s like to be an outsider and wishing to be inside. These feelings are not uncommon for gay adolescents. Here, they are compounded by not being one of the “advantaged.” For many working class students, immersion in the culture of college can often feel like being a fish out of water—not matter how much they have wanted it, as Silas does.
I highly recommend this “queer drama of love, lies, and loss”—and of redemption and truth.
View all my reviews
October 1, 2022
Clarity, edited by J. Scott Coatsworth
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Clarity by J. Scott Coatsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Writing prompt:
Clarity (noun):
1. Coherent and intelligible
2. Transparent or pure
3. Attaining certainty about something
4. Easy to see or hear (back cover)
Contest rules:
Maximum: 300 words, a complete story, Clarity-themed, "sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, or horror, with LGBTQ+ characters (Coatsworth, Foreword, Clarity, ix).
The result? A richness of tales, 120 to be exact, with "interpretations ranging from an 'Aha moment' to bubbling laughter at the water cooler, to various versions of what can and cannot be seen in a mirror, ghosts, and ...
You won't be disappointed. Recommended.
For full disclosure, this anthology includes a story I wrote.
View all my reviews
Clarity by J. Scott CoatsworthMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Writing prompt:
Clarity (noun):
1. Coherent and intelligible
2. Transparent or pure
3. Attaining certainty about something
4. Easy to see or hear (back cover)
Contest rules:
Maximum: 300 words, a complete story, Clarity-themed, "sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, or horror, with LGBTQ+ characters (Coatsworth, Foreword, Clarity, ix).
The result? A richness of tales, 120 to be exact, with "interpretations ranging from an 'Aha moment' to bubbling laughter at the water cooler, to various versions of what can and cannot be seen in a mirror, ghosts, and ...
You won't be disappointed. Recommended.
For full disclosure, this anthology includes a story I wrote.
View all my reviews
September 27, 2022
Into this River I Drown, by TJ Klune
Into This River I Drown by T.J. KluneMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Benji Green lost his beloved father, Big Eddie, five years ago. His truck ran off the road, into a river, and he drowned. Benji doesn't believe it, and is still deep, deep in his grief. He runs Big Eddie's convenience store in the small town of Roseland, Oregon, where he lives with his mother and three aunts next door.
Things began to change. His dreams about his father's death become more frequent. He has visions of feathers floating on the river. And a man falls from the sky, and Benji's notions of what is real must change--the world is not as it seems. It is far more wonderful and mysterious, and dark and dangerous. Who is this man and why is he here in Roseland? Who is he to Benji? How does this connect to his father's death?
The answers transform, as Benji learns about love, loss, and grief, and betrayal and evil.
I loved this book. Recommended.
View all my reviews
September 11, 2022
All The World's An Undead Stage (Offbeat Crimes, #6), by Angel Martinez
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All The World's An Undead Stage by Angel Martinez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Loved this book, loved the series--love stories, heroes fighting crazy monsters, from feral dust bunnies to jackalopes and necromancers. Silly and serious and grand storytelling!
View all my reviews
All The World's An Undead Stage by Angel MartinezMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Loved this book, loved the series--love stories, heroes fighting crazy monsters, from feral dust bunnies to jackalopes and necromancers. Silly and serious and grand storytelling!
View all my reviews
August 21, 2022
Telling the Truth, by Frederick Buechner
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale by Frederick BuechnerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found this little book beautifully written and compelling. Buechner's discussion of the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale spoke to me in a deeply profound and moving way.
Highly recommended.
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August 9, 2022
Twilight at the Gates, by Mark Allan Gunnells
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Twilight at the Gates by Mark Allan Gunnells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a Twilight Zone fan. I find myself tuning in to the marathons to watch “just one episode,” and then watch “just one more and …” You get the idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have thrown in a few bars of the opening theme to conversations about the weird and the strange. The Twilight Zone is, I would argue, a cultural icon. I’ve always loved it.
Mark Allan Gunnells has always loved The Twilight Zone, too. This rich and wonderful collection is his homage to the show, and is “a testament to [his] love of The Twilight Zone” and its “profound influence” on his creative work (“In the Zone,” Twilight at the Gates, 165, 166). The reader will find a treasure trove here: 28 short shorts, some flash fiction-length, and 3 poems, all of which display Gunnells’s talent as a storyteller and the influence of this iconic TV program. The program’s “trademark ironic twists,” the surreal view of the world, a world that is “recognizably our world,” yet “slightly off-kilter” are all here, presented through Gunnells’ “undeniably modern imagination,” that often uses an LGBTQ+ lens (165, 166). As Gunnells notes, these are not meant to be retellings of the various episodes, but rather stories told in the spirit of these episodes and the sometimes dark truths Gunnells has gleaned from them.
The stories and poems here have a wide range, from the dark and macabre to commentary on the world of the contemporary reader. A gay kiss eases the pain of a ghost trapped in the place where he died, a victim of homophobia. A wife takes revenge on her paranoid and brutally abusive husband through the magic of an old spell, a cardinal, and hair woven into a nest. In “If Heaven is a Library,” it is the nature of Hell that is examined. Just what would be one’s personal hell? This fascination with our relationship to the nature of the divine seems to be a favorite of Gunnells. Is this relationship a benign one, or a malevolent one? Or indifferent? “In the Hands of an Indifferent God, the Almighty is a six-year-old, with a snow globe, inside our world. Shake the glove a few times, and one has an idyllic winter scene, or is it?
Two of my favorites of these tales include “Turn the Lights Off” and “Knowledge is Power.” “Lights” is about the love between husbands, and how this love can sustain us in the darkest of times—even if the darkest here is more bittersweet. “Knowledge is Power” again asks what is the nature of God and the nature of our relationship with God. This question asks us to re-examine such familiar symbols and images as the serpent, the garden, and the apple. That such questions can be found in these short short stories, attests to Gunnells’ skill and talent. The sweet and the dark are here in this collection, and the horrific, and the hopeful. In this collection, the reader is “traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind …” (Serling, Twilight Zone). That he invites us into his mind and his imaginative process, in the concluding “Story Notes,” is an added plus.
Welcome to the twilight zone of Mark Gunnells’ imagination.
Highly recommended.
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Twilight at the Gates by Mark Allan GunnellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a Twilight Zone fan. I find myself tuning in to the marathons to watch “just one episode,” and then watch “just one more and …” You get the idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have thrown in a few bars of the opening theme to conversations about the weird and the strange. The Twilight Zone is, I would argue, a cultural icon. I’ve always loved it.
Mark Allan Gunnells has always loved The Twilight Zone, too. This rich and wonderful collection is his homage to the show, and is “a testament to [his] love of The Twilight Zone” and its “profound influence” on his creative work (“In the Zone,” Twilight at the Gates, 165, 166). The reader will find a treasure trove here: 28 short shorts, some flash fiction-length, and 3 poems, all of which display Gunnells’s talent as a storyteller and the influence of this iconic TV program. The program’s “trademark ironic twists,” the surreal view of the world, a world that is “recognizably our world,” yet “slightly off-kilter” are all here, presented through Gunnells’ “undeniably modern imagination,” that often uses an LGBTQ+ lens (165, 166). As Gunnells notes, these are not meant to be retellings of the various episodes, but rather stories told in the spirit of these episodes and the sometimes dark truths Gunnells has gleaned from them.
The stories and poems here have a wide range, from the dark and macabre to commentary on the world of the contemporary reader. A gay kiss eases the pain of a ghost trapped in the place where he died, a victim of homophobia. A wife takes revenge on her paranoid and brutally abusive husband through the magic of an old spell, a cardinal, and hair woven into a nest. In “If Heaven is a Library,” it is the nature of Hell that is examined. Just what would be one’s personal hell? This fascination with our relationship to the nature of the divine seems to be a favorite of Gunnells. Is this relationship a benign one, or a malevolent one? Or indifferent? “In the Hands of an Indifferent God, the Almighty is a six-year-old, with a snow globe, inside our world. Shake the glove a few times, and one has an idyllic winter scene, or is it?
Two of my favorites of these tales include “Turn the Lights Off” and “Knowledge is Power.” “Lights” is about the love between husbands, and how this love can sustain us in the darkest of times—even if the darkest here is more bittersweet. “Knowledge is Power” again asks what is the nature of God and the nature of our relationship with God. This question asks us to re-examine such familiar symbols and images as the serpent, the garden, and the apple. That such questions can be found in these short short stories, attests to Gunnells’ skill and talent. The sweet and the dark are here in this collection, and the horrific, and the hopeful. In this collection, the reader is “traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind …” (Serling, Twilight Zone). That he invites us into his mind and his imaginative process, in the concluding “Story Notes,” is an added plus.
Welcome to the twilight zone of Mark Gunnells’ imagination.
Highly recommended.
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