A Short Review of Out of This World, by Catherine Lundoff

Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories by Catherine Lundoff

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Tales of the queer fantastic. Queer speculative fiction stories. What can the discerning reader expect? Distant planets? Ghosts, witches, old gods? The Queen of the Fay. A magical bookstore (are not they all, to some degree?). Body-theft. Steampunk? Vampires? Yes, the discerning reader will not be disappointed. The fantastic is here indeed.

In this first collection published by Queen of Swords Press, the reader will find a steampunk ghost story, Beauty and the Beast retold with vampires, and a detective on a distant planet, faced with imminent invasion and murders to be solved, and a city without happiness. The mystery of just who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays is finally answered here, in a tale of “intrigue, ‘identical fraternal twins and swordplay’ (Glaeske, Out in Print i). And other rich and engaging tales are to be found as well, all of which kept me reading until the last page.

However, the speculative is only part of the title, the fantastic only part of the adjectives given for these tales. These are stories of the queer fantastic. The protagonists found are lesbians, bisexual, gay, or “somehow queer-identified,” as Lundoff explains in her introduction. These are important to her, as a “bi/queer-identified writer,” and to such readers like me. That detective on another planet is transgender. “Beauty”, the vampire retelling of Beauty and the Beast is also a gay love story, a “bit of yaoi with vampires” (v). This vampire gay love story was among my favorites. Shakespeare’s sister has to pass as a man, thus she is a crossdresser. The tale of the witches is a lesbian love story, one marked by jealousy, and slightly less than expert spellcasting. “A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace,” another of my favorites, is about political intrigue, dynastic quarrels, body switching at the palace, among other things. As Lundoff asserts in the introduction, “We need to be able to see ourselves as heroes and villains, gods and monsters, knights and wizards, and fair ladies and dragons and all the points between” (v). I read this and cheered! However, I did want to note that a good story, and this is a collection of excellent stories, is a good story, and that the reader does not have to be “somehow queer-identified” to enjoy them. These are human stories, about the human condition and human experience, seen through the lens of fantastic fiction. Here are some answers to the question of what it means to be human, answers that are thoughtful, often funny, sometimes dark, and always, well told, by an award-winning writer with a gifted imagination and keen sense of language and story.

This is a fine debut for Queen of Swords Press.

Highly recommended.




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