What do you think?
Rate this book
Crossroads: Tales of Southern Literary Fantastic
Duncan, Andy, Cox, Brett
384 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2004
1 person is currently reading
41 people want to read
About the author
Andy Duncan
86 books31 followersAndy Duncan is the award-winning author of two novellas—The Night Cache (2009) and Wakulla Springs (with Ellen Klages, 2013, 2018)—and three short fiction collections: Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (2000), The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (2012) and An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories (2018). He is also the author of non-fiction book Alabama Curiosities (2005, 2009), and co-editor (with F. Brett Cox) of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (2004). He has won the 2002 Theodore Sturgeon Award for "The Chief Designer", the 2012 Nebula Award for "Close Encounters", and three World Fantasy Awards. Born in Batesburg, South Carolina, Duncan currently lives with his wife Sydney in Frostburg, Maryland, where he he has taught English as an Assistant Professor at Frostburg State University since 2008.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 2, 2013
2.96 average rounds up (just a tiny bit) to 3 stars.
Definitely a higher quality of writing, overall, than found in many genre anthologies.
*** A Place of Mojo - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Impressive story, really well-written, and I felt like it accurately captured elements of Southern African-American society, just post-slavery. However, it's really not 'fantastic.'
**** The Wounded - Richard Butner. Shades of H.P. Lovecraft here, in this tale of a Korean War vet turned photography student, who unexpectedly discovers the dark secret of a remote seacoast town.
*** The Map to the Homes of the Stars – Andy Duncan. A couple of teen boys who never get a date are obsessed with driving past the homes of the girls they know from school; too shy to actually talk to them. But after one fateful night, one is left behind… An unsettling allegory of male coming-of-age.
**** Under Construction – James Sallis. A brief story of a future couple renting out a faux dilapidated dump of an apartment – and thinking it’s the most special thing ever. I read it twice in a row – it’s one of those pieces where the important things are off-screen. Effective.
*** Houston, 1943 - Gene Wolfe. A weird tale of a small boy unwittingly caught up in a voodoo ritual that’s somehow gotten out of hand. The treasure-seeking spell-casters are possessed themselves, and spirits from childhood tales are woven through this nightmare.
*** See My King All Dressed in Red – James L. Cambias. A seemingly-happy gay couple apparently have adjusted to life after having to move out of a flooded, abandoned New Orleans. But one of these men suffers an increasing obsession with Mardi Gras, the past, and the lost city.
*** My Life is Good – Scott Edelman. Alien ‘Visitors’ force a physicist to use a time machine to monitor and control the life of an inane pop singer. Is there some meaning behind this thankless job?
*** Rose – Brett Lott. Based on “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. I don’t believe I’ve read the Faulkner story; I feel that one probably should, to appreciate this work. It is undoubtedly well written, although not one tiny bit fantastic. I’d classify this as psychological drama.
** Boar Lake – Mark L. Van Name. A group of old friends gather to mourn the imminent loss of the national park where they’ve shared time and memories. And then a mysterious and inexplicable event occurs. I’d probably prefer the story if it weren’t so very inexplicable.
*** The Mission - Jack McDevitt. A post-apocalyptic setting, and a philosophical argument between logic and emotion. Well-presented - I found myself seeing both characters' point of view. I liked this better than the novels I've read from McDevitt.
*** The Moon and the Stars - Marian Carcache. An evil voodoo queen and a romantic tragedy.
*****The Specialist's Hat - Kelly Link. A re-read. I love this: "Claire's eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but Samantha's are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining." YES! Everyone (but Kelly Link) thinks I'm a lunatic when I tell them that 'grey' and 'gray' are clearly different colors, and Link understands (and agrees with me) on the precise difference. Oh, and the story? It's kick-ass, and spooky as hell. For anyone who likes children-stuck-in-haunted-houses tales.
** Christus Destitutus - Bud Webster. Christ returned to earth, but this time lived unannounced and anonymous. Now, he's dying in a pauper's hospice. Well done, but just not my thing...
** Ool Athag - Don Webb. Begins like a sword-and-sorcery type fantasy, and ends with crossing the line of artsy pretension. Had to roll my eyes.
*** The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia - Michael Bishop. A pretentious (and fired) ex-professor retires to a small hick town to lick his wounds - and inadvertently starts an obsessive craze for Yukio Mishima among the townsfolk. Bishop takes the concept past absurdity - and it's pretty funny.
*** The Last Geek – Michael Swanwick. A commentary on the utter weirdness of academic appreciation of ‘low’ culture.
*** Slippered Feet – Daniel Wallace. An older couple are enthusiastically planning a vacation to an exotic location, and enjoying trying to learn a bit of the language in advance. But then, things start to go horribly wrong. Nice use of psychological ambiguity.
** Alabama – Kalamu Ya Salaam. Why is this in this book? It’s not fiction, and not even slightly fantastic. It’s (sort-of) an essay exploring murder, suicide and racism. I was going with it (and felt it had some decent insights) until the end, which abruptly tries to connect fictional media violence with actual violence, and human evil. Sorry Mr. Salaam, but if you’re going to go there, you’re going to have to condemn your own work, as it also contains violence and bloody death.
*** Madeline’s Version – F. Brett Cox. Like ‘Rose,’ this is a retelling-from-a-different-viewpoint, this time of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The feel of the elements of the story as portrayed here remind me more of Tanith Lee than of Poe: a brother and sister living alone, incestuously, in a once-grand but decaying house. Illness, hints of a curse, maybe some kind of vampirism?
*** Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop – Lynn Pitts. OK, but this felt like every ghost story told late at night at a sleepover party that you’ve ever heard.
*** Water Dog God: A Ghost Story – Brad Watson. Not so much of a ghost story. More of a horror tale of rural hicks, abuse, incest and the tragedy of powerlessness.
** Mankind Journeys through Forests of Symbols – Fred Chappell. In this allegorical tale, a dream or an unfulfilled artistic urge and lead to inconvenient physical manifestations. When one of these manifestations blocks the road in a small town, the only solution is for the Sheriff’s office to hold a poetry contest.
*** The Mikado’s Favorite Song – Marian Moore. Newly promoted, a businesswoman learns that management has some unanticipated drawbacks.
*** The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor – Sena Jeter Naslund. A woman lives with her aging mother, but cannot emotionally follow her into the eerie yet somehow wonderful realms that the older woman seems to be moving toward. A metaphor for senility? Or something else?
*** Making Faces – Ian McDowell. An alterna-teen and her younger brother deal with emotional fallout and their father’s newly-found lunatic religiosity, after their mother’s death. When an ancient artifact enters the picture, a gory finale is in the works… pretty much straight-up horror.
*** John Kessel – Every Angel is Terrifying. A murderer on the lam acquires a cat that he seems to think grants wishes. Will he be able to turn his life around, or is hope an illusion? Another one for the horror fans.
Definitely a higher quality of writing, overall, than found in many genre anthologies.
*** A Place of Mojo - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Impressive story, really well-written, and I felt like it accurately captured elements of Southern African-American society, just post-slavery. However, it's really not 'fantastic.'
**** The Wounded - Richard Butner. Shades of H.P. Lovecraft here, in this tale of a Korean War vet turned photography student, who unexpectedly discovers the dark secret of a remote seacoast town.
*** The Map to the Homes of the Stars – Andy Duncan. A couple of teen boys who never get a date are obsessed with driving past the homes of the girls they know from school; too shy to actually talk to them. But after one fateful night, one is left behind… An unsettling allegory of male coming-of-age.
**** Under Construction – James Sallis. A brief story of a future couple renting out a faux dilapidated dump of an apartment – and thinking it’s the most special thing ever. I read it twice in a row – it’s one of those pieces where the important things are off-screen. Effective.
*** Houston, 1943 - Gene Wolfe. A weird tale of a small boy unwittingly caught up in a voodoo ritual that’s somehow gotten out of hand. The treasure-seeking spell-casters are possessed themselves, and spirits from childhood tales are woven through this nightmare.
*** See My King All Dressed in Red – James L. Cambias. A seemingly-happy gay couple apparently have adjusted to life after having to move out of a flooded, abandoned New Orleans. But one of these men suffers an increasing obsession with Mardi Gras, the past, and the lost city.
*** My Life is Good – Scott Edelman. Alien ‘Visitors’ force a physicist to use a time machine to monitor and control the life of an inane pop singer. Is there some meaning behind this thankless job?
*** Rose – Brett Lott. Based on “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. I don’t believe I’ve read the Faulkner story; I feel that one probably should, to appreciate this work. It is undoubtedly well written, although not one tiny bit fantastic. I’d classify this as psychological drama.
** Boar Lake – Mark L. Van Name. A group of old friends gather to mourn the imminent loss of the national park where they’ve shared time and memories. And then a mysterious and inexplicable event occurs. I’d probably prefer the story if it weren’t so very inexplicable.
*** The Mission - Jack McDevitt. A post-apocalyptic setting, and a philosophical argument between logic and emotion. Well-presented - I found myself seeing both characters' point of view. I liked this better than the novels I've read from McDevitt.
*** The Moon and the Stars - Marian Carcache. An evil voodoo queen and a romantic tragedy.
*****The Specialist's Hat - Kelly Link. A re-read. I love this: "Claire's eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but Samantha's are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining." YES! Everyone (but Kelly Link) thinks I'm a lunatic when I tell them that 'grey' and 'gray' are clearly different colors, and Link understands (and agrees with me) on the precise difference. Oh, and the story? It's kick-ass, and spooky as hell. For anyone who likes children-stuck-in-haunted-houses tales.
** Christus Destitutus - Bud Webster. Christ returned to earth, but this time lived unannounced and anonymous. Now, he's dying in a pauper's hospice. Well done, but just not my thing...
** Ool Athag - Don Webb. Begins like a sword-and-sorcery type fantasy, and ends with crossing the line of artsy pretension. Had to roll my eyes.
*** The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia - Michael Bishop. A pretentious (and fired) ex-professor retires to a small hick town to lick his wounds - and inadvertently starts an obsessive craze for Yukio Mishima among the townsfolk. Bishop takes the concept past absurdity - and it's pretty funny.
*** The Last Geek – Michael Swanwick. A commentary on the utter weirdness of academic appreciation of ‘low’ culture.
*** Slippered Feet – Daniel Wallace. An older couple are enthusiastically planning a vacation to an exotic location, and enjoying trying to learn a bit of the language in advance. But then, things start to go horribly wrong. Nice use of psychological ambiguity.
** Alabama – Kalamu Ya Salaam. Why is this in this book? It’s not fiction, and not even slightly fantastic. It’s (sort-of) an essay exploring murder, suicide and racism. I was going with it (and felt it had some decent insights) until the end, which abruptly tries to connect fictional media violence with actual violence, and human evil. Sorry Mr. Salaam, but if you’re going to go there, you’re going to have to condemn your own work, as it also contains violence and bloody death.
*** Madeline’s Version – F. Brett Cox. Like ‘Rose,’ this is a retelling-from-a-different-viewpoint, this time of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The feel of the elements of the story as portrayed here remind me more of Tanith Lee than of Poe: a brother and sister living alone, incestuously, in a once-grand but decaying house. Illness, hints of a curse, maybe some kind of vampirism?
*** Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop – Lynn Pitts. OK, but this felt like every ghost story told late at night at a sleepover party that you’ve ever heard.
*** Water Dog God: A Ghost Story – Brad Watson. Not so much of a ghost story. More of a horror tale of rural hicks, abuse, incest and the tragedy of powerlessness.
** Mankind Journeys through Forests of Symbols – Fred Chappell. In this allegorical tale, a dream or an unfulfilled artistic urge and lead to inconvenient physical manifestations. When one of these manifestations blocks the road in a small town, the only solution is for the Sheriff’s office to hold a poetry contest.
*** The Mikado’s Favorite Song – Marian Moore. Newly promoted, a businesswoman learns that management has some unanticipated drawbacks.
*** The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor – Sena Jeter Naslund. A woman lives with her aging mother, but cannot emotionally follow her into the eerie yet somehow wonderful realms that the older woman seems to be moving toward. A metaphor for senility? Or something else?
*** Making Faces – Ian McDowell. An alterna-teen and her younger brother deal with emotional fallout and their father’s newly-found lunatic religiosity, after their mother’s death. When an ancient artifact enters the picture, a gory finale is in the works… pretty much straight-up horror.
*** John Kessel – Every Angel is Terrifying. A murderer on the lam acquires a cat that he seems to think grants wishes. Will he be able to turn his life around, or is hope an illusion? Another one for the horror fans.
August 20, 2022
A good collection of stories, not great, but I enjoyed it. I must admit that I did not come away from the anthology with the names of new writers I wanted to read more of - and that is ultimately what denotes a great anthology, rather then just a good one.
September 8, 2018
A very mixed bag. The outstanding story was 'The Map to the Homes of the Stars' by Andy Duncan.
April 11, 2007
Some of the stories are amateurish (I assume because they were trying to achieve some sort of balance, by age, geography, race, whatever), and several of them are only "fantastic" in the vaguest way and would be perfectly at home in a mundane anthology.
Two fanfic stories: one on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (not impressive; too much 'oh, get a load of this, this is gonna be sooooo creepy, you won't believe it,' so that when it's finally revealed, though it's deeply creepy, it's still anticlimax; would have done better to underplay) and one on Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (can't judge; haven't read the original; nice voice, but definitely has the feel of something that's in dialog with the canon).
Way too much New Orleans; aren't there any other Southern cities fit to be the setting for the fantastic? Charleston? Galveston?
Standouts: Marian Carcache's "The Moon and the Stars," which involves voodoo (as far too many of them do) but does it in an interesting way; Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat"; Michael Bishop's "The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia" (I hadn't even known he wrote comedy), Kalamu ya Salaam's "Alabama" (a meditation on suicide and lynching, but not speculative in the least); Lynn Pitts' "Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop" (a nice compact ghost story), Daniel Wallace's "Slippered Feet" (the one with the language tape that comes to life), Sena Jeter Naslund's "The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor" (nicely vivid mother-daughter relationship).
Two fanfic stories: one on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (not impressive; too much 'oh, get a load of this, this is gonna be sooooo creepy, you won't believe it,' so that when it's finally revealed, though it's deeply creepy, it's still anticlimax; would have done better to underplay) and one on Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (can't judge; haven't read the original; nice voice, but definitely has the feel of something that's in dialog with the canon).
Way too much New Orleans; aren't there any other Southern cities fit to be the setting for the fantastic? Charleston? Galveston?
Standouts: Marian Carcache's "The Moon and the Stars," which involves voodoo (as far too many of them do) but does it in an interesting way; Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat"; Michael Bishop's "The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia" (I hadn't even known he wrote comedy), Kalamu ya Salaam's "Alabama" (a meditation on suicide and lynching, but not speculative in the least); Lynn Pitts' "Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop" (a nice compact ghost story), Daniel Wallace's "Slippered Feet" (the one with the language tape that comes to life), Sena Jeter Naslund's "The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor" (nicely vivid mother-daughter relationship).
July 31, 2011
A good collection, with the contributions by Wolfe ("Houston, 1943"), Kessel ("Every Angel is Terrifying"), and Jeffers ("A Plate of Mojo") particularly effective. Not all of the tales have a notably regional flavour: among these is McDowell's "Making Faces", a tedious catalogue of teen culture combined with teen horror movie plot which could be taking place anywhere in the US--easily the nadir of the book.
May 17, 2010
Another book of my To-Be-Read Shelf. Excellent collection--yes, as Catherine says, some stories I liked better than others--but, yes, all here are worth reading. Some are quite beautiful and this is a good exploration of the Southern Literary Fantastic. Only a couple I couldn't quite figure out why they were in the collection. Well done, Andy and Brett.
Read
May 2, 2019Perfect name for this book, the numinous southernness of "the crossroads." Blues, the devil, goth rural life, weirdness. The first story in the book "Plate of Mojo" by Honoree Fannone Jeffers, was so unique and strong, I had to give the anthology a rest after reading it. It just didn't seem fair to put any other story up against it.
August 2, 2012
I had a copy of Crossroads ages ago and lent it out. It didn't return... so I finally obtained another copy and am still enamored with this collection. If you want to borrow it, LMK - you'll just need to sign a few dozen contracts and leave me your car keys in return.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews