Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn

by Rosemary Edghill

This collection of Edghill's finest short fantasy works includes: "The Piper at the Gate" where Mary Frances Baynes longs all her life for Real Magic and finally achieves it . . . at a price; "The Intersection of Anastasia Yeoman and Light" where a midlist SF-writer-turned-successful-editor gets a glimpse of the way her life could have gone; and the story of Ator, Jannifer, Ancel, and the Grail, set in ancient Britain and told by the son that Ator tried to kill as an infant, is told in "Prince of Exiles."

Genres: Fantasy, Arthurian

318 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2003

About the author

She was born long enough ago to have seen Classic Trek on its first outing and to remember that she once thought Spock Must Die! to be great literature. As she aged, she put aside her fond dreams of taking over for Batman when he retired, and returned to her first love, writing. Her first SF sale (as Eluki Bes Shahar) was the Hellflower series, in which Damon Runyon meets Doc Smith over at the old Bester place. Between books and short stories in every genre but the Western (several dozen so far), she's held the usual selection of odd and part-time writer jobs, including bookstore clerk, secretary, beta tester for computer software, graphic designer, book illustrator, library clerk, and administrative assistant for a non-profit arts organization. She can truthfully state that she once killed vampires for a living, and that without any knowledge of medicine has illustrated half-a-dozen medical textbooks.


Her last name -- despite the efforts of editors, reviewers, publishing houses, her webmaster, and occasionally her own fingers -- is not spelled 'Edgehill'.


Also writes under the name Eluki Bes Shahar.

Reviews

[A. Kuhlii]

I loved the Bast series and was excited to dig into more of Edghill's work, but I could not get into this. Tried every story but DNF'd most of them. Maybe I'm dimmer than usual from long work days and too much screen time, but so many of them seemed overly complex and mysteriously opaque and I just couldn't figure out what was even going on. At least two were variations on Tam Lin, but didn't have anything new to say, nor particularly impressive characters or writing. Then in the last story, "Lizzie Fair and the Dragon of Heart's Desire," I was gobsmacked by the lines: "He was gorgeous. Probably gay. If he bit her, she'd die of AIDS." What the hell? Even more surprising and disappointing considering the Bast series (from what I remember) positively portrays queer characters.