THE DEVILS IN THE DETAILS

Contents:
Introduction / Tim Powers --
Through and through / Tim Powers --
Devil in the details / James P. Blaylock --
Fifty cents / James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers --
Mexican food: An afterword / James P. Blaylock.

Blaylock and Powers (The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook) are the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of fantasy fiction, writers whose characteristic playfulness is a measure of their control of craft and confidence in their materials. This slim three-story collection shows a slightly darker side of their imaginations, but is no less an index to their inventiveness and skill at using unadorned prose and everyday situations to evoke the uncanny. "Through and Through," a solo shot from Powers, is a haunting story of a fallible priest who is shocked to discover that his latest confessor is a troubled ghost to whom he can actually bring salvation. The title tale, by Blaylock, begins as a clever satire on the inherent absurdities of academic multiculturalism, but ends as a exercise in gothic horror centered on a nondenominational school chapel. "Fifty Cents," written collaboratively, is an eerie excursion into Twilight Zone territory, involving a motorist traveling through the southwest whose repeat encounters with two different men along the desert way can only be explained by inscrutable supernatural machinations. At the center of each of these stories are believably rendered characters, familiar in their simple sensibilities and understandably dismayed to discover that the paths they follow in their routine lives have merged imperceptibly with byways to extraordinary experience. Readers who have enjoyed the authors’ excursions into fantasy’s zanier possibilities will find this compilation of daylit dark fantasies a credit to their versatility.
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