The Lone Star Stories Reader

"An immersive collection of fifteen fantastic and unexpected stories by new and established writing talent awaits you in this anthology of fiction selected from the first twenty-five issues of Lone star stories webzine. Come walk through the outskirts ofgenre and exprerience the strange and wondrous tales of The Lone star stories reader"--P. [4] of cover.

Marin selects 15 fantasy stories from the first 25 issues of webzine Lone Star Stories, with moderate success. In Catherynne M. Valente's stunning Thread: A Triptych, a fantastical mail-order bride is brought to the real world, only to be cast aside. The western meets dark fantasy in Martha Wells's standout Wolf Night, when a group of people barricaded in a stockade are attacked by an otherworldly creature. Other standouts include Ekaterina Sedia's The Disemboweler, where a robot explores a world where little spirits animate machines, and Sarah Monette's A Night in Electric Squidland, where two queer psychic cops infiltrate an occult BDSM nightclub. Most of the stories have a writer's-workshop sameness to them that flattens their range, but the gems really shine. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From both established talents like Nina Kiriki Hoffman and relative newcomers like Marguerite Reed, these stories offer a wide enough range to keep the reader fumbling to find some commonality other than editor Marin’s excellent taste. Hoffman’s contribution, the short and sweet “Seasonal Work,” is the holiday retail season seen through a very strange lens—the kind of thing she does so well. Reed’s gorgeous “Angels of a Desert Heaven” is the story of a musician and a Hopi seer and the ways the gods of their shared desert home adopt even the Anglo, if the need is great enough. Despite the book’s title, the stories don’t have any Texas connections, though several take place in various Western settings. Title and stories come from the Web zine Lone Star Stories, where the latter are electronically archived. At any rate, this selection suggests that LSS is a force to be reckoned with. --Regina Schroeder