Rich Horton reviews "The Big Bah-Ha" for Locus Magazine!!!
Here's what he said:
"C.S.E. Cooney's THE BIG BAH-HA is a novella published as an e-book by Drollerie Press. It's a very imaginative work, at once a stark post-apocalyptic tale and a strange, sometimes quite dark, but never dour, afterlife fantasy. Beatrice is the leader of a small children's gang in a world of only children -- a disease called the "slaprash" kills everyone at about puberty (meaning, of course, that the end of the world is less than some dozen years away.) Then Beatrice comes to in a rather surrealistic environment. She must negotiate her new world -- "the Big Bah-Ha" -- with a strange clown and menacing Gacy Boys and so on. And back in the "real world," the rest of her gang vows to confront one of the Tall Ones, the Flabberghast, and beg for help to find Beatrice. Cooney's imagery and invention is as fevered as always with her work, and her control of tone is perfect -- this is a terribly sad future but the story is never morose, always oddly hopeful, even as the ending is uncompromising."
AND THEN HE RECOMMENDED IT! ON HIS RECOMMENDATION LIST!
"C.S.E. Cooney's THE BIG BAH-HA is a novella published as an e-book by Drollerie Press. It's a very imaginative work, at once a stark post-apocalyptic tale and a strange, sometimes quite dark, but never dour, afterlife fantasy. Beatrice is the leader of a small children's gang in a world of only children -- a disease called the "slaprash" kills everyone at about puberty (meaning, of course, that the end of the world is less than some dozen years away.) Then Beatrice comes to in a rather surrealistic environment. She must negotiate her new world -- "the Big Bah-Ha" -- with a strange clown and menacing Gacy Boys and so on. And back in the "real world," the rest of her gang vows to confront one of the Tall Ones, the Flabberghast, and beg for help to find Beatrice. Cooney's imagery and invention is as fevered as always with her work, and her control of tone is perfect -- this is a terribly sad future but the story is never morose, always oddly hopeful, even as the ending is uncompromising."
AND THEN HE RECOMMENDED IT! ON HIS RECOMMENDATION LIST!