The Homeless Moon: Imaginary Places
The Homeless Moon: Imaginary Places (2009)
Written by: Jason S. Ridler, Michael J. DeLuca, Erin Hoffman, Scott H. Andrews, Justin Howe
Genre: Short Stories
Pages: 79 (Chapbook)
I may have been late with reading and reviewing last year's Homeless Moon chapbook, but not this year! As with last year, the Homeless Moon folks passed around copies of their chapbook at ReaderCon, but because ReaderCon is something I don't have a chance in hell of attending, they were kind enough to send me a copy to review (also, because I resist reading stuff on my computer screen. It makes me more critical, since that's how I critique manuscripts).
And every disclaimer I had about reviewing last year's chapbook applies here, so I'm not repeating it save for this: I know these writers and consider them friends; therefore, I may not be as objective as I should be. Got it? Good!
The premise: this year, Homeless Moon's chapbook has a theme (yay!) of lands from Manguel and Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (huh?), which sent me marching to Wikipedia to learn what I could about this volume, and then it sent me marching back to the chapbook to see specifically had been used and when it first appeared. Fortunately, all the imaginary places used in this chapbook are obscure to me, so I was mostly happy. Plus, I got my theme, something that unifies the chapbook while also allowing each author to be true to him(and her!)self.
Review style: I will review each story individually, though I reserve the right to use the term "review" loosely. Will there be spoilers? I'll speak in generalities the best I can, focus more on the technique and the ideas driving the story rather than any specifics.
"A Cemetery Romance"
by Jason S. Ridler
Of all the stories, I think this is my favorite title. Mostly because it just captures the imagination on so many levels, so you can't help but read.
I had a little laugh once I learned the setting of this story was a graveyard, and the characters graveyard workers, simply because I know the writer worked as a cemetery groundskeeper at one time. Talk about bringing realism to a story! However, I tripped up with this piece really quickly. The first page alone enough threw world-building terminology at me that I had to step back and ask if I'd missed something, even though I knew that wasn't the case. Truth be told, it wasn't all that much: it was just the land name "Despairia" with its natives known as "Despairians" who hated "Jansenians," who, for some reason, owned the graveyard.
The criticism of getting too much too fast when it comes to a secondary world is one I'm familiar with. Hell, it's been lobbed at my work before, so I sympathize. As I continued reading, I understood the general sense of who was what and who worked where and why, but I think what threw me out of the story was the fact that 1) I know the author, and these are not terms he would come up with and 2) I got just enough world-building to obsess over why things were the way they were, so I wasn't entirely focused on the story itself. Instead, I kept asking questions about the logic of the world-building.
The story itself is actually simple, and I have to like it. Raz is a sympathetic enough, scrappy kind of hero you want to root for, and you want Ash to notice him in a positive way. Her need for the flower is a good motivation for both characters, and I like how that need played into the climax and ending of the story. However, the ending of the story felt a bit rushed: without getting into spoilers, the action scenes left me feeling like something was missing, and I had trouble visualizing just what was happening and what it meant. Was I really interpreting certain scenes correctly? Maybe, maybe not. Things might be clearer with a second read, but I'm not in any mood to read anything twice.
I did like the details of the story, especially that of working in a graveyard and the trinkets left for the dead. I think that's where Ridler's special brand of realism played its strongest role. However, of all the stories in the chapbook, this is the story that most felt like it was written in someone else's existing world, rather than the existing world being shaped and twisted to serve as the author's own story. Does that make sense? I don't want to use the term fan fiction, because that's not what this is: it's an homage, if anything, with the author's twist. However, I'm not sure Ridler was entirely comfortable with the world-building of the setting, which makes me wonder how he could've done the story differently while still embracing the imaginary place that inspired it.
"The Cannon and the Prophetess"
by Michael J. DeLuca
Those of you who are familiar with DeLuca's fiction will understand me perfectly: this is such a Michael J. DeLuca story.
Those of you who aren't familiar with his fiction are just going to have to read more of it.
That said, I kept getting distracted by the name of One Kestrel. It seemed so familiar, but I think the blame rests on the name of Kestrel, because I've seen it before, and recently. Yet, maybe it's a case where I critiqued an early draft of this story, as it did seem familiar as well. However, and this is telling not necessarily in a bad way, once I finished with the story, I promptly forgot about it.
Here's the thing: it's a well-told story. Its themes are obvious and heavily woven through-out the piece in a way that leaves no room for doubt what the story is all about, and that's not a bad thing. I enjoyed the settings DeLuca created, especially that in the cave. I enjoyed every element of this story, but in the end, for whatever reason, it's forgettable to me, and that may simply be that it didn't hit me on an emotional level, nor did it have a specific brand of weirdness or a lasting image that stayed with me. But it's a good story. It's a Mike DeLuca story. And that's all I can say about it.
Again, the commentary will make much more sense if you read more of his fiction, which you can find in Mike Allen's Clockwork Phoenix and Sherman & Goss's Interfictions and in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Granted, I have a slightly unfair advantage of reading unpublished work as well, but still. Once you read Mike DeLuca, it's not hard to recognize his work. And that's all I've got to say about that. :)
"In Lixus, Close to Waking"
by Erin Hoffman
I think of all the stories, based on what I read of the original imaginary places they were based on (which is nothing more than the entries provided in the back of the chapbook), this is the story that makes the imaginary land its own, it runs with the inspiration and creates something completely new while paying respect to the old. I think. Like I said, my knowledge of the original is rather non-existent.
However, I really enjoyed this story. I loved all the little terms and details: the answerbird, the cognitive processing wasp, the language wasp, the whale, the professor. I like the ending, the beautiful imagery. However, I had one problem, and that was from the start, I was never entirely sure what Kierkegaard was. The "king" wasp to the queen? A human, or something in human form? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the character and his role in the story, yet with all the glorious and interesting details (answerbird, language wasp, cognitive wasp), I felt I had to question what Kierkegaard was too, and despite descriptions of hands, I was never a complete enough picture to visualize him as I should. I ended up with him as a human, or the image of one, but I was never confident with my interpretation. Maybe I should've been, but I wasn't.
Save for that, I enjoyed this piece.
"Adrift in Ishtakar"
by Scott H. Andrews
Of all the pieces in the chapbook, Scott's was my favorite. Scott's story felt the most complete, most fully realized stories of the whole batch, and I never had a "lost in translation" moment from the page to my personal processing. It's a very solid, very enjoyable piece.
And I enjoy seeing plague settings in fantasy. I've become more familiar with the trope in recent years, but it's still an interesting one, because it's the real world creeping very naturally into a fantasy setting. I sympathized with Qarrara the healer, though I questioned her decision at the start to leave her charges to find her master. However, once the story got underway, I really enjoyed the details, her focused, determined character, and how Andrews showed us what she was made of before she was ever told herself. She may not believe in herself, and while the end of the story doesn't return her to the city of the plague, I, as a reader, have no doubt she'll be just fine and she'll save who she needs to.
Though, a selfish part of me did want more, just to see what happened and how she handles the plague. However, it's an emotionally satisfying piece, and I enjoyed the genii, and I especially enjoyed the scenes with Soliman Ben Daoud. Lovely touch, those were.
In all, this is the kind of fiction and fantasy I'm used to seeing from Scott Andrews, so I hope his future publications, in the chapbooks as well as magazines, are just as good, if not better. No doubt, Andrews is one to keep an eye on. (Okay, they'll all worth keeping an eye on, but in terms of this kind of fantasy, Andrews is it, methinks).
"Signature Days"
by Justin Howe
So how did Mr. Howe end up with the final story slot in both chapbooks? Interesting, most interesting indeed.
At any rate, "Signature Days" was my second-favorite piece in the chapbook. It's short and sweet (well, maybe not so sweet from a certain point of view), and while I didn't understand the logic behind the magic that made this story "work," I believed that the characters accepted it as fact, and I enjoyed the bits and pieces we learned about the world-at-large and the rather black humor of the piece on the whole. I mean, you just can't read that last line without a little shocked giggle, and I found Howe's choice of setting particularly unique, and not a traditional one for fantasy. Nonetheless, very enjoyable.
My Rating
No Rating: as with the first chapbook, this was free for me, and it's free for you too, because you can download it from the website as a PDF. Just go here to download not just this second chapbook, but the first too! As a whole, I was really thrilled with the fact this particular chapbook is united with a theme, all be it one I wouldn't have remotely considered if I were brainstorming with them. I wonder, because of the homages paid in each story, if any of the writers could get these stories published elsewhere if they hadn't published them here in this chapbook, but that's neither here nor there. This chapbook really charmed me with Scott H. Andrews's fantasy, as well as Justin Howe's short but amusingly dark tale. On a technical note, I was glad to see fewer typos and formatting errors in this edition, though I would like to see--should the Homeless Moon folks do another chapbook--the headers use not just the author's name, but the title of the short story as well instead of "The Homeless Moon". It really confused me in the first chapbook, but simply annoyed me here, as I would've liked to look up and see the title of the story at any given moment. But maybe I'm just too demanding. However, if I'm being demanding, I'd like to see a different theme for the next chapbook. Selecting imaginary places from Manguel and Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is all well and good, but I'd like to see a theme where the writers don't have to walk the fine line between homage and, well, the dark side. Not that any of the stories strayed to the dark side, but sometimes, it was a close shave.
Still, a great little read that is easy to get through and won't demand too much of your time or any of your money, as you can read it for free here. What have you got to lose? It's worth your time, trust me, especially if you enjoy short fiction.
Cover Commentary: once again, the artist for the cover art is not attributed (for shame!) so I'm left wondering who's responsible. I'm not quite as fond of this cover as I was the previous; however, it certainly fits the theme of the chapbook. Even though it does give me a creepy-crawling Colonial America vibe, a part of history I was never fond of. Still, I appreciate the little moon flags on each of the ships. That's a nice touch, addition or no.
Next up: Blindsight by Peter Watts