Maze presents a raft of speculative short stories and novellas.
This assemblage of speculative tales opens with “Blue Foot,” an environmentalist-themed SF novella about a grandmother named Ernestina and her grandson Ozzie who are cruelly expelled from their ancestral domed haven in an ostensibly eco-blighted future, sent into a dense jungle environment outside that’s reputedly filled with predators and dangers—and whatever remains of two other vast domed cities, which have mysteriously stopped communicating over time. What starts as an intriguing cli-fi premise ends rather abruptly, and readers will wish the tale had gone on. The collection is bookended by the opening chapters of a work-in-progress, Seed Rebels, an incipient YA series (much of this material reads as YA) set at the end of the 21st century, when asteroid bombardment threatens civilization—specifically, “Wind City” on the Great Lakes. Downtown media personality Athena receives advance warning and prepares transport that helps her to flee the worst of the destruction as she receives clues about her origins as an orphan in a farming culture that suffered cruelly in a previous generation’s pandemic. In between these stories are straight-out horror yarns (including “Detour,” in which a fountain of youth has grisly consequences, and the insect-fixated “The Regeneration of Tomas Renell”); even these stories don’t push the envelope much beyond YA boundaries. (“She backed away, jaw dropped, hands covering her screams as she tried to find the man she knew behind the grotesque, bulging eyes.”) Maze professes a fondness for the SF and horror genres borne of watching TV—everything from The Twilight Zone to local Illinois-broadcast horror hosts. This compilation of literary odds and ends will appeal to sympatico readers. Notes from the author follow each tale (in the case of some flash-fiction contest-entries, the commentary is longer than the stories themselves). The book suggests a rising young band’s EP—a fledgling sample of intriguing tracks that promises meatier stuff down the line.
An uneven handful of mostly fantastic short fiction.