A mixed but mostly satisfying assortment. J.K. Rowling is far from alone in the making of merry magic.
The Mammoth master’s third collection of silly, satiric, ridiculous, cute, pun-packed, cornball fantasy is often fun, but, well, not exactly awesome. Indefatigable anthologist Ashley (Shakespearean Whodunnits, 2001, etc.) weighs in with 32 tales here, dropping a mawkish fairy-tale farce by the comic actor John Cleese (in collaboration with Connie Booth), no doubt to rack up sales, and including an original tale by Craig Shaw Gardner in which the Devil gets a cable TV network. A horde of Charlie Chaplins threatens civilization in Garry Kilworth’s faux monster-movie screenplay, “Attack of the Charlie Chaplins.” In “Math Takes a Holiday,” Paul Di Filippo plays with mathematical paradoxes (and tweaks mathematician/SF author Rudy Rucker) as a pair of angels grant the pathetic wishes of a pathetic college math professor. After raising a few eyebrows, Cherith Baldry’s crude, hirsute “Broadway Barbarian” fits right in with a group of Runyonesque hoods. Most of the stories feature series characters, including Ron Goulart’s occult inspector Max Kearney, John Morressy’s dizzy wizard Kedrigern, and Avram Davidson’s delightful continental debauche, Dr. Eszterhazy, investigating an apparently honest fraud in “Milord Sir Smiht, The English Wizard. As demonstrated in previous collections, Ashley has a gift for finding obscure works by writers not typically associated with the genre, such as the now-forgotten humorist Porter Emerson Brown’s “The Diplodocus,” and the British Jewish fabulist Israel Zangwill.
A mixed but mostly satisfying assortment. J.K. Rowling is far from alone in the making of merry magic.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0867-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The indomitable, quick-on-the-draw Lizbeth remains an irresistible heroine, and Harris proves she still has the magic touch.
In the second installment of Harris’ weird Western series set in an alternate former United States (after An Easy Death, 2018), gunslinger/bodyguard for hire Lizbeth “Gunnie” Rose must accompany a mysterious crate to its destination, but things go terribly wrong.
A long train ride east to the country of Dixie isn’t 19-year-old Lizbeth’s idea of a good time, but it is a job, and she needs it, especially since her last job left her with a long recovery and no crew. Her new troupe, the Lucky Crew, seems competent enough, and when Lizbeth spots some suspicious folks on the train, she’s pretty sure they’re about to be tested. A shootout precedes an explosion that engulfs the train. Someone must really want the Lucky Crew’s cargo. Lizbeth has been shot, her crew has been decimated, and the contents of the crate are gone, but she’s still got a job to do. When a blast from Lizbeth’s past—Eli Savarov, a grigori, or Russian wizard—shows up, Lizbeth discovers that he’s in search of whomever hired the Lucky Crew to deliver the crate. Lizbeth agrees to take a job as his bodyguard, and the two, posing as a married couple (it’s only proper) poke around the Louisiana town of Sally for clues that will lead them to the chest. They quickly realize the town is in racial turmoil: Slavery doesn’t technically exist, but it might as well considering the backward attitudes of the townsfolk and their shabby treatment of Sally’s black citizens. It all seems to lead to a powerful family that holds the town in its thrall, and, of course, the explosive contents of that troublesome crate. Lizbeth and Eli spend quite a bit of time on old-fashioned sleuthing (and, delightfully, between the sheets), but the action ratchets up exponentially in the surprising last half. Lizbeth is a no-nonsense, dryly funny narrator, and while this installment lacks a bit of the spark of the first book, it’s still a shoot’em-up, rollicking ride.
The indomitable, quick-on-the-draw Lizbeth remains an irresistible heroine, and Harris proves she still has the magic touch.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4814-9495-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
A United States space probe erratically falls from orbit and lands near a small Arizona town mysteriously wiping out all life in the vicinity except for two diametrically different survivors. Scientists have to determine "why a sixty-nine-year-old Sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a two-month-old baby". . . among other things. This details the secret mobilization of efforts and the extraordinary precautions taken as the U.S. tries to discover what ominous extraterrestrial entity is causing the plague... as it slowly mushrooms. Four biomedical scientists are encapsulated with the deadly probe far underground in an amazingly intricate decontamination chamber. Obviously based on a pipeline of information to actual equipment and installations (to be annotated with diagrams, etc.), this is horrifyingly immediate and filled with fascinating detail such as the fumigation chamber where they burn the outer epidermis off the skin. Brought right down to earth by what has appeared recently in the news, an exciting demonstration of the possible impossible.
Pub Date: May 26, 1969
ISBN: 006170315X
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1969
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