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DARK STARS AND OTHER ILLUMINATIONS by Thomas F. Monteleone

DARK STARS AND OTHER ILLUMINATIONS

By

Pub Date: April 24th, 1981
Publisher: Doubleday

A trudging and derivative collection of nine stories and a one-act play garnered from various magazines and anthologies over the past seven years. Two stories are consciously patterned after other writers: the thoroughly predictable ""The Star-Filled Sea is Smooth Tonight"" (the adjustment problems of a cyborg spaceship pilot returned to planetbound human existence) after Loren Eiseley, and ""Taking the Night Train"" (a Ratso Rizzo type discovering something nasty on a downtown New York subway) after Harlan Ellison. Also excessively familiar: aliens-among-us variations, a time-travel anecdote, heavily thematic handling of eyes and photography and transplants. And the slightly better stories here--""Where All the Songs are Sad"" (Sicilian witch) and ""The Dance in the Darkness""-aren't really science fiction. Like Monteleone's novels (cf. Guardian, 1980): pretentious, hackneyed work.