Book Review: A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs by Andrew Kozma
In all honesty, this should really be called a booklet review, or, to be fancier, a chapbook review, because this is a slight little thing that a person could easily read all the way through while waiting in line at the DMV, still having time to start on another short story collection or anthology before her number was called. Which is to say that A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs could actually fit into a passport, as its amusingly apt cover might suggest. But though it be little, it is fierce, is this collection of Kafka-meets-Ionesco-as-Introduced-by-Borges bits. With just four wee stories, Kozma manages to sneak a few emotional wallops among what seems like whimsy, and, to readers like me who have been trained on Gene Wolfe for so long, he’s managed to suggest a degree of intertwined meaning that he might not have intended but feels like it’s there.
Angels, Demons and 1930s Spain: The Los Nefilim Trilogy by T. Frohock
The 1930s of Spain was a time and place marked by terrible oppression, a vicious civil war immortalized in works of the time such as Picasso’s Guernica and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s a setting relatively near at hand in time and space, but one which has only modestly been depicted and inspirational to the world of genre fiction. The film Pan’s Labyrinth, notably, captured the brutality of the period in the story of Ofelia and her connection to faerie, even as the unredeemable wickedness of her stepfather shines through the narrative of the film like a witchlight. Ian Tregillis’ novel Bitter Seeds takes the popular tack that the Spanish Civil War was a rehearsal for the Second World War in having his German supermen field test their developing powers during the conflict. T. Frohock’s trio of novellas, set in her dark fantastic Los Nefilim universe takes place in the years just before the full breakout of hostilities.
