As William Faulkner once observed, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." And the past of the American South lives on in a long literary tradition where fantasy and reality blur. It is evident in the writing of giants such as Faulkner himself, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Manly Wade Wellman, Truman Capote, Alice Walker, and many others. Steeped in this tradition and proud to be its inheritors, storytellers and editors F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan have gathered together stories of the unseen and magical American South by some of the most brilliantly talented Southern writers of our time.
From darkly imagined, powerful tales by Bret Lott, Lynn Pitts, Kalanu ya Salaam, Brad Watson, and Don Webb to a deeply affecting and sensual story by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, to atmospheric works by Richard Butner, James L. Cambias, and Jack McDevitt, to wildly funny stories by Scott Edelman and Michael Swanwick, these original fictions will delight readers who appreciate the unique wealth and breadth of the Southern literary tradition and its natural affinity for the fantastic. With the addition of wonderful reprinted stories by Michael Bishop, Fred Chappell, Andy Duncan, John Kessel, Kelly Link, Sena Jeter Naslund, Daniel Wallace, and Gene Wolfe, this collection is a crossroads of styles and themes where Southern and Fantastic literary traditions meet.
Together these stories paint a wide canvas of the real and mythic South in all its fabulous, terrible, joyous, chaotic uniqueness. They are set in all the Southern landscapes of the mind, from the shores of South Carolina to the city of New Orleans, from small-town Mississippi to the streets of modern Atlanta, from the ghosts of ante-bellum splendor to the shadows of what might be. The contributors range from realistic to Gothic, from magic realists to satirists. What they share in common is the South and the endless stories it inspires.
Industry Reviews
An anthology of fantasy with a pronounced southern flavor. The contributors make up a good cross-section of the field, with a handful of major genre award-winners, including Gene Wolfe, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Bishop, as well as Duncan himself. On the whole, the quality is up to the expectations that this list of names would raise. But while the stories have in common a vaguely southern setting, along with some tendency toward the gothic in subject matter, the variety of approaches may surprise some readers. Wolfe's "Houston, 1943" injects echoes of Peter Pan in a small boy's nightmare; Swanwick's "The Last Geek" brings the title character to a university as guest lecturer; and Kessel's "Every Angel is Terrifying" gives an escaped felon as his guardian a cat that fulfills his every wish. Entries by some of the less-familiar names include Scott Edelman's "My Life is Good," about aliens, obsessed with Randy Newman, who force a humorless scientist to monitor the songwriter's entire life through time travel; Bud Webster's "Christus Destitutus," where Jesus decides to die again in a homeless shelter; and Mark L. Van Name's quasi-psychedelic "Boar Lake." The anthology also includes a number of strong stories from an African-American perspective, including Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's "A Plate of Mojo," a dialect account of a plantation cook's life, and Kalamu Ya Salaam's "Alabama," a spare and stark examination of what lynching meant, not just to the victims but to the perpetrators. And on the science fiction end of the spectrum, Jack McDevitt takes a sobering look at the effects on a small town of the abandonment of the space effort. Judging by evidence here, the southern storytelling tradition is clearly alive and well. (Kirkus Reviews)
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