But while Passing Strange is a romance at its core, Klages makes it as much a story about this group of friends, ranging from the club scene that gave these women a haven to an unblinking look at the realities outside their safe places. For much of the novella’s length, it’s the story of a small cadre of women who find a common bond in their own lesbian desires and loves, trying to allow each other a safe place to co-exist. Next comes Ellen Klages’ Passing Strange, a tale that largely unfolds in San Francisco during the 1940s, and one whose magical elements only gradually come into focus. It’s a blast across the board, and serves as a welcome burst of energy to kick off the anthology.
She does all of this while giving us a fast-paced tale with plenty of horrific and surreal imagery to go around, all while investing us in the conflict by making it as much about big ideas as it is a murderous red deer. But rather than just letting her politics dictate the story, Killjoy slowly makes them part of the tale’s thematic complexity, as the characters have to wrestle with their own beliefs as part of dealing with the guardian and questioning who diverged from their utopia – the people or the guardian. Killjoy gives us a great community of characters – outcasts both by choice and by fate, all of whom have come together to build something more. All well and good, but when that guardian spirit begins turning on the town itself and those who summoned it, the town finds itself divided as to whether their own ideals or the purity of the guardian should win out, and what exactly “injustice” is comprised of. Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion opens the collection with a bang, giving us a squatter Iowa commune that summoned a guardian to protect them – a blood-red, three-antlered stag that murders anyone who brings injustice into the community.
It’s a great anthology, with four solid entries and four wildly diverse stories, each of which shows you a different side of how fantasy has truly begun to move away from the Arthurian tropes that defined it for so long. This month, in honor of Pride month, Tor released In Our Own Worlds, a collection of four novellas all written by LGBTQ+ authors and featuring LGBTQ+ characters. In recent years, Tor.com has made an effort to publish more novellas, a choice that both allows them to take advantage of ebooks and low prices as well as allowing a wider range of authors who might want to try out a world or idea before taking on a full novel.
0 kommentar(er)
