Tag: stories

And Your Flesh Shall Be A Wild Night and A New Road

Microfiction inspired by two well-known sayings and a recent band festival with someone important ✨

The wild scream of the guitar ripped down his spine, surging like power in his veins. Dominion, utter and absolute electricity, was what their music held over the night.

.  . . 1984.

That was the last time he saw her, and all he could recall were a few, sparse details of how she looked, before she’d faded from his life. Shiny curls and almond skin, and a frame so thin it bordered on frailty. Those details he could recall, and the very last question he asked.

“Heyyy,” her voice broke on a beach of uncertainty as she edged up beside him, eyes a strange elixir of warm and aloof. He regretted saying no to hugs and photos when she had asked over the phone a week ago. But only because he wanted to touch her now, to make sure she was real.

And only because he wanted new memories of anything but that fucking question.

“Hey.” He allowed the sudden burst of heat in his chest to reach his eyes at the sight of her.

Your time is almost up.

They had met over two decades ago, both living a charmed life of naïve optimism. Just two strange kids, sheltered and unsophisticated, who shared a love for folk music, and stargazing, and each other.

“You look great,” he added, almost a beat too late. “. . . Life has been kind.”

The wry regard she gave him slipped into something that lingered, her eyes and mouth filled with stories he wanted badly to taste. Then she broke the moment with a nervous smile as she turned her attention towards the stage.

“You look good too.”

He only just heard those words, swimming soft and slow under the thunderous gathering that threatened to crush them from all sides.

Burn into obscurity.

The energy in the air shifted then, as the chords of the next song opened out over the crowd. Atmospheric and full of emotion. It cast a spell and a shadow over his senses, and when she collided with him, jostled by bodies moving in and out of the throng, it didn’t help the feeling.

He watched her reach for his arm to steady herself, and all he could think of was the realness of her flesh, and what he had once asked her to do.

You’re so much more.

So much more.

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Uprooted

Review by Knicky L. Abbott

Author name: Naomi Novik

Book Title: Uprooted

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: He may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every 10 years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” 

Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for 10 years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood. 

The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows – everyone knows – that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.

Publication date: 1st March, 2016

Available formats: Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook and Kindle

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Uprooted-Novel-Naomi-Novik/dp/0804179050/

I’ve been meaning to write this review since summer 2021, when I first read this book, and I’m afraid I’ve waited too late. But I can’t shake the fact that I must sing the praises of the most wonderful fantasy story I’ve read since my childhood days, no matter how much time has passed since reading it. Perfectly named, and filled with characters I will never forget, Uprooted is the story of a natural village witch, Agnieszka, sacrificed to a beautiful but cold wizard, Sarkan the Dragon, and used for her magic to keep the malevolent, corrupted darkness of the Woods from consuming not only her village, and nearby villages, but all the world.

This book fed me for days, alternating between a languid, poetic, nature-infused read and an exciting, page-turning, moreish binge. No matter where I took my breaks, I couldn’t shake its satisfying hold on my imagination, called and called again by the small adventures and sweeping epic in which Agnieszka found herself entangled, from living with and learning from Sarkan, to the historical intrigue of a taken Queen, lost all these years to the Wood, and the political strongarm of her prince-son demanding that they find his mother. When I read the last line on the last page, I mourned for days the absence of the characters I had come to adore.

It is those characters, their chemistry and their finer details, that is the backbone of this book. I particularly enjoyed the character of Kasia, Agnieszka’s dearest friend, who was not at all who or how I thought she would be at the end of their journey; Her character so quietly strong, resolute and masterful, echoed the skill of novelist Novik in a manner that felt perfectly true to form. Yet it was the character of and behind the Wood itself, that left its mark on my mind as simply fantastic, and one of the most originally-rendered antagonists I have read in a fantasy story to date.

The feeling of time and things in this story are unmatched in their fantastical elements, unmatched and utterly delightful, leaving me greedy and deeply enthralled. It didn’t just feel set in the village of Dvernik in the kingdom of Polnya, it felt set in the very heart of me, and there is nothing more I love than a good story that makes me feel like I’ve come home to myself. A beautiful tale written in beautiful prose, Uprooted will remain a favourite of mine close to forever, and I cannot wait to get into other books of similar ilk to feed the near-hunger it left behind.

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For the Wolf (Wilderwood Book 1)

Review by Knicky L. Abbott

Author name: Hannah Whitten

Book Title: Wilderwood Book 1 For the Wolf

The first daughter is for the Throne.
The second daughter is for the Wolf.

For fans of Uprooted and The Bear and the Nightingale comes a dark, sweeping debut fantasy novel about a young woman who must be sacrificed to the legendary Wolf of the Wood to save her kingdom. But not all legends are true, and the Wolf isn’t the only danger lurking in the Wilderwood.

As the only Second Daughter born in centuries, Red has one purpose—to be sacrificed to the Wolf in the Wood in the hope he’ll return the world’s captured gods.

Red is almost relieved to go. Plagued by a dangerous power she can’t control, at least she knows that in the Wilderwood, she can’t hurt those she loves. Again.

But the legends lie. The Wolf is a man, not a monster. Her magic is a calling, not a curse. And if she doesn’t learn how to use it, the monsters the gods have become will swallow the Wilderwood—and her world—whole.

Publication date: 1st June, 2021

Available formats: Paperback, Audiobook and Audio CD

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Wilderwood-1-Hannah-Whitten/dp/0316592781/

For the Wolf is the story of the Second Daughter, Redarys and the Wolf of the Wilderwood, Eammon. It is the story of a sentient, prison wood and its binding forest magic, as it leeches the life from all Second Daughters and all Wolves, in order to hold its shadow monsters and mad kings at bay, and protect the rest of realm. And it is the story of how voluntary sacrifice makes the only difference that matters in the quest for meaning, self-knowledge and the place where you belong.

I gobbled this book down in two days, finding every opportunity to return to its pages, inexorably pulled over and again by the chemistry between its characters, the dark, dreamy telling of their story, and how true it rang in my heart. It’s really special that way. Like a letter to myself written by someone else’s hand.

Red is stalwart about her fate; Eammon stoic about his. She is filled with a dangerous magic – Wilderwood magic – and is willing to be sacrificed to protect those she loves, particularly her twin, Neverah. Eammon is willing to sacrifice himself wholly to protect those lives beyond the woods, because of the fate passed onto him through his parents, the original Wolf and Second Daughter. And as the story is told, they’re both willing to face that fate without cowering, despite their doubts, dread, and misgivings, for love of each other.

The scrumptious, slow-burn romance aside, my favourite part of the story was the curse itself. In almost every dark fairytale I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, a curse is just a thing made mention of, for the hero or heroes to inevitably overcome. Yet in For the Wolf the curse lives and breathes on every page, between the surrounding trees and the very bones of our main characters, and while it was transmuted and understood deeper by both those characters and I in the end, it never left or was broken in the traditional sense of the word.

In For the Wolf, the magic and worldbuilding, though wonderfully complex, is not too complicated to follow or understand. And the romantic love between Redarys and Eammon, while Red Riding Hood-coded, has a delightful Beauty and the Beast aesthetic, down to the crumbling castle keep in an atmospheric, twilit wood. Much like a Wilderwood Sentinel, it glows brightly on the pages, roots set deep in this first installment of the Wilderwood duology. And much like the Wilderwood itself, is one of the reasons why I can hardly wait for Book 2.

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A Seeming Glass: A Collection of Reflected Tales

Review by Knicky Laurelle

 

Author name: The Random Writers

Book Title: A Seeming Glass: A Collection of Reflected Tales

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How can I read the futures if I cannot see your skin?’ Six mysterious swans glide on a holographic pond in a totalitarian capital city. A terrified girl awaits her part in a ritual that could change the future… and the past. A dancer in ancient Jerusalem mourns her maimed sister and prepares for the performance of her life. A sword of legend sends its wielder back through the fiercest battles in history. A freshly qualified vampire hunter experiences the practical side of his vocation. Fourteen intriguing, dramatic, humorous and unsettling tales, inspired by existing stories and reflecting the breadth of storytelling from Greek myth to Hammer Horror, via fairy tales and Arthurian legend.

Length: 264 pages

Release date: 13 July, 2014

Available formats: Paperback and Kindle from Amazon

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Seeming-Glass-Collection-Reflected-Tales/dp/1500673579

“For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas.”

No finer words than these from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen capture the ethos of the short fiction collection, and debut tour de force of The Random Writers, A Seeming Glass. A mirror reflecting the truth of what could be and might’ve been, the universal that underscores every story ever told.

Even the most original work in this anthology echoes the oldest fairy stories, myths and legends we know, from Arthurian legend to Scottish, Irish and Greek mythologies, a genderbent take on the biblical Samson and timeless classics such as Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White.

This anthology is an experience, one that fully satisfies. The Rising Tide by Lorraine Wilson is deeply eerie and unsettling, and wildly contrasts in mood and temperament with the crackling-hot badassery of Karen Ginnane’s Samsara. Mirror Skin is an amazing contribution by Shell Bromley, and as the name suggests is perfectly in keeping with the reflective theme.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Straw Man by Martin J. Gilbert, and was absolutely thrilled to see Matthew Willis’ No Loyal Knight and True, a story inspired by one my favourite poems, The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Each story builds on the themes of the ones they’re inspired by, showing a different truth, an alternate aesthetic, old paths and endings made new.

And none more so than A Lamentation of Swans by J. A. Ironside. This vividly reimagined telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Wild Swans, set in a futuristic, totalitarian world of transhuman slavery, technology and even possible cannibalism, is simply astounding in imaginativeness and execution; while being utterly faithful to the spirit of the original tale.

Harrowing and inventive, I’ve never read anything like it, and it was my favourite story in this entire anthological work. This is a mirror, A Seeming Glass. Held up to stories of old, reflecting possibilities of a different kind, and echoing the constants that remain true in the stories we all love.

Overall Orb Rating

4 Roses – Bloom and Grow (I enjoyed the splendour)     

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Links to top reviews for A Seeming Glass: A Collection of Reflected Tales

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RRB7Q6ATSPX8Q/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1I9KOYZCQ3HEN

 

 

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Beyond Her Ramparts

She throws the walls up around herself higher than her eyes can see. They erase the open sky, and she disappears into forever. She is infinite, a story, walls without end. Walls deep and dense like forests, stony and unyielding like caves. They hold her transfixed, keep her safe from outside worlds, far below and deep within. These walls do not crack, do not allow for anyone’s entry, or escape. Impregnable. Incurious. Unfeeling. Nothing can reach her in this tower, where no windows or doors exist. How free she is, entrapped here, hidden away from everything that would do her harm.

She waits. Not for the beast raging beyond her ramparts seeking its way back in, but for the boy, the beautiful boy still yet to come. He will be gifted by the faeries, as she was when she was a child. The gift of charm. The gift of brilliance. The gift of love. These gifts will he have and other gifts besides but on those she is too broken to dwell. Her face contorts from once-blushing maiden to a mad woman in the throes of anguish as she remembers why. As her eyes fall towards her engorged belly, swollen with the child of the beast.

She had thought her walls impregnable but a hard kick from the child inside her proves that she was wrong. She is strong, but so is this child, and so is his will. From the first time he came to her – a false face with false sentiments and sweeping gestures that promised happily ever after – she had wanted this. Until she recognized his hatred for her, realized that he saw her as nothing more than a thing with which to please himself, tearing at her again and again and again, until neither of them knew the person who was left.

Her heart beats hard and slow as her eyes travel up the wall before her. It is a poisoned apple her heart, each beat nourishing and embittered. All she had ever wanted was to be devoured by someone who could love her, not break through her barriers and leave her disfigured with his flesh and blood inside her body. But the child brings change, and the boy won’t need to cut a path through thorns to awaken her. Because he is the way, because he is the door, when she walks out through him, she’ll come home.

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Something Rich and Strange: The Past is Prologue

Review by Knicky Laurelle

 

Author name: The Random Writers

Book Title: Something Rich and Strange: The Past is Prologue

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The Synopsis: ‘It started with the Zhar-ptitsa, the Firebird, as these things must. No, let us say it started again with the Firebird.’

A group of researchers open a door in the present day that has been closed for centuries – and should have stayed that way. In 1840s Ireland, starving children face desperate measures to avoid the crisis consuming the land. A visitor to 19th century Japan learns what it takes to fan love to life. A girl struggles to rise above the walls that surround her in Georgian England. In 7th century Britain, a scribe translates the true value of a legend. Fourteen surprising, moving and compelling tales, weaving the next steps in the telling of famous events and stories from Greek myth to English folktale, via fairy tales and real historical events. The second anthology from The Random Writers – this is Something Rich and Strange.

Length: 308 pages

Release date: 29 November, 2015

Available formats: Paperback from Amazon or Createspace Direct, eBook from Nook, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple and Smashwords

Purchase links: 

amazon.co.uk/Something-Rich-Strange-Past-Prologue/dp/151959724X

amazon.com/Something-Rich-Strange-Past-Prologue-ebook/dp/B018PK114A

“And so it ends.”

Or in the case of Something Rich and Strange: The Past is Prologue, begins again. I recently finished my first fantasy anthology read of 2016 and it couldn’t have made a more perfect beginning to a new year of stories to discover and explore. A marvel spun by The Random Writers from the fluid and infinite nature of Story itself, these are tales of wonder, a collection of rare and exotic fruit in a mythic orchard, each one bursting with secrets and truths untold. “What have you to offer me, poised on the edge of my life?” you might ask of it, to quote a favoured line of mine from this work. The answer is magic and sacrifice, power and loneliness, flight and despair. The answer is in its name.

Because this anthology is a many-splendored thing it would go without saying that it is resonant on myriad levels. You will find something, or someone, here to love. That is not to say it’s perfect. I found some stories middling compared to others, with endings that confused and fell short of resonance with me, while others sailed clean over my head and were simply not my thing. But I won’t say which ones, for all of this is a matter of mere opinion, which you might not find to be true and which is really my point.

A new year brings with it a new focus, and so I’ll focus on what I love. I loved Walls. It stroked my love of beast and tragic fantasy, and was a strong contender for my favourite wonder tale over all. I thought The Return of Lottie White clever and immensely enjoyable, and Speaking The Girls beautifully-written and yet another contender for overall favourite. The Descent of Man handled its premise and ideas so well as to leave me wanting more, and Godfather Death Part II won points for its narrative POV and having one of the strongest endings amongst all the stories.

I found The Great Hunger to be a wonderful coalescence between the Irish Potato Famine of 1845 and Hansel and Gretel, with traces of Peter Pan stirred in to darken the scent. Gold was quite funny, despite its rather abrupt and bleak ending, and Towards a Pure Land shone with characterization so emotively engaging and brilliant that my heart turned a cold, angry bitter at the ending, and I wanted to throttle the writer for thwarted hope I knew I had no right to feel. Which leaves the latest literary love of my life – Vasilisa, my favourite story, and my god, what perfection is here.

I anticipated reading this story most of all. Vasilisa tales are more often times than not inhabited by someone I love very much – Baba Yaga, the witch of the Iron Forest. There was no Baba in this Vasilisa story, but I was not disappointed. How could I be, with words so exquisite, a chase so surreal and loss so tragic it broke my heart as if it were my own? I’ve never read anything more perfect. And so it is with this anthology. It is as much home to thrills and enchantment as it is to uncertainty and fears, all of which you will gladly suffer, for all are shaping something, not just rich and strange … but rich and strange, and beautiful.

Favourite Line(s):

“What have you to offer me, poised on the edge of my life?” – Speaking the Girls, Karen Ginnane

“Soon, the battlefield was a mass of men, rippling, swelling and contracting like a flock of starlings in the early evening.” – Parchment, Matthew Willis

“That very hardest time of day is the hour after sunset when the whole world is tipped towards what it has lost and the sky is not yet done with bleeding.” – Vasilisa, Lorraine Wilson

Overall Orb Rating

4 Roses – Bloom and Grow (I enjoyed the splendour)     

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Links to top reviews for Something Rich and Strange: The Past is Prologue

amazon.co.uk/review/R3RB7OP2HPND72/

amazon.co.uk/review/R1MSJG058KJCKX/

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A Song in Red and Grey

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‘Oh, the red leaf looks to the hard gray stone

to each other, they know what they mean

somewhere, their future is still yet to come

in ways that are yet as of now unforeseen’

– Suzanne Vega, Song in Red and Gray

Strange

“I’m cold,” she says, looking into his eyes. Her expression is careless, the walls she had kept it behind long crumbled. The remains of his faded shirt are tucked around her more delicate areas. Her legs and back are bare to the frost that coats the walls overnight. Every night for the last ninety-eight days, they’d been held captive in the grey stone room. Every night for the last ninety-eight days, since they had been seized.

The only warmth she has felt during that time is the warmth she feels now. His fingers splay across her upper back, the cupping of her slender form in his arms, firm and protective. The promise to keep her safe flares unbidden in the gaze he returns as he pulls her closer. His head lowers towards hers own. Taupe-coloured hair falls around a youthful face, the strands mingling with her auburn mane, tangled from months of neglect.

His odour envelops her as she burrows in close. It has been days since they were last allowed to wash. That was when she had lost her own clothes, the guards who kept watch over them finding their absence … amusing. Until he had macerated the flesh of one guard’s nose with a blow, for touching what their absence revealed. They have been given no more clothing to replace the ones stolen and torn, recompense for the injured guard.

And no more baths either. His scent is pungent, and pleasant to her. She has come to associate that smell with his warmth, both now a source of great comfort.

“I’m sorry …” he says, his lips cracked from hunger. She nods thinking he means the cold. “… I didn’t think that when we left, we would’ve ended here.”

She plays with the thumb resting on her shoulder, her arm wrapped around her breasts concealing them from view. The gesture is unthinking.

“What we did was wrong,” she says, her words simple. They contradict the emotion raging in her heart. She shivers. The chill of the air intensifies with each moment as does the chill of their circumstance.

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