I’m always ambivalent about Realms of Fantasy. The reviews are fine, the fiction is consistently good or fun or both, and I love the non-fiction Folkroots pieces. I’m happy to allow the sometimes garish and adolescent artwork because just as often it’s eye-poppingly gorgeous.
Where I balk is the advertisements for erotic pulp with embarrassingly bad covers. Notwithstanding this persistent fly in my soup, the February 2008 issue is a tasty holiday treat.
Highlights include M. K. Hobson’s “The People’s Republic of the Edelweiss Village Putt-Putt Golf Course,”where the diminutive inhabitants of a miniature golf course become a comic microcosm of revolution, from monarchy to communism to imperial democracy. Jeremy, who just wants to take the trash out on time, finds himself at odds with his autocratic Marxist-feminist girlfriend Becky, whose parents gave her the golf course for her birthday.
Hobson does a great job of hitting all the ironies and hypocrisies of her ideologues, both large and small. Becky, in particular, is a caricature that resonates. The story’s humor does get somewhat washed out by blood near the end, but the idea still has me smiling.
I knew the end from the beginning of “And Spare not the Flock,” by Margaret Ronald, but that did nothing to inhibit my enjoyment. Cormac is a priest whose flock refused him after he performed the last rites for a dying conriocht, or werewolf. Now he must travel to Rome to resolve the theological question he has raised, but another wolf shadows him, and this one is hungry for stories.
I would have liked more meat to hang the ideas on, and a clearer sense of the setting, a northwestern Europe that corresponds to our own to an uncertain degree. But the characters work, the writing flows, and the combination of a religious dilemma and the role of story in our sense of identity and home has great appeal to me.
“The Singers in the Tower,” by Peni R. Griffinis another story saturated with mood. Notrone’s people, called Shrews, are hardened by generations of oppression, raised from birth ready to rebel against the Kingdom of Rollin. Sheldra works for a dressmaker, supporting her brother Ranu who studies at the University, trying “to make a place for himself in a world in which Notrone was dead.” But Ranu’s classmate is the arrogant Rollish prince, and it can be difficult to abide every insult when you’ve been bred for resistance.
I quite liked this story, despite some inelegancies. For example, it begins with a prologue (the backstory is fascinating but it’s a lurching approach for a short piece) and ends by abruptly breaking the fourth wall. Nevertheless, the characters are excellent, and the ghosts of Notrone’s past, singing in the ancient tower, blanket the tale with a sense of doom.
The Artist Gallery this issue features Adam Rex, whose grotesquely charming illustrations have me committed to picking up some of his children’s picture books next time I take the kids to the library. He also has some very nice fantasy work on display at www.adamrex.com.
