Another top month for stories, and here are my top picks.
Starbeast: a madcap, irreverent Mel Brooks-esque yomp through the dulled yet melancholy mind of The Monster, as he faces off with his returning nemesis, presumably his creator, reduced to insanely babbling the name of a vaguely political 90s beat combo. My type of crazy.
Droflet: very clever piece of circular logic showing the shards of the time traveller's identity, fragmented into as many pieces as the broken places he visits, until at last he's faced with an unrecognisable self, the traveller given unlimited freedoms doomed to spend those freedoms eternally caged.
Cathbad: a good old fashioned ghost story with plenty of spook and weird goings-on, probably enough to warrant the world being expanded to a short story.
Cory Swanson: a forking good tale packed with surreal imagery and bizarre non-seqiturs at every turn, just where I like 'em. This story is a cut above the rest.
Glen: what starts off as a quirky, gnomish little tale reveals hidden layers and depths, as a seemingly cantankerous old git hides unseeming benevolence well, but when the killer punchline is revealed, we're left wondering if the benevolence and malevolence are one and the same. A thought-provoking piece.
Robert Mackay: as usual, a hugely immersive piece, filled with the sort of childhood details - the graze of a knee, the colour of a door - that add up to more than the sum of their parts and make the reader realise the significance of their seeming insignificance through their vividity. Carries a strong Spielberg flavour of children's secrets and the danger of the other, grown-up world.
Mr Orange: a spiritual successor to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, filled with grotesque details, macabre delights and the threat that it just might be lurking under the bed... that typifies the best of children's literature.
The Judge: always worth terning off to visit to Merlin's Mage School. By the end I was puffin my cheeks out at the gull with which TJ applies her pun(guin)s. Some might say it's absolute bushtit, but for me she always shrikes the right note.
Some quackin... sorry, I'll stop now. Some cracking stories in there, but three albatrosses soared higher than the rest for me, and these were.....
Starbeast
Cory Swanson
Robert Mackay
Starbeast: a madcap, irreverent Mel Brooks-esque yomp through the dulled yet melancholy mind of The Monster, as he faces off with his returning nemesis, presumably his creator, reduced to insanely babbling the name of a vaguely political 90s beat combo. My type of crazy.
Droflet: very clever piece of circular logic showing the shards of the time traveller's identity, fragmented into as many pieces as the broken places he visits, until at last he's faced with an unrecognisable self, the traveller given unlimited freedoms doomed to spend those freedoms eternally caged.
Cathbad: a good old fashioned ghost story with plenty of spook and weird goings-on, probably enough to warrant the world being expanded to a short story.
Cory Swanson: a forking good tale packed with surreal imagery and bizarre non-seqiturs at every turn, just where I like 'em. This story is a cut above the rest.
Glen: what starts off as a quirky, gnomish little tale reveals hidden layers and depths, as a seemingly cantankerous old git hides unseeming benevolence well, but when the killer punchline is revealed, we're left wondering if the benevolence and malevolence are one and the same. A thought-provoking piece.
Robert Mackay: as usual, a hugely immersive piece, filled with the sort of childhood details - the graze of a knee, the colour of a door - that add up to more than the sum of their parts and make the reader realise the significance of their seeming insignificance through their vividity. Carries a strong Spielberg flavour of children's secrets and the danger of the other, grown-up world.
Mr Orange: a spiritual successor to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, filled with grotesque details, macabre delights and the threat that it just might be lurking under the bed... that typifies the best of children's literature.
The Judge: always worth terning off to visit to Merlin's Mage School. By the end I was puffin my cheeks out at the gull with which TJ applies her pun(guin)s. Some might say it's absolute bushtit, but for me she always shrikes the right note.
Some quackin... sorry, I'll stop now. Some cracking stories in there, but three albatrosses soared higher than the rest for me, and these were.....
Starbeast
Cory Swanson
Robert Mackay
