Supernatural Tales 45

Supernatural Tales, issue no. 45, is kind of like a small anthology, edited by David Longhorn. It contains eight stories, none especially long, with a broad range of topics that do fit under the title's rubric.  Most are well-written, but a few of them are oddly structured and less satisfying than they might have been. Mark Valentine's story "And Maybe the Parakeet Was Correct" is arguably the best story in the issue, but it meanders around various locales of European football before it finally jells into something intriguing near its end. Iain Rowan's "The Wildness" is a story of a woman's dissolution via her own "wildness," but it seemed a bit too short. William Curnow's "The Roundabout" is not the best written tale, but the most interesting story-wise, about how a man processes his grief over his wife's death via terrifying visions on a roundabout. In "Stricken," by Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin, a woman with a feverish illness has to face monsters, while in "The Terminal Testimony of David Balfour," Malcolm Laughton gives a tale of enacted revenge.  Rosalie Parker's "The Decision" concerns a woman wavering over whether to keep her inherited childhood home (and her boyfriend) or leaving it (and him) to go to London.  As she decides, she is haunted by the sound of laughter that no one else hears. Charles Wilkinson's "The Harmony of the Stares" concerns a musicians attempt to reproduce a version of the sounds of starlings in a "murmuration," though this cloaks some murkier happenings too. The only dissatisfying story (for me) was Tim Foley's "The Ghost of Niles Canyon," which is a nested double-vanishing hitchhiker-tale whose ending was telegraphed far in advance.  A worthy and enjoyable issue overall.  Order via Lulu,  or see more details via the blog. 

Cheek by Jowl, by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a slim collection of eight talks and essays, as the cover notes, "on how & why fantasy matters."  But the book is dominated by the title essay, "Cheek by Jowl," which takes up almost half the volume and is a thoughtful and critical study of the roles of animals in children's literature. As with most of Le Guin's essays, there are many insightful and quotable observations. I'll cite just one here, "To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizable error."  The collection came out in 2009.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

This book, published in 2015, was filmed as Love, Simon in 2018.  It's a teen rom-com with a twist: the boy is gay. It worked nicely as a two-hour film, so I wondered how the book might be different. It turns out it differs by a lot.  The basic story is still there in both versions, but in the film the details and scenes are all amped up to simplistic Hollywood movie proportions, sometimes at the expense of logic and character motivations. The book is more real to life, but it is very simplistically written. It's all plot and little art, but it's at least readable. (The "bonus" materials in the copy I read are all insignificant, the author and friends gushing over meeting Actors, and two teasers for other books by Albertalli that aren't very interesting.)