Customer Reviews

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

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Yes, reading this collection of short stories is like walking in Ms Hoyt's dreams. And what dreams they are!

Sarah A. Hoyt's book, Crawling Between Heaven and Earth, is a collection of eleven finely crafted short stories that set reality on end. Ms Hoyt is well known for her acclaimed novels, Ill Met by Moonlight, All Night Awake and Any Man so Daring. If you enjoyed these works then you will be pleased to find that two of the stories in this book are from this same Shakespearean realm, but the rest take you even farther afield to places that appear to be so familiar until you realise you have been lulled by her bold and direct prose and are in an alternate reality where the unusual can and will happen.

What I found most appealing about this book is that each story has an introduction by Ms Hoyt explaining how she came to write it. This creates an intimacy, as if you were sitting in her home talking to her, and then she starts in on her story and spins the magic that draws you in.

The collection opens with the story Elvis Died for Your Sins. Suddenly you find yourself in a New Age Store in Colorado, and you wonder where on earth Elvis comes into it. But along with Mariann, the jaded sales clerk addicted to ricecream popsicles, you discover that there is more to the proprietor, Elroy Peters, than meets the eye. Elroy has a concern for his employees that most employers don't. When teenaged Jonni doesn't turn up for work, he and Mariann go to her apartment to check up on her. Mariann is sure that she is dead from an overdose, and then, in the bright light flashing off a jewelled belt buckle, reality slips.

The range of topics is wide. Like Dreams Walking contemplates the outcome of the civil war if Stonewall Jackson had not died at Gettysburg, and the results are chilling. Dear John explores the feelings of clones who are created solely for the pleasure of humans - do they desire more out of their short life spans? Trafalgar Square takes us to a world upside down in terms of communism and democratic rule. Another George is a story where the realisation of what is right demands the ultimate sacrifice, and it involves dragons, so I was hooked. Thy Vain Worlds is a haunting look at the vulnerability even a race of superhumans can be suseptible to.

The story I liked the best was Songs. It is the story of a man who searches for his lost lover twenty years after leaving him. He goes to the motel where they were last together we find that there are parallel forms of existence where the end of their relationship was different for both men - who knows which is real, or if they can somehow cross and unite? Though this is essentially a ghost story, it left me with a feeling of hope.

Ms Hoyt writes with gripping immediacy. Her stories are refreshing, compelling, and entertaining, and ultimately they make you think. This book is a very satisfying reading experience and I would highly reccomend it.

Review by Lynn Nicole Louis

In Crawling Between Heaven and Earth, Sarah A. Hoyt has presented us with a atmospheric and sentimental collection of stories. The primary theme that seems to run through most of the stories here (intentionally or not) is that of loss and the process of loss, coupled with the value of sacrifice. In these stories we see characters achieve, but at a cost. In the end they, or those around, them are changed.

Ask two people to write a story about the loss of love and you will get two very different things. What would make those stories unique is not the core idea the stories revolve around -- loss of love -- but the characters the authors chose to populate their stories with. Ms. Hoyt isn't doing anything new or fancy. You won't find fresh plots or astounding twist endings that you didn't see coming. What you will find is good Character Driven Fiction, sure to appeal to those who like stories about people, not about ideas and things....

...If you like stories that ask questions such as "What does it mean to be human?", or deal with the concept of how our relationships with others define us, you find a comfortable and familiar home here.

Lynn Nicole Louis
Read the full review at www.SFReader.com