Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight [Paperback]

Cat Rambo (Author), Michael Livingston (Editor), Lawrence M. Schoen (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2009

Small Press newcomer, Paper Golem, debuts the first in a annual series of single author collections by brilliant new authors. EYES LIKE SKY AND COAL AND MOONLIGHT brings together twenty stories from the extraordinary talent of fantasy author Cat Rambo. Here are tales from seaport city of Tabat, both before and after the sorcerous wars that destroyed the Old Continent. Here are alchemical explanations for failed blind dates. Here you'll find a dryad, the last great elephant, and an uneasy blur of humanity. Cat Rambo doesn't simply amaze and delight, she restores wonder to her readers with every page. You won't simply believe that pigs can fly, you'll question why you ever doubted the premise at all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The first solo collection from Fantasy Magazine co-editor Rambo is a two-sided coin. Her stand-alone stories are crisp and compelling, but the longer ones set in imaginary seaport Tabat are filled with predictable genre tropes that fall flat. On the good side, Heart in a Box follows three present-day tourists in Thailand who encounter a real-life mermaid, while Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish finds an ancient dryad threatened by human progress. Less satisfying, Narrative of a Beast's Life tells the long-winded story of a centaur without a trace of tension or intrigue, and A Key Decides Its Destiny brings nothing new to the tired wizard yarn. Diehard fans of traditional fantasy will at least find plenty of familiar arcs and archetypes, if not so much narrative tension. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

...stories are crisp and compelling...Heart in a Box follows three present-day tourists in Thailand who encounter a real-life mermaid, while Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish finds an ancient dryad threatened by human progress. --Publisher's Weekly --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Paper Golem LLC (August 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097953495X
• ISBN-13: 978-0979534959
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,068,210 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bold New Voice, November 20, 2009

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paperback)

Spirits attack a fort full of despair on the frontier of a mythic kingdom. A girl is cursed to carry flame sprites throughout the land, creating a magical massacre. Tourists on the dingy side of Bangkok meet a woman who may or may not be Andersen's Little Mermaid. An elemental sorceress gambles everything to save her nation and discovers that victory may be the key to her greatest loss.

Cat Rambo, hailed as one of the leading voices in fantastic fiction, collects twenty stories of the speculative, the bone-chilling, and the uncanny. The tales in this volume are so strange, so evocative, and so different from one another that it's hard to believe they were all written by the same person. Rambo has a remarkable talent for plunging readers into alien realities in only a few pages, a talent that's become lamentably rare in recent short fiction.

These stories refuse to be limited to one or a few genres. Rambo freely mixes heroic fantasy with psychological horror, or steampunk with westerns. Hers is an innovative mind that will stop at nothing to tell the best possible story, and she writes for eager, curious readers. Every character she creates has a distinctive voice, and every story she tells expands her world, and the reader's as well.

I applaud Rambo for choosing a small press. However, the wing-and-a-prayer budget of Paper Golem seems to leave Rambo without an editor, and there are places her stories could use a little clean-up. Several sentences drop important words, and some of her punctuation could be called quirky. Though these are distracting, they never diminished my enjoyment. Some of Rambo's story notes, on the other hand, contain spoilers; read her notes only after the stories.

Cat Rambo comes to the reading public with glowing recommendations from luminaries like Jeff VanderMeer and John Barth, and it's easy to see why. Her unconventional fantasy refuses to follow familiar paths, and her writing is a cut above most genre fiction coming pell-mell from the major publishing houses. This, her first short story collection, signals the arrival of a bold voice in fantasy literature, and promises nothing but glory in the future.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange familiarity and familiar strangeness, November 6, 2009

By 

Saladin A. Ahmed - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paperback)

This is a wonderful collection in the truest sense of the word. It is full of wonders that will -- without ever pandering to predictability -- appeal to a wide range of fantasy readers. The standalone stories display Rambo's deft touch in several fantastic subgenres. The stories set in her seaport city of Tabat are like black truffle mac n cheese for genre geeks: comfort food gloriously reinvented for a grown-up palate. In respectful disagreement with the Publishers Weekly review above, the Tabat stories are anything *but* flat or predictable! "Narrative of a Beast's Life," in particular, is just plain brilliant -- a sort of splicing of the 19th c. American slave narrative with the old school Monster Manual. Do yourself a favor and buy this book!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Glimpses and marvels, November 5, 2009

By 

Rebecca Stefoff (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paperback)

One of the most satisfying things about these twenty stories is their compactness. Rambo offers up richly complete worlds--ours and others--in small but vivid tales. All that we need to know is implied, oblique; there are no infodumps here, and no elaborate world-building. The solidity of Rambo's creations lies rather in the telling detail, keenly observed. Characters in some stories, such as "The Dead Girl's Wedding March" and "Dew Drop Coffee Lounge," make radical choices and accept the consequences. In other tales, such as "Events at Fort Plenitude" and the title story, characters who live in interesting times endure events both wondrous and terrible. Rambo's prose is supple throughout, whether she is writing fantasy, science fiction, fable, horror, or humor, all of which are represented here. Brief notes on the genesis of each piece will be of interest to writers and genre buffs. Highly recommended.