Customer Reviews

Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I bought this collection because Cat is a friend. I read the collection because I could not put it down. Every piece in the collection is worth reading. Some are sad and terrible in emotion like "A Twine of Flame" and "Sugar." Others are magnificent in feel and tone like "The Dead Girl's Wedding March" and "In Order to Conserve." Most run the gamut of the senses and you come away changed in some way. Certain stories, like "A Key Decides Its Destiny" or the title short story, "Eyes Like Sky, And Coal, And Moonlight," will stick with me a long time to come, turning over pieces of prose or concepts in my head. This is one collection well worth reading and rereading.

I discovered Cat Rambo storytelling when [...] published Clockwork Fairies ([...]). I enjoyed it and when I saw this anthology of her work, I was immediately interested. I was not disappointed.

Eyes like Sky and Coal and Moonlight includes a wide range of stories with different styles, although throughout Cat Rambo's voice shines through. I am a soft touch for a sentimental story and Magnificent Pigs and Grandmother's Road Trip were my favourites. Fantasy fans who enjoy strong world-building will enjoy the Tabat stories and the twisted fairytale Rare Pears and Greengages can not fail to give shivers.

In my blurb for Cat Rambo's new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like "reading the literature from worlds that don't exist. She writes as that world's Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions -- sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple -- there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo's fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can."

When Cat's stories are at their best, they're more than good -- they're emotional, triumphant, beautifully rendered and profound. Her best stories are among the best published anywhere in the industry. This collection is well-worth purchasing for the strength and beauty of stories like "Heart in a Box," "Sugar," "Rare Pears and Greengages," and "The Dead Girl's Wedding March."

The best stories in the collection are "'I'll Gnaw Your Bones,' the Manticore Said" and "The Narrative of a Beast's Life," both set in Cat's Tabat. "I'll Gnaw Your Bones" uses its fantasy setting to contemplate issues of personhood, eugenics, and everyday cruelty. The reader watches a sympathetic narrator commit an act that would be (rightly) condemned as evil in today's society - but which is normal to Tabatians, just as it was normal in our culture for decades.

"Narrative of a Beast's Life" is a fantasy mirror of the slave narratives which were written and published by escaped slaves before the civil war and then used by abolitionists as tools for converting Northerners to their cause. Much contemporary African American fiction plays on slave narratives in some way - for instance, Jones's Known World and Morrison's Beloved have both been described as taking on the project of re-imagining the lost histories of people who could not tell their stories. Rambo's re-imagining of American slavery adds to this discourse in a different way, by altering the slave narrative subtly to create a new perspective for analyzing the original.

Of course, "Narrative of a Beast's Life" also brings the slave narrative form to readers who may never have read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which case it has the potential to mirror the purpose of the original work by simply recreating a slave's eye view of slavery (a thing which, until very recently, was not considered particularly important). Slave narratives are interesting in their own right, as well as being politically and historically invaluable, and Rambo's homage is well-written and full of lush detail.

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