This novella collection is powerful, sexy and very, very deadly. 'The Five Loves of Ishtar': Kaaron Warren Follow the path that the goddess Ishtar takes through the eyes of her most devoted worshippers, her washerwomen. Sharokin, Atur, Ninlil, Shamiran, Ninevah and Ashurina share in their goddess’ loves, losses and triumphs, as kingdoms rise and fall in the Land of Rivers. 'And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living': Deborah Biancotti In modern-day Sydney, male prostitutes are dying. Their bones have turned to paste and their bodies are jelly. As Detective Adrienne Garner investigates the deaths, she finds rumours of strange cults and old gods whose powers threaten her city and, ultimately, her world. 'The Sleeping and the Dead': Cat Sparks Dr. Anna remembers little of her life before the war, merely traces of the man she used to love. When three desperate travellers rekindle slumbering memories, she begins a search that takes her to Hell and beyond. A search for love and, ultimately, enlightenment.
Ishtar
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Wow, this book is very special and most unusual. Three talented authors take on three different time periods to tell the sweeping tale of the immortal goddess ISHTAR. As a result, readers are treated to three distinctly different tales, each with their own rich, beautiful voice. The book opens with a washerwoman in ancient times, leaps forward to a murder mystery in modern day Australia, and closes with an end of times story that brings everything full circle. I found it to be a highly mesmerizing journey.
Kaaron Warren gets things off to a sizzling start with The Five Loves of Ishtar, and what a provocative bit of foreplay it is! The language won me over from the start and I'm pleased to say that lovely words are the golden threads that connect all three stories. Here's a bit of memorable prose from The Five Loves: "Gilgamesh himself was scarred across the back and the tops of his thighs. He said sometimes that if a week went by without his father damaging him, he felt as if the world was asleep and that he was dreaming along with them." This part of the book is rather like sharing a dream, come to think of it. A dark, unsettling dream.
In the middle of all this, Deborah Biancotti delivers a gritty, suspenseful, and often humorous cop story that is surprisingly poignant. Of the three, the characters in this one touched me the most. More nice images abound too: A house "...stands high like a pale yellow cement sponge cake." Washerwomen kneel by a swimming pool, "wet to their shoulders", washing sheets. A deadman's face is "...liquid rubber, one eye against the ground, the other staring up at the ceiling, like an olive in an omelette." Mmm.
In the final episode, The Sleeping and the Dead, Cat Sparks asks the question: "Does time still flow when all the clocks are broken?" The world is a wasteland, that much is certain. Like the first two stories, an assortment of disturbing surprises await. "All today's ghosts are from the cities. Sleepwalking, listless in the tide. They chatter to the void, hooked up to the electronic whisper, muttering mantras under faded breath." So good!
Ishtar being all-powerful, she can give you anything your heart desires, and all in one handy little book. If you're a lover of historical tales of desire, Ishtar will satisfy your every need. Born with a taste for war? She'll give you a fight. Scratch that. She'll give you many fights. Love to fall in love? Ishtar does too. For crime-story readers, there's a crime, and for those who enjoy a good apocalypse, there's a good apocalypse. Long story short, Ishtar is all things to all people, which is exactly why she's so dangerously habit-forming.
Kaaron Warren gets things off to a sizzling start with The Five Loves of Ishtar, and what a provocative bit of foreplay it is! The language won me over from the start and I'm pleased to say that lovely words are the golden threads that connect all three stories. Here's a bit of memorable prose from The Five Loves: "Gilgamesh himself was scarred across the back and the tops of his thighs. He said sometimes that if a week went by without his father damaging him, he felt as if the world was asleep and that he was dreaming along with them." This part of the book is rather like sharing a dream, come to think of it. A dark, unsettling dream.
In the middle of all this, Deborah Biancotti delivers a gritty, suspenseful, and often humorous cop story that is surprisingly poignant. Of the three, the characters in this one touched me the most. More nice images abound too: A house "...stands high like a pale yellow cement sponge cake." Washerwomen kneel by a swimming pool, "wet to their shoulders", washing sheets. A deadman's face is "...liquid rubber, one eye against the ground, the other staring up at the ceiling, like an olive in an omelette." Mmm.
In the final episode, The Sleeping and the Dead, Cat Sparks asks the question: "Does time still flow when all the clocks are broken?" The world is a wasteland, that much is certain. Like the first two stories, an assortment of disturbing surprises await. "All today's ghosts are from the cities. Sleepwalking, listless in the tide. They chatter to the void, hooked up to the electronic whisper, muttering mantras under faded breath." So good!
Ishtar being all-powerful, she can give you anything your heart desires, and all in one handy little book. If you're a lover of historical tales of desire, Ishtar will satisfy your every need. Born with a taste for war? She'll give you a fight. Scratch that. She'll give you many fights. Love to fall in love? Ishtar does too. For crime-story readers, there's a crime, and for those who enjoy a good apocalypse, there's a good apocalypse. Long story short, Ishtar is all things to all people, which is exactly why she's so dangerously habit-forming.
By Dave Versace
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ishtar is an anthology of three linked novellas from Gilgamesh Press (edited by Amanda Pillar and KV Taylor) about the Babylonian goddess of love and war. The stories, each by a different Australian author, tells a tale of the goddess in a different time period - the ancient world, the modern day, the near future.
Kaaron Warren's "The Five Loves of Ishtar" is a sumptuous recounting of Ishtar's mythic origins in Mesopotamia, told through the eyes of generation after generation of the washerwomen who serve her. As the title implies, the story charts her great relationships with men, beginning with the demigod Tammuz and including great rulers like Gilgamesh and Sargon among others. Ishtar is beautiful, passionate and wise, but also murderous and fickle, delighting in war and given to tantrums and spontaneously cruelty; as centuries pass she becomes embittered with humanity and weakened by petty betrayals and boredom. Her slow decline is painted with a certain sad inevitability, though Ishtar herself is hardly a sympathetic character. As she goes, so goes the ancient world, passing through decadence into slumbering myth.
Deborah Biancotti's "And the Dead shall Outnumber the Living" begins as a straight police procedural set in modern Sydney. Her no-nonsense, professional police detectives might have stepped straight off the set of every Aussie Cop TV Drama of the past 20 years, though their work for the (fictitious) Gender Crimes unit is an uncommon angle. Investigating a series of repulsive killings, they soon figure out that there is a supernatural angle to the murders. Once the real horror of "Dead" begins to become apparent, it builds grim energy towards a monstrous conclusion. Chilling and nasty and absolutely terrific fun.
Cat Sparks' "The Sleeping and the Dead" is set several decades after an apocalypse that has left the world a MadMaxian wasteland. Into a fortified fertility clinic, Dr Anna endures rather than enjoys the company of a psychopathic cult of nuns as she vainly administers IVF treatments to crowds of despairing women. It's a bleak, hopeless situation that only takes a turn for the worse when some men wander out of the desert with news that sets Anna on a quest into the figurative underworld. A metaphorical retelling of the Ishtar legend which becomes rather less metaphorical as it progressesm, "Sleeping" contains some graphic, striking imagery. No review would be complete without mention of the evocative description of the nuns as "Necromaidens. Fallout wraiths. Praising absent gods for their blisters as well as their dreams" It's a grim, unsympathetic world where morality has worn almost to dust, with an ending that strikes just the right note of slim, ambiguous hope.
Ishtar showcases three writers with very different strengths working to similar ends. Warren applies an obvious love of research to evoke a rich sense of place and mood; Biancotti's command of dialogue and pacing delivers the feel of the breathtaking acceleration and sudden loss of control of a high powered sports car; Sparks' showers her story in riches of imagery, metaphor and tone to create as bleak a future as any I've seen. All three stand on their own. Together, Ishtar is an beautiful and rewarding collection.
Kaaron Warren's "The Five Loves of Ishtar" is a sumptuous recounting of Ishtar's mythic origins in Mesopotamia, told through the eyes of generation after generation of the washerwomen who serve her. As the title implies, the story charts her great relationships with men, beginning with the demigod Tammuz and including great rulers like Gilgamesh and Sargon among others. Ishtar is beautiful, passionate and wise, but also murderous and fickle, delighting in war and given to tantrums and spontaneously cruelty; as centuries pass she becomes embittered with humanity and weakened by petty betrayals and boredom. Her slow decline is painted with a certain sad inevitability, though Ishtar herself is hardly a sympathetic character. As she goes, so goes the ancient world, passing through decadence into slumbering myth.
Deborah Biancotti's "And the Dead shall Outnumber the Living" begins as a straight police procedural set in modern Sydney. Her no-nonsense, professional police detectives might have stepped straight off the set of every Aussie Cop TV Drama of the past 20 years, though their work for the (fictitious) Gender Crimes unit is an uncommon angle. Investigating a series of repulsive killings, they soon figure out that there is a supernatural angle to the murders. Once the real horror of "Dead" begins to become apparent, it builds grim energy towards a monstrous conclusion. Chilling and nasty and absolutely terrific fun.
Cat Sparks' "The Sleeping and the Dead" is set several decades after an apocalypse that has left the world a MadMaxian wasteland. Into a fortified fertility clinic, Dr Anna endures rather than enjoys the company of a psychopathic cult of nuns as she vainly administers IVF treatments to crowds of despairing women. It's a bleak, hopeless situation that only takes a turn for the worse when some men wander out of the desert with news that sets Anna on a quest into the figurative underworld. A metaphorical retelling of the Ishtar legend which becomes rather less metaphorical as it progressesm, "Sleeping" contains some graphic, striking imagery. No review would be complete without mention of the evocative description of the nuns as "Necromaidens. Fallout wraiths. Praising absent gods for their blisters as well as their dreams" It's a grim, unsympathetic world where morality has worn almost to dust, with an ending that strikes just the right note of slim, ambiguous hope.
Ishtar showcases three writers with very different strengths working to similar ends. Warren applies an obvious love of research to evoke a rich sense of place and mood; Biancotti's command of dialogue and pacing delivers the feel of the breathtaking acceleration and sudden loss of control of a high powered sports car; Sparks' showers her story in riches of imagery, metaphor and tone to create as bleak a future as any I've seen. All three stand on their own. Together, Ishtar is an beautiful and rewarding collection.
By Mark
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ishtar is a collection of three novellas, each dealing with the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, war and sex Ishtar. The book is cleverly put together, with each novella putting the Ishtar character in very different time settings (one in the ancient past, one in contemporary times and one in a dystopian future). This, combined with radically different story telling styles, avoids any continuity issues.
Having said that, the stories do work very well together. While they have obviously been written separately and in completely different styles, there are quite a few shared details that make the collection feel cohesive. Excellent editing must have gone into making this collection work as more than the sum of its parts.
For those who don't know much about Ishtar mythology (such as yours truly for instance), the collection is an interesting insight into an unfamiliar pantheon. The stories seem very well researched (to the point of having a reference material bibliography at the back of the book for one of the novellas). Those who are better versed in Assyrian/Babylonion lore will probably find a layer of interpretation and meaning that eludes a newcomer such as myself.
At the time of writing the collection has been nominated in the Best Collected Work category for the Ditmars (Australian speculative fiction popular vote award) and in the Best Anthology category for the Aurealis Awards (Australian speculative fiction judged award).
The Five Loves of Ishtar by Kaaron Warren in the first story in the collection. Each of the titular five loves are spread out over a large timescale in ancient history and their stories are told as separate "sub-stories". Ms Warren uses a third party narrator to describe each of the tales, but makes each narrator from a single family line of washerwomen servants to the goddess. This cleverly allows her to use different voices in telling each of the stories, while still maintaining a sense of connection between them. It also was a very effective in conveying the timescale of the story.
Ms Warren does an excellent job of capturing the mercurial nature of the goddess, and the ancient setting does make the reader feel like they are learning something as well as being entertained. The switch between voices of the very human washerwomen and their insights into the nature of the relationships playing out for the goddess made it much more interesting than if Ishtar or her lovers had been the point of view character.
And The Dead Shall Outnumber the Living by Deborah Biancotti is the middle novella of the collection. Set in modern day Sydney, the story follows a detective, Adrienne Garner, investigating a string of bizarre murders which lead her fairly quickly to a Ishtar worshipping cult.
The style of the story reminded me of some of the stories in Ms Biancotti's Bad Power. It has a dark contemporary urban fantasy feel. The fantastical elements build in a very satisfying manner from the start of the story. The story moved at a fair clip, with a lot of action occurring (especially in the last third of the novella). This was the quickest read of the collection for me.
The main character, Adrienne, is well drawn and sympathetic. She is obviously very competent and experienced, but has an edge of fragility which makes the reader concerned for her ability to deal with the increasingly bizarre circumstances she finds herself in. The fact that she rises to the occasion makes for a very satisfying character arc.
For readers living in or familiar with Sydney Australia, there are a lot of landmarks called out. Most of the action centres around places most people will recognise regardless of their knowledge of the city (the Harbour Bridge, Opera House etc), but there were also a lot of references to slightly more obscure locations which allows the native Sydneysider to feel knowledgable and slightly smug (which shows that Ms Biancotti knows what that particular target market likes).
And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living has been nominated for a lot of awards, including Horror Short Story in the Aurealis Awards, Best Novella or Novellette in the Ditmar Awards and the Novella category in the Shirley Jackson Awards (international award focusing on "dark" speculative fiction).
The collection is rounded out by The Sleeping and the Dead by Cat Sparks. This story is set in the future, after some referenced but not fully explained war that has left the world devestated (some linkages between the novellas are drawn on to leave the reader wondering more about the events at the end of And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living). Anna is a doctor working in a remote location providing fertility treatments to the increasingly desperate women who survived the devestation (and there aren't many of them).
Anna hears of a man running an underground facility who may or may not be a former lover. The story of her attempts to find him, and her discovery of more and more about herself and her past, form the spine of this novella.
The story is written in a very different style again from the first two, and this is a very different take on Ishtar. It was very interesting how the details of the dystopian world harken back to the mythology explored in the earlier stories. Without saying too much about the end, there was a feeling of a circle being completed.
Ms Sparks sketches fantastically vivid minor characters with an enviable economy, which added to the ambiance of the novel. The locations were also well realised and suitably hellish for a dystopia. I was particularly partial to some of the imagery when Anna could see visions of the time before superimposed over the wastelands around her.
The Sleeping and the Dead has been nominated in the Best Novella or Novellette category in the Ditmar Awards.
Ishtar was very enjoyable and I can certainly see why it has garnered such praise and award nominations. Highly recommended.
Having said that, the stories do work very well together. While they have obviously been written separately and in completely different styles, there are quite a few shared details that make the collection feel cohesive. Excellent editing must have gone into making this collection work as more than the sum of its parts.
For those who don't know much about Ishtar mythology (such as yours truly for instance), the collection is an interesting insight into an unfamiliar pantheon. The stories seem very well researched (to the point of having a reference material bibliography at the back of the book for one of the novellas). Those who are better versed in Assyrian/Babylonion lore will probably find a layer of interpretation and meaning that eludes a newcomer such as myself.
At the time of writing the collection has been nominated in the Best Collected Work category for the Ditmars (Australian speculative fiction popular vote award) and in the Best Anthology category for the Aurealis Awards (Australian speculative fiction judged award).
The Five Loves of Ishtar by Kaaron Warren in the first story in the collection. Each of the titular five loves are spread out over a large timescale in ancient history and their stories are told as separate "sub-stories". Ms Warren uses a third party narrator to describe each of the tales, but makes each narrator from a single family line of washerwomen servants to the goddess. This cleverly allows her to use different voices in telling each of the stories, while still maintaining a sense of connection between them. It also was a very effective in conveying the timescale of the story.
Ms Warren does an excellent job of capturing the mercurial nature of the goddess, and the ancient setting does make the reader feel like they are learning something as well as being entertained. The switch between voices of the very human washerwomen and their insights into the nature of the relationships playing out for the goddess made it much more interesting than if Ishtar or her lovers had been the point of view character.
And The Dead Shall Outnumber the Living by Deborah Biancotti is the middle novella of the collection. Set in modern day Sydney, the story follows a detective, Adrienne Garner, investigating a string of bizarre murders which lead her fairly quickly to a Ishtar worshipping cult.
The style of the story reminded me of some of the stories in Ms Biancotti's Bad Power. It has a dark contemporary urban fantasy feel. The fantastical elements build in a very satisfying manner from the start of the story. The story moved at a fair clip, with a lot of action occurring (especially in the last third of the novella). This was the quickest read of the collection for me.
The main character, Adrienne, is well drawn and sympathetic. She is obviously very competent and experienced, but has an edge of fragility which makes the reader concerned for her ability to deal with the increasingly bizarre circumstances she finds herself in. The fact that she rises to the occasion makes for a very satisfying character arc.
For readers living in or familiar with Sydney Australia, there are a lot of landmarks called out. Most of the action centres around places most people will recognise regardless of their knowledge of the city (the Harbour Bridge, Opera House etc), but there were also a lot of references to slightly more obscure locations which allows the native Sydneysider to feel knowledgable and slightly smug (which shows that Ms Biancotti knows what that particular target market likes).
And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living has been nominated for a lot of awards, including Horror Short Story in the Aurealis Awards, Best Novella or Novellette in the Ditmar Awards and the Novella category in the Shirley Jackson Awards (international award focusing on "dark" speculative fiction).
The collection is rounded out by The Sleeping and the Dead by Cat Sparks. This story is set in the future, after some referenced but not fully explained war that has left the world devestated (some linkages between the novellas are drawn on to leave the reader wondering more about the events at the end of And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living). Anna is a doctor working in a remote location providing fertility treatments to the increasingly desperate women who survived the devestation (and there aren't many of them).
Anna hears of a man running an underground facility who may or may not be a former lover. The story of her attempts to find him, and her discovery of more and more about herself and her past, form the spine of this novella.
The story is written in a very different style again from the first two, and this is a very different take on Ishtar. It was very interesting how the details of the dystopian world harken back to the mythology explored in the earlier stories. Without saying too much about the end, there was a feeling of a circle being completed.
Ms Sparks sketches fantastically vivid minor characters with an enviable economy, which added to the ambiance of the novel. The locations were also well realised and suitably hellish for a dystopia. I was particularly partial to some of the imagery when Anna could see visions of the time before superimposed over the wastelands around her.
The Sleeping and the Dead has been nominated in the Best Novella or Novellette category in the Ditmar Awards.
Ishtar was very enjoyable and I can certainly see why it has garnered such praise and award nominations. Highly recommended.
