The Shimmering Door (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This collection features 32 never-before- published sorcery stories from leading fantasy writers, among them Jo Clayton, Dennis L. McKiernan, and Janet Berliner.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A veteran fantasy writer's (Freeze Frames, 1995, etc.) anthology of 32 contemporary, original, mostly American stories. Greek myth is well-represented, with tales such as Susan Shwartz's feminist ``Hunters,'' about Artemis' tragic love affair with a mortal, and Esther M. Friesner's amusing if overlong ``Tea,'' about a lustful male aerobics instructor on a cruise ship who finds himself in the middle of a parlor squabble between Circe, Medea, and Prospero. Many efforts here draw upon reserves of deep sorrow: M. John Harrison's ``Seven Guesses of the Heart,'' for example, concerns the inability of magic to comfort a grieving father, and Gregory Feeley's ``The Drowning Cell'' is a sad story about a girl connecting with a boy who, centuries ago, drowned in a debtors' prison. Alternatively, the boy may be only an imaginary playmate, but, in any case, experiencing his sadness enables the girl to free herself of her own troubles. ``I just can't believe in a world where everything is run by science,'' says the main character in Connie Hirsch's amusing romp, ``Wicked Cool,'' which might be a manifesto for fantasy writers; most of these pieces feature some sort of ``magick''--in Hirsch's case, not always the magick of the Old Religion, since her witches fly around contemporary Boston on broomsticks. Mark Kreighbaum's overtitled ``Looking in the Heart of Light, the Silence,'' however, convincingly evokes the allure of the black arts: Two practitioners play out a foreordained scenario on a gloomy winter night in Minneapolis, intoning a series of powerful spells. Magick becomes bittersweet in Karawynn Long's clever commentary on the abortion debate, ``Riddle in Nine Syllables,'' in which a high-school girl invokes a medieval spell to induce a miscarriage in her friend, only to find herself carrying the fetus. Not flawless, but nearly so. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 434 pages
• Publisher: Harper Prism (August 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061053422
• ISBN-13: 978-0061053429
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,351,387 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Open and Enter . . .", January 20, 1999

By A Customer

For those who are wondering, this is the same book that was published as 'Sorceries' by Voyager in Australia and England.

A wonderful mix of authors, and a wide variety of stories and setting. It was a great introduction to me to authors who are not available in Australia, and a welcome homecoming to some of my favourite fantasy authors. I was only sorry that there was nothing by Kerr herself in the collection, although her co-author of the Pinch novels, Mark Kreighbaum is represented, along with another of my favourites, Charles de Lint.

My most favourite story in the whole collection was Connie Hirsch's 'Wicked Cool'. A fun story in an absolutely luscious setting. I hope she writes some novels or perhaps a collection of short stories in that world, as I would love to visit there again. The setting is a university in Boston where the students study magic as part of the curriculum, encounter ghosts on the stairwell and fly around on broomsticks. More please!