“Facing Africa had me quietly rooting for a sweet outcome beneath all that blazing sky and swirling dust” – Henry Roi About Facing Africa Fuerteventura, 1901. The island, just off the coast of Africa, is in the grip of a severe drought. As merchant and journalist Javier Morales campaigns to reforest the island, Famara, the […]
Click on the above to read more about this book. You can see my reviews and details of more of Isobel Blackthorn’s books right here on this web den.
Isobel Blackthorn is author of the Canary Island quartet, which has received glowing reviews incuding The Drago Tree, A Matter of Latitude and Clarissa’s Warning.You can see my review on this blog of The Perfect Square, which is a meditation on art and artists. Her dark fiction includes Twerk and The Legacy of Old Gran Parks and Cabin Sessions. Her collections of stories includes, All About You, Eleven Tales of of Refuge and Hope.
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‘To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there’s the rub.’ Hamlet (III, i, 65-68)
For when you are dreaming, you will wake. You assume. But what sort of waking will it be?
I think we have all experienced at some time that dread, dripping, crushing sense of fighting our way back up from .. something .. out from .. something. And to emerge as though breaking through an ocean surface, taking great gulps of waking reality, and to realise that the place or something you have fled from was not really there, and must have ‘only’ been a nightmare.
“He dreams of blackness: an endless blackness, darker than the crow and more inscrutable. There is a solidary light far in the distance, a dull yellow pinpoint swallowed into the void, and he stumbles towards it on his phantom legs.” The Crow.
But what if, as you sit up taking in your surrounds, another realisation crashes in – that perhaps you have just woken from someone else’s nightmare?
The calm prose of Dan Djurdjevic’s stories in The Shadow of Duskbelies the growing consternation of his characters as their personalities and identities shift and change. Frequently their perceived realities seem distorted.
“It took a while to realise that I was now in a different place altogether: a blank, featureless room of cold white … empty save for the bleached glare. There were no shapes, no corners, no lines. No shadows”.
They reassure themselves with stock excuses: ‘it was only a dream’, ‘it’s because I’m exhausted’, ‘it’s what happens out in space’, ‘it’s the drugs I took for the pain’. But again and again these ‘explanations’ don’t hold up. The characters sometimes seem to be changing places. Their loves and romances, fears, jealousies, start to seem to belong to other selves, as if they are seeing them through distorted memories. Or they might be seeing mirror images of themselves – which of course are similar but reversed, and perhaps distorted and warped too. Such a possibility is explored in TheMirror Image of Sound. (My review here.)
Dan’s stories, to different degrees, float in half lights and shadows where things may not be what they seem. In the modern romantic drama Nights of the Moon to which The Shadow of Dusk collection serves as a kind of “sequel”, we met the same characters (or are they) who apparently have a very definite existence in the harsh geographical reality of a mining camp in Western Australia. But they are presented to us only through the memories of one person’s point of view. Are we reading what has ‘really happened’?
Perhaps somewhere in the obscurities of moon light, twilight, dusk, and shadows all of us are able to become more acutely aware of alternative lives that we could be living had we made other choices. Perhaps those alternative ‘I’s sometimes merge with and partially morph into the “I’ that we think we own.
To dream. Ah there indeed is the rub. For how can we know if we ever wake fully?
See My review of The Mirror Image Of Sound is here . And of The Girl in the Attichere.
A Single Light is an urban fantasy tale of ghoulish monsters and non-human protectors battling to save humanity amid the spectacular and rugged landscapes of the Royal National Park south of Sydney.‘ From Back Cover.
‘When Rick Hendry is contacted by a federal agent to help investigate a growing number of mysterious vanishings across Australia, he finds himself immersed in a world where normal is a very narrow view of reality. The two men are joined by a doctor, an archeologist, a journalist, and an Afflur Hunter.’
They soon discover that in the bush, south of Sydney, among the beach goers, walkers and picnickers, a menace grows. The mysterious Bledray monsters are preparing for a Gathering; a feast of epic proportions. Only the Afflur Hunter and Guardians can stop them, but their strength is failing and humans are needed to help prevent a second holocaust’.
Reporter Gabriella worries about the state of her colleague Rick Hendry who is clearly not sleeping well. It turns out he doesn’t want to sleep because in sleep he dreams – and the dreams terrify him.
‘There was something out there, taking people ..’ p.36. Officer Anthony Biglia.
Biglia comes across an expose written by Hendry and believes that the reporter can help him. They swap their theories. Jamie Morell finds abnormalities in the victims’ blood. None of them can work out how and why eight people are dead.
‘‘All are equal in the face of eternal hunger.’
For the Bledray, Maliak, Moriah, Jedidiah and Laeh, the humans exist only to be protected or to be hunted. On the plains below the high country lie millions of souls, a feast to gorge on.
‘ She ran then, urgency gripping her as the screaming of dying souls mixed with the stars and faded into oblivion.’ p. 136
I found that the hunger of the creatures is believable- it’s the idea of insatiable appetite taken to extremes. The sense of menace grows as the hunters of souls and the hunters of Bledray converge upon one another until there is a climatic encounter as bush fire rages. (The fire scenes particularly struck me in the light of the huge fires in NSW last summer which covered some of these same ranges.) The author’s attention to detail and sense of place in the descriptions of these highlands in serves to ground the story. You can read more about Patricia Leslie and her work at her website patricialeslie.net.
Patricia Leslie also wrote The Ouroborus Key, an absorbing blend of Sumerian mythology, esoteric Templar secrets, and a detective story. This makes for a fascinating combination as you can see from my review here.
The graphics shown here are courtesy of the author and of publisher Odyssey Books.
PLEASE FOLLOW USAt Baffled Bear Books . Simply plonk your paw on the FOLLOW buttons on this very page. You can also follow on Amazon and on GoodReads. We are also on Instagram, and Tiktok, and Anchor/ Spotify and Mastodon (link is @mawsonbear@mastodon.au. )
You are at Mark’s blog called Baffled Bear Books. Mark is a dark coffee tragic, bibliophile and Guardian of Mawson Bear, a Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears.
‘When isolated from the bustle of civilisation, the mind slips unfettered.’
Seven Ghostly Spinscontains six paranormal tales that are short enough to read during a commuter ride to work. (But will you then feel a bit too disturbed to carry on as usual that day?) One tale, ‘Abiku’, is a creepy novella perhaps best read when safely at home with the lights turned on.
‘Amelia’s mouth opened and an infinite, desolate scream escaped.’
I am not a frequent reader of ghost or horror tales. Although the author offers tantalising notes on the inspirations for this collection, for instance, that one of the stories is based on “a real walk in the moonlight”, I still began by thinking, “All right then, so let’s just see if you can get to me.”
Fellow Baffled Ones, these stories got to me.
We get crumbling houses and overgrown paths in abandoned gardens, dark basements, cemeteries, fortune tellers, and birds ominously pecking at the window. Yet, as the book’s subtitle suggests, the stories are more about ‘brushes’ with the supernatural than with horror. We are offered different levels of the mind and of sight, portals that open unexpectedly, places that seemingly tug at the mind, objects that influence actions.
‘I close my eyes and I float for a while, not in my room but in a dream. I think I should go home but I don’t know how. I’m not worried though ‘.
‘Alison’ is the sweetest ghost story I’ve encountered although very sad. It’s based on the legend of a girl who died in a real theatre in San Francisco.
‘By The Iron Gate‘ is as much about the pathos of a woman’s tightly restricted life as about the supernatural. ‘I would grab the iron bars and stare into the moonlit garden, like a prisoner longing to return to her cell.‘ In ‘She Caught A Ride’, a hazing goes wrong, and in ‘Carolina Blue’ a chiffon dress leads to a fateful encounter of the heart. The dully named story called ‘205 1/2, 25th Street’ is anything but as a man’s viewing of a real estate purchase turns into a chilling time slip through to the actions of his forebears.
I enjoyed these stories both for the brushes with supernatural elements and also for the well written glimpses of the characters’ lives wherein time and again a carefully added word or phrase by the author turns the ordinary into something else. Why not let your own mind slip unfettered for a while. I think you may close the book, as I did, feeling thoughtful about particular ‘odd’ events in your own lives.
Seven Ghostly Spins, by Patricia Bossano, with featured author Kelsey E Gerard, is published by Water Bearer Press. Patricia Bossano has also written Faery Sight, Nahia, and Cradle Gift.
Where to unshroud it: From Amazon in Kindle and soft cover, Barnes and Noble in Kobo and soft cover, also Waterstones . Hardcover editions are also available. Or, ask your friendly local bookstore to order it in for you, and for your friends who appreciate a frission of the supernatural.
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