![]() ![]() No, the Nameless One is not a new nickname for Voldemort. Koja’s prose throughout the book provides a bevy of indelible passages: “He pressed her leg, the bare skin below the edge of her cutoffs his hand was warm, with long strong workman’s fingers, small hard spots like rivets on the palm, his skin a topographic map of his days: cut wood, carry water, name and number and know all the plants in the world.”Īn impressive collection of stories unafraid to explore bleak topics like death and despondency.Īfter 1,000 years of peace, whispers that “the Nameless One will return” ignite the spark that sets the world order aflame. In it, a morgue janitor in Paris closely observes a female cadaver that he believes holds some sort of mystery. ![]() ![]() Nevertheless, the highlight of this impressive collection is the Poe-esque “The Marble Lily,” one of two stories herein that hasn’t been previously published. Koja tackles a handful of genres, including SF, somber drama, and sublimely understated horror. Now that Susan has died, Anne wants to adopt a dog, which her mother had never allowed-but getting a puppy from the kennel takes a bizarre, unsettling turn. Anne had cared for her ailing art-collector mother, Susan, for years. Other characters, like Anne in “Coyote Pass,” have trouble simply moving on. Some of the characters in these generally grim stories come to terms with a tragedy they don’t want to face: The man in “Road Trip” has intermittent flashes of a car accident (or moments before), and he not only mourns losing a loved one, but his responsibility for the fatality. This act may be his unorthodox way of understanding his famous architect father’s suicide, which likewise entailed driving into a tree. In “Velocity,” an artist creates his art by running bicycles into trees. ![]() These tales have an estimable provenance: “Fireflies” first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (2002), “Road Trip” in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 16 (2002), and other stories in similarly respected books. Thirteen dark fantasy stories feature tortured characters whose lives are drastically changing-or will soon end-in Koja’s ( Under the Poppy, 2010, etc.) collection. ![]()
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