Subject: (urth) Strange Birds

From: Nicholas Gevers <vermoulian at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 15:41:24 +0000

I've now read the new Wolfe mini-collection, STRANGE
BIRDS, forthcoming from Dreamhaven Books in April.
It's 40 pages, $10, and of interest especially for the
second of its two stories, "Sob in the Silence", a
masterful deconstruction of gratuitously macabre
horror fiction. The first piece, "On a Vacant Face a
Bruise", is distinctly weird far future SF, about a
boy joining the circus and redeeming it; it's a fine
story, but less focused.

Wolfe has another avian story in the May F&SF--"Bea
and Her Bird Brother", an intriguing allegory (as I
read it) of the schism between humankind's spiritual
and carnal natures; and forthcoming in the first
(June) issue of Jim Baen's Universe is "Build-a-Bear".
Animal themes seem dominant in GW's output at present.

--Nick Gevers.

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