Strange Birds

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.