Previous SFF Author: Lori Handeland
(1957- )
Elizabeth Hand has won two World Fantasy Awards and one Nebula Award. She also writes science fiction, thrillers, and movie novelizations. Learn more at Elizabeth Hand’s website.
Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
I’m on either my third or fourth copy of Waking the Moon, I can’t remember which. I first read it eleven years ago, loaned it to everyone I thought might be remotely interested, sometimes didn’t get it back, and never felt quite right when I didn’t have it on my shelf. This is one of my Desert Island Books.
The plot revolves around Sweeney Cassidy, an insecure college freshman who goes wild in her first semester away from home.
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 5 | Elizabeth Hand | Mythopoeic Award, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Elizabeth Hand, who famously dealt with the Mother Goddess myth in Waking the Moon and the cult of Dionysus in Black Light, here tackles the subject of the fatal muse: the White Goddess, the lhiannan-sidhe, the Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Mortal Lovedrifts back and forth between several periods of history, between men throughout the years who have fallen under her seductive spell. Along the way there are Hand’s usual lush fruit-metaphors and insect-metaphors and jewel-metaphors,
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Elizabeth Hand | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand
We’ve been living through a renaissance of science fiction and fantasy short fiction in the past decade. New authors are entering the field through the monthly magazines both online and in print. Small presses are also producing excellent work: Small Beer Press, Night Shade Books, and Golden Gryphon among them.
I’d not previously heard of M Press, but if it is a new entry into the small press arena, I’m happy to welcome it, especially if it continues to publish books as strange and brilliant as Elizabeth Hand’s Saffron and Brimstone.
Terry Weyna´s rating: 4.5 | Elizabeth Hand | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
It hardly feels right to class Elizabeth Hand’s Illyria as fantasy, and yet it won the World Fantasy Award for best novella in 2008, and who am I to argue? There are only a few very short scenes of a magical character spaced throughout this story and they are subtle, unexplained and un-commented upon. These moments linger in the reader’s mind, who is free to draw their own conclusions and find their own meaning. And yet despite the essentially non-magical nature of this story,
Katie Burton´s rating: 5 | Elizabeth Hand | World Fantasy Award, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
Generation Loss (2007) is a Shirley Jackson Award winner and the first in Elizabeth Hand’s CASS NEARY thriller series. Cass is a washed-up, alcoholic photographer who was briefly famous in the 1970s for her images of the punk scene. Now middle-aged, she’s struggling, and a friend offers her a job interviewing another photographer, Aphrodite Kamestos, who had her own heyday in the 50s and 60s and now lives reclusively on a remote Maine island.
The job quickly proves to be harder than Cass expected.
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Elizabeth Hand | Horror, Shirley Jackson Award | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand
It’s been a few months since the events of Generation Loss, and Cass Neary, strapped for cash, has made a big mistake. In that previous book, she took pictures of someone’s death but told the police she wasn’t at the scene. She never meant to publish any of the photos. Whoops. So, with the police and the dead person’s son asking awkward questions, and Cass in need of money again, it seems like a great time to take a gig that will absent her from the country for a while.
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Elizabeth Hand | Horror | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand is one of my favorite writers, prose-wise, and I just love languidly relaxing into her style. I feel like I’m always looking for the same kind of writing in other authors — and having been remiss in reading Hand for the last few years, it was nice to finally enjoy the real thing again with the short novel Wylding Hall. Her prose is actually more spare than usual; it has to be, as the entire story is told in dialogue.
Kelly Lasiter and Terry Weyna´s rating: 4.5 | Elizabeth Hand | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |
Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand
Pin Maffucci wanders the midway and aisles of Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park, running errands and delivering dope for Max, the carnival’s She-Male performer. At nearly fourteen, Pin is considered small for his age. That’s partly because Pin, with his trousers, cropped curls and cap, is really a girl in disguise. When a young woman from the nearby Essenay Film Studio is found murdered in one of the dark rides, Pin investigates, putting her own life at risk, and she has no idea who to trust.
Elizabeth Hand’s 2019 novel Curious Toys is an historical mystery set in 1915.
Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Elizabeth Hand | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand
First, a warning: If you are alone while you are reading this book, do not read it after it gets dark. I don’t care how good your motion-sensor lights, your security system and your Ring doorbell are; just don’t do it to yourself. Trust me.
2023’s A Haunting on the Hill, by master writer Elizabeth Hand, is an indirect sequel to another master writer’s classic work, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Elizabeth Hand | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Shirley Jackson Awards will be handed out in just less than two weeks, at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts. This is the third of three columns about the short fiction nominees, this column covering the novellas; the short stories are discussed here, and the novelettes are discussed here (now updated to include a discussion of Jeffrey Ford’s wonderful novella, “The Last Triangle” from the Ellen Datlow-edited anthology, Supernatural Noir).
Michael Morano’s “Displacement” from Stories from the Plague Years begins with a chilling picture: a serial killer is “showing” a victim’s body to her decapitated head,
The November/December 2012 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a mixed bag. Some of the fiction is excellent; some is not.
The best story in this issue is Naomi Kritzer’s “High Stakes,” a novelette that is a sequel to “Liberty’s Daughter” from the May/June 2012 issue (about which I said that I hoped there would be sequels). The setting for the story is a fictional, near future group of platforms and decommissioned cruise ships and other floating flat places in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that serve as home for several groups who found existing governments distasteful.
The latest issue of Nightmare Magazine opens with Angela Slatter’s chilling tale, “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter.” Hepsibah Ballantyne is the titled daughter, the inheritor of her father’s business and haunted by his ghost. In this world, great care must be taken that the dead do not come back as ghosts; corpses must be tightly wrapped and mirrors covered. Coffins must be sturdy, with locks. Hepsibah is therefore an important part of the community, even if she is not well liked. But Lucette D’Aguilar will flirt with her, even indulge with her in a kiss or two,
Terry Weyna | Elizabeth Hand | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
“In Her Eyes” by Seth Chambers is the novella in the January/February 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and it’s a doozy. It’s one of a number of stories and movies I’ve seen lately that address the question of what it is we love when we love someone. Do we love a mind? A body? Both together? Must they be unchanging? They can’t, really, can they, because we all age and grow; change is actually the only constant. And the question goes deeper, to the nature of the mind as an organic,
Here are a few of the short stories we read this week, all of which are free to read online.
“The Summer People” by Kelly Link (February 2015, free online at Wall Street Journal, also included in her anthology Get in Trouble)
“The Summer People” is the first story in Kelly Link’s new story collection Get in Trouble. Fran is a teenager living in a rural part of the American southeast. Her mother is gone,
Today’s SHORTS column features all of the 2018 Locus Award finalists for short fiction. The Locus Award winners will be announced by Connie Willis during Locus Award weekend, June 22 – June 24, 2018.
NOVELLAS:
In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle (2017)
Claudio, a middle-aged curmudgeonly farmer living in a remote area of the Italian countryside, has been a standoffish loner since his wife left him decades ago. He’s satisfied with his current lifestyle,
Kat Hooper, Skye Walker, Taya Okerlund, Terry Weyna, Bill Capossere, Nathan Okerlund, Tadiana Jones and Katie Burton | Charlie Jane Anders, Elizabeth Hand, JY Yang, Kai Ashante Wilson, Karen Joy Fowler, Ken Liu, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Peter S. Beagle, Samuel R. Delany | Audio, Horror, Locus Award, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007
In many ways, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007 anthology is a difficult book to review. For one thing, to me and a lot of my reading/writing circle, this is easily the definitive bible when it comes to short stories of the genre. For another, many of the stories that are included in this collection have been featured in other anthologies as well, so there’s an overlap in terms of stories featured. But I’ll try and talk about what makes this anthology unique from other similar anthologies.
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008
For me, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 has been a two-headed beast. On one hand, it’s an eagerly anticipated book by people involved in the industry, usually for the summation at the front of the book and the honorable mentions list at the back. The various editors are quite thorough and detailed when it comes to this part. The other aspect is, of course, the story/poetry selection, which is what will likely attract the casual reader.
So,
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance is the best anthology I’ve ever read. These stories will be enjoyed by any SFF reader, but they’ll be ten times more fun if you’ve read Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, because they are all written in honor of that fantastic work. Each tale is written in the style of Vance,
Kat Hooper´s rating: 5 | Dan Simmons, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Moon, Gardner Dozois, George R.R. Martin, Glen Cook, Jack Vance, Jeff VanderMeer, John C. Wright, Kage Baker, Liz Williams, Matthew Hughes, Mike Resnick, Neil Gaiman, Paula Volsky, Phyllis Eisenstein, Tad Williams, Tanith Lee, Walter Jon Williams | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
I haven’t actually read every page of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, yet I’m giving it my highest recommendation. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Master and Mistress of Weird, The Weird is 1126 pages long and should really be considered a textbook of weird fiction. It contains 110 carefully chosen stories spanning more than 100 years of weird fiction.
Kat Hooper´s rating: 5 | Abraham Merritt, Caitlín R. Kiernan, China Mieville, Clark Ashton Smith, Clive Barker, Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Hand, Fritz Leiber, George R.R. Martin, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Haruki Murakami, Jeff VanderMeer, K.J. Bishop, Kelly Link, Laird Barron, Lisa Tuttle, Liz Williams, Lord Dunsany, Lucius Shepard, M. John Harrison, Margo Lanagan, Mervyn Peake, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Tanith Lee | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Mixed Up edited by Nick Mamatas & Molly Tanzer
Mixed Up (2017) is an anthology of cocktail-themed flash fiction and cocktail recipes, edited by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer. The stories, like the drink recipes, are grouped by type and theme. I thought the editors took the most liberal view of “flash” here, because I think some of these works might run to 1200 words or slightly over, and I think of flash as topping out at 1,000 words. I don’t think there is a hard and fast threshold,
Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Elizabeth Hand, Jeff VanderMeer, Maurice Broaddus, Molly Tanzer, Nick Mamatas, Tim (T.A.) Pratt | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Previous SFF Author: Lori Handeland
I might say "formulaic" actually.
Your review made me curious, so I looked this book up. Sure enough: Tor. Tor seems to specialize in these…
It's a tightrope act for sure.
[…] Stuart (2 December 2015). “Roadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X | Fantasy Lit…. fantasyliterature.com. Retrieved 8 […]
yes, I mean, there are certainly lots of good sci-fi/fantasy novellas out there, so they aren't impossible to do, but…