This short story is about an actual place near Kiama where I live in the Illawarra. The story was a semi finalist in the Aussiecon 4 Make Ready fantasy/scfi competition 2010. It's now part of my short story collection: A Matter of Perception “Hurry up,” Con shouted. His voice sliced through Ellen’s morning fog. She groaned and rolled over, pulling the quilt over her head. Con poked his head into the bedroom. “Are you coming or what?” “I’m coming,” Ellen grumbled. She struggled out of bed and grabbed last night’s clothes off the floor. “I wanna see this place as much as you do, I’d just rather do it later, that’s all.” “I’m not going later.” “I know,” she growled. Why else would she be getting up before sunrise. Half an hour later, they stood in lung-searing cold staring at blocks of jagged rock silhouetted against a predawn sky. Waves crashed, splashing treachery. A briny breeze whined around the basalt forms and Ellen shivered. The rocky monoliths reminded … [Read more...]
Unpredictable supernatural suspense: The Glade by Harmony Kent
The Glade is basically a supernatural suspense story. It's different, intriguing and totally unpredictable. Like many indie works this book crosses genres. The supernatural element puts it in the fantasy category, but apart from The Presence that Helen and Geoff, her husband, feel in their little glade in the Forest of Dean and the dead people who get up and walk, it all happens in the fairly ordinary world of a small country village. It's this low key approach that makes the story all the more chilling because we can't immediately dismiss it as a fantasy world. This real world basis means that the book also fits into the mystery and suspense categories. There isn't so much fantasy that it would turn off those who aren't generally fantasy readers, and there's plenty of mystery and suspense for fans of those genres. Kent's characters and the world she creates around them are very real, but beneath this ordinary exterior lies a dark underbelly. Helen has cancer and she and her husband … [Read more...]
A superb supernatural mystery: Vingede by Krisi Keley
The second of Krisi Keley's Friar Tobias mysteries is even better than the first. Once again the author's background in linguistics and theology provides the unique material for this superb supernatural mystery. A man seeks Tobias's help for his foster son. He thinks the child may have witnessed a crime, but the boy has a speech problem due to either autism or schizophrenia, so no one can understand him. Like Ms Keley, Tobias has a degree in linguistics which is why the man seeks him out. Paolo speaks in poetry and makes obscure references to what Tobias eventually figures out is an old fairy tale about a girl and her eleven brothers that are turned into swans by a wicked witch. He senses that someone is in trouble, but who? Tobias's friend, the psychiatrist priest, wants him to meet a mute and apparently traumatised girl who has turned up in a hospital and, in what appears to be sheer coincidence, her sketches indicate that she fills the role of the girl in the fairy tale. But where … [Read more...]
