Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

"Short Fiction Reading Month" is off to a good start. Here are the initial results, from the last couple of days.

First, two stories from the current issue of Realms of Fantasy: "The Man Who Did Nothing", by Karen Traviss, and "Alephestra" by Bruce Holland Rogers. RoF has been one of my favorite magazines for years (despite my track record of failure in actually selling stories to them). The magazine is obviously focused on fantasy, but their range is broad within that spectrum: not only is there adventure-oriented, imaginary world fantasy, but they also do a lot of urban fantasy, "mythic" fantasy, and occasionally they do downright horror. These two stories were both excellent. "The Man Who Did Nothing" is about the old axiom that "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing." In this tale, the administrator of an apartment bloc comes into some difficulty when the people living in his neighborhood become convinced that the new neighbor is, in fact, the Anti-Christ. Rogers's "Alephestra" is a different story, inspired by astrology and Roman myth. Rogers spins a very brief tale about a Greek deity named Alephestra (whom I am pretty sure is not an actual Greek mythic figure, but a concoction of Rogers's, but I'm not entirely sure on this point). Alephestra is the second moon that Earth once had, but she incurs the wrath of Jupiter, who throws her from the sky. What she becomes after that is unexpected and haunting. (Rogers is known to me as the writer of a very remarkable story from a few years back, "The Dead Boy At Your Window".)

And yesterday I dipped into Neil Gaiman's short-fiction anthology, Smoke and Mirrors. The book contains a grab-bag of differing styles and formats, of which I took advantage. First I read the hundred-word "Nicholas Was…", which is a dark Christmas story; then I read a story-poem called "Bay Wolf", which is an odd combination of Beowulf and BayWatch (and it actually works, somehow); and finally there is "Snow, Glass, Apples" which may be the darkest telling of the "Snow White" story I've ever encountered. I've always found something pretty compelling about the story of Snow White, and I have my own spin on the tale that I'm planning to write when I finish the current baseball story. Gaiman's version is, well, pure Gaiman: it's exactly what I would expect of a Neil Gaiman-"Snow White" story.

Further updates as stories warrant.