When first I discovered the thrill of magical beauty I was a child – too young to comprehend what had happened.Still am, in fact. Oh I was smart enough back then to know that inside the little cardboard tube were mirrors and pieces of colored glass, which, when I peered into the small end and tapped the tube, those pieceswould rearrange themselves into patterns so surprising, so glorious they rivaled the windows of the Lutheran church my mother took us to on Sundays and holidays. It wasn’t only the kaleidoscope’s mechanics that intrigued me, but something beyond, something deeper and subtler ..read more

Had I not already known who wrote The Long-Legged Fly I would have been shocked to learn it was not Walter Mosley introducing a new PI series with “Lew Griffin” taking over the sleuthing business from Easy Rawlins. I’d never known of Fly’s author until two days ago when I read a short-story of his in the Bill Crider tribute collection, Bullets and Other Hurting Things. The story was so good, so different, I immediately looked up its author on Amazon and downloaded the first in his Lew Griffin series. It was a thoroughly absorbing though surprisingly quick read, living up to the good and differ ..read more

I'm not going to tell you. Sorry, nary a hint. You'll have to find it on your own. Ordinarily that shouldn't be too hard, considering there are only twenty stories. The catch is each story’s so damned good it might come down to flipping a coin to determine which is your favorite. The thing about mine is it’s so different it caught me by surprise. Some of you might disagree that being different isn’t enough to win the contest, and ordinarily I would agree. But that is only what caught my eye. The story itself then went ahead and did its job on me. I shall probably never see crime fiction quite ..read more

Hearts at Dawn is a fairy tale told by one of the fairies—or witches, as shetells us, "or some more accurate sort of non-mortal." She doesn't give us her name, possibly out of shame, because, using the witch side of her powers, she once did an "awful awful" thing, and now spends the entire book trying to rally our support in making amends. Our fairy/witch narrator starts her storyrecounting a silent duel between her and her mentor, a gorgeous raven-haired beauty who captures the eye of the tall, dark, handsome (of course) Charles Rush whom our storyteller—admittedly plain and with “disaster ..read more

He’d been in the tub the better part of an hour, Calvin had. The duty water had long washed most of the shit off and carried it down the drain, leaving only a trickle from the shower head above the spigot knob he was unable to reach with enough leverage to push all of the way in to choke off the damnably taunting trickle. Now, awakening from a short nap and remembering he’d somehow gotten himself turned around and was facing the drain and water source, he hoped his muscles were sufficiently rested for another one-handed assault on the wall-bolted steel handle located waist high were he standin ..read more

Roger Loring doesn’t give a big cahoot if the menu’s changed, so long as it doesn’t take half a day to reach a live human voice. He’s back, badass as ever! So badass Loring is that I’m going to repeat his latest book’s title so I can hyperlink it to his Amazon book page so he doesn’t come after me with his nine-iron for leaving out an important marketing tool. Here, then, with no further ado: LISTEN CAREFULLY as OUR MENU has RECENTLY CHANGED. There! If that won’t mitigate the retired high school teacher’s potential rage should he detect so much as an imagined nuance of inattention to details i ..read more

Surprising me as I finished Tracks, Peter Cherches’s retrospective of the music that awakened and nurtured his soul, and trying to imagine producing a film version with a musical theme that might capture the mysterious allure of melody and lyric for the human sensibility, I came up dry until the very last sentence of the finale, the part that gives us data about the author: “His first album as a jazz vocalist, Mercerized! Songs of Johnny Mercer, featuring Lee Feldman on piano, was released in 2016.” Merely reading the album title instantly mercerized me, summoning two irresistible ear worms—M ..read more

 Three figures stood on the road with their backs to the sun, but only two cast shadows. Cattle clustered in the distance, their caretakers watching from the slanting shade of the terebinth trees, and even further beyond were sheep with their shepherds. At the crest of the hill before them, birds circled the gates of a walled city where even the land seemed to fall silent. Each mudbrick structure stood washed with flares of sunset that gave a burnt illumination to the little metropolis. . . The year is 1415 BC. The three figures are there to determine the fate of the “little metropolis ..read more

Shrapnelis what warriors call the little pieces of flesh-tearing metal launched by a bomb, an exploding artillery or mortar shell, or a grenade like the one on the cover of James Lloyd Davis's new collection of fifty literary tales. A warrior himself, having served in Vietnam, Davis knew well the metaphor's power when he chose SHRAPNELas the book's title. He doesn't explain why he chose it, but to me the grenade represents Davis's creative mind. Open the book, and its cleverly crafted pieces fly at you—the many sizes and shapes—none lethal, although some will discomfit readers whose own minds ..read more

Not especially surprised when I arrived atHer Life is an Edward Hopper Painting, asI was in one myself, had been from the beginning of Tobi Alfier's latest collection, Grit and Grace. From the git-go:“All that is left sometimes, is to hold faith in tradition and comfort—dog laying in front of the fire, a bit of spirit to make the kisses sweet, one last song hanging in the air.” Actually that’s the last stanza of the first poem, Before any Words are Spoken, but even at the first I’dsuccumbed to the mood of inevitability with its respites of blessed solitude. Iwas one of the nighthawks in Hoppe ..read more