Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(InkerMen Press, 2008) Land’s End, the follow-up anthology to 2007’s Green and Unpleasant Land, is a fairly dark and sinister collection of tales covering a broad range of themes within the confines of that narrow strip of land betwixt the sea and the larger world. Consisting of twelve stories and a Preface (“Didn’t we have a Lovely Time?”), Land’s End covers, for example, mythology, seaside entertainments, sea creatures, and plenty of ghosts. Lucy Ann Wade starts off the stories with her take on the Calypso and Odysseus episode from The Odyssey (“Calypso”), doing so with great success as she explores the always treacherous nexus of naiveté and sexual lust. The “do as I say, not as I do” two-facedness of Calypso’s fellow Naiads made them read like a pack of modern high-school girls and not the far-off subjects of what is often (wrongly) seen as an irrelevant and antiquated tale. Over the past several years of reviewing InkerMen titles, I have made no secret of my fondness for the tales...

Having read and reviewed some of the early InkerMen titles about a year ago (also posted here), I looked forward to this new anthology of stories from the self-labeled “Independent publishers of alternative fiction and criticism” with eager anticipation, and it did not disappoint. Green and Unpleasant Land is a collection of tales and poems that “reimagine some of the stories and events of British legend and a want to write about places that had never been adequately mythologised” (back cover). I should say up front that this review is an American’s take on a very British set of tales, so I’ll be framing some of the stories for U.S. audiences. For instance, I imagined many of them being read aloud by Jude Law or Paul Bettany, which helped me to glide easily into their pacing¬—almost all of the selections mix fantasy with humor (the old Monty Pythonesque “nudge, nudge, wink, wink”) and although many of the places and figures mentioned were unfamiliar to me, it did not detract from my en...

Every so often we are lucky enough to stumble across a collection of stories that speak to us on several levels all at once—the tone, the atmosphere, the characters, and the locales all coalesce into a whispering wind in our ear—the unconscious is awakened and vaguely recalled stories from our childhood come bubbling up to the surface of our carefully managed swamp of secret information. This is one of those books. From the moment I opened the Just Maybe..Stories and mistakenly read the table of contents as a disjointed, fascinating poem, I knew that I was walking in a familiar wood. I was none too surprised to see on the inside cover that the stories were all Traditional, and arranged by the author. I read each story with growing interest and a buzzing in my gut and as soon as I was done I hit the Internet, searching out the distinctive character names and when that turned up dry, entering every combination of keywords my mind put forth. I came up as empty as the treeline as the morni...