Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

Twelve O’Clock Tales is the fourth collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, True Stories). A personal homage to the storytellers of his youth, Edgar Allen Poe, E.F. Benson, and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as his acquaintances, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Eleven dark tales, eerie, bizarre, and dreamlike, the tales will thrill and disturb, discomfort and titillate, enthrall and leave you wondering. Picano ranges across time and space, from tribal West Africa to the American heartland, to a lab in Venezuela, and a California Highway fifteen years from now. His characters range from a teen accident survivor with a secret, to a far-future scholar forced to travel to a galactic backwater, to a retired L.A. cop who dabbles in astrology, and a peasant girl in B.C.E. Israel encountering the strangest of strangers. The thirteen tales include brand new stories and acknowledged Picano masterworks collected here for the first time.

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Felice Anthony Picano was an American writer, publisher and critic who encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.

Reviews

[Carlos Mock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twelve O’Clock Stories by Felice Picano

This is Felice’s fourth collection of short stories. In Twelve O’Clock Tales Felice gives us 13 short stories - three of which I’ve read before:

Food for Thought - A Sci-Fi adventure on Plant Deneb 3 where Andy, a telepathic member in the exploration colony for “The Company.” After realizing the planet is not fit for colonization Andy is lured by forces within the planet that make him become one with it.

One Way Out - An experimental treatment is given to a patient who was catatonic, wherein the patient thinks there is a catastrophic event and he must chose to come out of it voluntarily. However, Bay, the patient, inexplicably prefers to stay in the new created reality.

The Perfect Setting: An artist, Ottilie Chase., has been murdered and our hero decides to investigate. Apparently, Ottillie paints landscapes which she dates and times to the minute. In these landscapes there is evidence of a terrible past for someone. After finding out why Ottillie was killed the protagonist realizes that she had captured his indiscretion and if Ottillie had not been killed by her murderer, he would have had to kill her himself.

Then there are nine new ones I enjoyed just as much:

Synapse - A seventy-seven year old man is somehow connected to the body of a fourteen year old boy. He confronts the boy’s mother.

Duel on Interstate Five - A futuristic drag race on interstate Five where our protagonist wins a car

Spices of the World - David is looking for his friend Raji and can’t get much information from the owner of a spice shop

Eye - A comet is brought for study and the comet which begins to act strangely. It has a fissure that keeps enlarging and from which a torus which connects the handler to another world.

Love and the She Lion - This is an African folk tale about a woman who wants to be independent but it cost her the affections of the man she loves. A witch doctor explains that to get the man to marry she must separate from the lioness spirit within her.

A Guest in the Heavens - This is the story of a rescue mission in the future. Our solar system has vanished due to the explosion of our Sun. The rescue mission finds a large group of chimpanzees that must be rescued

Swear not by the Moon - Detective McGraghiu dwells in the zodiac

The Gospel According to Miriam, Daughter of Jebu and Anna, Wife to Josephat, Mother of Joshua - is the tale of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary with a twist

Absolute Ebony - This is the tale of Michaelis, a promising painter who has gone dark. He gets this very dark pigment: absolute ebony, darkest than anything else he’s ever seen and things start to happen on his masterpiece canvas.

And finally - Room Nine - Cregnell is sent to revise a textbook at a famous university. He’s given a very cold and small hotel room to do the work. Dr. Edwin Blethworthy gives him the keys to his clubhouse where Cregnell sees two rugby players having sex. He’s threatened by them and fleeing from a sexual attack by the rugby team, he drowns in room nine’s shower stall.

This is a wonderful collection of tales, which includes one of my all time favorites: The Perfect Setting and One Way Out; and introduced me to new favorites like Absolute Ebony, Love and the She Lion, Eye, and A Guest in the Heavens.

A wonderful and interesting read. I strongly recommend it to all Science Fiction fans

['Nathan Burgoine]

When I started this year of short stories, I knew that I had an abundance of anthologies to work with. Even just from anthologies in which I've been lucky enough to have a story published, I could probably make it a third of the way through (after all, two anthologies pretty much a month makes at the rate of a story a day), and I had fallen woefully behind in writing about the tales in those collections.

But since the project has been underway, I've learned something about myself. The thing I learned is this: I need very, very, very little rationalization to pick up new anthologies. This project? More than enough rationalization. Plenty, in fact. So much so that as I'm reading stories by authors I adore, it's reminding me to (a) check my bookshelves for other anthologies I have of their work, and (b) buy anthologies I don't find on my bookshelves.

Today's story comes from the latter group.

"Synapse," by Felice Picano

I've mentioned my admiration for Felice Picano before, but listening to "Gratitude" a short while back as an audio made me look into other collections of his short fiction work, and I found I'd somehow missed picking up Twelve O'Clock Tales, the collection from which "Synapse" is the first story.

"Synapse" - like so many of Picano's tales - has a narrative that lulls you in one direction before giving you a quick about-face resolution that leaves you rocking back on your heels. The idea behind the tale is this: a young man is chatting with his mother about how they both know perfectly well that he is not her son anymore. If that makes you blink, then you have a sense of the abruptness of where the story begins, but it's the why - and the decision they both make given their circumstances of their relationship with each other - that leads the tale onward. And then, like I said, there's that final twist at the end that left me shaking my head at the grace of it.

The problem with finding more anthologies to love is it just reinforces my purchase choices.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am ordinarily a big fan of Picano, one of the finest chroniclers of gay life in the top circles of later-20th-Century - New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fire Island, and more. He knew everyone, and wrote it all down. His fiction is equally broad-reaching, and masterfully constructed.

So what happened here? These are light sci-fi, or Sci Fi Lite, I guess. But these short stories and tales seem whisper-thin to me, rarely all that compelling as visions of alternate universes. Some are woefully inadequate, as with "Food For Thought," in which a distinctly Star-Trek crew explore a potential planet home, in between rounds of cyber-sex with their robotic playthings. Others seem like dreary generic sci-fi, which as a genre is not generally my thing.

This latter confession is likely the major problem, as I just don't warm to visions or other planets with red suns, or sex with robots. Even on a long plane ride back from LA, I still didn't bother to finish it.

[Eric Andrews-Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picano's latest collection of short stories once again shows why he is a masterful storyteller. This collection holds something for all, no matter what your taste. Science Fiction, paranormal, or even spiritual these tales may not all be scary but they will give the reader pause. And they will linger in the memory after the back cover has closed.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm afraid I found these stories mediocre and disappointing. Honestly there are so many other better collections of stories out there I can't imagine why you would read this one.

[willowdog]

Science fiction is not my favorite genre. Vote no--hardly any lgbt content.