Forrest’s Reviews > Buried Shadows > Status Update

"The Floor of Heaven" will haunt me. Not with potential terror, but with a dreamstate longing, a reaching that is unable to grasp, though I can feel the air moving between my fingers as the object of my desires - the sense of firmness of place and surety of remembered experience in physical space - escapes me. Now I think I am truly beginning to understand the tragedy of Tantalus in full. Five stars.

"The Floor of Heaven" is a dream - that dream where you know that there is someone, somewhere, who you have absolutely met, where you've absolutely been, but when you go to find that place and that person, they are impossible to find, though you know you are there. This is how I dream of England. Often. Like I'm back there, but the people and places that should be there are gone. It haunts me.

"You Promised You Would Walk" is an engaging exploration of Berlin and the cyclical nature of time. I feel like Howard "telegraphed" a little in this story, that I caught on far too soon to spoil the latter part of the story. I'll blame Twilight Zone: The Movie, as there is a similar vignette in there (though with much more deadly and deserved results). Still, this was more subtle and nuanced than TZTM. 4*

With all this talk of Dr. Caligari and traipsing around Berlin as a stranger, well, this isn't going to end well for Jon, I'm guessing.

"More Than India" is an emotional gut-punch of a story. A rather melancholy older man makes the acquaintance of a young rower on the River Thames. But the older man's life is now a sort of palimpsest of his younger life, and the faint words of his earlier story are starting to show through. A ghost story without ghosts, this is a powerfully emotional story worthy of five stars.

"The Shape and the Colour of the Moon" is one of the more beautifully dark stories I've read in a long time. First published in a Machen tribute anthology, it reads as if the ghosts of Machen and Borges where whispering in Morrisey's ear when we wrote "Every Day is Like Sunday". Transformation and devotion to the City behind London drive the subtle,, evocative plot. I could drown in this grey story. Five stars.

"Numbered as Sand or the Stars" is a humor-filled, yet deathly-serious foray into man's ability to adapt to new regimes that overlap the place where one lives, where one has grown. This thread interweaves with that of, of all things, economics and inflation. Issues of old versus new class structure and political power undergird all of it. The economy of cosmic-horror in the form of regime change and geography. 5*s!

Sex and murder and . . . architecture? Yes, it's as strange as it sounds. "Buried Shadows," the title story, was not my favorite. Not bad, but not terribly compelling, either. Three stars.

When I was a teenager, I was legally "banished" from a place I loved. Long story. So I read "The Defiant Sky" and ached with that sense of longing that only the banished know. You need not have been banished from anything to enjoy the story, but it does intensify the effect. This is a story of defiant hope and belief wherein the city of London becomes a means to an end. A mysterious end that isn't an end. Five stars.

Aha! This story takes place circa the mid-sixties, which further lends credence to my theory of the typography on the cover! You have to take your little victories and celebrate them, you know?