Don’s Reviews > Jagannath > Status Update

5* for "Jagannath." A story so clear, I could see a short film version playing in my mind as I read.

2* for "Aunts." Some really nice lines in this story, but I didn't find the piece very compelling. Seemed to amount to little more than Augusta Prima, part 2.

4* for "Augusta Prima." Sort of like a reverse Twilight Zone episode.

3* for "Pyret." Got really interesting toward the end, but took too long to get to The heart of the matter IMO. The payoff ultimately didn't justify the length.

3* for "Cloudberry Jam." The first page of the story reminded me of "Miss Nyberg...." It's a compelling story, but all too familiar at this point.

3* for "Reindeer Mountain." Fairly compelling piece despite starring another "mysterious woman" from "somewhere else, no one knew where." But it just took too long IMO to get to the heart of the matter, or to where I felt something (anything) was at stake. Trick intro didn't help, either.

3* for "Avrid Pekron." The main character reminds me of the public persona of Harvey Pekar, "the flunkie with a government job." Imagine this character set in John Kessel's story "The Red Phone," if that story had a Kafkaesque twist. You'd think I'd have liked it better...

5* for "Herr Cederberg." A "boys and their toys" piece that, again, almost reads like a Fredric Brown story with a twist. Not an O. Henry "gotcha" twist; rather it was the fact that this honest, clockpunk version of the story of Icarus, turned out to be just what it promised in the beginning.

5* for "Rebecka." IMO, a more personal and gut-wrenching version of Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God" with a slightly different view of religion, but one to which I related more closely than the one Chiang presents.

4* for "Miss Nyberg and I." It has a minimalism and a twist a la Fredric Brown, with an added poignancy.