The ramblings of a bibliophile.
I still haven’t yet had time to sink my teeth into the first Signs of the Zodiac novel. Yet, I seem to keep picking up the novellas and thoroughly enjoying them. And this one was no different. Taking the idea of love and polar opposites and twisting it into a story that was both fun and kind of tragic. Especially when JJ is left at the end, clutching a broken heart and forced to face an unhopeful future.
This is one of those short stories that is fun to read, but not overly memorable once you turn the final page. It’s a fun journey and one that I’ll love to read again and again. But it’s also not the kind of story that has left me thinking and reflecting once I’ve turned the final page. It’s just… fun.
Although I gave this story a kind of low rating, I did thoroughly enjoy it. The wording was just so beautifully lyrical and swept me away. Which makes sense, since it was originally written in 1933. It definitely means that this is a short story that I’m likely to go back to and reread. After all, the very lyricality of the wording makes it a fun journey and an intriguingly poetic one as well.
Ideas of time change across the world. It’s an idea that completely fascinates me. So it kind of makes sense that a story about a timekeeper and conjurer finds it’s way into a collection of dark magic stories. Although this one isn’t as dark and twisted as the other tales, there’s still that sense of mystery and brutality that is present in the rest of the stories in this collection.
I understand the pressure and stress of trying to get a ridiculously ambitious project done in a much shorter amount of time than desirable. After all, like the characters in this short story, I too am a PhD student. The fact that this tale of the pressures of being a postgrad student intertwines with murder, mayhem and magic just made me connect all the quicker with the characters and the storyline.
I both thoroughly enjoyed this story and felt kind of concerned by it. This is the first short story in a collection of short stories based on our experiences in school. And it has a shooter entering the school grounds. Granted, this was written and published quite a few years ago and may not have been such a hot issue… but considering the constant gunning down of children happening in America at the moment… it was more than a little concerning that the story starts with a tale about a gunman.
Order is not something that comes easily to me. Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly organised and have a system for things. But my life in and of itself is not actually organised. And I don’t tend to follow conventions about 90% of the time. So I kind of liked a dark fantasy tale that dealt with the intersection of order and chaos. How they are both important to the existence of life as we know it.
This wasn’t my favourite collection of short stories. Maybe I’m not all that much into vampire stories, maybe because these are just the type of vampire stories that I really love. The only two tales I really loved in this were by Kelley Armstrong and Tanya Huff. They weren’t necessarily bad tales, just not ones that I was completely enthralled by.
I was really dreading a horrible ending to this story. One that would involve a tragedy and the dark magic practitioner riding off into the sunset with her own version of happily ever after. But it didn’t quite end like that. In fact, it had a very happy ending with a bit of violence and darkness thrown in. Something that I thoroughly enjoy in a good story – some violence, some hope and a happily-ever-after.
I struggled a little to get into many of the short stories in the Evolve collection. But, this, as a final ending to the anthology was just amazing. This was exactly the kind of short story that I love, and my biggest complaint is that it ended too soon. I want to find out more about Vicki and Mike and the ways in which they have each other’s backs. I also want to find out why Vicki seems to be different from other vampires…
