Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Talebones, 2005
As usual, Talebones published two issues in 2005. This continues to be a fine and consistent magazine, always worth reading -- notable, really, in the way that even the lesser stories are still solid work.
This year there were 15 stories, one a novelette, two short-shorts, for some 62,000 words of fiction -- comparable to last year's total.
The best included James Van Pelt's "One Day, in the Middle of the Night", a sharp retelling of a children's poem as a dark story of sibling rivalry aboard a starship; Anne Harris's "Still Life With Boobs", a funny take on the somewhat familiar notion of body parts with minds of their own; Michael Poore's "The Wooden Mother", a "modern day fairy tale", in which the "wooden mother" deals with inner city youth; Ken Schole's "The Man With Great Despair Behind His Eyes", a sort of secret history of Meriwether Lewis, in which Lewis meets a surprising individual in the far West (I was of course delighted that I guessed the identity of this man well in advance); and Christopher East's "Systemic", about a man who works for a shadowy figure, adopting disguises to do occasional questionable jobs, and how he reacts when first he meets a woman he wants to make a stable life with, and second he does a much more "questionable" job than he had been used to.
