Last Summer at Mars Hill

I discovered this collection of stories after first reading Waking the Moon (also amazing). Elizabeth Hand uses words like an artist uses paints; they evoke textures and colors and feelings when you read them. Her descriptions are like none that I've ever read before - as well as her storylines. One or two of the stories presented didn't do much for me, but the rest more than made up for them. The title story and Snow on Sugar Mountain were favorites, the latter being particularly interesting (about the strange connection between a shapechanging boy and an ailing former astronaut). I also highly recommend her novels Waking the Moon and Black Light (read them in that order).

I wish these stories were longer. In "Last Summer at Mars Hill", Hand continues her journey through Magic, twilight, and Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary. She speaks from different points of view in each story, exploring dark purposes and good, varied enough that the collection could have been written by four or five different writers. Her stories are palpable and audible, and quite frequently, as in the case of "Prince of Flowers", you can smell them too.

This book is amazing. Each story is captivating, entertaining, and very real even while Hand explores the impossible.

Elizabeth Hand is an absolutely magnificent writer. These stories are wonderfully written, and yes, they will make you think. But you owe it to yourself to think, and thinking deeply in this particular case is grand pleasure. She has included some little biographical blurbs at the end of each story, and one of them relates that someone said her work had "sharp little teeth." It does, it does. And linguistically splendid teeth, too.

I've always liked Elizabeth Hand's work. Her writing is the jazz of the science fiction world: intelligent, sophisticated, complex and stylistically thrilling, but at the same time requiring a lot of effort on the part of the reader. Don't bother trying to read these right before you go to sleep at night after a hard day. You will have to think and have some patience to make it through these stories, but they are well worth it. Her characters are usually well-sketched and interesting, and the stories, if occasionally falling prey to the postmodern habit of having little in the way of plot and leaving dangling strings, are unique and exciting. Much better than The Glimmering.