It’s an odd feeling to pick up an anthology and realize that about a third of its volume is stories that you have personally published.
Such was my experience as I read the new Derek J. Goodman anthology Things of Loose Reality.
Some of these stories might be familiar to those of you who are slavish readers of RevSF and SPACE SQUID. There’s "The All-night One-Stop Apocalypse Shop" (one of my all-time favorite stories), the Clarion-Schmarion contest winning "A Case of Yellow Bricks and Emerald Towers", "Power Pastry" from SPACE SQUID #3, and "Crossover Event" which appeared in SPACE SQUID #4.
For those of us who are Derek J. Goodman fans, this anthology brings us the Apocalypse shift cycle in its current entirety, as well as a shotgun peppering of stories that would be hard to scrape together into one place.
Things of Loose Reality sets off the proper mood with its opening story "Sequin Man" (previously published in Hungur #1), a quirky horror story about a bunch of vampires who are hunted by a shadowy yet somehow familiar figure.
I felt that the highpoint of the book came with the semi-autobiographical stories of magic realism. "Deus ex Machina" (originally in Gods and Monsters) and "Flora and Fauna of the Heartland" (Seasons in the Night #4) both are about blue-collar jobs and the transformative powers that trap you in their monotony.
And even if you’ve already read most of these stories, it’s worth getting the anthology just for the informative afterword where Goodman talks about his inspirations for each entry in the compilation.
Having read Goodman’s shorts, I was pleasantly surprised to find that his long-form efforts are just as compelling. When I picked up Goodman’s book Beliel Rose
I thought to myself, "great, a self-published epic fantasy."
Well, this one is a good read. It’s a horror-tinged sword and sorcery story that takes place in the socially progressive kingdom of Daliroor.
Yes, there are vampire/zombies. Yes, there’s a cursed sword. Yes, there are lesbians. But the whole lesbian thing is tackled with far more empathy and sophistication than, say, I personally have brought to bear under similar circumstances.
Beliel Rose sat on the toilet tank as my primary bathroom reading for a while. My housemate probably thought something terrible had happened to my bowels, for all the time I spent in there reading, eager to find out what happened next.