Book Reviews by Michael Matheson

Dark Duet, a collaborative collection of poetry from Linda D. Addison and Stephen M. Wilson, is an exquisite work of interwoven voices blending seamlessly into something greater than the whole of their already excellent parts. Creating narrative through harmony and discord, call and response spirals of imagery and prose, and poems both new and culled from other sources, Dark Duet is an extraordinary achievement.

Dan Wells' The Hollow City is something of an oddity. The novel should work, except it doesn't. The Hollow City follows in the tradition of the kind of stories The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery used to run. And the construction of the story mimics the structure those programs commonly employed: an interesting premise that plays off the audience's uncertainty, keeps the audience guessing during the build-up, and then dumps the reveal in the audience's lap at the close.

So, first things first, an open apology to Nathan Shumate, because I wish I had better things to say about Arcane. Especially since the idea behind Arcane—create an anthology without theme, centred instead around the excellence of the stories themselves, creating as much variety as possible—is a great concept; unfortunately, Arcane's stories are not, except in a few instances, written well enough to support Shumate's goal.