New from the Swan River Press comes this handsome volume of nineteen tales by Yorkshire-based writer Rosalie Parker. According to the blur Sparks from the Fire offers 'a wide variety of familiar characters and settings, yet there is always something else — a shadow world that haunts, disturbs, and threatens'. Which sounds right up our street, gentle reader.The first story is 'The Bronze Statuette', which was published in ST #29. I need hardly say that I like it. As the lead tale I suspect that it's themes and general 'feel' will be encountered again in various mutations. Here we have a superficially normal, indeed rather comfortable woman who goes too far in pursuit of something apparently trivial.
The statuette of the story is material enough, but could represent many things - a genuine achievement that she feels eludes her, a transcendent beauty that she can never quite grasp. From normality to destructive obsession is, the story shows, a much shorter trip than most 'respectable' people acknowledge.
So, here we got with another day-by-day (probably) look at some stories, eighteen of them new to me. Let us discover them together!
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