Robin D. Laws

Another solid anthology product from Stoneskin Press. If you haven't been reading of their collections, I strongly recommend you do so.
This particular collection consists of modern retellings of a variety of myth/folk/fairy tales and fables. I admit, I was not as engaged as I expected to be, in part because I expected something maybe a little more along the lines that Yolen, McKinley, and others have done in retelling fairy tales as short stories or even novellas/novels. This is not that. These are much more in the vein of fables, being only one to five pages in length each, often with explicitly stated morals. It is very clear which fables or stories some of these are drawn from, some are more mysterious in their origins. We also get a nice mixture of retellings of non-european fables, with some Native American, African, Asian, and Pacific Islander fables getting equal treatment here.
As in any collection, I felt some entries were stronger than others. Particular personal favourites were: The Wolf and Death, The Very Rude Salmon, The Loquacious Cadaver, The Fox & the Quantum Physicist, The Scientist and the Zen Master, Three Zombies & the Crypt Keeper, The Squirrel and the Pigeons, The Muskrat & the Deadline, The Clan of the Crzy Babies, and The Coyote & the High Density Feed Lot.
While some of these may be a little 'mature' in theme, I think their overall morals and length make them, like their forebears, well suited to be read and discussed with children. I would consider reading a lot of these to my own god-children who are quite young, but can also see using these with my high school English classes as well.… (more)

The war is over. The gates to Carcosa are closed again, and the Castaigne dynasty is out of power. Many of the upper-level collaborators have been caught and tried for their crimes; others are still on the lam; some are staying in place, waiting for the new government to get organized so it can be exploited for their own personal power and profit.

Our hero (?), The Technician, former revolutionary soldier and now a People’s Deputy, has been convinced to run for one of New York’s two new democratically elected senate seats, with the goal (for him) to have the Government Lethality Chambers (suicide booths) that he maintained decommissioned permanently. During the first debate, an assassination attempt on one of the other candidates kills an innocent woman instead of its target. Unwilling—on unable—to leave the investigation to the police, T and his crew suspect a parageometrical cause, and they work with and around the NYPD and the Feds to solve the crime, unearth the hoodoo-doers, and keep the campaign moving ahead.

Along the way, we get lots of sneaky action, complaints about politics and politicians, interactions with various sketchy individuals, and more toxic Carcosan leftovers than anyone would want.… (more)

An intriguing way of analyzing stories by breaking them down into different kinds of "beats," of which the most important are "procedural" beats (where protagonists try to accomplish some task) and "dramatic" beats (where characters seek emotional concessions from each other). After outlining his model, Laws spends most of the book putting it into practice by analyzing three stories for their beats: "Hamlet," "Dr. No" and "Casablanca." Laws, a prominent designer of tabletop roleplaying games, offers this analysis as a way for gamers to improve their roleplaying (and would later write a new game, "Hillfolk," based around the principles in this book), but most of the book would be helpful for anyone hoping to understand ideas of drama and narrative construction. Not a life-changing read, but an intriguing one.… (more)