Review by Booklist Review
In the realm of fantastic short fiction, fantasy often lives right next door to horror, and Spanish writer Palma's (The Map of Time, 2011) collection of dark fantasy is a very good example of that. The stories center around the general theme of love, though how this love is expressed is often bizarre or gruesome. In The Land of the Dolls, a young girl receives letters from a beloved lost doll; Meows describes a cat's rather unnatural love for her owner. Palma uses elegant language to evoke compelling, dream-like scenarios that are in turn hypnotic, sad, and frightening. In stories like these, carefully crafted language is essential to evoke the necessary captivating atmosphere, and translators Caistor and Garcia capture Palma's elegant wordplay. This book is just the ticket for readers seeking escape from the mundane into a dark dreamworld. Fans of the short fiction of Neil Gaiman will find much to like in Palma's dark fantasy tales.--Gary Day Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Palma's solid collection, following his The Map of Time trilogy, the surreal collides with the deeply mundane in transformative ways. In these stories, the protagonist--almost always a man down on his luck or depressed in some way--encounters something extraordinary. This might be a magical train set, where an avatar painted in one's likeness placed inside it can traverse the world ("Roses against the Wind"); a new apartment that's perfect in every way, except for the man behind the curtain in the den ("The Man behind the Curtain"); or, in the title story, a man who gives pieces of his body to his lover on birthdays and anniversaries. In the most ambitious story, "The Seven (or So) Lives of Sebastian Mingorance," Palma pulls off the impressive juggling act of considering one man and all the different directions a day in his life could have gone, with all seven alternative Sebastian Mingorances occupying the same room at one point. The scope of Palma's imagination is undeniable, even if his female characters suffer for it--all of them are objectified or otherwise treated as accessories to the plot, and most meet rather gruesome fates. Palma proves he is an assured, creative writer with a knack for the unsettling. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Palma, a Spanish writer best known here for the Map of Time trilogy (The Map of Chaos, 2015, etc.), returns with a book of imaginative stories.In "Snow Globe," one of the stronger tales, a traveling encyclopedia salesman masquerading as the dead son of a senile and grief-stricken elderly woman describes the title item as "a toy world that obeys its own laws.Everything inside it works differently." It's a metaphor for the story at hand, but it could also apply to the book overall. "The Karenina Syndrome" unfurls an enigmatic tale about a man's dread of Sunday dinners with his wife's family into a domestic thriller centered around a love letter bookmarking his in-laws' tattered copy of Anna Karenina, deftly recalibrating the book's themes into something new and alarmingly grotesque. "Roses Against the Wind" expands a similar premise of how little family members actually know about one another into a fantastical meditation on compassion and escapism. But the title storyabout a wealthy man who gives his wife pieces of his body over the course of their marriageis indeed the standout and is practically dripping with black comedy and potential interpretations. Are the eyes, appendages, and limbs passed across the table over lavish dinners indicative of unbridled affection or "an act of tremendous egotism...akin to giving the church the clothes you no longer wear"? In Palma's tales, lecherous co-workers inevitably steal jilted wives waiting at the foot of a staircase with their suitcase, work crushes wind up the talismanic muses of magical figurinesall evoked with an onslaught of metaphor and simile that hits the nail so hard and so frequently that, in aggregate, they have some trouble signifying. Palma has a piercing imagination hampered only by plots that are borderline contrived and an unchanging narrative voice.Twelve well-paced stories straddling the line between parody, magical realism, mystery, and farce. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
