Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, December 2023

Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, December 2023

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

It’s rare to come across a sweet story in these cruel days, but “The Flip Side” by Hall Jameson is that nonesuch, a touching tale with a happy ending, sentimental without being saccharine. It’s also a cat story, and although I’m not a cat person, I was charmed by the narrator, Sam, aka OhNo! Apparently, cats do indeed have nine lives, during which they study “the places where we’re not the dominant species” before returning to the “UpSide,” a dimension of feline nirvana. Along with his best buddies Dot and Carrot, Sam is incarnated as a kitten in a shelter. While waiting for adoption, being a reckless little rascal, he quickly begins to use up one life after another, each time returning briefly to “Catopia” before being sent back to Earth to resume his tour of mortal duty with no memory of what occurred during his demise. Jameson does a believable job describing life in the shelter from a cat’s point of view, and the story moves along at a good pace to a conclusion that is both satisfying and bittersweet… Recommended.

Unfortunately, the second December offering, “New Year’s Angel” by E.E. King, which recounts the brief doomed romance between Able and Ana, crosses the line from sentiment into treacle, and slathers on the pathos so heavily this reviewer feared going into diabetic shock. Almost every sentence of the story is designed to tug at your heart strings so hard that they break, and I was left feeling used rather than enlightened. That being said, I did learn a new thing, which is doves actually produce milk for their young. However, unlike mammals, they don’t breast feed—the milk is produced in their crop and regurgitated during mealtime. You wouldn’t know this from the story, though, which typically denatures the messy procedure with the phrase “offered her nutritious dove’s milk.” I guess that sounds better than “the pigeon vomited into the starving kid’s mouth.”