Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #58, November 2023

“Hamelin in the Distance” by Maria Schraater

“Isle Of The Thousand-Eyed Strangler” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue

“Dragon Tears” by Caleb Williams

“The Third Way” by Darrell Schweitzer (reprint, not reviewed)

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

We don’t generally review poetry here at Tangent Online, but “Hamelin in the Distance” by Maria Schraater, published in the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, is a prose poem, and thus falls within our purview. The narrator, a fiddler, encounters the evil piper on the road, trailed by hundreds of enchanted children. Feeling sorry for the kids, he dares the piper to a musical duel for their freedom. Instead of accepting, however, the piper curses the fiddler, dooming him to a forlorn lifetime without music—until he makes a deal with a Nokken, who restores his musical ability for a price, allowing him to again challenge the dread piper in his desolate lair… A simple tale, true, but as I mentioned, this is a prose poem, and what’s important here is the language. I’m no expert, but I enjoyed the rhythm and the rhyming, and I recommend that instead of reading “Hamelin” on the screen, you close your eyes and listen to the author recite it to you. There’s an audio file just above the text.

Next up is the short story “Isle Of The Thousand-Eyed Strangler” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue, which takes place in a “fantastical version of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean” and reads like it’s part of a larger narrative cycle. Pandara, a prince turned pirate captain, agrees to help Mala-Diwata, a baylan or shamaness, put an end to a centuries old curse on the island of Mabalete. Once they get there, things go very wrong. There’s not much more to the story, but the slight plot is embroidered with enough atmosphere and cultural detail to make it readable, and to interest me in looking at other stories by the author set in the same magical milieu.

Last up is the second half of the novella “Dragon Tears” by Caleb Williams. In the first part, published in HFQ 57, Larohd du Masiim, a royal scribe and a novice student of blood magic, is banished from the country of Alma’Riha for the crime of loving the princess Yadira, fiance of Augustin, the future king. Amarantha, a dreadful sorceress, agrees to teach Larohd her secrets if he provides her certain magical artifacts, and he sets out on a year-long quest to retrieve these items. Returning successfully to Amarantha, Larohd spends the next seven years in training, and in the second half of the novella, he travels to Alma’Riha to wrest his beloved Yadira from the hands of the brutal king… An entertaining adventure with interesting characters and some bloody good details. Recommended.