Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes

by

Jean Marie Ward

(with an introduction by Jody Lynn Nye)

(Ginger Blue Publishing, July 2024, 461 pp. Kindle, pb.)

“Lord Bai’s Discovery” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Hoodoo Cupid” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Yesterday I will” (reprint, not reviewed)

“The Taxman Cometh” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Rosemary’s Kitten”

“The Nameless Stranger”

“A Taste of Paradise”

“Protective Coloration” (reprint, not reviewed)

“The Big Fish”

“District Coincidental” (reprint, not reviewed)

“The Sultan’s Bath”

“Fire Sale” (reprint, not reviewed)

“About the Flies”

“Lord Bai and the Magic Pirate” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Make It Rain”

“Clear as Glass” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Green Eyes” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Dragon Trap”

“Ghosted”

“The Gap in the Fence” (reprint, not reviewed)

“The First Stone” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Lord Bai’s Masquerade” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Duzell’s Due” (reprint, not reviewed)

“Pas de Demons”

“Brownies”

“The Wrong Refrigerator” (reprint, not reviewed)

Reviewed by C. D. Lewis

Jean Marie Ward’s Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes collects twenty-seven short stories sharing some or all of the title’s themes, including eleven (11) new works reviewed this month by Tangent. Two elements that recur through the collection are comedy and horror. If either is your jam, this may be for you. The works are all Fantasy, containing elements like dragons or talking cats. This reviewer has previously suggested that if one third of a volume’s stories are worth recommending, the collection is worth a consumer’s consideration. This proportion certainly holds for the reviewed works, making the volume a winner.

Set in the one-bedroom apartment of a post-pandemic cat fosterer, “Rosemary’s Kitten” is a comic urban fantasy that pokes fun at demonology, capitalism, cats, witchcraft, OCD, and further subjects already slipping from recollection. This is a lighthearted one-scene vignette; describing the end or the main action would threaten spoilers. Cute, funny, cozy: like hot cocoa you can read.

“The Nameless Stranger” opens on a phone call to a hotel museum by paranormal investigators seeking permission to film the hunt for the hotel’s famous unnamed dead guest’s ghost. Weighing in at 1500 words dripping wet, this one-scene short story gives paranormal romance vibes as the reader is shown the investigators’ rejection isn’t really about risk to museum artifacts. The conflict appears mostly as a vehicle for humor and to deliver the backstory required to appreciate the relationship. Warm fuzzies.

Told from the perspective of a swatted housefly, “A Taste of Paradise” offers what might be described as the comedic origin story of a housefly religion. Like a lot of stories that rely on an uninformed narrator, much of the humor relies on the author’s skill in communicating to the reader things the narrator misunderstands. Could be viewed as an explanation why houseflies are so persistent. Only fantasy element is houseflies intelligent enough to adopt religion. Funny.

Narrated by the senior of two housecats whose owner has fallen on hard times, “The Big Fish” unspools a culture-hero story that recalls tricksters of myth. A scheme that depends on a successful con and a heist falls into jeopardy when a fish really can grant wishes. If you like to see a scoundrel succeed, “The Big Fish” is a good catch.

“The Sultan’s Bath” is a third-person secret history revenge plot that describes why the rulers of the Ottoman Empire were really driven to commit the atrocities one can find attributed to some of its leaders. A djinn too curious about human craft to keep a safe distance from the Ottoman Empire’s most famous architect and engineer (and apparently wizard) suffers the fate of all too many djinn who encounter clever humans, and pays a heavy price. Those interested in the colorful lunacy of autocratic elites will be entertained by what “The Sultan’s Bath” depicts as the work of the vengeful djinn.

“About the Flies” returns to the topic of irritating houseflies. In under 160 words, this tiny work combines several comic elements to deliver a giggle-worthy tale of petty revenge. The reviewer is unaware how broadly the expression to have “no flies on” someone is currently known, but it’s an Australianism complementing someone’s cleverness and familiarity with it helps best appreciate this work.

“Make it Rain” is clearly introduced as a sequel to “Rosemary’s Kitten” and is set in the same cheap apartment while that tale’s kittens are yet youngsters. When a neighbor’s bogus police reports bring unwanted attention of law enforcement to the sorcerer’s door during a rash of jewelry thefts, the protagonist ends up searching for a missing kitten with her landlord and a huge policeman on her heels. The conclusion offers just-desserts comedy.

“Dragon Trap” follows a young woman with some magical talents and a bright and branching future as her community responds to a dragon taking up residence near her river and killing the wildlife she’d charmed with her songs. Local scheming patriarchs adopt a crooked scheme to sell her future, if not her life, for their convenience. Page after page of horror follows involving misfortune, loss, misogyny, dehumanization, and betrayal—horrors arising in a fantasy but grounded in non-fantastic elements. At 13,000 words, “Dragon Trap” is long enough to really feel the horror and the anticipation built up for the protagonist’s awful fate. And at that length it’s too long for readers who don’t enjoy experiencing horror being spooled out with mounting anticipation: you need to like this kind of thing to love “Dragon Trap.” Selling a child to die as a sacrifice to a monster, selling a child-bride to a sadistic rapist—it’s a dark journey and not for everyone. Naturally, the talented and clever heroine wins with her wits—the worst monsters are the people, after all; you can at least reason with the dragons.

Narrated by the cat Muldoon, “Ghosted” is sequel to the volume’s earlier entries “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” and “The Big Fish.” “Ghosted” leverages established characters to good effect, especially a disliked neighbor and an excitable dog whose fervent fits of barking are depicted with a comically true-to-life quality immediately appreciable by those who have met dogs of this temperament. The same cats have an adventure with a ghost, who turns out to be less delightful company than one would hope. An upbeat ending is saved from the jaws of despair.

An urban fantasy period piece, “Pas de Demons” switches perspective between a third-person view following a vampire we find working on a holy day in 1723, and the first-person account of a demoness hungry to feed on the population of Nouvelle-Orleans. Constant misunderstandings are entertaining, and the dark backstories that support the main characters’ current situations seem well-suited to the grim environment of French colonial occupation. Eventually the inevitable contest between the two predators erupts, and the reader enjoys the back and forth as the momentum and the apparent outcome veers from side to side: whose victory would be worse for the humans? Recommended for fans of grimdark.

“Brownies” is a brief vignette of some 215 words, less about plot than about the place of little tidying Fair Folk in the twenty-first century. The author suggests some entertaining ideas about the antics of brownies that might be caught on local security cameras.

C.D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.