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Four Summoner's Tales (2013)

by Kelley Armstrong(Favorite Author)

3.56 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

145169668X (ISBN13: 9781451696684)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Gallery Books

review 1: Anthologies generally have a common thematic thread (witches, werewolves, unicorns vs zombies...), but this one is a little more complex than most. Each author was given an inspirational sentence: "A strange visitor comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk's dearly departed from the dead--for a price..." Armstrong is the only contributor with whom I was familiar, but all four authors spun a satisfying tale, another rarity in the world of anthologies. Each ran with the theme in different ways, with Armstrong's being the most compliant with the type of story I would expect to get given that inspiration. Her 19th century rural Canadian setting was perfect for a story that literally involved two strangers walking into town and offering to revive a group of townsfolk ... morewho'd recently died of a diphtheria outbreak. The means by which the dead were raised made sense, as did the motivations and outcomes. It was a fully realized story that fit well in the novella format, with no unanswered questions or extraneous content.Golden's was also a pretty literal interpretation of the theme, but brought forward to current time. After a group of residents of a Texas border town are gunned down by a Mexican drug cartel, a necromancer shows up and offers to restore their loved ones if they'll use them to bring down the cartel that also murdered his daughter. It's a pretty straight forward concept and he dealt well with the emotional blowback of making such a decision. I'm not sure I totally loved the ending, exactly, but it worked.Liss's execution was a little more liberal--while it did technically involve a stranger offering to raise the dead for a price (or not raise them, as the case may be), the "stranger" was actually the narrator and the story had much more to do with how he came into this mysterious power than it did the offer itself. It did, however, paint a pretty vivid portrait of how such a decision could affect the magician himself, and watching him get out of his predicament was just as, if not more, entertaining than seeing him get into it in the first place. Told in first person, Liss did a good job with the language of the narration to really give you a sense of following an 18th century English con man on this journey of discovery, but at times the intentional vagueness of the narrator read more as authorial conceit than as character-establishing dialogue.Maberry's story was the least literal interpretation, since it involved soldiers on a rescue mission in Afghanistan, so the "townsfolk" part didn't really fit though there was some mysterious zombie raising going on. That said, it was still an interesting read, particularly since military thrillers are not my typical genre. I enjoyed that glimpse into a different literary window and Maberry did a good job weaving the rescuing soldiers' realistic thread with the paranormal thread to achieve a well-balanced story.
review 2: Four authors were given this premise: “A stranger comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk’s dearly departed from the dead—for a price.” The stories that emerged caution you to be careful what you wish for, because the price might be higher than you can pay.The stories:Kelley Armstrong; “Suffer the Children.”David Liss; “A Bad Season for Necromancy.”Christopher Golden; “Pipers.”Jonathan Maberyy; “Alive Day.”Ranging from lost children to lost soldiers, innocent victims and more questionable dead, the stories are eerie and chilling, and sometimes sad. Grief can make people do terrible things, and somewhere out there are people willing to capitalize on that grief and use it towards their own ends.Would you make a bargain, or accept your loss? less

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