The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SepOct 2023 by The Magazine of Fantasy && Science Fiction & Sheree Renée Thomas

Author:The Magazine of Fantasy && Science Fiction & Sheree Renée Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, Fantasy fiction, Short fiction, Magazine
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2023-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Dandelion, by Alex Bledsoe, Falstaff, 2022, $29.99, hc.

I was a little surprised at how dark this story is. Sure, there were dark bits in the various Tufa books, but they’re really front and center here. And yes, it’s marketed as a horror novel, but I’ve seen that happen before only to find it was just the marketing. It’s set in the south, as much of Bledsoe’s contemporary work is, this time focusing not on transplanted faerie from the British Isles but on demons that hang out in TLC-Mart (a Walmart sort of a store), looking for weaknesses in the customers that will let them slip in and take over their lives.

One of our principal viewpoint characters is the Reverend Deacon Elder who travels doing deliverance ministry—the non-Catholic form of an exorcism. He’s come to Somerton, Tennessee, to find out what really happened to his friend Grove Prosser, who died in a church fire in the middle of a deliverance.

We’re presented with lots of demons and the horrible things they do during the course of the novel, but I found the ordinary, everyday, small-minded evils of humans far more disturbing than anything Hell can throw up to torment people. One has only to follow the news to know what I mean. Yes, the TLC-Mart is a haven for demons, but it’s how it sucks the life out of small towns that is the real horror. Elder muses, early on in the book, “These stores had popped up everywhere across the south, cancerously killing off all the small, locally owned businesses and even other chains. He understood the appeal: to people on fixed incomes, disability, or unemployment, the stores were a lifeline to goods and services they could not otherwise afford. He didn’t blame them.

“But the rest, the blindly avaricious, overstuffed on grease, Fox News, and self-serving interpretations of the Bible, were destroying their own culture without even realizing it.”

There are plenty of those small-minded, unpleasant characters in Dandelion, but happily many good people as well, providing a very clear picture of Good vs Evil that we can see in our world without the need of adding demons to the mix, and Bledsoe does an excellent job of fleshing out both. I’m afraid you won’t get a cathartic release from how things eventually play out in the novel, but for all the unpleasantness in its pages, Bledsoe also gives us inspiring examples of courage and hope. I can’t say I necessarily enjoyed Dandelion, since it’s so dark, so let me say instead that I was utterly engrossed by it and glad to have read it. Though to be fair, Bledsoe is such a fine writer, I’m happy to read any story he decides to tell.

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