Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes

It has taken the best part of two weeks just to read a couple of hard sf titles. As a reading rate for me that just sucks. The solution - read some fantasy. Specifically Voice of our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll. It took just a few hours. Basically it is just a little ghost story. Or perhaps the exorcism of some inner demons. Of course, being Carroll, the characters are intricate and more than a little unbalanced. It is all about the trauma.

Carroll has been around writing in the fantasy genre for a while and on my limited reading, he seems to be every bit as good as his fans say he is. The time in the genre factor is interesting. I suspect that if he was starting up now, the modern lit crowd would not let him go. You would hear the cries of "it isn't fantasy, it is literature" in all the fashionable review mags. Carroll still gets reviewed in those mags but they cannot claim him as their own . He writes fantasy. Damn fine fantasy.