It becomes wildly successful, and he seeks out the girl again for more ghosts to use. He uses them and an abandoned house to set up an artistic tableau highlighting the horrors of poverty. In “ Her Black Coal Heart a Diamond in My Hand” an artist buys a basket of ghosts from a girl at the train station, almost certainly kin of hers. The story comes to a nicely clever and satisfying conclusion.īeneath Ceaseless Skies #322 features an R.K. Judge Dee has his hands full sorting out a likely sequence of events while the various parties are figuratively and literally at each other’s throats.

A vampire count has been murdered, and multiple people are claiming to be the murderer, hoping to inherit his estate: his wife, vampire hunter Chrétien de Troyes, and an ancient vampire from Roman times. It had been a complex case and it ended inevitably in a shower of blood.”) and moves on to the titular case. Wandering through 12th-century Europe, Tidhar skips over one adventure (“He tried not to think of the Monastery of the Old High Ones and the horrors that, well, no longer dwelled there. He’s walking towards a known destination, a terrifying display of Arctodus, a giant bear from Pleistocene times, but as things seem to change and shift around him, what will he find when he gets there? Moore ramps up the tension inexorably.įinally we have “ Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels” by Lavie Tidhar featuring the recurring characters Judge Dee (vampire) and Jonathan (human servant/companion/definitely not for snacking on). He’s desperate to escape all of this, and is definitely scaring himself by encountering the familiar Path at night in a mostly closed museum. A family wedding is held in his favorite part of the Natural History Museum, the “Path of Time.” Unfortunately his mother is drunk and sobbing over everyone she can find, while also trying to get him to recite his award-winning interpretation of the famous William Blake poem. In “ The Tyger” by Tegan Moore, Jules is a 12-year-old boy whose parents have divorced.

After many harrowing encounters and only a little bonding, they make it to the Turk’s compound and we learn the secrets within. The thief (there are few proper names here) hires a guide to take him to the Turk after the thief’s wife disappears/leaves him. From Richard Kadrey, we get a tale of a post-plague apocalyptic cityscape in “ Across the Dark Water“. In the subsequent year they all suffer terribly and psychotically. “ Shards” by Ian Rogers is a cabin-in-the-woods story in which four friends violently murder the fifth friend, due to a demonic artefact. The stories in Tor.com I read this month leaned heavily toward horror, with three edited by Ellen Datlow and the fourth a vampire story edited by Jonathan Strahan.

The Tyger by Tegan Moore