Greetings travelers, and welcome to a new week in the Otherworld. While we’ve more recently had some laser-focused content, sometimes it is a lot of fun to see how varied and exciting you can get with a bunch of stories all at once. With that in mind, today might be just the day for you to have a wonderful time with a new anthology. Read on to learn more about The Reindeer’s Heart and other Short Stories.
Author Stephen H. Clayborough brings to life over thirty interesting stories across over 300 pages in The Reindeer’s Heart and other Short Stories. The author has the benefit of a very active imagination as well as an assortment of Scandinavian folktales that get a reimagination here. It is apparent that Clayborough has an appreciation for the old stories, yet he brings new emotion and cleverness to them, and also fills his tales with a fair share of irreverence when the situation calls for it. Some of the stories are funny, some of them will send a chill up your spine, but each of them is handled with the utmost care, and nothing feels out of place.
This is a collection of short stories written over many years. Some are longer, some are shorter, but I’ve always held myself to Poe’s ideal that a story should be read in ‘one go’. There’s science fiction and fantasy, historical fantasy and bits of myth. There’s a lot of variation in here, so I’ll just offer some glimpses: A chemistry teacher meets Anubis, a pair of astronauts get eaten by a white dwarf, though they later re-emerge and create an ecosystem out of crab dip. Characters live, die, fight, make love and soldiers eat pizza. Little girls meet sea-monsters, and we visit Norway quite a lot and occasionally Sweden. Old Shitbeak the vampire hasn’t got any friends, and Heming the bear-hunter has to escape his gruesome fiancé. And as for the reindeer’s heart- it has it’s own story, as has the glass eye, the Buttercat, the last of the Patagonian giant Eagles and Boris the Brave, the cowardly lion-tamer. Enjoy.
It’s an eclectic bunch of stories, for certain, but they will stick with readers long after they’ve finished them. Feeling in a way like gothic fairytales, there’s a certain vein in which Clayborough develops his shorts, and they all feel as though they could be loosely connected. By the end of the tales, fans will also realize that they might have learned a few things about an unfamiliar culture that they weren’t aware of before. If you’ve been searching for a special sort of anthology that drips with style and has a wonderful flow, you need look no further. Check out The Reindeer’s Heart and other Short Stories, by Stephen H Clayborough, on Amazon today!
