Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fantasy, Science Fiction
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
“The course of true love never did run smooth” might be a cliché, but for the lovers in these stories, it’s an understatement. Consider: having to rescue your beloved from seven years of service to sentient trees, or your lover wants you to curse an entire town, or your husband is sure aliens are calling to him from a comet. Find out what happens in these and other stories in The Great Forest and Other Love Stories.
Warnings: neglectful parents, end of the world
The Review
I felt very targeted by this book—and that’s not a complaint. Anthologies are, for me, difficult to review, because they have multiple parts which can’t be simply included in some sort of blanket opinion. As the title suggests, every part of this collection is about love, but that suggests a sameness that fails to represent the literary variety and emotional range these works offer. It’s important to understand that love stories don’t always have happy endings. That’s one reason I found myself in tears more than once.
Rochelle is very good with characters, and each of the people who populate these works felt fully rounded and unique as I imagined them in the reading.
Drinking the Moon is a beautiful word-picture about creation—or maybe self-creation. Inspired by a line from a poem by Sufi mystic Rumi, it is deceptively simple—and all the more moving for that. I think it sets the tone for the entire book.
The Great Forest is the title piece and also the longest story here. It is really a sort of sci-fi/magical fantasy that takes place in what I call a “happy post-apocalyptic” world. It is an adventure and a love story, and fooled me into thinking all the stories in the book would end this way. Two boys of very different backgrounds meet in school, and it’s a meeting that will change both of their lives.
On the Radio is a short fantasy piece that felt, to me, like an elaboration of “Drinking the Moon.” It is darker than the word-picture, with a distinct paranormal eeriness to it. It is an allegorical story of facing one’s truth and through that finding what one yearns for.
Second Cup took me by surprise. The title suggested something to me that I knew couldn’t be right—and yet it was exactly what the author uses to flip the story upside down. An enormously successful young writer has to confront his boyfriend and an angel in order to understand what he must do. It was the epilogue in this one that made me cry—in a good way.
Susurrus is the second longest piece in the collection. It has all the trappings of a romantic magical fantasy, but a deeply moving message about the blindness of love and the unseen consequences that come from wielding power selfishly, even with the best intentions.
Snowfall made me weep as well. It is a short piece about the end of the world—which comes not with a bang or a whimper, but with love.
Silver Rising is poignant and moving, mixing science fiction with magical spirituality. Its singular moment of exaltation is a striking blend of triumph and loss.
The Tale of Robert and Phillip and the Bookstore is a kind of fable about two old men who have built a life together that anyone (me, for sure) would appreciate and even envy. It addresses head-on a truth that I write about in my own memoir: there are no happy endings in this life, because someone always ends up alone. This made me cry, too, because it resonated in an entirely personal way for me.
Warren Rochelle uses many of the tropes that we have come to know and love in the varied genres of gay love story today. He does something quite different with them, and that makes this collection worth reading.
5 Stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
