One of those sports that still hasn’t lost its novelty – there are two new reviews out there for the dedicated Horn-spotter. The first is available online at Specusphere – as usual, there’s a random sampling to whet your appetite:
Horn is a memorable, unique, and highly polished work. Spanning noir, horror, fantasy and several other sub-genres, it has widespread potential appeal. The novella is an excellent showcase of Ball’s ability as an author, and also a fine example of Twelfth Planet Press’s intriguing novella range.
The other came out in the September issue of Locus magazine courtesy of their short-fiction reviewer Rich Horton:
New from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is a first rate novella chapbook, Horn, by Peter M. Ball. Miriam Aster is a freelance detective, having blown her police career with some unprofessional behavior, but she’s still called back for certain cases as a consultant. Cases, apparently, involving visitors from Faerie. This story starts with a teenager found raped and killed, evidently by a unicorn’s horn. To her regret, the case requires Aster to deal again with her former lover, an exiled Queen of Faerie, and of course Aster still loves the other woman, but knows she can’t get back with her.
But there’s a rogue unicorn loose, and maybe worse in the form of people willing to use a rogue unicorn for very nasty purposes indeed … All the traditional hardboiled attitude, mixed effectively with adark look a Faerie. Strong stuff indeed.
Should probably go do some work on the second novella now, so I return you to your regularly scheduled bloggery…
