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Angel Road is the second story collection from Steven Savile and the first of his works released by Elastic Press, an independent house that specializes in single author short story anthologies. Savile has previously published two novels and a novella, Houdini's Last Illusion.
Angel Road collects two previously unpublished short poems and eleven stories, six of which have already found their way into print. Each piece deals with the subject of angels, some more overtly than others, and the stories span a wide range of styles.
The book opens and closes with a short poem - Two Stones In My Heart and Angel Road. Malice, the first story, is also one of the most stylistically daunting. This bizarre and nearly plotless tale is not easily summarized. It unreels more or less as a travelogue narrated by Max Noon, "tour guide to the rich and infamous," as he roams the fabled terraced city of Malice. Along the way we are treated to such oddities as Kabokov's Tourniquet, a great arch that spans the entire city and is intricately carved with historical events. Also on hand are the Nothing Door, cockroach people, doomed lovers with butterfly wings crucified on inverted crosses, and Drondach, a demon with an enormous barbed penis. Savile gets points for imagination and for the striking quality of his imagery, but as a story Malice doesnŐt quite get off the ground.
The Fragrance of You is told in a more conventional narrative style and fares better for it. It is a dark tale of dying angels that finds a book illustrator meeting the daughter of a now deceased author whose book he once illustrated. As their relationship blooms, the protagonist finds himself drawn into a strange sequence of events strongly resembling one of the dead author's plotlines.
The Absence of Divinity is an ambitious story which tells of the mother of all battles of good versus evil. Among the combatants are Leonardo Da Vinci, an enormous clockwork man, Lucifer, and the archangel Michael. All That Remains Is You reintroduces the character of Hoke Berglund, the deceased author first encountered in The Fragrance of You. This time around Berglund is alive and well and he is a wildly successful author who has taken ten years to write his eagerly awaited second work - a children's book. As in the previous story where Berglund appears, life again imitates art. This time the author must venture into The Forgetting Wood - in classic fairytale fashion - to rescue his daughter.
And So Yearns the Sparrow's Heart is one of the darker tales in the bunch. It is also one of the standouts, in spite of a decidedly downbeat ending. It concerns a group of outcast children living beneath a city and the strange and barbaric rites of passage they subject each other to. The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost, another very ambitious tale, is about a group of unsavory monks who have constructed an enormous golem. They feed the golem with sins, hoping to strengthen it to the point that it will be able to destroy all of the angels.
Angels In The Snow takes an unexpectedly sentimental turn as a mysterious father and daughter help a man struggling with guilt after the death of his wife. The Restless Dead is a fairly conventional tale of ghosts and haunted houses, but a good haunted house yarn is always welcome, even if it doesnŐt break any new ground.
The God of Forgotten Things finds Savile in wistful mode again, as an old man somehow absorbs a dying girl so that they can spend her final hours together. Remember Me Yesterday keeps the reader guessing as the protagonist helps a former lover who claims his memories are being siphoned off by the Thief of Time, only to find that things may not be what they seem.
This Broken Land, the last story in the book, is also the longest and the most ambitious. Savile aims quite high with this sprawling tale and doesn't completely hit the mark, but it is an intriguing tale nonetheless. Set in 1877, in a vast mansion near Budapest, the story finds a scientist, Herr Froller riding herd over a group of children who have the ability to travel in dream worlds. Savile once again presents a king hell battle of good against evil, this time throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, including demons, angels, necromancers, Atlantis, the down and dirty trenches of WWI, Joan of Arc's execution, and Harry Houdini.
Savile has collected a number of intriguing, thought-provoking tales here. A few of the stories donŐt quite measure up to his lofty intentions, but you could certainly find worse ways to while away a few hours of reading time than by taking a stroll down Angel Road.
William I. Lengeman III is an Arizona-based freelance journalist, humorist and fiction writer. More info at http://wileng.home.mindspring.com/.
© William I. Lengeman III
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