I'm finding it quite hard to write a review of this collection of seven short stories by Kelley Eskridge. The themes here are of physicality, art, sex, and insanity. In many of the stories, the author plays in a very interesting mental space by avoiding gendering the protagonist, without it ever seeming heavy-handed (in a few cases, it is barely noticeable).

"Strings" focuses on the struggle to be a musician in a world where musical creativity is outlawed. The story was well-written, but I found it to be the most pedestrian story in the collection. Its theme -- struggling with society barring the one thing your soul is called to do, until you realize you have no choice but to be true to yourself -- is rather trite, and it is certainly outshone by the other stories in the collection. ★★

In "And Salome Danced", the director of a play is lured in and trapped by an actor who can be anything the director wants. There is an abuse/predation thread in this story that is intriguing. ★★★★

"City Life" treats a woman with the power to heal, who watches her ability cause the world to crumble around her. This story rolls together the warning to be careful what you wish for and the worry that happiness may in fact be a zero-sum game, and it brings that world to life through fiction. ★★★½

"Eye of the Storm" is one of the two winners for me. I read this story previously in another collection, and I found it one of the freshest in that collection as well. The story teases out and draws a story based on the parallels of love, belonging, and finding a place for oneself with fighting. It's excellent. ★★★★½

"Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road" seems to deal with insanity or lack of control or evil organizations or something. I didn't like this one. I think it's a combination of not getting it and disliking prose written in dialect (made further disastrous by the feedback loop between them). [Not Rated]

"Dangerous Space", like "Eye of the Storm", treats what it means to love and be loved, to belong, and to find a place for oneself, although here the narrative focus is on indie music rather than fighting. This, too, is a wonderful story. ★★★★★

"Alien Jane" is a coming of age story in a mental hospital, dealing with what it means to be strong. I catch a whiff from this one, like "City Life", that your own troubles become more manageable when you start to understand what others face. ★★★★

All told, this is an interesting and worthwhile collection that teeters at the edge of mundane and speculative fiction. Because the themes form a meaningful high-dimensional Venn diagram, the collection may be spaced over multiple months -- unless, of course, your intent in reading is to consider how the stories could fit so tightly together. ( )

While these stories are all speculative fiction in some way, more than that they are all about people, people whose pain and happiness you become invested in shockingly quickly. The themes of music and the fluidity of sexuality and gender and gender roles permeate nearly all of the stories in the collection, and as far as I'm concerned there is not one weak link among them. Solid collection. ( )

Dangerous Space is a revelation. I had no idea these gorgeous short stories were out there. Put me on the list of people who will now read absolutely everything Kelley Eskridge writes, because if these are characteristic of her work, I want it all.

Eskridge often makes creativity her subject, writing movingly about various forms of art, especially music. The opening story, “Strings,” posits a world in which the classical composers are revered so completely that any deviation from their scores, note by note, tempo by tempo, is punishable by loss of employment, and apparently by loss of the right to make music at all. Master musicians are named for their instruments, so that the world’s best violinist is known only as “Stradivarius,” the best pianist as “Steinway.” Being an instrument carries with it great prestige and wealth, but the musician who is cursed with an imagination is condemned to a world in which she can hear her music only in her own head. Improvisation is a crime, and new composition is absolutely unheard of. What will such a person sacrifice in order to be true to herself, to her music? This story gives me goosebumps; Eskridge can explain the process of creating better than anyone I’ve ever read. Try it:

"The music in her exulted and laughed and wept and reached out, farther, farther, until she wondered why everyone in the room did not stop, look, point, dance, run. It poured out sweet and strong through her heart and head and hands into the wood and gut of the violin that was her second voice, and her song was yes and yes and yes in a shout and a whisper and a pure, high cry."

“Eye of the Storm” is about art and creativity, too, but the art is a very different one: the art of war, of defense, of fighting. The way Eskridge writes about it, though, it might as well be dancing – or, more to the point, sex. The narrator, aptly named Mars, begins his tale by stating, “I am a child of war. It’s a poor way to start.” But he must take the world as he finds it, and his world is violent. “No one can escape what they’re born to,” his mother tells him. And so, as he grows, he learns to fight – mostly, at first, by being badly beaten by another boy whom he asks to teach him. Once he has learned, he heads for the city, seeking to fight. He doesn’t know that there are soon to be auditions for the city guard, but he soon learns it from strangers on the road, with whom he forms a quad – the basic fighting group that must audition as such. As Mars learns to fight with his group, he finds that it is as exciting and intimate to him as making love, which leads him to refuse the offers of everyone in his quad for actual sex. Of course they get accepted into the guard, but the story’s only just begun there. How it plays out will not surprise you, precisely – as it plays out, it seems the only way the story could possibly good, the mark of a great storyteller. It’s a lovely fairy tale, told this time not from the point of view of the princess, but through the eyes of the guards.

The piece de resistance in this book is the novella “Dangerous Space.” This gorgeous story about a band and how it makes music – and how sex can screw everything up unless and until it becomes love – is so good that it will stay with you forever. I particularly liked that it is told from the point of view of an extremely skilled “sound guy,” the one who knows how to set the console, the monitors, the mix to make the band sound as good as it should. This might be the story of a band as it becomes famous, but it is really about how “the drummer brought down his sticks, the bass walked in, the guitar wailed an impossible chord, and the singer opened his mouth and took me apart and put me back together again and again and again.” And it’s about how sometimes those who create must be pushed and prodded to do their best work – not to hide from the raw emotion that sits at the base of their art, but to bleed before the world. It’s an amazing work, and it took me apart.

Eskridge published a debut novel some years ago; it is called Solitaire, and is being reissued by Small Beer Press on January 1, 2011. (Small Beer Press is one of those amazing small presses I write about here from time to time; you could do worse than to simply read everything they publish, absolutely including its zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.) Eskridge is an editor, mentor and coach for Sterling Editing, which I suspect means she doesn’t devote as much time to her own writing as I, an eager reader of her work, would prefer. I’m looking forward to reading Solitaire, and I’m looking forward to rereading Dangerous Space. It’s that good. ( )

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/2009/01/dangerous-space/ ( )

"Dangerous Space" is a collection of seven short stories by Kelley Eskridge. Although some of them have scifi and/or fantasy elements, most are not what you'd call "strictly" scifi. These are the kind of edgy, intriguing stories that the term "speculative fiction" was invented for. I was not familiar with Eskridge's work before reading this, but I will definitely be seeking out her other stuff.

The "dangerous space" of the title can, of course, be interpreted in many ways. I think of it as that place inside you where your most extreme emotions live, where you keep them pressed down so that you can function; the place you go to, willingly or not, when something or someone touches you in just the right way. Eskridge's writing is all about exploring the intensity of emotions -- emotions that take you over, that drive your existence, that grab you and won't let go until they've shown you what you need to see, even if you don't want to see it.
Read my full review of this book at:
http://chlaal.livejournal.com/801893.html ( )