It’s always great when some gets your fiction. I was please to wake up to a review of my flash piece, “Conjuring Shadows,” (at Expanded Horizons)–especially since I had received a rejection minutes before!
John Stevens of SFSignal wrote about “Conjuring Shadows”:
Craig Gidney’s offering in Expanded Horizons, “Conjuring Shadows,” was beautiful and eye-opening. The shift in forms from poetry to reportage to fiction, the nesting of ideas and images that is created, are smoothly synergistic and wonderfully written, and while they make a point, it is one that you must uncover. For me, it delivered a challenge to think about the constraints we put on pleasure and the ways in which identity can be marked and embraced simultaneously. It is a story that compels meditation not just on the meaning of the story and the fantastical tale at its center, but on the way we look at art and sexuality and beauty and power, and the entanglements that can arise between them.
I am also happy to be recommended along side the likes of Kiernan,Walton, and the Vandermeer’s collection. His column, Fantastika is also well worth following; he writes about fantastic fiction beautifully.
Craig Laurance Gidney 