HebrewPunk by Lavie Tidhar

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Paperback: 978-0-9788676-4-5, $13.95

“The Heist” is an excellent theme setter for this collection. This story has an urban fantasy flavor, only instead of the default setting of the world being based in nature worship-style paganism or Christianity the magic comes from a very distinct Jewish flavor.

Jimmy the Rat (a Jewish vampire), The Tzaddick (an immortal), The Rabbi (a powerful Jewish mystic) and his wickedly constructed golem Goldie come together to take down a mysterious and magical blood bank. Along the way they encounter peculiar versions of zombies and angels and a fortress that will boggle readers with its incredible level of security. It’s the motley crew’s job to break the fortress, to take down the blood bank and of course, collect their fee.

From there HebrewPunk moves to stories focusing on the trio individually.

“Transylvania Mission” pits The Rat against a band of Nazi werewolves searching for Dracula in the hopes of enlisting his help in their war. More could be said, but that, and awesome, sums up this tale.

“Uganda” mixes the Jewish flavor with distinct African ingredients. In this tale it’s the turn of the century and The Rabbi is asked to investigate a tract of land in Eastern Africa which some people hope will become a new Jewish Homeland. Recognized as a mystic by a local tribe, he walks with them, getting a glimpse into the truth of the land, and possibly even the future. While this is a solid, interesting and richly flavored tale it feels unfinished at the end, perhaps because it’s written as if compiled by a third party from multiple sources, a style that lends better to longer works.

Finally comes The Tzaddick in “The Dope Fiend”, a 1920s set tale of voodoo and ghosts and how they surface in the Jewish mythos. Unfortunately this one is the weakest of the four. There are many major secondary characters that move in and out of the story, playing fairly important roles, but there’s a feeling to them as if the reader should know who they are. It’s not, however, guaranteed that they will.

Also a point of discontent with this story is The Tzaddick himself, who often comes off as if being a drug addict is all that he is. While there is a level of realism to this portrayal, in this story it keeps the reader from connecting with The Tzaddick as anything but a drug addict. This, and the previously mentioned crew of secondary characters, overpower the plot itself, as if Tidhar had more fun writing the characters than the story.

Altogether HebrewPunk is a collection that reveals interesting possibilities, especially for the Urban Fantasy genre who should sit up and take notice at how much space there still is in the genre outside the realm of nature based magic systems and romance melodramas.

Apex Magazine, December 2008

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“A Night at the Empire” by Joy Marchand kicks off the last issue of Apex Magazine for 2008. It begins with a familiar dream, a slightly distorted version of Len’s work day. As readers follow Len through a real day at the post office they can easily start to sympathize with his hatred for the cold, impersonal embrace of technological doodads that travel like parasites with everyone around him. But the wonder years of yesterday hold no comfort in their vice grip either. “A Night at the Empire” is simultaneously beautiful and creepy, and a perfect reminder in this holiday season that the past is sometimes better left behind us.

“Organ Nell” by Jennifer Pelland is the tale of a woman exploited by the medical industry, a woman who has saved countless lives, or possibly the tale of a strange genetic mutation. True to Pelland style there’s a lot layered into this mixed interview style story of a destitute woman who is selling her body in an entirely different way. In only a paragraph or two per character Pelland spins not just a large tale, but dozens of small ones with characters every bit as real than Organ Nell herself.

“The Barrow-Maid” by Christine Morgan is a Norse-flavored tale of Sveinthor the Unkillable, who though he dies in the opening, is truly unkillable in a Permuted Press way. But this tale is more than just a battle tale, or a zombie tale. It captures a sense of honest and loyal love that historians often leave out of Viking legends. Originally printed in History is Dead here’s another tale worth rereading.

The last piece of fiction for this issue is Anil Menon’s “Harris On the Pig: Practical Hints For the Farmer”. A strange, tech-heavy tale of a future pig farmer being terrorized by someone akin to a hardcore PETA activist, there are more twists and turns here than in a brick of ramen. Despite the complex scope of the tale there’s a feel of hyper focus, of only a small bit being shown to the reader. This feel adds a lot to the narrow-mined, superior mindset of the narrator. Like most excellent tales this one dwells in a muddled moral gray space where neither side is exactly wrong, but they aren’t by any stretch right either.

This issue also features:

Confessions of a Book Junkie #12: Rumours of the death have been somewhat premature (or, on the difference between print and digital storage) by Lavie Tidhar

An Interview with Michael A. Burstein

Popped Culture: Doomsgiving by Justin Stewart

Free Fiction: Samples from The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams

Editor John Joseph Adams has released samples from his upcoming anthology, The Living Dead. Details and links are here.

Dying to Live by Kim Paffenroth

Like the real world the fictional world in Dying to Live is brutally unfair. One would expect no less from a book set a year after the world succumbed to zombies. This isn’t a story of the uprising, the slow rot of the human beast. This is a tale part in retrospect, told by characters who are in a brave new world, but still remember and mourn their old world.

 

Jonah is a man living a grim existence, spared from the initial zombie take over, but finally persuaded to leave his seaborne safe haven to search out his loved ones. After finding his former home empty, with no signs of violence his life took a turn toward simple goals– namely surviving. He wandered the countryside, with no purpose or goal outside of the drive to find food and not become food, until, by a million little coincidences, he finds a compound of survivors.

 

Hidden in what was once a museum the motley crew of living humans each have their own tales of how they came to safety, their own haunting losses and their own emotional battles to face just to maintain the will to survive in a dangerous world. Jonah and the war refugees wrestle not just with the undead, but with questions of how to, and even if they should, restart society in the face of the horrific future before them.

 

Flavored with a combination of Biblical end times and a touch of Richard Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, Dying to Live is a novel that transcends the shuffling dead image of classic zombie fiction from the beginning, nearly taming the creatures by giving them an odd sort of humanity and exposing humans as the root of the evil.

Disposal by Jeff Strand