Darkly, Darkly:  A Chapbook of Speculative Fiction
By Robert Marcom
Twilight Times Publishing
Speculative Fiction
http://www.twilighttimes.com
e-book
56 pages
ISBN 1-931201-63-3

In this book of 17 short stories and eight poems, we encounter a lot of questions.  Most of them can be prefaced with the phrase "What if", and many of them ask questions dealing with the spiritual.  The stories all seem to be meditations on the established world around us, especially when it comes to religion.  Sometimes slightly uncomfortable, the stories nevertheless challenge you to consider religious aspects from different angles.  His tales on organized religion, especially Christianity sway more towards the indifference aspect, that God is not all that caring.  He paints God as a bureaucrat in some stories, in others he basically has God say, "Tough, you don't like it, deal."

At his best this man challenges the views of the world we see.  I loved his take on political correctness in "Dracu's Lament " and his view of what happens when capital punishment is outlawed, as in "Alyse X in Wonderhood," the name itself a clever twisting of another, older book.  "Sea Salt" is very cute, and Estre's Night is odd and a little scary.  My favorite story was "Terwiliker -- Time Trader!" a cheery time paradox story that I felt shone the brightest of all these tales because it is shamelessly (almost) cheerful, and after some of the other deep, almost hard stories, I needed the cheer.   

There are a lot of strengths in this book.  He does know how to tell a story...he makes them interesting, and he is good at choosing his words for impact.  The stories are all very lean...sometimes too much so, and one finds oneself leaning a bit on the author's notes sometimes to find out what the author intended the story to be about.  Sometimes my perception of theme was quite different from his.  Some writers like to leave a bit of ambiguity, to leave things open for reader interpretation, and if this was his intent, he achieves it well.  His main weakness is that, like I said, he is sometimes too short.  Some of his stories are quick blips that are hard to grasp..."Estre's Night" depended too much on a surprise ending to resolve the plot.  And who is Estre?  Is she meant to be the Estre from myth, or is she some character Marcom created?  The reader should not have to ask such questions...true, there is not a lot of s! pace to move in a short story, especially if you want to keep it clean, but you need to place something in the context.  Marcom relies heavily on mythology in some stories, and it can be interesting.  In several of the stories, such as "The Quantum of Dharma" he skewers scientific conceptions and challenges us again to think about his view of the world.

I think that this collection has some definite high points, but the stories end up being more contemplative than adventurous.

Three out of Five trench coats
--Cindy Lynn Speer, GWN Book Reviewer
7/21/2003