First Lines of Kevin Lucia's "Liminal Spaces"

 "I'm sitting, crisscross-applesauce, in the deepest part of the deepest end of the Twin Oaks Community swimming pool, but down here, I may as well be sitting on Mars. My eyes are closed, have been closed, for about five minutes."

- from "Written in Water," by Robert Ford, the first story in Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction edited by Kevin Lucia.

Lucia writes that this anthology offers takes on "dark specultative stories about the in-between. ... Neither here nor there. Strange stories about poeple and places lost in a shadowy, hazy middle-ground." Thus these are tales a person or a place with a dark- often occult - secret, and the fun comes from the journey of discovering that secret. I enjoyed it but like with most collections there mixed results based on your personal taste. For example, Jessica McHugh's "Back to One" and Chad Lutzke's "Womb with a View" were too grotesque for me. But most were quite entertaining. My highlights were "The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own," Gwendolyn Kiste's take on the Black Dahlia; "Mirror, Mirror" Joshua Palmatier's fantasy offering; "O Adelin," Michael Wehunt's Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic tale; and the twisted logic of Norman Prentiss' "Cabinet People." 

First Lines of Octavia E. Butler's "Wild Seed"

 "Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone."

- Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed

I'm about half-way through this unique book with mixed emotions. On one hand, it's a killer pitch: a struggle between two frenemy immortal shape changers, one of whom is obsessed with breeding ever more powerful and unique abilities and the other who can provide them but doesn't agree with the project. On the other hand, much of the book takes place in long, intense conversations that, while skillfully rendered, take a long time to unfold without much actually occurring. It's essentially philosophical dialogue, but about the esoteric situations of these two supernatural beings that don't directly connect to the moral dilemmas that I personally find relevant. I've debated stopping the book but find myself compelled to return to it - there's a understated, moving power in Butler's prose. Curious to see how this ends; i'm hoping it's a clean ending and not merely a bridge to the next Patternist book.