Reviews

These five novellas mark the newest epiphany in a career that spans some dozen books, including Summer of Night ( LJ 1/91). In an unusually detailed introduction, Simmons observes that his work is almost obsessively concerned with the themes of love, death, and loss. The stories move confidently from the plea of an excessively cautious parent to a horrific drama of AIDS inflicted by a vengeful ex-G.I. A young brave's search for sexual adventure shapes a tale drawn from Native American tribal mythology, while a recreational drug that replays life in flashbacks forms the premise for a slight piece that juxtaposes a desperate fantasy with the Kennedy assassination. The final novella, an elaborate war saga, weaves the verse of Siegfried Sassoon and other real-life poets with the diary of a fictional soldier turned priest. Dipping in and out of the collection fosters better appreciation of the novellas' differences in tone, mood, and effect, but Simmons's scattershot technique guarantees at least one intense encounter for every reader.-- Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress

Wildly varied images of love and death, and the strange connections between them, pervade this imaginative, uneven collection of five novellas. Simmons ( Children of the Night ) starts conventionally with ``Entropy's Bed at Midnight,'' a Carveresque tale focusing on parental and marital love impacted by tragedy. ``Dying in Bangkok'' juxtaposes elements of supernatural horror with a meditation on the natural horror of the AIDS epidemic. ``Sleeping with Teeth Women,'' the most successful of the novellas, addresses its themes of love and death through a synthesized Native American folktale engagingly told by an embittered old man on a reservation; ``Flashback,'' a contrived but intriguing SF tale, examines familial love in the face of urban disintegration and a new, nationwide drug addiction; and ``The Great Lover,'' an ambitious historical fiction, takes the form of a newly discovered journal kept by James Edwin Rooke, a famous (fictional) WW I infantryman and poet whose horrific battle experiences fostered a new and mighty love for life. Generally, Simmons is far more convincing when evoking the faces of death--whether the real terrors of war or fanciful ones like a vampiric succubus--than those of love. The stories occasionally take on an unexpected facileness or wax incongruously saccharine, forcing a reader to question their sincerity and depth of thought. Fortunately, Simmons's first-rate storytelling and the eerie vividness of his darker imagery should pull the engrossed reader through most such moments of doubt. (Nov.)