ironymaiden | Leviathan 4

Cities edited by Forrest Aguirre

overall, the anthology has the quality of a dream state, in which each episode is connected by the knowledge that you're in the same place, even though everything looks and feels entirely different. it's a metropolitan state of mind.

it contains stories i love (The Dreaming City by Ben Peek, and The Soul Bottles by Jay Lake) and stories that haunt me (The City of God by Michael Cisco and The Wizard of Wardenclyffe by Ursula Pflug).

and then there are the unfortunate attempts at art; i'm not the sort that appreciates a story "composed by using an obsessive collage technique" nor one that reads like a knockoff of Prospero's Books (even if parts of it have been in McSweeney's - what-ever).

i find myself returning over and over to the images of scratching stories into tabletops, lips sewn shut, and Mark Twain on a ghost ship. i think about a phrase like "I like to feel the wind blow away my ashy thoughts," and i forgive "obsessive collage." but just a little. worth reading for The Soul Bottles alone.