From the August edition of LOCUS, a lovely review by Rich Horton:

Agog! Ripping Reads, Cat Sparks, ed. (Agog! Press / Prime 0-8095-6237-5, $29.95. 284pp, hc) June 2006.

Cat Sparks has produced a series of Australian anthologies through Agog! Press over the past few years. This latest is getting American distribution from Prime, and it’s the best of these anthologies so far.

Geoffrey Maloney’s “‘When the World Was Flat” is an engaging tale of a Faux-Elizabethan “Albion,” a dominant country on a literally flat world. The protagonist, Lord Admiral for the Queen, is dealing with problems caused by the world’s seasonal tilt, his Queen’s unreasonable demands, and a friend’s scientific investigations. It’s all quite tongue in cheek, and plenty of fun. Anna Tambour’s “See Here, See There” is a dark tale of a deformed, much mistreated, young man who attracts the notice of his King, becoming a trusted advisor – with advice, naturally enough, influenced by his harsh life. Margo Lanagan contributes another very dark story, “A Pig’s Whisper”, about two children lured from home by a nasty man, and the unkind world they encounter.

“And Down Came a Spider” is a fine novelette from Simon Brown, about a girl and her father who travel across parallel universes when spiders bite the girl. The father is always hoping to return home to his wife, but eventually the girl longs for a stable universe, as her memories of “home” are less intense. Besides the sad story of people lost in other universes, the differences make sharp points about political and religious oppression. “Rosebuds”, by Tansy Rayner Roberts, is an amusing and pointed story about a girl who falls in love with an enchanted prince – and about her sister, who is rather less sure of the motives and worth of this prince. Paul Haines’s “Lifelike and Josephine” is a fine reductio ad absurdum look at cosmetic surgery gone amok, as a put upon (though himself rather unpleasant) husband finally gets the upper hand, rather creepily, on his ever self-improving wife.

Ben Peek’s “The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, not Little Boys” is a spooky and intriguing story of a strange war-tom underground realm, and the way a poor family is affected by the invasion of soul-ridden blackbirds. Chris Lawson, in “Screening Test”, examines the ironic impact of a test for a “violence gene” and a program to help those with the gene, as reflected in the lives of a “lost” boy and his equally lost girlfriend. The boy, now an ambiguously successful adult, returns to his childhood slum and tries to find the girl, who didn’t get the same help he got … for a bitterly ironic reason.

Sue Isle’s “Daughter of the Red Cranes” looks at a China devastated by a plague that led to infertility among women and death among men, decades later, as an outside agency tries to help the gangs of surviving women. I’m always happy to see novellas in small press books — this book includes Brendan Duffy’s “World’s Wackiest Upper Atmosphere Re-Entry Disasters”, indeed a wacky story, with a sort of ’50s Galaxy feel (though very contemporary in its concerns), about a grounded pilot and his jealous car in an advertising-saturated future.

There’s plenty more — this is a pretty well-stuffed collection. There are interesting pieces from the likes of Jay Lake, Jeff VanderMeer, and Adam Browne, just to name a few more. The Agog! anthologies have been pretty interesting for some time, but this latest is a step up – one of the better original anthologies of 2006.