Blue Yonders, Grateful Pies, and Other Fanciful Feasts

Scholes’s third Imagination Forest collection (after Diving Mimes, Weeping Czars, and Other Unusual Suspects) continues exploring the limits of speculative fiction in 17 short stories whose genres include playful fantasy and SF as well as edge-of-your-seat suspense. Scholes revels in the offbeat and surreal, marrying otherworldliness with very real human fears and concerns, and his stories are all the richer for it. Curious characters abound, including “The Starship Mechanic,” about an alien mechanic fascinated with the holdings of a San Francisco bookstore, and a cat-woman trying to escape her former owner in “A Chance of Cats and Dogs.” The collection has a distinctive rhythm, with the novella-length standout piece “A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves” bookended by shorter vignettes. Scholes’s work is considerably inventive, and this collection showcases his versatility as a writer. (Aug.)