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A Mary Soon Lee story isn't a swashbuckling adventure or a pyrotechnic fountain of ideas. Lee doesn't mince mint images but hits her stride with characterization, detailing the backdrop of lives and relationships, gathering her huddled masses of the discarded: the divorced and the destitute, the desperate and the longing, the lost and the lonely. These are quiet stories -- even in death -- awash with sentiment, unburdened by complex plots. The reader looking for the pace of a literary story in traditional and contemporary speculative garb has found his place in Lee's twenty-story fantasy collection Winter Shadows and Other Tales. Jack McDevitt could not have struck upon a better adjective than "passionate" in describing the strength of Lee's creations.

The collection opens with a tale from F&SF under the editorial helm of Kristine Rusch, "Monstrosity," varying the old fairy tale of Beauty & the Beast by reversing genders. A few of her stories like "Monstrosity" that end abruptly as though rushed, make the reader wonder if more could be developed here. Lee's "Cause and Consequence" won the Best of Soft SF Contest for answering the intriguing question of what happened during the years of missing letters in the history of the real Jane Austen's life. A man in love with the personal letters and the woman of letters travels back in time to find out, bungling a rich literary history. "Winter Shadows" relates Anna's encounter with the ghost of an old lover she had dumped for a richer sort. The ghost regains the moment he needs for peace, and she discovers what she lost.

Mixing horror and war fantasy to conjure the inevitable doom of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the "Vigil" Branwen takes is one that greets the war dead in search of their bodies and then binds them to their bones under earth. When her young apprentice returns against her wishes soon before the enemy troops arrive, Branwen must act in a manner that runs counter to her profession, if she hopes to save the life of this child. "Vigil" compares reasonably well to "The Hollow Dancer," another war fantasy concerning the dead wherein, instead of killing thousands in a chaotic, bloody battle, a dancer inspired by the goddess dances with those who have been appointed to die, but what if the goddess doesn't seem to inspire?

"Mail-A-Day" and "Roadside Stop" are probably the most emotionally evocative and, hence, the reviewer's personal favorites. Jane Digby, a lonely, homely, middle-aged woman, orders a "Mail-A-Day" mailbox to keep her engaged, but like the woman, the mailbox's loneliness has borne out the Catch-22 personality that desires companionship but simultaneously shoves it away, exuding diesel exhaust and eau de rotting garbage, casting aspersions on Jane's weight, looks and choice of perfume. When Jane stops trying, the mailbox reconciles but it may be too late. The company that made the mailboxes is coming around to recall them due to all the complaints. Thanks to an undertone of Lolita, the character complexity steps up in the Twilight Zone-ish "Roadside Stop." Disappointed his wife won't start a family, a trucker heads South to find peace in labor elsewhere. He pulls over to wet his whistle, plays a game of cards with an adolescent girl who cons more than poker chips out of him.

With an ingenious title like "Conversation Pieces," the story plays off a number of literal and not-so literal meanings: objects conversing, objects to converse about, and someone going to pieces over such objects. A young woman moves town-to-town to escape discovery of her possessing the talent (or is it madness?) of talking to her belongings. All that changes when a prostitute with the heart of gold comes calling... but is it change for the better?

"Spell Night," the tale of human cursed into cat-form prowling the streets for the price to purchase peace, finds Lee in rare descriptive form:

"When Misha had been human she had hated the dark. But now she padded through the streets of Tivermouth at midnight, a lithe black shadow slipping cat-quiet over the cobblestones. Messages threaded the air from every side: the scurry of a mouse darting for cover as Misha approached, the distant slap of water on wood where the boats rocked in the harbor, a musky smell from an attic where two human lovers pressed one against the other."

Trent Walters' work has appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Speculon, Spires, Vacancy, and The Zone among others. He has interviewed for SFsite.com, Speculon and the Nebraska Center for Writers. More of his reviews can be found here. When he's not studying medicine he can be seen coaching the Minnesota Vikings as an assistant coach, or writing masterpieces of journalistic advertising, or making guest appearances in a novel by E. Lynn Harris. All other rumored Web appearances are lies.