I'm always glad to see another Father Muerte story from Lee Battersby. "Father Muerte & the Joy of Warfare" shows us several odd inhabitants of the Father's curious town, particularly a certain German Baron who seems to be turning into a bird. These stories are really quite decidedly odd: this one went in an unexpected direction indeed.

Other stories include Sophie Masson's "Dreamer," in which a rather arrogant psychologist treats a boy's unusual dreams. At first our sympathy is naturally with the tormented child -- but his dreams turn out to be different to what we expect, and the ending is a dark twist. Rjurik Davidson has done some quite interesting stuff during his young career, but "Domine" is a bit disappointingly ordinary in the end: a man trying to deal with the return of his glamourous spaceman father amid guilt about his failed relationship with his ex-wife and their son. Not bad, really, but I was never excited. Andrew Lyall's "Beautiful Decay" concerns a sick man who meets -- or thinks he meets -- a beautiful woman, hoping eventually to go off with her. The ending seems too predictably metaphorical, but I may have missed the point. Adam Browne's "Postdiluvian" is a short-short about some beings that didn't make it onto the Ark. And, finally, Ben Peek's "John Wayne" is a really curious story -- an alternate history, it seems, of John Wayne's life and death, featuring a meeting with Orson Welles and an encounter with Stalinist assassins. The story is certainly politically energized -- with Wayne shown fearing Koreans and Hispanics before finally meeting the real menace. But I confess it all seemed out of focus to me -- almost trivial -- Wayne simply doesn't have enough resonance to me to make the story really matter. That said, I did feel in the presence of an engaged writer -- which is always worth something.

Aurealis is by now a rather venerable presence in the Australian SF scene, with a decidedly irregular history -- but they continue to publish enough interesting stuff to make us look for more.