There is good news and bad news from DAW's latest fantasy selections. I'll give you the bad news first.

Owl Flight, a new novel by Mercedes Lackey (illustrated by husband Larry Dixon), returns us to the world of Valdemar, with its mage-storms, mysterious forests, and jerkwater hicks. And although the novel starts out well enough, describing an entire medieval village economy concisely and wonderfully, the book quickly bogs the reader down with back-story and flashback, errant introspection and old battle scars, teenage rebellion and fortysomething angst.

In a fantasy novel replete with low and high magic, battles, and medieval societies, the most striking feature is a troubled orphan boy, an erstwhile hero who spends more time up a tree thinking in late-twentieth-century kid-talk then actually doing anything constructive. If you can stomach the first 100-page bitch-and-moan circus, then maybe you'll get something out of Mercedes Lackey's world...

But if not, I have something else in my bag of tricks: Elf Magic, the newest theme anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg. These anthologies promise good fun, a kaleidoscope of feelings, maybe a Houdini disappearing act of the mind, in which we forget about gardening and chores and bills, and sink into the deep currents of story.

And it's not hard to lose yourself, with the quality of writing in this anthology. Take, for instance the first sentence from Michelle West's "Under the Skin," which starts the anthology:

The rain that fell in the city was the color of her eyes, clear and gray where it blanketed the traffic-strewn streets with the persistence of its fall.

Thomas Myer is a technical writer. He has been known to program in sed and awk.