Geoffrey Maloney's "Things That Dead People Do" is also quite enjoyable. It's a longish piece about ghosts, in particular Dr D, who likes to haunt people in such a way as to attract attention -- for example by jumping off bridges. One of his ghostly friends is Sister Midnight, who follows rumors of the mysterious White Lady to Kathmandu, hoping to find a way out of the wearying life (?death?) of a ghost. It's an oddly genial story for its subject matter, and also a somewhat hopeful piece. "Fragments of a Fractured Forever," by Nathan Burrage, opens in a futuristic milieu, with a man, apparently a hopeless drug addict, scoring a hit that might kill him from another man, then meeting and somehow recognizing a beautiful pop star ... then the scene shifts suddenly to the past, and what had seemed perhaps gritty SF becomes a fantasy of a couple of gypsies in love, and a murder, and a curse that lasts for centuries. The mix struck me as curious -- and while certainly intended by the author, not really successful. Promising materials end up failing to convince, especially as the central romantic story isn't quite sold. The following piece is Felicity Dowker's "After the Jump," about a diver who recovers the bodies of bridge jumpers, suicides. Predictably (according to narrative logic) he becomes obsessed -- and the course of his life remains (narratively) predictable. A well-executed story that nonetheless left me cold.

Aurealis has a continuing tendency to feature a fair admixture of horror in its SF and Fantasy. The Dowker story is horror, and one could makes arguments for Maloney's story and even Burrage's fitting that genre. And so too does "The Traps of Tumut," by Bill Congreve, about a woman returning to the country creek where her mother drowned. There she manages to unravel the mystery behind a series of mysterious drownings at the same place, and their origin, while of course she too is threatened. Again, a story that in the end left me rather cold. Finally Thoraiya Dyer offers "Death's Daughter and the Clockmaker," also arguably a horror story, but one that is sufficiently original, and with a sufficiently ambiguously toned ending, to please me more than most. The plot is simple -- an apprentice to a master clockmaker is lured to the strange woman in the upstairs room, eventually to be seduced by her apparent sad plight. She's not what she seems, of course. And the apprentice is in serious trouble -- but just perhaps there is a way out. And there is, but not the routine solution we might have expected. Nice work.

With strong stories from Simon Petrie, Lachlan Huddy, Geoffrey Maloney, and Thoraiya Dyer, and with the other stories, if not as successful for this reader, still being reasonably well done, this qualifies as a very good outing for this long-running magazine.