Four Summoner’s Tales
by Kelley Armstrong , David Liss, Christopher Golden, Jonathan Maberry
Gallery Books, 2013
336 pages
Adult
From the Introduction:
“It has been said that there are only seven basic plots, and that each and every story can be reduced to fit within the parameters of one of those fundamental structures. While the authors of Four Summoner’s Tales could debate that assertion for eons, that dinner conversation brought Golden and Maberry into a tangential discussion about diverse works that share the same root plot, and how the quality and value of a story comes in the details and in the approach of the individual writer.
In other words, it’s all in the execution.
Wouldn’t it be interesting, they mused, to give a group of very different writers the same short, simple premise—just a single sentence, without any other parameters—and see what the result would be?”
A strange visitor comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk’s dearly departed from the dead—for a price.
Suffer the Children by Kelley Armstrong
Life on the frontier is hard. Addie watches her friend Charlie die as a diphtheria outbreak kills third of the town. Soon after, two strangers appear and offer to bring back the dead. (Only those that have been dead less than five days, any longer and it can’t be done.) That leaves seven children who only recently perished. The price? $300 each. …And that other price that only a select few know about. Can these good Christians suffer the sacrifice of a life for a life? What about the shady characters that live on the edge of town that no on e likes? And come to think of it, how did that Addie survive the plague?
When Addie’s friend comes back, she recognizes that it is NOT Charlie inside the body. Her adoptive father, the local preacher, is the only one to recognize what is really going on, but can he save Addie and the town from the strangers’ agenda? Who or what is inside the bodies of the risen, and what will they do next?
In this story, the bad guys don’t lose entirely, nor do the the good guys entirely win, but the town gets what it deserves. I liked Addie’s character, strong and honest, and I liked the way Armstrong handled the supernatural elements put forth in the project’s guidelines. This is my favorite story in the book, though you won’t find any storybook endings here.
Piper by Christopher Golden
A Mexican cartel slaughters a large portion of a town’s populace in retribution for having curtailed their drug trafficking though what they had designated a prime location. A Summoner then appears, and teaches the townsfolk how to play bone flutes to control the bodies of their re-animated family members to exact revenge. Of course, things never work out as planned.
There was a lot of shooting and physical violence that came naturally out of the story, but I was hoping for more in the way of the supernatural. Bone flutes leading an army of the undead are, indeed, an eerie vision. A good tale of revenge, but ultimately I ended up feeling sorry for the characters I cared about, hating the villains, and pining for a catharsis that never came.
A Bad Day for Necromancy by David Liss
I couldn’t wait to find out how Mr. Reginald January got out of the mess he created when he raised up the ex-husband of the woman he pined for in retaliation for being spurned. Though a savage street rough himself, he is outmatched by the evil Sir Albert and his thug, and only one person can help him find a winning strategy: his abusive, and very dead, father. He doesn’t offer to raise the dead in this one– no, he threatens to.
This story includes some scenes that are too emotionally intense for the background we have, as if we had watched the end of a Mel Gibson movie without the preceding three hours of characterization. People are tortured and killed in retribution for bad deeds because all the characters in the play are bad people. I had little sympathy for the protagonist, who is a vengeful pauper bent on lying his way into high society. Perhaps it stands more as a morality play; an admonition of greed and avarice.
That said, the story was engaging and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the show. I also liked the fact that the resurrected were not zombies, but healthy, restored bodies.
Alive Day by Jonathan Maberry
Maberry kind of strays from the original idea, and the Summoner is, this time, an ancient being… a goddess –one of the Lillitu, and we came to her. Set in modern, wartime Afghanistan, a Special Ops Captain loses his men. They don’t come back nice and clean like in the other stories, either. But they come back. And there is a price.
I am not really a fan of war stories, but a reference to Sgt. Rock spiked my interest as did the spirit’s concern about who had been stealing the artifacts of her worshippers. (It was the Taliban.) Plenty of action and plenty of paranoia keep us moving. Flashback is interspersed with scenes of a unit moving to rescue the lost men, and it is done well, revealing the story at just the right pace.
It felt like I was reading a Robert E. Howard story. (Howard could write action of any genre with flair, be it boxing, the Wild West, Cajun swamps, Roman Britain, or WWII two-fisted tales, and he would always leave the reader wanting more.) I was able to expand my mind and roll with this modern war story, to put myself in the heat of a desert battle and come up enjoying it. Not to mention it has the scariest zombies in the book.
This book was received from a publisher or author in exchange for an honest opinion of an artistic work. Neither Awake at Midnight nor the reviewer received monetary compensation for this review.