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Contents

Introduction





Take off your shoes. 

Here. Take these sturdy mountain boots instead. You may need these crampons too. And you'd best take this nomex suit. You are about to enter a wild and wonderful place. It’s not entirely safe or predictable. These stories are a doorway into the mind of Sarah Almeida Hoyt, and there is no place for ordinary shoes.  

Oh yes, it can be very beautiful in this book. Parts of it will move you to tears, other parts to laughter. They are lovers and heroes here with you. There are fire and ice, there are gods and monsters, all crafted with a delicate but incisive hand. It is a special place, both ancient and so new that it has not yet come to be, filled with wonder. It is a complex place, as only a writer of depth and subtlety can will into being. The one thing you may be sure of is that you will not be quite the same person when you finish this book. And you will, because it will dig in and not release you until it is done with you. 

Begin your journey as is fitting, in the darkness with Prometheus and a setting so cunningly woven as to seem right and natural, which takes a knowledge of history and skill beyond most historical writers.

Walk with the bard in various incarnations, sinister and brave. Travel to Carthage, with the general that almost humbled Rome, and changed the face of the world. See how those who make bargains with gods always get what they bargained for, but not always they thought they thought they’d get. 

Be prepared for the fact that Hoyt takes on shibboleths -- oh, not the usual suspects, the nice, safe, near moribund ones, that tend to get the doyens of established literature to burble enthusiastically about ‘daring to speak truth to power." That requires all the courage that kicking a corpse in the face does, because things such as anti-feminism have lost power and barely survive among a handful of rednecks. No, instead she takes the bull by something a lot more tender than the horns, and she twists, with issues that make the new powers cringe. Of metaphysics. Of loyalties. Of those dirty words money and power - music to ears of dragons. She talks about love -- not lust, but love. Of death and what it means to be a creator. Of facing our weaknesses in the diner that is the antechamber to Hades, with a beautiful blend of myth and story, and of swimming the sea of tears. Of the real costs and rewards of drugs and revolution. 

This anthology belongs in the collection of all fantasy and science fiction readers. And like Eurydice you will find yourself looking back on it, and forced to return.



Dave Freer   




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Framed