Nina Allan's Stardust was published by PS Publishing in April/May 2013. Stardust is #11 in PS Publishing's PS Showcase series, which highlights new authors.
Information about Nina Allan:
Nina Allan is a British author. She is the author of A Thread of Truth, Microcosmos, The Silver Wind and Spin. Her stories have appeared in British speculative fiction magazines Interzone, Black Static and Crimewave, and have featured in the anthologies Best Horror of the Year #2, The Year’s Best SF #28 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012 and 2013. Her story 'Angelus' won the Aeon Award in 2007, and her short fiction has shown up on BFS and BSFA shortlists on several occasions.
Click here to visit Nina Allan's official website.
Information about Stardust:
Michael Gomez is thirteen and he is a chess prodigy. He has no experience of losing until now, and as he struggles to come to terms with a major defeat, he finds himself drawn into a world he thought existed only in the movies.
The woman of his dreams is Ruby Castle, a charismatic beauty famous for her roles in horror films and then notorious for murdering her married lover in a jealous rage. Ruby's glory days are long behind her, but for Michael she is the only escape he knows from the world of chess. Walking home across Blackheath Common he is apprehended by the Puppeteer, the evil genius of the film that made Castle famous. The man should not exist and yet somehow he does.
The stories collected in Stardust are themselves the story of Ruby Castle, told in snapshots and fleeting glimpses and secret histories, in tales repeated and reinvented by those who fall under her spell: her childhood sweetheart, an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artefacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle's lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of the stars. Worlds collide, and the boundaries between the real and the fantastic begin to break down. Is Ruby Castle a living person or a collective fantasy? By the time the final page of Stardust is turned, the world that Castle created through her films has become dangerously indistinguishable from our own.
Stardust is the lure of fame, the fallout from a burning rocket, the evanescent glister of a vanished dream.
A REVIEW OF NINA ALLAN'S STARDUST
Every once in a while a speculative fiction reviewer finds an author who can immediately be called a quality author. Nina Allan is without a doubt a quality author who stands out as one of the most imaginative and gifted short storytellers of the last decade. She has become one of my favourite speculative fiction authors, because she shows real talent for writing beautiful and fascinatingly weird stories that seem to defy easy categorization. Her stories have plenty of depth and different layers.
Nina Allan is one of the brightest new rising stars of speculative fiction. She writes fascinating and intellectually stimulating stories that appeal to several readers. Her stories will especially appeal to readers who want high quality from their speculative fiction, because they offer a wide range of emotions all the way from sadness to melancholy, and the happenings are intriguing.
I recently read Nina Allan's Spin, which was a beautifully written and interesting novella, so I'm glad that I had a chance to read and review Stardust. Stardust is an excellent short story collection, because it contains strange and hauntingly beautiful stories. (I've always enjoyed reading all kinds of speculative fiction, but I have to admit that I love this kind of hauntingly beautiful fiction above all else.)
Stardust contains the following stories:
- B-Side
- The Lammas Worm
- The Gateway
- Laburnums
- Stardust
- Wreck of the Julia
- Red Queen (poem)
Stardust is a collection of stories about Ruby Castle, who is a bit mysterious movie star who became famous for her roles in horror films and then notorious for murdering her lover in a rage of jealousy. Bits and pieces of Ruby Castle's life are revealed in interesting ways in these stories. Each story shows a different aspect of her and things about her life. These stories also show how people feel about her and what kind of an affect she has had on them.
I think it's intriguing that the author writes about Ruby Castle this way, because it gives the readers a chance to collect the different pieces and try to figure out who Ruby Castle really is and what has happened to her. It was interesting for me to read what kind of a woman she was and how each story revealed a new side of her, because every person, who seemed to be fascinated by her and had fallen under her spell, thought about her in a different way. I loved every page of this collection and at the end I was totally fascinated by how the author had managed to write these stories about Ruby Castle.
In my opinion Stardust can be categorized as speculative fiction, which contains elements of fantasy fiction, science fiction and weird fiction. Nina Allan explores the slightly darker side of fantasy fiction in this collection, because weird things happen to the characters and the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur in dark and unexpected ways.
I think it's best not to reveal too much about the happenings in these stories, so I'll try to avoid spoilers. These stories must be read and experienced personally to understand how beautiful and enchanting they are, but I'll try to do my best to show you how good an author Nina Allan is by writing about my thoughts about the stories.
B-Side is a beautifully written story about Michael Gomez and his fascination in Ruby Castle's films. I admire Nina Allan's ability to create realistic characters, because Michael is a totally believable thirteen year old boy, who has difficulties accepting that he lost the chess tournament. She writes wonderfully about Michael and his problems. In my opinion she handles masterfully the scenes between Michael and Colin Wilkes and also writes perfectly about Michael's feelings about his chess teacher, Lennox. It was interesting to read how Michael's life took a strange turn when he met the evil puppeteer from Ruby Castle's film, because he shouldn't have existed in real life.
The Gateway is an exceptionally beautiful story about Andrew and Thomas who haven't seen each other for a long time. The letter that Thomas has written is the highlight of this story, because the author writes about family history and history in an intriguing way.
The Lammas Worm, Laburnums, Stardust and Wreck of the Julia are also powerful stories.
To be honest, Wreck of the Julia is one of the best and most fascinating stories I've read in a long time, because it's a real masterpiece of storytelling (it develops nicely from a normal story to a subtly weird story). The author writes fantastically about dreams, art, mountains and weird happenings in this story. The combination of dreams and reality creates a haunting atmosphere. Vernon's life and feelings towards Eloise and Clarissa are explored perfectly. When Vernon buys a painting called Wreck of the Julia things become even weirder, because he meets the artist's relative, Clarissa, and finds out several things about the painting and the artist...
Red Queen is an interesting poem about Ruby Castle, because it has been credited to Matthew Cleverly who was mentioned in the story Laburnums. Matthew Cleverly was a man who said to have been in love with Ruby Castle and wrote a cycle of poems about her.
That's all I'll write about these stories, because I don't want to write too many spoilers.
The characters in this collection are interesting, because Nina Allan brings them to life by writing fluently about their feelings, problems and lives. She has the ability to create living and breathing characters that have lives of their own. She lets her readers get to know the characters through the events that happen in the stories.
Stardust is a bit similar to Nina Allan's previous short story collection, The Silver Wind, because these stories are connected together. Everybody who has read The Silver Wind will notice how fluently the author has written these interlinking stories and how well she has created a weird atmosphere that keeps readers turning pages until they've reached the end of the collection. In these stories beauty, grief, weirdness, terror, secret histories and melancholy go hand in hand, so readers who like the author's previous stories will be in for a treat.
The prose in these stories is amazingly beautiful and nuanced, which is great, because it highlights the weirdness of the happenings. The author creates an interesting and seductive atmostphere with her words and sentences, so it's a pleasure to read these well constructed stories.
I'm sure that everybody who begins to read this collection will instantly forget everything else for a while and be transported into a world of literary beauty that's full of tender and cruel moments. There's plenty of seducing weirdness, human tragedies and fascinating darkness in these stories, so there are lots of interesting events in store for fans of speculative fiction.
Although Stardust is clearly a short story collection, it can also be seen as a novel, which has been split into six stories. Each story can be read as a standalone story, but Ruby Castle is the interlinking factor that connects the stories together. She and her movies are almost like ghosts from the past that haunt the characters in different ways.
I can highly recommend Stardust to readers who want to read quality stories and good prose. If you call yourself a fan of speculative fiction, you must read Stardust, because it's one of the best and most captivating and beautifully written collections published during the last couple of years. There's a darkly and strangely appealing nature to these stories, so I hope that as many readers as possible will put this collection to their reading list.
I also highly recommend Nina Allan's stories to readers who have read Christopher Barzak, Livia Llewellyn, Brendan Connell, R. B. Russell, Laird Barron and Richard Gavin. Her stories are totally different from these authors' stories, but she writes similar kind of literary prose that's full of depth and wonders.
If you haven't discovered Nina Allan yet, I urge you to read her stories. You'll love them!
Highly recommended!