Raven Electrick Ink’s latest anthology, Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, is a slim volume packing a big punch. The theme is Hollywood and the movie culture we all share, but editor Karen A. Romanko has opened the playing field for all sorts of speculative fiction in exploring this one subject. Everything from the earliest imagistic storytelling of the Neolithic to far future performances writ large across whole star fields, from tales of Hollywood’s legendary Studio Age to modern horror’s celebration of urban legends, future worlds of the apocalypse, unseen worlds of the fantastic, and even those things overlooked and unexpected in today’s world of big budget blockbusters, indie films, and bootleg DVDs.
Cinema Spec is packed full of stories, which tend to the shorter end of the spectrum, as well as some inventive poetry. Showcasing such a wide breadth of fiction and authorial voices, the anthology never gets repetitive, and manages to hit the chosen theme from so many different and surprising angles that the reader never knows just what is around the corner. Truly a celebration of cinema and the myths that surround it, Cinema Spec captures much of the excitement and discovery of those first magical trips to the theater that we can all recall from childhood. Add in the smart and often poignant storytelling on display here, and you’ve got something that will appeal to every facet of a discerning reader’s tastes.
While there are too many truly good stories to single out in Cinema Spec, some of my favorites include Gregory L. Norris’ celebration of classic monster-movie horror, ‘Creature Double Feature,’ Robert Borski’s weird sci-fi short, ‘War at the Bijou,’ which gives us aliens whose skins flicker with broadcast images of old earth movies, and ‘Bootleg Images,’ by Daniel R. Robichaud, which paints an oppressive near future China’s ban on ‘flickershows.’ A surprising straight-up fantasy piece, Rodello Santos’ ‘Oracle in Chains’ shows us our cinematic love of spectacle and suffering through the lens of an imaginary world, and Donald Jacob Uitvulgut’s ‘Cineraku’ supposes a post-apocalyptic future where movies only partially survive in a hybrid art form. Martha J. Allard’s moving tribute to Old Hollywood and the lingering presence of films in our private imaginations, ‘End of an Era,’ is a conversation between a celluloid ghost and the fan that would rob his grave, set against the backdrop of a ruined LA. And in ‘City of Facades,’ Daniel Ausema presents an entire, unreal city grown from the bones of an old movie set, and peopled by descendants of the film’s cast and crew.
That’s just a sampling of Cinema Spec, which turns out to have been one of the most consistently high-level anthologies I’ve read in a while. I’m proud to say one of my own stories also appears int it. ‘After Sundown’ is a look at a condemned classic-style theater with a science fictional happy ending, inspired in part by the travails of a theater and historical landmark in my area, The Senator.
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