Tim Powers 'The Bible Repairman and Other Stories'

The nice thing about completing a (essentially) 4,500-page novel is that it opens the floodgates for the other, shorter books waiting on my shelves. (Heck, even Patrick Rothfuss' second novel looks trim compared to George R.R. Martin.) This will continue on for a while, as I build up the stamina for my next epic series: Steven Erikson's 10-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (To be followed, sometime next year to coincide with the eventual end of the series, a complete reading of The Wheel of Time.)

The first of the shorter books I picked up was short indeed. Tim Powers' new short-story collection runs a trim 170 pages, featuring half a dozen stories from the past few years. Mind you, since it's been six years since Powers' last novel, I'll take whatever visits to his imagination I can get.

And we get quite a set of them here. Unlike his expansive novels (including On Stranger Tides, which was sort-of used as the basis for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film), these are tight little golden nuggets. In short form, Powers has the same inventive drive and desire to mix the everyday with the fantastic into a world where magic is an everyday experience for those willing to look. Death and ghosts play important roles throughout here, from the title story to a haunted-book story ("A Soul in a Bottle") to one that plays with the idea of automatic writing from the beyond ("Parallel Lines").

The collection ends with a somewhat return to the world of Byron and Shelly from The Stress of Her Regard, using the real Edward John Trelawny as a way to delve into the one story here that is closer in scope to Powers' longer works. The novella puts a lot on the table, from Greek-Turk battles in the 1820s to an attempt to engage the giants from the Bible, the Nephilim, into this war. At the center is Trelawny, a maddening complex character who has built his life upon so many lies that he has begun to believe them. (Also true of the real-life character, whose "autobiography" was considered to be true for generations before finally being debunked.)

Powers' next novel, about the Rossetti family (Trelewny was involved here as well) and vampires, is due out in March. A bit of time with his short stories, or rereading the earlier novels might not be a bad way to pass the time.