Margo Lanagan’s newest collection, Cracklescape, has recently been released as part of Twelfth Planet Press’s “Twelve Planets” series; it is a small, pocket-sized book containing four short stories as well as an introduction by Jane Yolen. Each of the stories is linked by a stunning sense of place: rather than making the strange familiar, here Lanagan takes the familiar—in this case, Australia—and makes it strange. The stories are also linked, as Yolen suggests in her introduction, by haunting or being haunted, of the ghost in the shadow, be it real, imaginary, or metaphorical.
Cracklescape is like a box of gourmet chocolates: four unique, rich bites. This is the natural intent of the “Twelve Planets” series of collections, of course—in each case, to give a sampler of four stories from a great Australian SF writer. (Twelfth Planet Press, run by Alisa Krasnostein with editors Tehani Wessely and Helen Merrick, publishes other fine books, too, which have been winners and nominees in everything from the Aurealis award to the Tiptree.) Margo Lanagan’s Cracklescape is the seventh installment of the series, which is slated to run through 2013, and also one of the most powerful to date.
[A review.]