“Bone Island” by Shannon Page and Jay Lake

So it seems I end my gallop through Interzone as I started it, with a disappointment. “Bone Island” is the overlong, over-digressive tale of a hapless young male protagonist caught between two witchy women. There’s a deal of would-be portentious talk about types of magic, creation myths, and suchlike (“Just as the eggs flow from a woman on a river of blood, so do the futures flow from the world on a river of blood”); its attempt to portray a tight-knit island community rather pales in comparison to Ali Shaw‘s (and at times feels rather ersatz); and it is, most criminally, rather dull. A shame.

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