A Sublime Celestial Blessing

A Sublime Celestial Blessing
A. G. Bennett
World Audience, Inc
ISBN: 1-934209-24-0
Fiction, Anthology
Reviewed by Eugen M. Bacon

“In the normal world of lies and falsehoods, a gospel of modern action was (printed)...”
A spectacular paragraph, fire blazing on all cylinders, opens this collection of sole author short fiction. A.G. Bennett’s writing conveys the importance of mind, dreams, illusions. And though most tales carry abstract themes that did not take me to a place outside myself but provided a mirrored ceiling for something sometimes too condensed to see, there is a sense that the author carries a sense of his worlds, of dark themes that grasp troubled minds, of the repercussion of crime, of the impact of a single image stare at death or the silent scream of a comatose soul. Overlapping concepts sometimes loosen depth and a persistent slowness dilutes complexity. However, in places, the odd double effect, of real vs unreal, of tangible vs illusion, finely blend to heighten elemental flow and gravity and supernatural liveliness to the stories, even the obscure macabre.
Memoirs of a Star Child, also encountered in Audience (Vol 1, No. 4), stands apart as a soaring favorite.