What I Didn't See

These stories, characterized by obsession, disappearance, and revelation, often feature first-person narrators—e.g., the smart, sarcastic resident of a cult whose leader promises immortality but forbids sex with anyone but himself; John Wilkes Booth; a druggy teenage girl whose parents have foisted her off in the name of tough love; a woman who accompanies her husband on a jungle mission (what she did or didn't see feels like a riff on Joseph Conrad); and an expert on historical and contemporary instances of the bubonic plague. Fowler's previous short story collection, Black Glass, won the World Fantasy Award. Several stories here also fall within the realm of fantasy and sf, having appeared for the first time in publications like Asimov's Science Fiction. However, Fowler is surely best known today as the author of The Jane Austen Book Club, a novel in which we learn, among other things, that sf readers and Austenites have more in common than we might think.