A nice review of “Firestorm…”

By Dru Pagliassotti.

And I’m mentioned. faints

As for the status of the anthology, I believe it’s out.  The page on Dragon Moon Press still says “preorder” but the Amazon.com page has it listed as in stock.

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Firestorm of Dragons

Review © 2008 Dru Pagliassotti
Creative Commons License
This review is available for reprint under a Creative Commons License.

Firestorm of Dragons
Michele Acker & Kirk Dougal (Eds.)
© May 2008, Dragon Moon Press

Firestorm of Dragons is a collection of 15 new stories featuring dragons — good, evil, intelligent, bestial, humanoid, reptilian, and all permutations in between.

The mood of the stories ranges from understated to brash. On the quieter side of the spectrum is Sarah R. Suleski’s thoughtful “Poison Bird,” about adolescent misunderstanding and separateness. Other stories in the collection that take atypical views of dragons are Eric Diehl’s “A Darkness of Spirit,” in which dragons are seduced into battle madness by the demands of a warlike humanity, and Chris Azure’s “Dragonkeeper,” which plays on the Chinese conception of dragons and the earth to deliver a message about responsiblity and acting as a steward over nature.

On the brasher side, the amusing “Dragonscaling!” by John Teehan opens the collection with an in-your-face essay about the extreme sport of climbing and collecting scales off the backs of sleeping dragons. Karina L. Fabian’s light-hearted “Dragon Eye, P.I.” introduces Vern, a working-toward-repentance North African Faerie Wyvern who combines a hardboiled look at fantasy cliches with an original take on the dragon’s history with St. George — it’d be nice to see more of this character. “Dragon’s Blood” by Michele Acker throws a struggling hunter together with a baby dragon with charming, if somewhat predictable, results, and “Dragon Fruit” by Kim Richards suggests an intriguing secret background to the cliche of petty nobles sacrificing village virgins to the dragon.

The collection contains several more stories told from or at least including the dragon’s point of view — “Lessons” by Kirk Dougal, “Shattered Dreams” by Kevin Tisserand, “A Dragon’s Dawn” by Dana Sisson, and “Inside the Cavern” by Richard Bray. Other stories are fantasy adventures in which the dragon poses some sort of problem to be overcome, such as “The Druid’s Dragon” by Bob Nailor, “A Reptile at the Reunion” by Sandra M. Ulbrich, “No Time for Dragons!” by Tina Morgan, and “For Your Eyes Only” by J. M. Butler.

Firestorm of Dragons is an entertaining collection of dragon-themed stories that would be a great read for a scorching dragonfire-hot summer day.