Pink Marble & Never Say Die
By Dawn Dunn
Wormhole Books $12.00 (chapbook)

Having published stories in various anthologies and with a story collection to her credit, A WALK ON THE DARK SIDE (1998), Wormhole editor and publisher Dawn Dunn here offers her work for the first time as a chapbook. Bearing another superb cover by Joanna Erbach, this one a blend of influences from realism to Baroque/Renaissance, the contents are the stories "Pink Marble" and "Never Say Die."

In the first, a terrible accident kills a young child - bad enough to ruin a family, but not the worst thing that can happen. No, the worst thing is the child's return day in and day out, as a ghostly laughing presence which keeps the family from letting go and drives them further apart and into near insanity. Dunn allows simple language to tell the story with few linguistic frills, but with a surprising depth of understanding. For such a ghost would prevent the closure needed to come to terms with the loss, creating another, more subtle crisis. "The dead become stronger than the living," author Nancy Kilpatrick notes in her introduction.

"Never Say Die" is, on the face of it, yet another zombie story at home in one of the BOOK OF THE DEAD anthologies or in a volume paying tribute to the great Romero trilogy. A plague of biblical proportions has brought the dead back to life, hungry for fresh human flesh. Living human flesh. But the narrator, a happy-go lucky postal worker, sees every silver lining. Happy to go off to work with his deer rifle and pick off walking, lumbering corpses, he is certain to keep his family safe partly through his amazing optimism. But sometimes even optimists must revise their outlook. 

This second tale weaves a humorous strand through the more serious implications by riffing on the government and the US Mail, but having read it during the height of our own recent troubles (particularly with regard to the Postal service and the hope that government will provide security for everyone), it must be stated that the humor seems a thin veneer for cosmic truth. For at bottom we are responsible for ourselves, and no government can guarantee survival in the face of a plague - be they zombies, terrorists, disgruntled workers, or some sort of bioweapon. The story strikes a much deeper, darker chord thanks to this time we call our present, uncertain as it is.

Wormhole Books has produced another winner, a thin volume that swings more weight than at first apparent. It's both collectible and a quick read, but it's also an elegant set of moral lessons - and what more can one ask of our often unjustly maligned field?