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Newsletter
Prom Night
reviewed by
The night of the prom. For some people, the biggest night of their lives. For others, traumatic. But what if the trauma came from an unexpected direction. What if the term "magical night" really meant magical? Nancy Springer has put together a series of prom night vignettes worthy of "The Twilight Zone"-meets-"The X Files," and the predominant tone is humor ... though more than one story hints at darker stuff beneath.
Tim Waggoner's "Meeting Dad" is a perfect starting point: maybe Kevin's date's family is a lot stranger than he thought, and maybe all his dad's ideas about what he should get away with tonight should be reconsidered. In the sweetly sad "Three Strands of Her Hair," Dave Smeds shows one fantastic reason a date might be ditched on this night of nights, even if unwillingly. In the funny but bittersweet "Omar's One True Love," Gary Jonas masterfully proves that even bringing someone back from the dead doesn't guarantee she'll go out with you. And Lorelei Shannon's hilarious "Peggy Sue Got Slobbered" suggests that you shouldn't ask your grandma the witch for help when trying to make a boy jealous.
In Alan Rodgers' starkly realistic "A Touch, A Kiss, A Rose," the swirling emotions of teenagers reveal all sorts of truths about life, while in Fred Saberhagen's futuristic world of "The Senior Prom," it's the couples who don't have sex who are the outcasts. In Billie Sue Mosiman's "The Executioner's Prom Night Song," alien visitors destroy their present by yearning for a prom experience.
But the anthology's moral anchor is the stunning "Borrowed Lives," by Richard Parks, in which an elderly man shuffles two photographs — and two lives — and chooses ... not the best one, but the right one. Tragic, illuminating, and compassionate.
Good work by Connie Wilkins, Lawrence Watt-Evans, A.R. Morlan, Lawrence Schimel, and ten others rounds out an anthology which could have been trivial but chose instead to enlighten.