Signs and Portents

Rating:
Summary: Another solid showing from CQY
Review: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Signs and Portents (Jove, 1984)

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a wonderful writer who doesn't mind wallowing in the literary muck now and then; she harbors no illusions that she's too good for, well, anyone. That pretty much assures the uninitiated Yarbro fan (for there are two types of people on Earth, Yarbro fans and those who have not yet been exposed to her work) that any piece of fiction the woman has turned out is going to be a fun time. Signs and Portents is no exception to the rule. It's a book of short stories, and it suffers from one of the deficiencies of almost any book of short stories, inconsistency (only the truly great and the truly awful short story collections are uniform in their quality). However, that is to be expected, and no reader of short stories will fault a colelction for it.

When Yarbro is good, she is very very good, and that's the case here. Her characters jump off the page and into the reader's brain with a minimum of hassle, and they're usually doing something altogether fun, like learning that getting a love potion from a witch ain't all it's cracked up to be ("Savory, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme") or messing with the order of the universe thanks to, well, being an incompetent clod ("Space-Time Arabesque"). There's quite a bit to enjoy here, if you're lucky enough to find a copy. ***