Dragon's Fin Soup: Eight Modern Siamese Fables

Rating:
Summary: 8 Voyages into a twilight zone
Review: Somtow is a poet who effortlessly spins a pattern in his tales which make the unbelieveable commonplace and the unimaginable believeable. To read Somtow's stories is to take a journey into a world that doesn't and could never exist in the United States. Only in a reality like never-never land where you step outside your world and greet old friends that you've never met before can you begin to sense the subtle beauty of Somtow's literature. The texture of his style is unforgetable and it will resonate within you, like a memorable symphony, long after you've finished.

Rating:
Summary: 8 Voyages into a twilight zone
Review: Somtow is a poet who effortlessly spins a pattern in his tales which make the unbelieveable commonplace and the unimaginable believeable. To read Somtow's stories is to take a journey into a world that doesn't and could never exist in the United States. Only in a reality like never-never land where you step outside your world and greet old friends that you've never met before can you begin to sense the subtle beauty of Somtow's literature. The texture of his style is unforgetable and it will resonate within you, like a memorable symphony, long after you've finished.

Rating:
Summary: Gothic Thailand
Review: The author continues to have a great eye and ear for the differences between Thai and farang (Western) culture. He humorously exploits these bi-cultural differences usually in a hip and slightly edgy way. The stories are fun and often take unexpected turns. If you have been to Bangkok you will probably feel you have sampled little bits of Dragon's Fin Soup tales.

I have a personal prejudice, in that I loved the author's early science fiction works. At some point, however, his writing changed direction and he became a teller of gothic horror tales. For me, gothic horror could have stopped with Bram Stoker, and the world would be no worse off.

While there is still more than a whiff of the abatoir in most of these stories, they don't sink under the gratuitous (and frankly boring) darkness and decay of his vampire novels. These stories show many glimmers of the imagination and savagely funny social commentary that made "Mallworld" a minor classic of science fiction.