At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Two themes drive Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination.  The first is a fantasy motif, placing this novel right on the line that separates the best fantasy from the genre-that-won’t-admit-it’s-a-genre, i.e., the literary novel. This motif is the Illumination itself:  beginning at 8:17 on a Friday night, every spot of pain on every human’s body begins to shine, a bright light emanating from the impacted heel of a woman in high heels, a cavity in the mouth of a politician, the sore spot on the back of a constant reader’s neck.  The Illumination is so bright in cases of serious injury that doctors and nurses need to wear sunglasses to attempt to revive a patient in heart fa... Read More

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

A little while ago, Terry discussed Kevin Brockmeier’s latest novel, The Illumination, for "Edge of the Universe." Having just finished it myself, I’m still thrilled she introduced Brockmeier to our audience, as he’s one of my favorite relatively new authors. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy The Illumination as much as Terry did, or as much as previous Brockmeier novels.



The titular event, the Illumination itself, occurs one day when suddenly all our wounds, all our pain, are made visible via light.  Our first introd... Read More

Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3 edited by Kevin Brockmeier

On a hypothetical chart, with high epic fantasy in the vein of J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen Donaldson on one end and (for want of a better term) the magical realism of Gabriel García Marquez and Graham Joyce on the other, the twenty stories in the excellent Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3 fall, for the most part, close to or smack on the latter extreme of the scale. If you then add a y-axis, describing how pulpy a story is, everything in this collection would trend towards the end of the scale where the most accomplished and literary pieces of short fiction res... Read More