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"A Song, a Prayer, an Empty Space" is roughly 8000 words.
"A Song, a Prayer, an Empty Space" is roughly 8000 words.
Darja Malcolm-Clarke holds master's degrees in Folklore and in English and is a PhD candidate in the latter at Indiana University. A graduate of Clarion West, her fiction appears in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, and elsewhere. Her short story "The Beacon" (Clarkesworld Issue 11) was nominated for the 2007 British Science Fiction Association award for short fiction. Her nonfiction article "Tracking Phantoms" appears in the VanderMeers' anthology The New Weird. Academically, she studies monstrosity in relation to gender in post-World-War-II speculative literature. She lives in numinous southern Indiana, where there are many thunderstorms, which suits her just fine.
While I found the cover off-putting for a handful of reasons, once inside I was caught in the flow of the narrative. Roberts realizes her players well, showing multiple sides to mythic characters, and the details she puts into this historical re-imagining of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" really bring the story to life.
