Red Spikes Margo Lanagan Published by David Fickling Books ISBN 978 0385 613224
Australian author Margo Lanagan's second collection of short stories, Black Juice, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2004, and fans eagerly awaited her third collection to hit bookshops.
Lanagan's cutting-edge writing style and sometimes disturbing imagery are not to everyone's taste, but young adults and older teens who like fantasy with real impact spread the word that here was a writer delivering just what they wanted.
The 10 stories in Red Spikes are unsettling, nervy and deliberately disturbing, winning Lanagan the 2007 Australian Book Award. Gritty and black, these stories are written to jolt us out of our comfort zone.
The first story, Baby Jane, sets the tone. A young boy, whose mother is a midwife, is forced to deliver a baby for a toy-sized queen who grows to human proportions for the birth but shrinks back to being a toy after the baby is born. He is left holding the human-sized baby as the queen and her counsellor vanish back into their fantasy world.
Winkie is an unsettling story in which an emotionally insecure young girl cannot cope with the thought of being separated from her mother for a single night. She has to call on powers she didn't know she had when, alone and without her mother to help, she faces a child-eating ogre.
